The Muséu del Pueblu d'Asturies, in La Güelga (Gijón), is an ethnographic museum founded in 1968 with a farmhouse, hórreos, paneras, a cider press and the Bagpipe Museum on a 35,000 square metre site. Entry is free; from October to March it opens Tuesday to Friday from 9:30 to 18:30.
In La Güelga, near El Molinón, there is a wooded site with a pond and houses that someone took apart elsewhere and put back together here. It is the Muséu del Pueblu d'Asturies, the museum of ordinary people's lives: how they cooked, stored grain, made cider or played the bagpipes. It is free, and it is one of the places where you best understand what you will later see in Asturian villages.
A museum for people's memory
It was founded in 1968 by Gijón City Council and the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Navigation, to preserve, study and share the memory of the Asturian people. Today it coordinates the Red de Museos Etnográficos de Asturias, the network of Asturian ethnographic museums.
It occupies a wooded site of 35,000 square metres with a brackish pond, what is left of the marsh that once lay at the mouth of the Piles river. Several of its buildings, such as the manor houses, the cider press, the hórreos and the paneras, are themselves part of the exhibition.
The farmhouse
This is the first thing worth seeing. It recreates a single-storey farmhouse, very common among farmers in central Asturias, with a kitchen, two rooms, a byre with a hayloft and an entrance porch. The furniture and tools are those of a house from around 1900.
In the kitchen there is the hearth with its benches and the sardu, a frame of woven hazel rods for drying chestnuts; the oven and the kneading trough for bread; the bogaderu for washing clothes; the duernu for salting the pig. In one room there is a loom for the wool and linen the house produced. There is no electric light: the fire and smoke of the hearth were the centre of life. Next to it is a garden with the medicinal plants most used in rural Asturias.
Granaries and a cider press
On the site there are three hórreos and two paneras, the raised granaries of Asturias, from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, brought from Gijón and Carreño. They were used to store grain, cured meat and also clothes or saddles. The panera facing the house dates from 1856 and has the carved and brightly painted floral decoration typical of central Asturias.
The cider press building copies one from Tueru, in Villaviciosa, built in 1900, and inside it has the two most common types of cider press in Asturias: a weight press brought from Llue, in Colunga, and a sobigañu press from El Toral, in Argüeru. There is also a pisón for husking spelt, brought from Llanuces, in Quirós, in 2001; shepherds' shelters of stone and broom; and a bowling alley from 1973 for the cuatreada style of Asturian skittles, where competitions are still held.
The Bagpipe Museum and the manor houses
The González de la Vega house was built in Serín in 1757 and moved to the museum in 1976. Inside is the Museo de la Gaita, the Bagpipe Museum, which began as a small display of bagpipes from different countries and today shows about 200 pieces: bagpipes of the world, the Asturian bagpipe, traditional Asturian instruments and music of the industrial age. It ends with portraits of Asturian folk musicians collected since the seventies.
The Valdés house is a 17th-century noble house built in Candás and moved here in 1970; it holds the Fototeca de Asturias, with more than a million images. And reception is in a building with a story of its own: the pavilion that represented Asturias at the 1992 Universal Exposition in Seville, moved here in 1994.
Opening hours, price and getting there
Entry is free. From October to March it opens from 9:30 to 18:30, Tuesday to Friday, and from 10:00 to 18:30 on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays; from April to September, from 10:00 to 19:00 Tuesday to Friday and from 10:30 to 19:00 at weekends and on public holidays. It is closed every Monday, on 1 and 6 January, Carnival Tuesday, 15 August and 24, 25 and 31 December. Opening hours and price checked in October 2026 on the Gijón City Council website.
It is on the Paseo del Doctor Fleming, in La Güelga. City bus lines 1, 4 and 10 stop nearby, at the El Molinón, FIDMA and Rastro stops.
Checked
Facts checked in October 2026 against: Gijón City Council (Muséu del Pueblu d'Asturies page in its directory: opening hours, entry, history, grounds and buses) and the museum's official visitor leaflet published by the council (map, houses, granaries, cider press, Bagpipe Museum and Expo 92 pavilion).
Quick questions
Do you have to pay to enter the Muséu del Pueblu d'Asturies?
Nothing: entry is free. It is closed every Monday of the year.
Which buses go to the museum?
City bus lines 1, 4 and 10, which stop at El Molinón, FIDMA and Rastro.
Which building houses the Bagpipe Museum?
Inside the grounds, in the González de la Vega house, built in Serín in 1757; it shows about 200 pieces.