The Most Beautiful Places in Asturias
6 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Asturias are Naranjo de Bulnes (Picu Urriellu), Santa María del Naranco and Gulpiyuri Beach. The list covers 6 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Asturias is the green north of Spain: a narrow strip between the Bay of Biscay and the Cantabrian Mountains, where Atlantic rain keeps meadows and chestnut woods lush all year. Its eastern edge holds the Picos de Europa, limestone massifs cut by deep gorges only a short distance from the sea. Asturias is also where the Christian kingdom that later spread across Iberia began, after the battle of Covadonga in the 8th century, and its early kings left a rare group of pre-Romanesque buildings around Oviedo.
The finest of them is Santa María del Naranco, completed in 842 as a hall for King Ramiro I and later turned into a church. Its upper floor, with arcaded loggias and barrel vault, is a refined building for such an early date and is part of a World Heritage Site.
In the Picos de Europa, Naranjo de Bulnes, or Picu Urriellu, is a sheer limestone tower whose west face turns orange in the evening light; it is a classic of Spanish climbing. The Cares Trail follows a canal carved into the walls of the Cares gorge, with drops of hundreds of metres beside the path. Higher up, the Lakes of Covadonga, Enol and Ercina, sit in glacial basins grazed by cattle. On the coast near Llanes, Gulpiyuri is a small beach with no visible sea: a sinkhole in a meadow, filled by tidal water that reaches it through a cave.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Naranjo de Bulnes (Picu Urriellu) | Summit | |
| 2 | Santa María del Naranco | Church building | ✓ |
| 3 | Gulpiyuri Beach | Doline | |
| 4 | Picos de Europa National Park | National park | |
| 5 | Cares Trail | Canyon | |
| 6 | Lagos de Covadonga | Lake |
01 Naranjo de Bulnes (Picu Urriellu)
Naranjo de Bulnes / Picu Urriellu
Spain43.200° N 4.817° W
Image by ELG21 from Pixabay Naranjo de Bulnes, known in Asturian as Picu Urriellu, is a single block of limestone standing alone in the Central Massif of the Picos de Europa. Seen from the meadows below, it looks less like a mountain than a monolith: smooth, almost sheer walls rising on every side to a summit at 2,519 metres.
Did you know? Climbing the first route in 1916, a local man from Bulnes recovered pieces of rope the first climbers had left jammed in the rock twelve years earlier.
02 Santa María del Naranco
Spain · 4.3 km from Oviedo43.379° N 5.866° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
D.Rovchak · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the southern slope of Mount Naranco, looking down over Oviedo, stands a small rectangular building that is one of the most remarkable survivals of ninth-century Europe.
Did you know? The building probably became a church after the chancel of neighbouring San Miguel de Lillo collapsed, and was recorded as Santa María by about 1150.
03 Gulpiyuri Beach
Playa de Gulpiyuri
Spain43.448° N 4.886° W
Fernando Vázquez · CC BY 3.0 Gulpiyuri is a beach with no sea view.
Did you know? Its sand is mostly fine quartz, carried in through the same underground channels that bring the tide.
04 Picos de Europa National Park
Parque nacional de Picos de Europa
Spain43.250° N 4.917° W
- biosphere reserve
Image by javierAlamo from Pixabay Barely twenty kilometres from the Bay of Biscay, the Picos de Europa rise as a wall of grey limestone pinnacles, the most dramatic stretch of the Cantabrian Mountains. Local tradition holds that the name comes from sailors returning from the Americas, for whom these jagged summits were the first sight of Europe.
Did you know? Local tradition says sailors named the range because its peaks were their first glimpse of Europe on the way home.
05 Cares Trail
Ruta del Cares
Spain43.239° N 4.890° W
Image by dkatana from Pixabay For about 12 kilometres between the villages of Caín and Poncebos, a path cut into sheer grey limestone hangs halfway up the walls of the Cares gorge, passing through rock tunnels and over bridges while the river runs far below.
Did you know? Most of the rock was cut by hand with sledgehammers and chisels; a compressor was used only for the tunnels at Los Collados.
06 Lagos de Covadonga
Spain43.268° N 4.986° W
80kmh · CC BY 4.0 Two glacial lakes lie on a high pasture in the western massif of the Picos de Europa, ringed by limestone peaks and grazed by cows and horses right down to the waterline.
Did you know? The climb from Covadonga gains about 1,056 metres at an average gradient of 7.3 per cent, with La Huesera averaging 15 per cent for 800 metres.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Asturias?
- On our list, Naranjo de Bulnes (Picu Urriellu) ranks first, followed by Santa María del Naranco and Gulpiyuri Beach.
- How does Gulpiyuri Beach get its water?
- Gulpiyuri is a flooded sinkhole about a hundred metres from the coast. Seawater reaches it through underground channels eroded in the limestone, so the tiny beach has waves and tides even though it lies in a meadow.
- What is the Cares Trail?
- The Cares Trail is a footpath through the Cares gorge in the Picos de Europa, built along a water channel for a hydroelectric plant. It runs for about twelve kilometres, cut into the cliffs high above the river.
- What is Asturian pre-Romanesque architecture?
- It is the architecture of the Kingdom of Asturias in the 9th and 10th centuries, best seen in Santa María del Naranco and San Miguel de Lillo near Oviedo. These buildings are part of the World Heritage Site of the Monuments of Oviedo and the Kingdom of the Asturias.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Asturias?
- In our collection, the places in Asturias are most often summits (1), canyons and gorges (1), sinkholes (1) and lakes (1).
- How many places are on this list in Asturias?
- The list covers 6 places.