Cimavilla, Gijón: from the Roman baths to the headland: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
From the Roman baths to the headland
Cimavilla sits on a headland that fishing families, noble houses and the city council all shared, so the walk passes palaces and a town hall beside the old fish market, the fishermen's chapel and the cigarette makers' factory.
The stops
Public baths were built here near the end of the first century, heated by a hypocaust, and they went out of use in the fourth century. In the Middle Ages the ruins served as a burial ground, and in the 19th century a plaza was laid over them. They were found again in March 1903 while a sewer was being dug, with the locals Calixto Alvargonzález and Julio Somoza leading the excavation, and the site has been an underground museum since 1995.
Photo: Maria jose 1963 — CC BY-SA 4.0 San Pedro was Gijón's only parish church until 1893. The 15th-century building was dynamited on 27 September 1936, after the city's three parish churches had been set on fire, and a few days later the writer Pachín de Melás rescued the remains of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos and took them to the Escuela de Comercio for the time being. The present church, built between 1945 and 1955 by the architects Francisco and Federico Somolinos, takes its look from Asturian Romanesque and pre-Romanesque.
Photo: Superchilum — CC BY-SA 4.0 This baroque palace of the Valdés family has a central block between two matching towers, a front of rusticated stone with a monumental door under a pediment bearing the family arms, and a chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe built in 1625. A tobacco factory worked in it in the 19th century, before moving to the former convent now called the Tabacalera. Today it is the Colegio del Santo Ángel de la Guarda, and Louis-Antoine Ormières, founder of the congregation that set up the school, died in Gijón on 16 January 1890, in the sisters' school there, which Spanish Wikipedia places in this palace.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 This was Gijón's municipal fish market, inaugurated on 13 March 1930 in a pioneering reinforced-concrete structure by the engineer José María Sánchez del Vallado, with 126 stalls for fish and 16 for shellfish. The fish arrived from the waterfront where the marina is today and was sold by the pescaderas, women born in Cimavilla. The market closed in early 1991 after 61 years, and the building, whose pediment still reads AÑO 1928 / PESCADERIA / MUNICIPAL, was rebuilt inside in 1996 as city offices.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 The council planned this square in 1858 on the model of a Castilian plaza mayor, and the city hall on its east side was finished in 1865. The plan called for arcades on all four sides, but for lack of budget only two sides were arcaded and a third was closed by the city hall, and the north side was left unarcaded, keeping older buildings whose demolition was proposed in the 1980s. The Pescadería was joined to the arcaded range in 1928, and the square, at the gates of Cimavilla, the old fishermen's quarter, is paved and closed to traffic.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, the Enlightenment statesman, author and philosopher born in Gijón in 1744, belonged to a family that owned this house from the late 15th century. His father gave it its present look in 1758, with two towers joined by a central block and the chapel of Los Remedios attached. It has been a museum since 1971, with rooms set out as a small sitting room and a bedroom of Jovellanos, and Roman remains in Cimavilla include a water reservoir in the square in front of it.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 A tower dated to 1572 stood beside one of the two towers that gave access to Gijón's Roman walled enclosure, and archaeological remains of the Roman wall gate survive at its base. Over the centuries it served as the town hall and later as a jail, and it was pulled down around 1911 once the new El Coto prison opened. The present tower is a reconstruction by Francisco Pol, built between 1989 and 1995 and now home to the municipal archive.
Photo: David Álvarez López — CC BY 2.0 Carlos Miguel Ramírez de Jove, first Marquis of San Esteban de Natahoyo, had this baroque palace built from 1704, using an existing Gothic tower of the 15th century, and it was finished in 1721 under Francisco Menéndez Camina. It is called Revillagigedo because the title of counts of Revillagigedo later passed to the same family. The Colegiata de San Juan Bautista beside it was finished fifteen years after the palace, paid for by the marquis's uncle Luis Ramírez de Valdés, prior of Oviedo cathedral.
Photo: Jose L. Marin — CC BY 2.5 José María López Rodríguez's statue of Pelayo, founder of the Kingdom of Asturias and counted as the starter of the Reconquista, was inaugurated in 1891. It stands 2.8 metres tall and weighs four tonnes, and in its right hand it holds the Cross of Victory, the emblem of Asturias. According to José Antonio Samaniego Burgos, it was made from bronze cannons taken from the Moroccans in the war of 1859 and 1860.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 The shipping agent Alberto Paquet commissioned this neo-Renaissance house, built in 1918 to a design by Miguel García de la Cruz, as both the office of his shipping business and his family home. While the old houses on the site were being pulled down, a black liquid like petroleum seeped out of the ground; an analysis showed it was shale oil, probably from a broken barrel in one of the demolished warehouses. With the Revillagigedo palace and its chapel, it forms the southern face of Cimavilla, and it is used as a tourist information office.
Photo: B25es — CC BY-SA 3.0 This small chapel dates from 1674 and began as the chapel of La Ascensión. It became the seat of Gijón's old mariners' guild, the Gremio de Mareantes, after the guild's earlier home, the chapel of Santa Catalina on the hill, was turned into a powder store in the 19th century, and today it is the seat of the fishermen's brotherhood, the Cofradía de Pescadores. The present chapel was rebuilt after the Civil War and restored in 1996.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 This convent of the Augustinian Recollect nuns, planned in 1668, was turned into a tobacco factory in 1843 and worked until it closed on 31 July 2002. Its workforce was mostly women, the cigarreras: in 1890 the factory counted 1,935 women and 50 men, and in 1903 they called the first women's strike in Asturias. In the courtyard, digs between 2006 and 2009 found a Roman cistern of the third or fourth century, six metres square and four deep, and the building is being converted into a cultural centre.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 The hill, also called La Atalaya, takes its name from the old chapel of Santa Catalina, seat of the guild of mariners, the oldest and most powerful in Gijón. In the 17th century a military battery was raised here to protect the coast from pirates and privateers. The city council bought the military land in 1982, and in 1997 the architect Francisco Pol turned the hill into a museum site, with a large park around it.
Photo: Torres05 — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida made this concrete sculpture, 10 metres tall and 500 tonnes in weight, as a tribute to the horizon, which he called the homeland of every man. He began looking for an oceanside site in 1985, and in 1986 the city offered him the Cerro de Santa Catalina, then a military zone that was to become a park. The civil engineer José Antonio Fernández Ordóñez used more than twenty concrete mixes to get the colour right, and it was inaugurated on 9 June 1990; it was first criticized for its cost and its odd shape, and is now called a symbol of the city.
Photo: Fernando — CC BY-SA 4.0
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