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Monumentos de Oviedo y del reino de Asturias(Oviedo)

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Description

In Asturias a complete and homogeneous set of architecture from the 9th and early 10th centuries has been preserved, which was exported and influenced the Spanish Middle Ages as it was the nucleus from which the Christian kingdom spread during the Islamic struggle in the Peninsula. Oviedo was the capital of the Kingdom of Asturias between 791 and 910 and an architecture was created around it that sought to recover the constructive characteristics of the Roman Empire, in an attempt to revive the glorious past. These constructions share almost all the features that characterise contemporary European architecture of the same scale: coexistence of multiple typological proposals, a certain spatial compartmentalisation reflected in the exterior elevation, concealment, a tendency towards interior shadows and decoration of heterogeneous origin based on the repertoire of Late Antiquity. The most notable examples of this way of building, declared World Heritage in 1985, are Santa María del Naranco and San Miguel de Lillo. Both were part of the same architectural complex, in which Santa María, with a single nave and two storeys high, would have been built for civil purposes, as a royal residence or royal hall dedicated to the leisure and hunting of the court, while San Miguel de Lillo, which is only partially preserved, originally had a basilica floor plan with three naves. In addition to these two elements, four other monuments were added in 1997 that help to complete the vision of this historical period and this architectural style: the church of San Julián de Prados, La Foncalada, the Holy Chamber of Oviedo Cathedral and the church of Santa Cristina de Lena. All these pre-Romanesque monuments, whose architectural style is linked to the surrounding landscape, forming an aesthetic unity with it, exerted a decisive influence on the development of medieval architecture in the Peninsula for centuries and have survived over the centuries to the present day, maintaining the original use for which they were conceived.

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