Asturias

It had absorbed the last fragment of independent Roman Gaul, Auvergne.

In Spain it had cooped up the earlier invaders, the Swaves, into the mountains of Asturias and Galicia.

It had driven the Vandals into Africa.

It had rapidly assumed an organized shape with its peculiar polity, its half-Roman legislation, its national councils.

The Gothic nobility perished in large numbers.

King Roderick, the last Gothic king, was never seen again.

In ten years' time the Saracen invasion had overwhelmed almost the whole country, and there was nothing left in Spain to Christianity and the European races but the mountains of the Asturias and old Castile.

Spain was the only one of the new Teutonic nations which was beaten down by an entirely alien power.

Bar RBC and RBC were doing a trip in late May, early June.

We're starting to sign people up for that in Spain, starting in Madrid, ending in Bilbao with Asturias along the way.

So I'm also going next week, the week after, I'm going to ask stories to do a little research for that too.

So I'm excited about that.

And even not working, I couldn't afford that time away from the family.

You could have taken a medieval sailboat across the Bay of Biscay, couldn't you? And just sort of landed somewhere on the north coast of, I don't know, someone in Asturias or something like that.

Well, you can actually.

You can now do the Camino Inglés, which I think is going from Reading down to Southampton.

There's less water.

It's true, there's less water in Almería than there is in Asturias.

There's less ice.

There's less ice in Egypt than there is in Canada.

There's also botanical artist Lucy Smith is on there.

A little about, bit about Asturias, which he talks about-

Yes

...

And then if you go-

So is this the, the Pyrenees we're talking?

Asturias, it's called.

Oh, sorry, the Asturias.

Okay, let me get to my pick.

I picked the Jurassic Museum of Asturias, which I was lucky enough to go to in August.

Asturias is one of the, uh, geographic regions of northern Spain on the coast.

Um, and this Jurassic Museum is, uh, made in the shape of a, a dinosaur footprint, so it has three big lobes to it.

And I put in the link to it, uh, from Wikipedia, and so that's in English.

And I looked at my friend, Isabel Novea, who, uh-

[laughs]

... was a virologist at University of Toledo, and that's how I know her, and she's moved back to her home in Oviedo, which is in Asturias.

With the Civil War settled, Augustus determined to settle the rest of the empire.

He prosecuted a brutal bloody Tenia war against the Cantabria and Asturias, who were the last two independent Celtic tribes in Hispania, essentially sent 50,000 Roman soldiers to completely subjugate these tribes.

When the fighting was through, the Romans either enslaved or executed most fighting men age of the tribes and resettled the survivors from their mountain forts into valleys.

Augustus then declared the Pax Romana, a massive empire-wide urbanization project.