Village
Mieres is a municipality of Asturias, in the valley of the river Caudal, which is born from the confluence of the rivers Lena and Aller near Ujo and is a tributary of the Nalón. Its capital, Mieres del Camino, retains the air of a small industrial town from when the town, with about 36,000 inhabitants, moved from an agricultural economy to a mining and steel one with the arrival of Numa Guilhou's Fábrica de Mieres and the working of the coal mines, an activity that came to attract close to 71,000 residents around 1960. The relief, mountainous and of narrow valleys, alternates farming and forested slopes with the flood plains of the Caudal and the Turón, previously occupied by mine shafts; part of the municipality is now included in the Protected Landscape of the Mining Basins of Asturias, and the workers' settlement of Bustiello is preserved.
Monument
A temple of Romanesque origin on the Asturian Camino Real, already mentioned in a donation by Ordoño I to the first bishop of León, dated 28 June 860. Railway works forced it to be rebuilt in 1922, but three elements of the original fabric were saved: the exedra of the original apse, the chancel arch, now relocated, and a richly decorated doorway — moved to the north wall — with three archivolts decorated with Zamoran rolls on pilasters with different capitals, one of them showing Daniel in the lions' den. In 1956 an excavation uncovered the Lauda del niño Velasco, dated 921, which confirms the existence of a 10th-century Christian cemetery already mentioned in the 860 donation. It was declared a Monumento Histórico Artístico (heritage protection category) in 1923.
Monument
The Santa Bárbara pit is a coal mine located in the spot known as La Rabaldana, in the parish of Turón, concejo de Mieres, next to the river and Hunosa's service road. It was opened in 1913 by the Sociedad Hulleras del Turón, with a shaft 5.5 metres in diameter and 545 metres deep, spread over eleven levels beneath an iron headframe about 30 metres tall, to work the seams of the San Víctor and San Pedro groups. It was key to the rise in production in the 1920s and to the mechanisation of the work. It passed to Hunosa in 1970 and closed in 1995. It preserves the vertical shafts, the engine house, the washery and the bathhouse, and today functions as a cultural centre. In 2009 it was the first Asturian coal mine to be declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection).
Monument
A settlement built between 1890 and 1906 by the Marquis of Comillas's Sociedad Hullera Española, with housing graded according to job, a church, schools, a sanatorium and a Catholic workers' club. It was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) in 2017 along with the Santa Bárbara barracks.
Monument
The oldest civil building in the town, in the La Villa de Arriba quarter, also called the palace of the Álvarez Castañón. An inscription beneath the coat of arms records that Fernando Álvarez Castañón rebuilt it in 1689. It is a large square-plan house with a four-sided roof and a wide eave, whose main façade is divided into a compact section, with two lintelled openings, and another open section with a glazed gallery on the upper floor; it is built of masonry and sandstone ashlar, which frames the openings and corners. The descendants of the Álvarez Castañón moved to the León comarca of Gordón, where they married into lineages such as the Villafañe or the Quirós. It is a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) and was restored in 1997, although it has remained closed to the public since 2012.
Monument
An 18th-century temple, the work of Pedro Muñiz, located in the village of Insierto, in the Cuna valley, and declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) in 1995. Tradition places the origin of the veneration of the martyrs Cosmas and Damian in the transfer of their relics from Toledo to Oviedo during the Muslim invasion. With a cross-shaped plan and a flat chevet, a tower at the foot and porticoes surrounding both sides — added in the 19th century —, its vaults are decorated with paintings darkened by a fire, and the chevet is covered by a four-pointed star vault. Facing the sanctuary stands the Casa de la Novena. Every 27 September it hosts the Romería de los Santos Mártires, declared a Fiesta de Interés Turístico Nacional (festival declared of national tourist interest) in 1969.
Monument
A mine sunk by Fábrica de Mieres between 1937 and 1941 to a depth of 355 metres, the setting at Christmas 1991 for the sit-in by the union executives against Hunosa's restructuring plan. Flooded since 1997, its water now provides geothermal heating for several buildings in the municipality.
Nature
An inland range of 13,225 hectares declared by decree of 14 March 2002, spread across Mieres, Langreo, Laviana and San Martín del Rey Aurelio; it protects mountains and forests on carboniferous bedrock at the headwaters of the Caudal and Nalón valleys, with Peña Mea (1,559 m) as its most distinctive peak. The vegetation combines meadows and farmland with oak, beech and Pyrenean oak woods, and shelters the Cantabrian capercaillie, the Egyptian vulture, the otter and the Pyrenean desman, as well as wild boar and roe deer; the mountain is recovering from old mining activity and acts as a wildlife corridor towards the Redes natural park. Sheep, cattle and horse farming continues, in decline, and numerous routes link up with the industrial heritage paths of the lower valleys.
