Oviedo's old town and its statues: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
A cathedral city of street sculpture
Oviedo has filled its streets with sculpture, more than a hundred figures that honour writers, tradeswomen, a lost oak and even a visiting film director.
The stops
Asturian kings gave Oviedo its cathedral: it was founded by Fruela I in 781 and enlarged in 802 by his son Alfonso II, who made Oviedo the capital of his kingdom. The Cámara Santa is the most important structure to survive from that early royal complex, and when the court moved to León in 910 Oviedo stayed on as a bishop's seat and a stop on the northern branch of the Way of St James. The cathedral seen today mixes styles from Pre-Romanesque to Baroque.
Photo: Aarón-ulpgc — CC0 This stone friar is Benito Feijoo, a Benedictine monk and scholar who led the Spanish Enlightenment and set out to debunk myths and superstitions. Gerardo Zaragoza carved the statue in 1953 and set it facing the windows of the cell where Feijoo lived from 1709 until his death. He was professor of theology at the University of Oviedo from 1710 to 1739, in what was then the convent of San Vicente and is now the Archaeological Museum of Asturias.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Víctor Hevia carved this stone king in 1942, and the inscription on it reads Alfonso II, King of Asturias, 791-842. Alfonso moved his capital to Oviedo, where he built churches and a palace, and during his reign the supposed tomb of St James was found at Compostela. A copy of the statue stands in Santiago de Compostela, a gift from the Principality of Asturias.
Photo: AdelosRM — Public domain Mauro Álvarez Fernández cast this slightly larger than life bronze in 1997. It shows a lady of the late 19th century, Ana Ozores, set straight on the pavement with a plaque at her feet, in homage to the writer Leopoldo Alas, Clarín, and his novel. In La Regenta, published in 1884 and 1885, the story is set in the fictional city of Vetusta, easy to recognise as Oviedo, and Ana's confessor is a canon of its cathedral.
Photo: Aristonico — CC BY-SA 3.0 es Sebastián Miranda's fishwife was unveiled in 2005 as a bronze reproduction of a smaller work, one of ten of his sculptures bought by the city council. It honours Saturnina Requejo, known as la Cachucha, a woman from Cimadevilla who also appears in Miranda's Retablo del Mar in the Jovellanos birthplace museum in Gijón. Two more bronzes of everyday trades stand in this square: a crouching fish seller by José Antonio García Prieto, and La Lechera by Manuel García Linares, both from 1996, a tribute to the women who took milk round the old town with their donkeys until the 1970s.
Photo: Chairego apc — CC BY 4.0 Amado González Hevia, known as Favila, made this realist bronze in 1996, and the date is engraved under one of the figures. It stands in the Plaza Daoíz y Velarde, part of the Fontán market, where farm produce, livestock and Asturian crafts were sold on Thursdays and Saturdays and which became a place for women only after the civil war. The group was inspired by an old photograph by Adolfo López Armán of women who came up from Faro to Oviedo to sell the typical ceramics made in their family pottery.
Photo: Nacho from Oviedo, España — CC BY 2.0 Eduardo Úrculo made this life-size bronze in 1993: a traveller in a brimmed hat and overcoat, surrounded by suitcases with an umbrella leaning against them, as if he had just arrived in the city. It sits straight on the street with no pedestal, shows Úrculo's friend Williams B. Arrensberg and is popularly known as El Viajero. Úrculo, noted for his portrayals of luggage, hats and the female bottom, also made Culis Monumentalibus on this walk.
Photo: Astur — Public domain Fernando Botero's bronze is dated 1989 but was installed in 1996. A seated woman holds a child on one thigh, a modern version of the mother and child nearly two and a half metres tall and weighing 800 kilograms, in the rounded forms the Colombian sculptor is known for. The square it stands in is called Escandalera, a name used unofficially from the 19th century for the heated arguments in the council and the press over the first house built on its corner.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Úrculo's bronze from 2001, four metres high and blackened, stands on an 80 centimetre granite plinth on Calle Pelayo in front of the Campoamor Theatre. Its Latin title means roughly to the monumental buttocks, which is what it shows, and Úrculo took it from a 1977 article by Camilo José Cela about his passion for painting them. It came out of a city plan from the 1990s to make an open-air museum of Oviedo, and it has left nobody indifferent, with detractors and fierce defenders and a debate that reached the opinion columns.
Photo: Pabernosmatao — CC0 A plaque set in the pavement of Calle Uría marks the spot where the Carbayón stood, a huge oak that was a symbol of Oviedo until it was felled on 2 October 1879, after the new Calle Uría left it in the way of traffic. At its base it measured nine metres across, with two main trunks reaching 30 metres, and it was supposed to be around 500 years old. The people of Oviedo are still nicknamed carbayones after it, the council voted in 1949 to lay the plaque, and in 1950 a new oak was planted in the gardens of the Campoamor Theatre.
Photo: Adolfobrigido — CC BY-SA 4.0 This life-size bronze of the American film director was designed by Vicente Santarúa and installed in 2003 by mayor Gabino de Lorenzo, a year after Allen came to Oviedo to accept a Prince of Asturias Award. A plaque in front carries his own description of the city, which ends by calling Oviedo like a fairy tale, and his 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona was partly set here. Vandals broke his glasses so often that in 2008 the city council said it would repair them only once a year.
Photo: Noemy García García — CC BY-SA 2.5 es Since October 2014 Mafalda, the girl from Quino's Argentine comic strip, has sat on a bench by the Estanque de los Patos, the duck pond. Pablo Irrgang made the statue, after designing another Mafalda for the San Telmo district of Buenos Aires. It arrived the month her creator received the Prince of Asturias Award at a ceremony in Oviedo. People of all ages and from all over the world sit beside her to have their photograph taken.
Photo: Pachug — CC BY-SA 4.0 The writer Leopoldo Alas, Clarín, was born in Zamora, moved to Oviedo in 1863 and died here in 1901, and his novel La Regenta has a statue of its heroine on this walk. This stone monument dates from 1931 and was promoted by the city council and the university: Manuel Álvarez Laviada designed a small plaza with a fountain around it and Víctor Hevia carved the bust at the front. The Civil War damaged it, Hevia made a new bust in 1955, and a restoration in 1967 put an inscription with Clarín's dates where a female figure had stood.
Photo: Nacho from Oviedo, España — CC BY 2.0 The Campo de San Francisco began as the orchard of a Franciscan convent, and a 13th-century deed kept in the cathedral records a canon's gift of a fountain and a meadow to the friars. In 1534 the city and the cathedral chapter agreed to turn all the land into one public space, and in the 19th century two mayors made it an English-style park with ornamental fountains, now home to monuments such as those to José Tartiere and Clarín. Today it holds 127 species of trees and shrubs, and peacocks live free among them.
Photo: Nacho — Public domain
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