Other activities

Lecture at the Archaeological Museum of Asturias, Thursday, May 29, 7:00 pm 

"Valdediós. The Monastery of Water. The Lost Archaeology of the White Monks"

by Iván Muñiz

Next Thursday, May 29, at 7:00 PM, in the auditorium of the Archaeological Museum of Asturias, PhD in History and archaeologist Iván Muñiz will give a lecture presenting the results of his research on the Valdediós River (Villaviciosa), which represents a new milestone in the history of Asturian and medieval Spanish archaeology.

The river, which was reportedly colonized and exploited as early as the time of the kings of Asturias, was reorganized by the Cistercian monks of the Valdediós convent beginning in the 13th century. Thanks to their monastic order's mastery of water engineering, for which they have been considered great innovators, they developed an exceptional network of hydraulic infrastructure, completely transforming the surrounding landscape. Due to the size of the space and the power, complexity, and number of the structures and elements identified, the hydraulic archaeology site organized on the Valdediós River is unparalleled in the panorama known to date, becoming the most important in Asturias, a milestone in the context of the northern Christian kingdoms, and one of the most significant on the European map.

Furthermore, the study and the findings opened a new avenue of research in medieval Asturian archaeology and contributed a new model of cultural heritage to the Principality's cultural heritage, a unique and extraordinarily rich space that places Asturias, at a European level, among the main cultural landscapes that took shape around rivers in the Middle Ages, with the Cistercian monks as exceptional architects of an aquatic heritage born in water territories. A water territory that, in the historical setting of Valdediós, reaches one of its peaks.