Oviedo Audio Tours

In 722, the Visigoths and Asturian nobles won a small battle at a place called Covadonga, and from that unlikely start the Kingdom of Asturias eventually became the seed from which Spain grew back. Oviedo was its capital from the reign of Alfonso II, who built the Cathedral of San Salvador around 830 AD to house relics including the Sudarium, a cloth kept in the Camara Santa and displayed to pilgrims three times a year. The pre-Romanesque churches on Monte Naranco, Santa Maria del Naranco and San Miguel de Lillo, are among the most quietly moving buildings on the Iberian peninsula.

Modern Oviedo is a university city of around 200,000 people with a genuinely elegant old quarter, a pedestrian street culture centred on Calle Uria and the Campoamor Theatre, and a sidra culture that is hard to overstate.

Asturian cider is poured from a great height, with the bottle held above the head and the glass below the hip, aerating it as it falls. The fabada, a stew of white beans, chorizo and black pudding that is the region's defining dish, needs exactly this cider alongside it.