Dairy Museum

Latitude: 43.2842674 Length: -5.8832645
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Today, Asturian milk is among the most highly valued and consumed in Spain. Historically, dairy products from the Principality have steadily grown in prestige. The region's pastures, the increasing presence of cattle throughout the 20th century, and the extensive knowledge and expertise of its farms have ultimately resulted in milk of exceptional quality, considered among the best in Europe.

The Ethnographic Museum of Dairy Farming, located in Morcín , not only provides a comprehensive overview of the dairy industry associated with the Friesian breed, but also of the blending of milks, which in Asturias is a sign of quality.

It also illustrates this center with rural philosophy, always in tune with the rational use of natural resources.

In this museum we will discover that milk in Asturias also comes from herds of goats and sheep, and that it is not only consumed in liquid form, since dairy products such as butter and cheese have played and continue to play a perhaps more prominent role than milk itself.

In the Network of Ethnographic Museums

The museum, belonging to the network of ethnographic museums of Asturias, was inaugurated in 1993 with the purpose of collecting, studying and publicizing the different aspects of the science and traditional technology of milk and its derivatives, as well as traditional agricultural uses and customs.

The museum's collection comprises over five hundred pieces , mostly acquired from various Asturian municipalities, and is divided into four sections: livestock, milk, butter, and cheese. It also features an audiovisual room, a specialized library, and a document archive.

The visit begins with an exhibit dedicated to livestock farming and grazing , the source of the raw material for processing: milk. It continues with the methods used for traditional butter production , the tools employed and their evolution, the various types of devices for skimming milk and forming butter, as well as its sale in markets and its export. A fine collection of butter churns, wineskins, vats, and churns for churning the butter is on display, in addition to several centrifugal cream separators and kneading tools.

Another section contains different types of molds, marking stamps, presses, kneading machines and other utensils traditionally used for the production of different kinds of cheeses (from wineskins or odre, from bladder, from concu, from Caso, from Cabrales, Gamonéu, etc.)

A blue cheese ripening cave is also reproduced, with some tools and materials typical of this activity.

Basic lexicon related

A leisurely visit to this center not only allows us to visualize the techniques and processes associated with traditional farming, but also to understand, through a semantic exercise, the Asturian lexicon of these tasks , the most typical definitions of tools and practices:

Like rennet or curd for milk: formerly taken from the stomach of the piglet animal.

The arnios: the cylindrical hoops, made of wood, leather, bark…, for draining the cheese.

The boot: the leather container (lamb, kid…) used in some areas for smoked cheese over a fire during the winter, such as in the council of Quirós.

The butía: a special milk churn for churning milk and forming butter; with a small tube through which the skimmed milk will come out.

The frieras: small hollows, caves, gavias, among the rocks, where milk was left to cool in the brañas; places where there is usually a draft, which face north and are in the shade.

Mazar: beat the creams until the butter separates until it “axunte”, and releases the “dibura”.

And endless terms that take us to an ethnographic knowledge in its purest form and take us into one of the richest rural cultures in the country.