There are buildings that seem to have been built not to last, but to stay, like those after-dinner guests who no longer know whether to offer another drink or tell another story. The historic University of Oviedo building is one of them: It has withstood fires, wars, reforms and fashions, and there it remains, in the heart of the city., impassive and somewhat haughty, as befits someone who was a house of knowledge when the majority of Spain still believed that studying was a thing for monks or madmen.
The University was founded no less than in 1608, by testamentary will of Don Fernando Valdés Salas, a native of Salas and no less than the Inquisitor General of Castile, Archbishop of Seville, and President of the Council of Castile. A self-made man... and others. Valdés, who understood the power of knowledge (albeit with certain reservations about what that knowledge should be), He wanted to provide his homeland with a center of higher education, and to this end he left provisions in his will that a university be founded., with funds obtained, among other sources, from income from the exploitation of the liquor monopoly (because in this life everything ends up being paid for with taxes or hangovers).
The building was designed by Rodrigo Gil de Hontañón and completed by Juan del Rivero Rada, and its style is none other than that of the sober elegance of Herrera: that architecture that speaks in a low voice, without unnecessary embellishments, as if it were afraid of interrupting a professor in the middle of a dissertation. The central courtyard, with a square floor plan, is arranged around a beautiful two-story cloister, supported by Doric and Ionic columns. They seem to be sternly observing the students. On one side, above the portico, is the founding inscription, and above it, the University's coat of arms, with its three fleurs-de-lis and papal tiara, which is more reminiscent of Rome than Oviedo, although it will all come later.
La Porlier Square, which gives access to the building, was once more a maneuvering yard than an urban lounge: a place for meetings, semi-closed walks, and gatherings in the arcades. Today it's a stop for tourists who stop to photograph the traveler from Úrculo, but for the veteran Oviedo resident, The University continues to set the pace: The clock on its tower has taught more classes than many teachers.
The building suffered serious damage during the October Revolution of 1934, when it was set on fire - which, in Spain, seems to be the most definitive way to argue with an institution. The fire destroyed the historical library and part of the archive, which is not only an intellectual tragedy, but also a metaphor: knowledge, like faith, is tested in flames. Fortunately, it was lovingly restored in the following decades, maintaining its sober dignity.
Along the centuries, Men and women of letters, sciences and legends passed through its classrooms.: since Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, eternal enlightened man of the town and court of Gijón -in 1757, at the age of thirteen, he moved to Oviedo to study Philosophy-, to Clarín, the one from La Regenta, which made Vetusta a satire more enduring than many educational reforms. And thousands of anonymous students also passed through, with their dreams, their worries, and their eight-a-morning classes, those true martyrs of wisdom.
Today the building is the headquarters of the Rectorate or the General Secretariat and of solemn acts, but it retains the air of a secular temple where words—thought, read, spoken—remain sacred. Its cloister holds echoes of debates that didn't make the papers, of hurried steps before an exam, of declarations of love at the foot of a column. It's a place that, without saying anything, says everything.
Text: © Ramón Molleda for asturias.com
