Avilés

For centuries, pilgrims on the Camino del Norte passed through a wealthy medieval port that held Spain’s salt monopoly. Then, in 1950, the Spanish steel company ENSIDESA built a massive plant with four blast furnaces named Carmen, Joaquina, Rosario, and Carmen 4. Within a decade, the population more than doubled, from 21,000 to 48,000, and the medieval facades vanished beneath black soot. The city that once exported salt and iron now forged steel for a nation, its Gothic churches obscured by industrial smoke until the late 1980s, when the cleaned-up town revealed its hidden medieval quarter once again.

Avilés had spent the better part of a millennium getting rich off a substance nobody remembers being valuable, running the region’s entire salt trade out of a royal warehouse that supplied Asturias and León with product shipped in from as far as Portugal and Andalusia. Then the twentieth century arrived and offered a louder kind of wealth. The first blast furnace was fittingly named after the dictator’s wife, and by the time the fourth one lit up in 1969, the city bore almost no resemblance to the walled medieval port it had been twenty years earlier. It took the furnaces going cold in 1989 for anyone to notice the old town had been quietly waiting underneath the whole time, patient in the way stone usually is.