Gijón is Asturias's largest city, a working port on the Bay of Biscay that combines a long beach in the city centre with an unusually rich concentration of museums, a historic fishermen's quarter on a headland, and a cider bar culture that is both a genuine local tradition and one of the more enjoyable social experiences in northern Spain. It's a city that gets more interesting the longer you stay: the surface is an industrial port town with beaches, but underneath it are Roman foundations, a distinctive regional food and drink culture, and a literary scene expressed annually in the Semana Negra crime fiction festival.
The old quarter of Cimadevilla sits on a rocky headland at the eastern end of the beach, and that's where to start. The Eduardo Chillida sculpture at the headland's tip, the Roman baths in the quarter below, the small museums, and the cider bars that fill most evenings give the neighbourhood a density of interest that rewards a full day. The beach — Playa San Lorenzo, running 1.5 kilometres along the town front — is the other axis of the city's life in summer. Beyond these two poles, the Museum of the Asturian People and the International Bagpipe Museum reward visitors interested in the region's distinctive culture, and the railway museum is one of the best of its kind in Spain.