Nature
The chain that closes Mieres to the south, on the boundary with Lena and Aller, and where Burra Blanca rises, 1,153 metres high, the highest point in the municipality. It also holds Pico Tres Concejos, 1,096 metres, which marks the meeting of three municipal districts.
Nature
A mountain line that closes Mieres to the east and peaks at El Cogollo, 1,017 metres above sea level. Below its slopes hides the Urbiés valley, a corner of scattered hamlets reached from the capital after a dozen kilometres of mountain road.
Nature
The Caudal river rises at Sovilla, in the concejo de Mieres, at an altitude of 256 metres, from the confluence of the Lena and Aller rivers, and runs 20.6 kilometres northward, passing through Ujo, Santullano, Mieres, Santa Eulalia, Argame and Figaredo, before flowing into the Nalón river at Soto de Ribera. It gives its name to the whole comarca and was one of the two great mining basins of Asturias, with its floodplain concentrating the coal pits, washeries and workers' settlements. During the revolutionary strike of the summer of 1917, the so-called Tren de la Muerte ran through its valley, from which soldiers fired in reprisal against the population. Mallards, cormorants and grey herons are often seen in its waters.
Nature
A 1,051-metre summit that crowns the Carraspientes ridge, on the eastern edge of the municipality. On its western slope were the mountain mines of Mariana and Corujas, the basis of the Fábrica de Mieres, and horses still graze on its high pastures.
Curiosity
A burial ground built between 1860 and 1880 by the French industrialist Numa Guilhou, founder of the Fábrica de Mieres, to bury the foreign families who came with industrialisation. It is the only Calvinist Protestant cemetery in Asturias and Guilhou himself lies there.
Curiosity
An artisan Asturian cheese made with whole cow's milk without rennet or starter, which coagulates solely through acidification over four or five days while being skimmed; the curd is then placed in cloth bags and matures for six to nine months, being turned so that the surface mould spreads evenly. Rindless, with a soft, unctuous paste and a very strong flavour — the spiciest in the Principality —, it is served in small clay pots called tarreñes; its names vary according to the bag used, such as the vexiga, made in animal bladders with cow colostrum. It takes its name from the hamlet of Urbiés, about 12 kilometres from Mieres, although it is also made in Turón, Proaza, Quirós, Lena, Teverga and Somiedo. A food festival dedicated to this cheese is held in June.
Activity
A festival of folk music and Asturian culture born in 1996 that takes over the streets of Mieres del Camín for a week in April. It opens the Principality's festival calendar and combines native folklore with Celtic-roots groups from other countries.
Activity
Every 27 September the valley of Cuna and Cenera hosts one of the concejo's most typical romerías, around the 18th-century sanctuary of the martyrs Cosmas and Damian: a picnic in the meadow, bagpipes and dancing well into the afternoon. Declared a Fiesta de Interés Turístico (festival declared of tourist interest) in 1969, the events begin on 18 September with a novena and on the 26th with bagpipe parades and the awarding of sashes to the Xana and the Xanines, the village's maids of honour. The main day begins with masses at the sanctuary, continues with the procession of the saints and, already in the meadow, with the puya'l ramu, an auction of spelt bread, and the Concurso de Baile a lo Suelto. The following day, Los martirinos, there are children's games and a tonada festival; the singer-songwriter Víctor Manuel dedicated his song La Romería to the festival.
Curiosity
A shaft at San Andrés which, without ever being worked, became from October 1937 one of the largest mass graves in the country: it is estimated that between three and four hundred people were thrown down its thirty metres.
Monument
The Romanesque doorway of Santa Eulalia de Ujo belongs to the former church of that name, in the parish of Ujo, municipality of Mieres, on the royal Camino de Santiago of Asturias, whose origin is documented at least since the 10th century. When the church was pulled down in 1922 to widen the railway, three original elements were saved: the apse, the triumphal arch —today the entrance to the new apse— and this doorway, moved to the north wall when it had previously opened to the west. Its three inner arches, decorated with 'Zamora rolls', rest on four pilasters whose capitals alternate plant and geometric motifs of Celtic origin with a Daniel in the lions' den. The rest of the church is a neo-Romanesque reconstruction; the whole was declared a Monumento Histórico Artístico (an earlier Spanish heritage-protection category, forerunner of today's Bien de Interés Cultural) in 1923.
