Walk the open plaza between the dome and the auditorium and work out that the plaza is the actual building

Find out how Avilés got it: a gift from Niemeyer to the Principality after the Prince of Asturias Award of 1989

Look from the centre back across the ría at the steelworks and see the contrast Niemeyer was working against

Go into the medieval old town, which is a completely different Avilés a few hundred metres away

Work out why he rated it above everything else he did in Europe

Oscar Niemeyer won the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 1989, and on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the awards he gave the Principality a project. What he gave them was a set of white curves on the industrial riverside at Avilés — a dome, a tower, an open plaza — set against a heavy steelworks town and a medieval old quarter. It opened officially on 26 March 2011. It is the only Niemeyer building in Spain, and he said himself it was the most important thing he ever built in Europe.

Avilés: Niemeyer's Only Building in Spain

Go into Santa María del Naranco and find the barrel vault with transverse ribs matched one-to-one by buttresses outside — Romanesque construction, decades early

Work out what it actually was: a royal pleasure palace of Ramiro I completed in 842, only consecrated as a church in 848

Walk the hundred metres to San Miguel de Lillo, the other half of the same royal complex

Go down into Oviedo and find the Cámara Santa in the cathedral, which holds the Cross of the Angels and the Victory Cross

Work out the political story: the court moved from Cangas de Onís to Pravia to Oviedo, and the buildings moved with it

Between 711 and 910 the kingdom of Asturias was the only Christian state left in Iberia, pinned against the Cantabrian mountains, and it produced an architecture found nowhere else — Asturian pre-Romanesque, which took Visigothic, Mozarabic and local traditions and made something with its own personality and a startling level of refinement. Santa María del Naranco above Oviedo was built by Ramiro I as a recreational palace, finished in 842 and consecrated as a church in 848. Its barrel vault with transverse ribs answering buttresses outside is a clear precursor of Romanesque. UNESCO listed it in December 1985.

Asturian Pre-Romanesque: The Architecture of a Kingdom in Hiding

Stand on the harbour and look back up at the village stacked in tiers around you

Climb to one of the miradors above the village for the view straight down into the amphitheatre

Find out what a pixueto is and why the villagers are named differently from everyone else in the same council

Eat what comes off the boats — this is still a working fishing port, not a reconstruction of one

Walk out to the nearby beaches down the ravines west of the village, which are reached on foot and mostly empty

Cudillero's houses are stacked up the walls of a narrow ravine above the harbour in tiers, painted in different colours, so the whole village looks like a theatre with the port as its stage. The port and the first settlement date to the 13th century, and the earliest document naming the place is a deed of 1285 granting a plot at the port of Cudillero where bread could be sold. The villagers have their own name and their own dialect: pixuetos, from living off fish, as distinct from the farming people of the rest of the council.

Cudillero: A Fishing Village Stacked in an Amphitheatre

Drink at a sidrería on Calle Gascona, Oviedo's 'Boulevard of Cider'

Pour a culete of cider the Asturian way, holding the bottle high above your head so the stream hits the glass and aerates the cider

Walk up to the Plaza de la Catedral and look at the Gothic tower of San Salvador, finished in the mid-16th century

Asturias drinks around forty million litres of cider a year and it is poured, not served. The bottle is held at full arm's length above the head and the glass at hip height, so the stream falls a metre or more and breaks on the side of the glass — that aeration is the whole point, because the cider is still, dry and sharp, and without it it tastes flat. You get a couple of fingers at a time, a culete, and you drink it straight down and throw the last drop on the floor. Calle Gascona in Oviedo is a whole street of places doing it.

Oviedo: The Cider Boulevard of Calle Gascona

Ride the trackbed through the Trubia valley and work out that the gradient is a locomotive's, not a hill's

Go through the tunnels and over the river sections, which are the original mining railway works

Stop at the bear enclosure and find out why these particular animals are not in the wild

Work out what was being carried down this line before 1991, and from where

Look for the wild Cantabrian brown bear population in the valleys around, which is a separate thing entirely

In 1991 the Principality approved a plan to recover the old mining railway that ran from Quirós and Teverga down the Trubia valley, and what came out of it is the Senda del Oso — a greenway on the trackbed through four Asturian councils, almost flat, with tunnels and river gorges the whole way. It is the best cycling in Asturias for anyone who does not want mountains. Along the route is an enclosure holding brown bears that could not be released back into the wild, which is where the path gets its name.

