The Museo del Ferrocarril de Asturias is one of the best railway museums in Spain, housed in the former Jovellanos station with a large outdoor display of preserved locomotives and rolling stock. Asturias had an extensive narrow-gauge rail network serving the coal mines and ironworks that drove the region's industrial revolution; the museum charts that history with well-preserved examples of the engineering that moved coal from pit to port across difficult mountain terrain. The steam locomotives on display include some that worked into the 1970s on the narrow-gauge lines that still thread through the Asturian valleys.
The setting adds to the appeal: the station building is substantial and handsome, and the arrangement of locomotives on outdoor track allows you to walk around and between them in a way that a conventional museum hall wouldn't permit. The industrial history context is genuinely interesting — Asturias's economy was built on coal and steel, and the railways were inseparable from both — and the museum handles it with enough local specificity to feel honest rather than generically triumphalist about industry. The museum is west of central Gijón, about 20 minutes' walk from the beach.