It never crossed my mind, I must confess, to attempt to stop in the city of Aviles even though I’ve crisscrossed the Principado de Asturias whenever I would visit my maternal grandfather’s hometown of Entrago in Teverga. And at times spent memorable holidays in the seaport city of Gijon with my enchanting Tia Maria, my mom’s younger sister. Blame it on my misled perception that Aviles was solely an industrial commercial port with nothing else to tempt me to discover.

However, till rather recently, after learning its medieval old town — doesn’t every city of worth in Spain have one? — and the tourist beaches — but don’t we have beaches where dreams are made of in our own islands? — this time, I succumbed to its allure.

You see, in a recent decade, the town gave rise to the Centro Cultural Internacional Oscar Niemeyer in a wide open space, seldom seen in centers of metropolises, a modernist complex with four distinct structures — the striking sunshine yellow auditorium, the 4,000-square-meter dome, a disc-shaped observation tower which likewise serves as a restaurant of pride for the area, and a curved multi-purpose building — which all are treasured venues of historia y patrimonio, costumbres y tradiciones y artes y cultura.

The entire colossus was created by and named after the famed Brazilian architect and designer Oscar Niemeyer, considered one of the key global figures in the development of modern architecture. The revered ahead-of-his-times gentleman was likewise responsible for a number of civic buildings in the planned capital city of Brasilia in Brazil and for his extensive collaborations for the headquarters of the United Nations in New York.