The passion for travel, Art and Architecture, finds sovereignly outstanding incentives, when you have the opportunity to embark on a passionate cultural adventure through the unknowable and gloomy regions of northern Spain and more specifically, through the most impressive corners of that recognized Cradle of Spain, which for our History, was the Asturias of the first monarchies.

My intention, then, on this occasion, is none other than to cordially invite you to accompany me on an adventure, which I hope will be as fascinating to you as it has been to me, in which we can discover and enjoy, even briefly, an art and a peculiar architecture, which to this day, still continues to present numerous enigmas and passionate misunderstandings: Asturian Art, better known as Asturian Pre-Romanesque.

Although many of the buildings that made up the great Asturian architectural heritage from the 7th to 10th centuries were irretrievably lost during the Cuenca Minera revolution, which occurred in 1934 and later, during the bloody Civil War from 1936 to 1939, there are still, fortunately, some exponents in an excellent degree of conservation, to delight us with their meritorious symbiosis.

A symbiosis, which constitutes a metaphorical dividing line -hence, the autochthonous art- between the Visigoth descendant, on the one hand, and the pre-Romanesque ascendant, on the other, who were the forerunners of an architecture, the Romanesque, which would spread like a trail of gunpowder throughout a large part of the peninsular territory, if by such we understand that which remained on Christian lines - where, in fact, the most notable examples are located - settling, also, in those other early reconquered territories.

Among the numerous mysteries attached to San Salvador de Valdedios (Valley of God), which is popularly known by the nice and beloved name of 'el Conventín' (Little Convent), it is necessary that we move to a very special place in the Principality of Asturias, to which many of you may know of reference, because it has always had a reputation for being one of the largest importers of that sacred drink, cider, which has its roots in the ancient cultures of Celtic origin, which inhabited the place millennia before: Villaviciosa.

Approximately fifteen kilometers from the town center of Villaviciosa -the old Maliayo Council- and collected at some distance from its estuary, among the marvelous foliage of the Boides Valley, among a small paradise of chestnut and pomarada (apple trees), the Conventín is one of the most impressive and, at the same time, the most enigmatic buildings of Asturian autochthonous art, which from now on, in order not to arouse excessive suspicion, we will simply refer to as Pre-Romanesque.

Ordered to be built by King Alfonso III, it was consecrated by seven bishops -we must not forget the importance that numerology had at that time- in the year 893, according to a founding tombstone, which is still preserved, along with some sepulcher of time, so primitive, therefore, like the vertigo produced by seeing the age of this building and its impressive differences, with the neighboring Cistercian monastery of Santa María -in fact, so close, that they are barely separated by fifty or one hundred meters of distance and until the middle of the 20th century, it was connected by a passageway, which, inconsequentially, Patrimony ordered to be demolished-raised, precisely, in the year in which the order that constituted the armed wing of the white monks, the Templars, was supposedly founded: 1118.

Regardless of the subsequent restorations and the inclusion of baroque elements, which above all, as happened with many other Asturian temples, damaged a good part of the original paintings, the nave preserves, almost intact, its primitive classical basilica plan with three naves, with arcades composed of semicircular former arches, which rest on their corresponding columns or bases, to which capitals must be added where the foliaceous theme reminds us, in part, not only of the remarkable knowledge of botany they had at the time, but also the symbolic idea of peace and holiness -referring, above all, to the presence of acanthus and palm leaves- and of paradise or garden, which has always accompanied this type of representation.

Like the vast majority of architectures of its kind, it also had a raised dais, exclusively for the royal figure, who attended mass away from the inconveniences of the town, a detail that possibly -it is just an affirmation- could have given rise to the well-known choirs that would incorporate later constructions.

It also has, in its western part, a vestibule open to the outside, in which the sepulcher of an anonymous character is located, perhaps a bishop, according to the teaching staff with which he is represented.

But regardless of other details of an architecture whose functionality has not yet been fully explained - for example, the two small rooms that are located on both sides of the main entrance portico, on whose function historians do not agree - it contains, as the rest of the buildings of its class, a mystery that has never been elucidated: that of the so-called Chapels of Saint Michael.

These are some peculiar rooms, located in the highest part of these buildings, which do not have any entrance or exit, except for a small latticework, carefully carved in a single block, whose mysterious function has not yet been elucidated to this day today.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property and therefore are subject to my Copyright.