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Gijon sits on a peninsula jutting into the Cantabrian Sea and has been a port since Roman times, when it was called Noega and linked to the imperial road network across Asturias. The old quarter of Cimadevilla still occupies the original peninsula, its narrow streets climbing to the collegiate church of San Juan Bautista and the Revillagigedo Palace at Plaza Mayor, a baroque palace that has been converted into a contemporary art space. Below the old town, San Lorenzo beach stretches for 1,500 meters in a clean arc, and on summer evenings the paseo along it fills with the easy, late-Spanish rhythm of a city that knows where it lives.

The 19th century brought coal from the Asturian interior through the port, and shipbuilding and steel followed, transforming Gijon into one of Spain's industrial centers.

When those industries declined after the 1970s, the city began the long task of reinvention. The Universidad Laboral, a vast Francoist complex completed in 1955 and built to house orphans of workers killed in the Civil War, became LABoral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial in 2007 and is now one of Spain's major contemporary art institutions, occupying baroque and Renaissance buildings of staggering scale.