Llanera

The first thing you notice is the smell of cut grass drifting across a dual carriageway. Motorists heading for Oviedo’s office blocks flash past at 100 km/h while, fifty metres away, a farmer in overalls coaxes a tractor between apple trees. Llanera never lets you forget it is both things at once: a working council of scattered hamlets and the green breather that coastal Asturias forgot to concrete over.

Fifteen Kilometres That Make All the Difference

Leave the A-66 at the hospital exit and the city drops away faster than you can finish a Radio 4 sentence. Within five minutes you’re on the AS-17, a road that narrows until two vans can’t pass without one mirror folding in. Hedgerows replace billboards; the temperature falls two degrees. At 160 m above sea level the air is moist enough for lichen to silver every oak branch, yet low enough to spare you the ear-popping climbs of the Picos. That mid-height, mid-climate position is why families from Gijón keep weekend houses here and why walkers doing the Camino Primitivo suddenly find their boots drying overnight.

The municipality strings out along the Río Nora flood-plain. There is no “old town”, just a chain of parishes—Lugo, Ables, Pruvia, Posada—each with its church tower poking above red-tile roofs like a bookmark in an atlas someone keeps rearranging. Distances are short (Santa María to Lugo de Llanera is 4 km) but the lanes loop and dip so a paper map still beats phone GPS for spotting the odd hórreo hidden down a cow track.

What You’re Really Looking At

British visitors arrive expecting either a whitewashed hill village or a cider-soaked fishing port; Llanera is neither. The built heritage is vernacular rather than monumental. Start with the Iglesia de Santa María, late-Romanesque bones clothed in 18th-century dress. Stand at the south door at about eleven o’clock: the sun picks out the chevron carving that the Reformation stripped from most English churches, and you realise why the priest chose this spot—every ray lands on the altar during winter solstice mass.

Move on to Lugo de Llanera for the tower-cum-fortified house at Villanueva. It’s not National Trust tidy; brambles grow through the bottom loopholes and a farmer uses the ground floor as an open barn. Still, climbing the short spiral gives you a crash course in local power politics: from the roof you can see every medieval parish boundary, the river ford and, less romantically, the 1994 industrial estate. The council keeps the key at the bar opposite; ask while ordering a cortado and they’ll wipe their hands, shrug, and lend it for free.

Between monuments you’ll pass pasture that smells faintly of cider apples—thousands of them, trained low enough to pick from the saddle. Asturias ships most of its fruit to the Basque Country, so the orchards here are small, family plots. Stop at the honesty stall outside Posada: a paper bag of cookers costs €2 and the honesty box is an old post box painted green, a nod Royal Mail devotees can’t fail to like.

Moving Slowly in the Middle Ground

Serious hikers sometimes sniff at Llanera’s 200-metre contours, but that misses the point. The pleasure is in continuity: you can walk from parish to parish on ancient drove roads without ever meeting a way-marked “route”. A two-hour loop from Ables to Pruvia follows a stone-walled lane so overgrown the cows use it as a corridor; blackberries ripen in September exactly at elbow height. After rain—which is most April mornings—the path turns to orange clay; boots with a half-decent tread are enough, no need for Alpine kit.

Cyclists appreciate the secondary tarmac: traffic counts drop to a tractor an hour once you leave the AS-17. The council has painted bike logos on the road to Posada, mainly, locals joke, so lycra groups don’t scare the livestock. Elevation gain is gentle enough for families, yet the rollercoaster profile still earns you a pastry at the end.

Eating Between Shifts

Because this is commuter land, restaurants open early by Spanish standards. The menú del día appears at 13:00 sharp and kitchens start mopping up around 15:30; turn up at 16:00 and you’ll be offered a packet of crisps with apology eyes. For a fiver you get three courses, bread and a bottle of cider poured overhead like a fire drill. Try the fabada if your cardiologist isn’t watching—Llanera versions are heavy on compango (chorizo, morcilla, pancetta) and light on pretension. Children can retreat into arroz con leche, a cinnamon-dusted rice pudding served cold, reassuringly similar to what grandmother made on the Aga.

The area’s signature is gochu celta, Celtic pork from blond-haired pigs that spend their final months gorging on windfall apples. A tabla de embutidos usually includes lacón (shoulder ham) and a soft loin that tastes like a nuttier version of Wiltshire cure. Pair it with a glass of local still wine, increasingly stocked now Oviedo’s sommeliers have discovered it; the bottle will cost less than a London pint.

When Concrete Refuses to Go Away

Honesty requires admitting the downside. Llanera’s northern edge is a rectangle of logistics warehouses and the Fernando Alonso kart circuit. Petrolheads love the track—£25 buys ten minutes in a 270 cc kart capable of 80 km/h—but the brutalist grandstand is visible from the river path. On weekdays the N-634 roars with refrigerated lorries heading to Santander; light pollution means you’ll never get the Milky Way. Accept the compromise or, better, build it into the itinerary: let the kids exhaust themselves on tarmac then bribe them with a walk through pear orchards afterwards.

Parking etiquette matters more here than in most of rural Spain. Lanes are single-track with passing bays; a Ford Focus wedged on the verge blocks the milk tanker that comes at 17:00 sharp. Pull fully into gateways and never reverse into someone’s driveway—these are working farms, not photo sets.

Turning Up Without a Plan

Spring and early autumn give the brightest light and the least mud. Buses leave Oviedo’s central panel every thirty minutes; the journey takes twenty and a single is €1.65. With wheels you can cover the whole municipality in half a day, but that defeats the purpose. Stay in Posada’s only hostal (doubles €55, heating that actually works) and you’ll hear the church bell that still dictates field-workers’ lunch. English is thin on the ground—staff at the circuit speak enough to take your money, otherwise phrase-book Spanish gets smiles and, occasionally, an unsolicited top-up of cider.

Leave the checklist mentality at home. Llanera rewards drifting: the carved stone you only notice because the sat-nav lost signal, the cider house that opens on Thursdays because the owner feels like it. It isn’t dramatic, but it is alive—an ordinary landscape doing what it has always done, just gently enough that you can finally hear yourself think.