The Senda del Oso: A Mining Railway Turned Greenway

Ride it, if you can — and find the Cueña les Cabres, where it hits 23.5%

Work out what gearing you actually need before you start, because there is nowhere to stop and change your mind

Find the sign at La Vega-Riosa that calls the climb the Olympus of cycling

Find out what happened on the first Vuelta ascent in 1999 and who came out of the fog to win it

Work out how recent all this is: a farm track until 1997, and one of the most feared climbs in the sport by 1999

Until the late 1990s the Angliru was known to local cattle farmers and walkers and nobody else. In 1996 an Asturian looking for a summit finish to rival the Lagos de Covadonga suggested it, Riosa council surfaced the road in 1997, and the Vuelta went up it in 1999. It ramps to 23.5% at the Cueña les Cabres and is reckoned among the hardest surfaced climbs in world cycling, mentioned in the same breath as the Gamoniteiro next door, the Mortirolo and the Zoncolan. Chava Jiménez won that first stage out of the fog. A sign at the bottom now calls it the Olympus of cycling.

The Angliru: The Hardest Climb in Professional Cycling

Go to Tazones and find the house with the carved facade marking where Charles I came ashore in 1517

Go into a llagar during pressing season and find out how Asturian cider is actually made

Learn to pour it yourself — from arm's length, a couple of fingers at a time, drunk straight away

Work out why the pour matters and what it is doing to the cider

Get to Rodiles beach at the mouth of the ría, which is one of the best waves in northern Spain

In 1517 a storm pushed the fleet carrying the young Charles I of Spain off course for Santander and put him ashore at Tazones, the fishing port of Villaviciosa — his first landing in the country he had just inherited, in a village he had never heard of. Villaviciosa is the apple capital of Asturias and the centre of the cider industry: llagares pressing the fruit, cider poured from a height to break the surface and drunk immediately, and twenty-eight kilometres of coast behind it with Rodiles among the best surf beaches in northern Spain.

Villaviciosa: The Emperor Landed by Mistake

Go in on the mine train through the old gallery, which is the only way in

Find the helictites — eccentric stalactites that grow sideways instead of down

Find the draperies, translucent sheets of calcite hanging like flags from the roof

Work out how it was found: miners cutting for zinc and lead broke into a cavity that blew air at them, which is what soplao means

Work out the scale of what is behind the lit section: about twenty kilometres of cave, of which four are open

El Soplao was cut into by accident during zinc and lead mining, and soplao was the miners' word for a karst cavity that blew a strong draught when they broke into it. It runs to about twenty kilometres of which four are open, and what makes it exceptional is the formations: helictites — eccentric stalactites that grow sideways and defy gravity — and translucent draperies hanging from the roof. You go in on a mine train, through a working gallery, into a cave the people who found it had no idea was there.

El Soplao: The Cave the Miners Found by Accident

Watch a navaya being forged and find out why the handle is made the way it is

Find the water-driven mills, forge hammers and fulling machines still working on the streams

Work out how far back this goes: six forge hammers recorded in the Ensenada cadastre in the 18th century

Walk between the hamlets on the old paths — this is one of the greenest, wettest corners of Spain

Buy a knife made here rather than a souvenir version of one

Taramundi in the far west of Asturias had a working iron industry in the 18th century — the Ensenada cadastre records six forge hammers and a set of smithies — and it never entirely stopped. The knives and folding navayas made here are still forged by hand, and the whole trade runs on water — the mills, forge hammers and fulling machines that shape the blades are driven by the streams, as they always have been. It is one of the wettest corners of Spain, which is the reason the industry could exist here at all.