Avilés is an Asturian industrial city that made a remarkable transformation in the early twenty-first century. For most of the twentieth century it was defined by its steel works — ENSIDESA, which at its peak employed 14,000 people and left the estuary heavily polluted and the city visually bleak. The steel plant closed progressively from the 1980s onwards, and Avilés has since reinvented itself around culture and tourism, with surprising success.
The old town, largely intact behind its medieval walls, reveals a genuinely beautiful historic centre that the industrial era left untouched. The Plaza de España is bordered by stone palaces with arcaded ground floors typical of Asturian civic architecture, and the streets around the church of San Nicolás de Bari and the San Francisco park are among the most atmospheric in northern Spain. Several medieval palaces — the Balsera, the Camposagrado, the Maqua, the Llano Ponte — face each other across narrow streets in a concentration of Renaissance and Baroque architecture rarely found in cities of this size.
The signature addition to the contemporary city is the Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Centre — Puerto Niemeyer — designed by the Brazilian architect (then aged 104) and opened in 2011. The complex of white domes and towers on the estuary waterfront is genuinely spectacular, an assertion of architectural ambition that gave the city a global profile it had never previously enjoyed.
Oviedo is only 25 kilometres south, and Gijón is 30 kilometres east. The Asturian coast nearby has good beaches, particularly at Salinas and along the Costa Verde. Avilés makes a manageable and affordable base for exploring the region.