WHY FOREIGNERS SHOULD COME TO SPAIN FOR THE CELSIUS FESTIVAL
The Celsius 232 ( = Fahrenheit 451) Festival is Spain’s main SF & Fantasy festival, happening each July in the centre of the lovely town of Avilés half way along the north coast of Spain. Activities start on Tuesday and finish at Saturday, late night. People go home on the Sunday—or alternatively stay on in Asturias for tourism!
The centre of Avilés boasts arcaded stone streets from the 17th Century, a big square where an inflatable screen shows SF-related movies after dark, and numerous cafés and restaurants spilling on to the street where fans gather to gossip convivially over beers, brilliant wines, giant gins, and ciders poured from a height to oxygenate them.
In fact UNESCO has newly (December 2024) honoured the Culture of Cider in the Province of Asturias to be part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity!
This includes how to pour Cider for café customers, as you shall experience in Avilés if cider’s your tipple. Beware that alcoholic drinks are seductively cheap, and that the robust local cuisine is to die for, not least Asturian Bean Feast, Asturian Hot Pot, and giant Cachopo which must exceed the size of your plate. The Tierra Astur Asturian-theme cider restaurant a few metres from the Palacio de Avilés hotel has a huge menu in English (& Spanish) fully illustrated by photos of all the meals; these look big but what comes to your table is bigger still. Your party can sit inside a cider barrel for your feast if you like.
A circle of cabins houses book dealers, more of whom are in a marquee where some programme items happen, big items being in the adjacent cultural centre backed by a lovely park where sword fighters display. Thus no memberships nor membership list nor tickets exist; all is open to everyone.
There’ll be a number of programme items in English (with Spanish interpretation). Above all, there’s the fannish ambience, with lots of people happy and eager to chat with you.
Hotels: foreign visitors should book early because Avilés isn’t crowded with hotels and Celsius is very popular. The star hotel (in fact 5 stars!) is a 17th Century palace on the main square, great gardens to the rear, with an extensive buffet breakfast (bacon, eggs, and sausages cooked on request so that they’re fresh): the Palacio de Avilés. This is a bit expensive but not so much as you’d think for 5 stars. Hotel La Serrana is just as lovely, 200 metres from the main square, and quaint Hotel Don Pedro is pretty close too. Near the center you’ll find the giant pteranodon-look pedestrian bridge leading over railway and estuary to the impressive cultural centre designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of Brasilia. A bit further away there’s an impressive open-air seaside museum of anchors as well as one of the dozen most historical cemeteries of Europe (based on it housing all of the architectural styles).
Travel: Direct flights from several national and international airports to Asturias (Oviedo) airport. Asturias Airport (code: OVD) is a toy, so you can’t get confused. From the airport to Avilés is just 15 or 20 minutes by bus—or by reasonably priced taxi right to the door of your hotel. Visitors from mainland Europe may need to change planes at Madrid or Barcelona or London.
Souvenirs: together with Dracula’s Whitby in the UK, Asturias is the major European source of jet for jewellery: azabache in Spanish. Or you can buy Asturian bagpipes.
The climate of Asturias province in the summer is Atlantic, so there isn’t the excessive monotonous heat of the south of Spain. Variety is the keynote: warm sunshine and clouds, maybe rain showers, maybe not. Rain, when it falls, wets a landscape of green hills and valleys resembling Tolkien’s Shire grazed by cows whose milk accounts for over 50% of the varieties of cheese in Spain, notably delicious blue cheeses of various strengths which mature in caves. A couple of leisurely hours from Avilés along the very uncrowded motorway between sea and dramatic mountains, just short of Santander, is the Altamira Cave famous for its prehistoric paintings, next to a very authentic replica cave. For some years the original cave was closed to the public due to fears that too much human breath might slowly hurt the Stone Age paintings. Nowdays, if you visit on a Friday, a ticket lottery gives you a 1 in 10 chance of seeing the original—but never mind if you see the copy; it’s generally agreed that the experience is almost identical.
Part of Avilés is on the sea, and more is on the shipping estuary. The local seaside town of Gijón, half an hour away by bus or train, is well worth a day’s visit—the Vikings visited in 860 A.D for loot. Two huge beaches of yellow sand, traces of Roman baths, innumerable bars (including real ales), an excellent aquarium, and a large botanical garden on the outskirts close to the largest single connected building in Spain, the monumental hilltop fascist-architecture University of Work. (Get off the bus outside the Universidad Laboral to see inside its mighty courtyard, then stroll back downhill to the Jardín Botánico.)
