I was in Mieres del Camín a few days ago. I had not set foot there since october 2004, when I had gone to visit an Art Exhibition in Casa Duró to commemorate the 70 years of the Revolution of October 1934 (Ochobre'l 34).
Normally you don't go to this Asturian post-industrial, post-coalmining, post-prosperous, post-whatever... small city to do tourism, as there's not much to see there for the average person. In my case, given that this small city played a role in my life in the late 90's, when I had some friends there and played with them in a band, I wanted to bring back memories from those times, see streets, buildings, shops... that suddenly would move me back to that time in my life. Additionally, 20 years ago I did not have any particular interest in architecture, at least, not in the boring buildings and streets of an industrial, mining small city surrounded by mountains that had fastly grown in the first decades of that century and had started a deep decline... now, it's something that really captivates me...
Mieres looks as I remembered it (well, as I didn't remember it indeed). For a city that size (22.000 people right now) it looks much more "urban" (most buildings have between 4 and 7 floors, with no space between them, so it's moderately dense) than any equivalente French small city, that's why I had no particular memories of its streets, cause they just look like my neighbourhood in my 12 times bigger hometown (Xixón). Of course, it has several of those 2 - 3 stories neighbourhoods (shame the bloody dictatorship did not use for this a more "soviet style" many stories approach) that were built in haste to house the miners, those neighbourhoods that you find all over Central Asturies save for Xixon-Uvieu. These "quartiers ouvriers" are a living memory of our history and are quite different from the single family houses that make up Nothern France and Belgium Corons.
I think there are very few other places that size in Western Europe (apart from its "sister in pain" Llangréu) that have undergone such a dramatic population lost in the last decades. The municipality of Mieres fell from 70.000 inhabitants in the 1960's to 38.000 inhabitants now. I don't have the old figures for the city proper, but probably the decline has not been so steep. Anyway, with 22.000 inhabitants now, I would say that at its peak in the sixties it would have at least 35.000 inhabitants. With this in mind, there are 2 things that really surprised me:
The city looks good, it looks "alive". For sure I was not expecting that the sidewalks, parks, lightning, public buildings... would look bad. The area received much money from the EU to try to mitigate the effects of the end of the old economy (coal, steel...) so any thing maintained by the city council should look OK, but I was expecting to find tons of abandoned buildings, dilapidated ones almost empty save for 1 or 2 old dwellers, closed shops... and it's not like that at all.
Some new residential buildings have sprung up in the last years, and some of them look really "fresh". They are completely different from what you see in other Asturian (or northern Spain) cities, much more in line with what you see in some recent areas of Bordeaux (Bassin a Flot), Lyon (Confluences) or Paris. Those odd black or gold metallic facades with balconies with sliding blinds... That's something totally new here. It's a pity that they didn't rise the buildings a bit more, from their 6 floors to 8 or 9 (as in Bordeaux). Investigating a bit I've found that the most appealling of these blocks even won an architecture price in Spain. All these blocks seem to be intended as social housing (don't panic, social housing here is in no way as terrifying as HLM in France), so that has probably allowed the architects to play with concepts that quite likely would have scared the average Asturian-Spanish potential buyer, that has a more traditional aesthetic vision.
Golden facade with "hidden" balconies
"Bassin a Flot" style
Not that the building on the left is beautiful, but it looks quite unusual in Asturies
Sharp contrast with the adjacent buildings from the 50's-60's
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