Asturias
You can be here in January for about €520, 4 days, direct.
Why now
Off season in January: 14°C days, 16 rainy days, sea 13°C.
The mountains are reliably open only from late spring to autumn, and the Covadonga lakes road is closed to cars on busy days, with a shuttle instead. Rain falls in every month; the trick is to have both a mountain and a coast plan and swap by the forecast.
Best months here: August, September, October. Daytime highs, sea temperature and rainy days from three years of Open-Meteo reanalysis; a rainy day is one with at least 1 mm of rain, which is the WMO threshold and not the same as "it drizzled".
The place
Asturias is green Spain: a strip of Atlantic coast with cliffs and coves, the Picos de Europa rising to 2,600 metres within 25 kilometres of the sea, and cider poured from height in sidrerías. Oviedo is the polished capital with pre-Romanesque churches, Gijón the port with a beach in the middle of town. It suits walkers, eaters and anyone who has had enough of the Mediterranean sun.
What you can do
- 01Walk the Cares gorge from Poncebos to Caín and back, about 12 kilometres each way on a path cut into the rock.
- 02Take the Fuente Dé cable car or the Covadonga lakes road for the Picos without a long walk.
- 03Eat fabada, cachopo and a cabrales cheese in a sidrería on Gijón's Cimavilla or Oviedo's Calle Gascona.
- 04See Santa María del Naranco and San Miguel de Lillo above Oviedo, ninth-century churches of the Asturian kings.
- 05Visit the Bufones de Pría, blowholes that roar on a rough sea, on the cliff path near Llanes.
Where to stay · neighbourhoods
Base in Oviedo for the trains and the churches or Gijón for the sea, and add nights in Llanes or Cangas de Onís for the Picos. Avoid trying to see the mountains from the capital as day trips only.
Unusual things
- ◦The Tito Bustillo cave in Ribadesella, with Palaeolithic paintings entered on a limited daily ticket.
- ◦Cudillero, a fishing village of houses stacked in an amphitheatre round the port, west of Gijón.
- ◦The mining valleys south of Oviedo, with the Ecomuseo at Samuño for a train ride into a coal mine.
Day trips
Flight options
Routes come from OpenFlights (historical) and a 2026 route reference compiled from public timetables. Durations are the published schedule where we have it, otherwise a block-time model fitted on measured nonstop flights. Verify schedules with the airline before booking.
Entry requirements · IT passport
Source: passport-index-data, March 2026 (coarse indicator), covering 258 of our 268 destinations for each of 199 passports. Always confirm with the destination's official site.
Airports
Distances are centre to airport derived · nonstop counts are our route reference for 2026, not every flight that exists.
Local transport
- Airport to city
- Bus, 45 min, €9; car essential
- Car needed?
- Recommended for most of what is worth seeing
- Getting around
- Asturias airport is between Avilés and Gijón, about 45 minutes by bus from Oviedo. Cercanías trains and ALSA buses cover the coast and the main towns; the Picos and the coves need a car.
- Clock
- 1 hour ahead of Lisbon (Europe/Madrid) derived
- Daylight
- 9.3 hours of daylight in January · sunrise 08:53, sunset 18:10 derived
- Currency
- EUR
Alternatives at a similar price
Whole trip per person for 4 days from Lisbon in January, then the flight time; estimates, like the total above.
Luxor
Casablanca
Cairo
Sharm El Sheikh
Agadir
La Palma