Pretty villages, pretty ugly towns

Villandás where we live is a pretty village. Its traditional stone-built houses with terracotta tile rooves sit in picturesque fields where the brown jersey-style cows with their soft eyes rimmed with eyeliner tinkle their cowbells. The traditional barns- or horreos- sit on their saddlestone supports like gypsy caravans come to rest on giant mushrooms. If you head for the local town, however, you are in for a shock. The first time I drove through Grado it was a rainy day and I thought, 'When did the Soviets make it to Asturias?'
Grado is a good argument against car tourism. You can see the town as you approach it in its magnificent location in a rich valley surrounded by hills. And it's ugly. The apartment blocks rise sheer out of the farmland with all the grace and charm of giant cardboard boxes. From one end of the town you enter along the straight approach road from the motorway from Oviedo lined with brand new hangars and warehouses interspersed with abandoned older buildings turning dirtier and dustier with each day. The road is littered along the borders with that omnipresent scrub and rubble the road-builders like to leave behind.
The main road that passes through the centre of Grado passes through a gully of ten storey apartment blocks that butt directly onto the road, with bars outside wafting their aroma of beer, cider and tobacco onto the street. All of the older buildings along this road are abandoned or in poor condition. Carmen said that the buildings are protected by a local ordinance so you can't knock them down like you used to be able to. This doesn't mean you have to do them up, however, so people just wait for them to fall down then ask for permission to build another apartment block.
The visible casas de indianos on the edge of the main road are surrounded by large ironwork fences that say 'No Entry'. These exagerrated and overblown mansions were built by people returning from Latin America with the fortunes they had made there and display an extravagant taste for ornament, but their very scale clearly makes it difficult for them to be maintained these days: they are neither residence nor museum. If you stopped the car to have a look you would not be able to get much closer and you might decide to just keep going until you reach the other end of town where things peter out along a winding road where local drivers push aggressively along at breakneck speeds.
In spite of its ugliness I find Grado charming. Between the main road and the river, where some enlightened planner installed a sweltering, shadeless walk from one end of the town to the other (with views of the cardboard boxes), lies the heart of the town. A mish-mash of one way streets between two-storey terraces in various states of decay brings you to a pedestrianised zone in the centre where there is a handful of buildings that are old enough and well-built enough that they can neither be torn down nor will fall down.
Tha administration has taken over one of these palaces for the Ayuntamiento and another houses the library or Casa de Cultura. But the real charm of Grado is not the architecture- it is the people. Burly men in check shirts with round bellies and dirty trousers walk smiling into the dozens of shops that sell spades, shovels, fertilizer and seeds. Women with frumpy clothes push prams with fat babies that look eager to get going with the rotovator whilst stern-faced grannies talk over each other on the corners of the streets. A blue-faced man walks by coughing and spluttering, then stops under the trees of the small park to light a cigarette and talk about the cost of cow feed with a buddy.
On the market days there is a bustle of activity at the trestle tables and there is a real sense of local pride in the bread, the vegetables and the fruit: it is not all cheap clothes from China like many markets in Britain. And on these days, when Grado is filled with people from the surrounding villages who descend to the plaza to sell their veggies, you have the sense that the town is really no more than the expression of the aspirations of all those village folk. If a group of villagers could get together to design a town they would probably come up with something a bit like Grado: ugly, friendly, functional and thrown-together.