Gijón's Roman Baths and the Elogio del Horizonte: Cimadevilla

In Cimadevilla, in Gijón, it's worth climbing in order: the Roman baths under the Campo Valdés square, the remains of the Roman wall halfway up the slope, and, at the top, the Elogio del Horizonte by Eduardo Chillida, from 1990. It's barely eight hundred metres of steady uphill, and a couple of long hours including the visit to the baths.

You can walk all of Cimadevilla in one short outing, and that outing fits two thousand years without covering the same ground twice: Roman baths buried under a square, the remains of a wall built when the Empire started getting nervous, and, right at the top, a concrete piece by Chillida where, if you stand in exactly the right spot, you can hear the sea amplified. The trick is doing it in order. The elevation climbs at the same pace as the centuries.

An isthmus, eight hundred metres, and two thousand years

Cimadevilla isn't a neighbourhood shaped like a neighbourhood: it's a low peninsula attached to the mainland by a narrow isthmus, with San Lorenzo beach opening out on one side and the harbour on the other. That geometry explains almost everything. A headland like this is defensible by definition, since you only need to seal off the neck; and a bay with two sides lets you anchor sheltered whatever wind is blowing. The Romans saw exactly that twenty centuries ago, and later so did the fishermen, who packed the houses onto the rock until the alleys narrowed to a metre and a half.

What almost nobody points out is that the neighbourhood can be read as a sequence. The Roman baths sit at sea level, literally under a square. The wall appears halfway up the slope, where the climb begins. And at the very top of Cerro de Santa Catalina, where there are no more houses or shelter, stands the Elogio del Horizonte, from 1990. Walked from bottom to top, the route climbs in height and in time at once, and each stop makes sense because of the one before it.

Almost everyone does it the other way round: straight up to the sculpture, a photo, and down to eat at the harbour. It works, but you miss half of it. Two warnings before you start: it's barely eight hundred metres, but it's a constant uphill, and there isn't a single tree at the top to shelter under.

Under the Campo Valdés square

In front of the church of San Pedro, on the edge of Cimadevilla facing San Lorenzo beach, there's an ordinary-looking square. Underneath it is a Roman bath building, and you visit it by going down a set of stairs. It's not an open-air ruin or a fenced-off site you look at from outside: it's an in-situ museum, built over and around what turned up, so you walk the same corridors people walked then, only now under a roof, with the modern city two metres above your head.

The timeline archaeologists work with puts construction in the late 1st century AD, with a major extension through the 2nd. They stopped functioning as baths between the late 4th and early 5th century, and the building wasn't abandoned: it was repurposed as housing, the usual fate of Roman public works once the money to maintain them dries up. The layout keeps the usual logic — cold room, warm room, hot room, plus a pool — because a Roman bath was a circuit of temperatures, not a single room with water in it.

It's worth going in with the right scale in mind. These aren't the imperial baths you see in books: they belong to a port settlement at the far northwest corner, sized for the people who lived and worked here. Even the settlement's name is disputed; tradition calls it Gigia, but not every specialist accepts that identification. Knowing the site well is recent: modern excavations began in 1990 and the museum opened in 1995.

Hours and admission prices change by season, so there's no point fixing them here — check the [Gijón municipal museums website](https://www.gijon.es/es/directorio/museo-termas-romanas-de-campo-valdes) the day before. Admission to the municipal archaeological museums is usually free on Sundays, but confirm it on that same page before you plan the walk around it.

How a room was heated in the 2nd century

The hypocaust is the reason these baths are worth a visit even if you've seen others. The system is simple to describe and fiendish to build: the room's floor is raised on brick pillars, leaving an empty chamber underneath; a furnace burns at one end; and hot air and smoke circulate through that chamber before rising through ducts built into the walls. The result is radiant underfloor and wall heating, which is exactly what gets sold today as the last word in thermal comfort.

At Campo Valdés, a rectangular hot room survives, probably a 2nd-century sudatorium, with a hypocaust built not from loose pillars but from brick arcading. The difference isn't cosmetic. An arcade spreads the floor's weight far better and lets hot air pass with fewer obstacles than a forest of small pillars; it also holds up a good deal longer before collapsing, which is precisely why it's still here. The museum's own documentation presents it as the best-preserved example of its kind in Hispania.

That's the detail that changes the visit. Normally, at a bath site, the raised floor collapsed centuries ago or the bricks were carted off for some other building, so you're left looking at a rectangle of stumps and have to imagine the rest. Here there's much less to imagine: the structure is still standing, and you can tell at a glance where the air travelled. It's worth spending a few extra minutes just looking at where the arches spring from.

The wall almost nobody looks at

A few steps from the baths, stone footings start appearing, embedded in the fabric of the neighbourhood, and most people walk past without noticing them. They're the remains of the Roman wall, built between the late 3rd and early 4th century. It closed off the whole perimeter of Cimadevilla the sea didn't defend, from around San Pedro to the fishing harbour area, reinforced with semicircular towers — sixteen have been counted. The main gate opened roughly where Calle Recoletas runs today.

