Over a two-week period in late 2024, Asturias collected two recognitions that most European regions wait a very long time for. Casa Marcial, in the countryside outside Arriondas, became the first restaurant in Asturian history to hold three Michelin stars. Days later, UNESCO added Asturian cider culture to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Many American travelers know Spain well. Most would still struggle to say where Asturias is.
Americans go to Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Granada, and the Mediterranean coast. Northern Spain has become better known through Bilbao and San Sebastián. Asturias sits farther west along the Atlantic coast and has been a Spanish holiday destination for generations. The region’s airport handles about two million passengers a year, almost all of them arriving from elsewhere in Spain.
Spaniards call this area Green Spain. The Cantabrian Mountains run almost to the Atlantic, and the Picos de Europa are their highest peaks. The valleys below are apple country, and the coast is cliffs and fishing harbors.
Oviedo, the regional capital, has a compact old town and a group of ninth-century pre-Romanesque churches, several of which are UNESCO sites. Gijón, half an hour north, sits directly on the Bay of Biscay. Villaviciosa anchors cider country. Cudillero is a fishing village stacked up the walls of its harbor.
The cider
Asturians drink cider daily. It is dry, cloudy, low in alcohol, and made from native apples. The region produces about 80 percent of all the cider in Spain.
Serving it is a learned skill. The pourer holds the bottle overhead and the glass near the waist, sending a thin stream through the air to break against the glass. Only a couple of inches go in at a time, a measure called a culín, and it is meant to be drunk immediately, before the next pour. The practice is called escanciar. Traditionally, everyone at the table drank from the same glass.
Liliana Ausín, an Asturian guide, told Travel + Leisure she learned it as a small girl by practicing in the bathtub with a bottle of water.
UNESCO recognized everything around the drink, the orchards, the native apple varieties, the cider houses, and the pouring itself, because Asturians were already doing all of it.
The food
Asturias is known for fabada, a heavy stew of white beans, pork, and sausage, and for Cabrales, a blue cheese aged in mountain caves in the east of the region. Gamonéu, made from a blend of cow, sheep, and goat milk, is one of several dozen cheeses produced here.
Casa Marcial is not alone; a region of about a million people holds fourteen Michelin stars. Nacho Manzano cooks his own region at Casa Marcial, in the converted farmhouse where his parents once fed neighbors.
Why it stayed quiet
Asturias has its own explanation for why it stayed off the American itinerary.
Esther Manzano, Nacho’s sister and part of the family that runs Casa Marcial, told National Geographic that the weather was unreliable, flights were scarce, and getting there was difficult. Asturians reached the obvious conclusion themselves.
“We just assumed nobody would want to come.”
Trains from Madrid had to climb the Pajares Pass, a slow, twisting route over the Cantabrians. Spain spent twenty years digging a tunnel underneath it. Since it opened in 2023, the crossing has taken about fifteen minutes.
There are still no nonstop flights from the United States, and connections run through Madrid or another European hub.
Asturias is not undiscovered. What has changed is that getting there is no longer the obstacle it was.
