Tour of Oviedo

On Wednesday night, members of ESN Oviedo gave us a city tour. ESN Oviedo is a student organization at the University of Oviedo that organizes a welcome week for us international students and trips for us on the weekends.

This is where we met. This statue is called ‘La Gorda.’ Can you see why? :) The group of Iowans I was with arrived about 15 minutes early and we were debating whether we were at the right place or not because the technical name of the statue is ‘La Maternidad’ and those leading the tour never told us where ‘La Gorda’ was. Luckily, my host mom showed me on the map, and it was right!

This is the original University building. It was founded 404 years ago. The statue is the founder of the university, Fernando de Valdes Salas. He was a part of the Catholic Church’s Inquisition in Spain. You can still see bullet holes in the building from the civil war.

This statue is called ‘The Traveller.’ It’s a man that traveled to the United States and made lots of money and sent money back to Oviedo (if I understood correctly).

There is a book called ‘La Regente.’ I’m actually going to read it in my literature class. It’s about Oviedo and people in Oviedo, but changes the names of everything. This statue is the mayor’s wife in the book who is one of the main characters. I’m not really sure why they have a statue of her because I thought he said the book was kind of making fun of Oviedo.

This is the cathedral in Oviedo. It supposedly holds the shroud that covered Jesus’ face. It was built using many different styles because of how long it took to build. It used to have 2 towers, but one was destroyed because of a fire and they didn’t have money to rebuild it.

Supposedly if you sit on this statue of a donkey, you will pass all your finals.

There was more, but it was getting dark, so I didn’t take pictures. One of the other places we saw was a church that is apparently the only circular Catholic church in the world. Unfortunately, this tour did not help me orient myself in the city at all because it was at night and I just have no sense of direction, but it was interesting to see all the city has to offer.

*all pictures personal