Tourist Visit in Oviedo

Some of you asked to send the info that I said yesterday... here you are!!!

Hello Castores (I didn´t say it, but I say it now)

We are here in the meeting point for the young people, the sculpture of Botero, Maternity, we use to call her The Fat Woman (La Gorda). Arround you you will find a lot of palaces and buildings like the one for the Goberment that shows you the great architecture from the 19th and 20th centuries, but we are not going to talk about it.

If you take a newspaper almost everyday, Asturian people is the poorest, we have no work, people is leaving to the big cities and as a stereotype, we are supposed to be drunk people... So the only moment in the history when we have done something was the Middle Ages.

In 711 arabs arrived in Spain to conquer all the lands, until 722 whe they arrived to Asturias. There ar 2 versions of the story, and I would tell you both. In theory, the Asturians where the great people that preserved the Christianism from the Arabs. They decided to fight against them, and kept the spirit pure. Pelayo, a prince coming from Toledo (with a Royal visigothic family) arrived here and was chosen as the King of the lands. They were fighting and after the battle in the mountains they started the reconquering period.

The true story says that Pelayo could not stand that his sister was going out with an Arab (in fact, when he was away, they got married), so, thinking that the people in the towns were fed up cause they had to pay the taxes to the Arabs, he encouraged them to fight. Evenmore (I forgot yesterday) If you read the Arab Chronicles, they say that in the end, they decided to stop fighting because it was jus a piece of land with no interest.

However... the thing is that a kingdom was stablishe here, they started building the cathedral that you can see nowadays, even if most of what you see is from the XIVth century. They included Oviedo in the Camino de Santiago, as a compulsary stop:

"Quien va a Santiago y no al Salvador conoce al Siervo pero no al Señor"

"Who goes to Santiago and not to Salvador (Oviedo´s Cathedral) meets the servant but not the Lord"

And like this we started, with the visit, where we saw the oldest house in Oviedo, the Fish Market, the City Hall and the Fontan Market, where you had the opportunity to learn the Castor Call!!!

Enough for today!