The figure worth remembering is the thickness: around four and a half metres. For a port town this size, that's excessive, and that's exactly why it's so telling. The 3rd century was the century of the Empire's crises, and the whole Atlantic and Cantabrian coastline filled up with new walled enclosures then. Nobody invests in a four-and-a-half-metre-thick wall for prestige. That figure says more about the mood of the time than any written chronicle.

What you see today needs an honest disclaimer. The wall came to light in 1982, during some demolition work, and was excavated systematically over the following years. What survives of the Roman original is mostly the lower courses; a brick reconstruction was built on top so the layout reads from the street, a decision specialists still argue over and that grates on some visitors. The trick to enjoying it is not to look at the whole, but to find the horizontal line where the old stone ends and the modern brick begins. It's perfectly visible, and from there you know what you're really looking at.

The rest of the Roman map lies outside the old town

Cimadevilla is only one piece. Across the bay, on Cabo Torres, is the Campa Torres Archaeological-Natural Park: an Astur hillfort on a windy headland that the Romans reorganised and that ancient sources call Noega. There's an on-site museum, remains of walls, ditches and cisterns, and a lighthouse. From up there you can see the whole of El Musel port, a contrast between the pre-Roman anchorage and the bulk cargo terminal that's hard to forget.

The third leg is inland, in the parish of Cenero: the Roman villa of Veranes. It's both a residential and agricultural complex, with a manor section and a working section, in use between the 1st and 5th centuries, and it still has a mosaic. Its museum opened in 2007. If Cimadevilla is the city and Campa Torres the port, Veranes is the farmland that fed both of them; seen that way, the three sites stop being three separate excursions and become a single economic system.

All three belong to the city council's network of archaeological museums, and share the same calendar and admission policy, with different hours for the October-to-March and April-to-September seasons. Checking the municipal website beforehand saves you the classic disappointment of turning up in Cenero on a Monday.

Right at the top: the Elogio del Horizonte

The climb ends on a bare, open hilltop with a single thing on it, huge and made of concrete. The Elogio del Horizonte, by Eduardo Chillida, was installed here in 1990 as part of the redevelopment of Cerro de Santa Catalina led by architect Paco Pol; the structural engineering was by José Antonio Fernández Ordóñez. It stands about ten metres tall, sits on an elliptical base roughly twelve by fifteen metres, has walls a metre and a half thick, and weighs around five hundred tonnes. In Gijón it's known as King Kong's toilet, and it's said with no ill will at all: the nickname lives alongside the pride.

None of those figures is the reason it's worth the climb. This is: you have to step inside and stand in the exact centre. There, the shape of the piece itself catches and amplifies the sound of the sea breaking below, on the same principle that supposedly lets you hear the sea in a conch shell. It's not a vague sensation or a suggestion: it's an effect of position, and it proves itself. Two steps to either side and it's gone; step back to the spot and it comes back. Watching it appear and disappear is what hooks people who arrive not knowing about it.

The effect depends heavily on the day. With flat seas and no wind, there's barely anything to amplify. With a swell, a north wind, or the tide working against the cliff, it's unmistakable. It's worth choosing your day by the marine forecast rather than the rain forecast.

And there's a decision of Chillida's that's better appreciated on site: the sculpture doesn't frame the city, the harbour or the beach, the three postcard views you'd expect from that spot. It frames the horizon — an empty line. It turns its back on everything you've been seeing on the way up and looks instead at the one thing that hasn't changed in the two thousand years of the walk.

How to walk it, and what to leave for another day

In real time, the whole walk is a couple of long hours including the visit to the baths, and that's going slowly. The climb from Cimadevilla is short and not difficult, but it's a steady uphill and the last stretch is out in the open. There's almost always wind at the top, even in August with the city at thirty degrees; a long sleeve in the backpack keeps you from cutting the walk short after ten minutes. Sunrise and sunset are the good hours, mostly because the hilltop empties out.

If the plan lands on a Sunday, it's worth checking the admission policy for the municipal archaeological museums, since entry is often free that day, though it should be confirmed. And with children, the chronological order works surprisingly well: the hypocaust explains itself in two sentences, the wall is something you can touch, and the sculpture's acoustic effect is a magic trick you can repeat twenty times over.

Left for another day is La Laboral, at the other end of the city, Spain's largest building at 270,000 square metres. It was built between 1948 and 1957, designed by Luis Moya Blanco, and its tower, around 130 metres according to the institution's own figures, is the tallest structure in Asturias. The viewing platform is reached by lift, in small groups and always with a guide, since the floors in between are in use. Hours and prices change, so check them at laboralciudaddelacultura.com before going.

For day-to-day listings, events and notices, the two official accounts worth following are [@visitagijon](https://www.instagram.com/visitagijon/), the city's tourist board, and [@turismoasturias](https://www.instagram.com/turismoasturias/), the regional one. They're useful for knowing whether something's open outside the usual hours, or whether the hilltop is closed for storms, which happens in winter.