Monument
The sanctuary of San Cosme and San Damián, in Insierto (Mieres), is an 18th-century church designed by Pedro Muñiz with a cruciform floor plan. Around it, every 27 September, the pilgrimage of the Santos Mártires de Valdecuna is held, one of the most deeply rooted dates in the municipality, declared a Fiesta de Interés Turístico (an official Spanish designation for festivities of special tourist interest) in 1969. The events begin on 18 September with a novena; on the 26th there are parades of bagpipes and drums, a proclamation and the presentation of sashes to the Xana and the Xaninas, and on the 27th, after the first Mass at seven in the morning and the main midday Mass, the procession of the saints goes out around the sanctuary, followed by an open-air meal, the puya'l ramu and the Concurso de Baile a lo Suelto dance contest. Singer-songwriter Víctor Manuel dedicated his song La Romería to this pilgrimage.
Monument
The church of San Juan Bautista is the parish church of Mieres del Camín, in the La Pasera district, and occupies the site of an earlier Romanesque church, demolished in 1927, from whose rubble the doorway was rescued, today kept in the Palacio de los Condes Rodríguez Sampedro, in Gijón. Inaugurated in 1931 to a design by Enrique Rodríguez Bustelo, it is one of the great neo-Baroque churches of Asturias from the first third of the 20th century and dominates the town centre of Mieres del Camín with its bulk. It has three naves and a façade with a neoclassical pediment flanked by two towers topped with bulbous spires, and holds an altarpiece donated by Mieres native Félix Granda Buylla. The feast of San Juan is celebrated every 24 June.
Nature
Despite more than a century of mining along its banks, this tributary of the Caudal still holds otter and Iberian desman, the second of these exclusive to this watercourse within the municipality, which marks it out as the river with the cleanest water in Mieres.
Curiosity
Five surviving engines from the valley's collieries and railways, among them the Turón III, are displayed around parks and former stations in the municipality as a reminder of the trains that carried the coal out.
Historical milestone
The insurrection began on 5 October 1934 and within three days the miners of the coalfields controlled almost all of Asturias; the army, with troops from Africa and with aircraft, crushed it in two weeks with well over a thousand dead.
Curiosity
Founded in 1890 with Basque capital to work the valley's coal, it came to have nine mines in 1926 and its production peak in 1958; Turón went from 2,000 residents to 20,000 before being absorbed into Hunosa in 1967.
Activity
The Pozo Espinos, in the Turón valley, had already been worked since 1906 as Grupo Espinos, although the present shaft was built in 1927 by the Basque company Hulleras de Turón; brought into Hunosa in 1967 as an auxiliary shaft, it remained active only a few more years before closing. Its original headframe stands out, with the machinery hidden inside a wooden shed crowning a seven-metre tower. Today the old lamp room houses the mining interpretation centre, which explains underground work, life in the mining settlement and the coal cycle that sustained the valley for nearly a century; the visit takes in the loading building with a restored cage, an iron bridge with wagons from the old mining railway, and a viewpoint on the spoil heap.
Curiosity
The Fábrica de Mieres was a mining and ironworks company founded in 1879 where a namesake ironworks had already existed since 1844, in the mid-nineteenth century. The Asturian Mining Company, of London, built a blast furnace between Rebollada and Ablaña that in 1848 produced Spain's first quality iron made with coke, the so-called English method. After the company was dissolved in 1849, its assets passed through various hands until falling under French capital in 1861. Its blast furnaces, beside Mieres del Camino, made iron using coal from the Caudal mines, within an ironworks triangle alongside the Moreda-Gijón and La Felguera plants. It turned a farming town into an ironworking centre and pushed its population above seventy thousand inhabitants by 1960. Its mines passed to Hunosa in 1967; it closed in the seventies and was dissolved in 2010.
Monument
In Figaredo, this seigneurial mansion preserves the attached chapel of San Clemente, which houses a Baroque altarpiece inside; it is one of the complexes of noble architecture that survive among the industrial housing of the Caudal valley.
Curiosity
The pozo Figaredo, in the Figaredo parish of Mieres, is the union of two coal workings: the San Vicente shaft and the San Inocencio shaft. Ignacio Figaredo, an ancestor of Rodrigo Rato Figaredo, managed the family's mining concessions in the Turón valley and in 1871 installed a tramway to the loading point of the Norte railway. In 1932 Minas de Figaredo was set up, which deepened the San Vicente shaft to 500 metres. The 1978 crisis caused labour conflicts; it passed to the Instituto Nacional de Industria in 1980 and to Hunosa in 1997, until its closure in 2007. Two mine entrances, the engine house and the 40-metre headframe are preserved. Its sheds remained standing, part of the valley's industrial landscape, alongside others such as the pozo Polio or the Mariana mine entrance.
Historical milestone
Mieres was part of the concejo of Lena from the time Alfonso X granted the latter its charter of settlement in 1266; it had no town hall of its own until 1836, during the regency of María Cristina, when it was constituted as an independent concejo.