San Miguel de Lillo

Listen for a moment. Up here on the slopes of Mount Naranco, the city of Oviedo hums far below, but the air around this little church is quiet. Grass softens your footsteps. The stone in front of you is warm grey, rough to the touch, flecked with lichen. It is a small building, taller than it is wide, and it seems to lean slightly into the hillside. You are standing beside one of the oldest surviving churches in Western Europe.

This is San Miguel de Lillo, a church dedicated to the Archangel Michael. It was built in the ninth century, during the reign of King Ramiro the First of Asturias. Ramiro ruled for only a few years, in the 840s, yet his builders left behind work that architects still study today. A short walk down the slope stands its companion, Santa María del Naranco. Together they formed part of a royal complex on this hill.

To understand why a king built here, picture northern Spain twelve centuries ago. Most of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule. In these green, rain-soaked mountains, a small Christian kingdom held on. That was the Kingdom of Asturias. Its kings saw themselves as heirs of the old Visigothic monarchy, the Christian rulers of Spain before 711. Building in stone was a statement. It said this kingdom was here to stay.

The style you are looking at is called Asturian pre-Romanesque. Romanesque is the heavy, round-arched style that spread across Europe around the eleventh century. Pre-Romanesque simply means it came earlier. But this is not a crude first draft. Look at the proportions. Everything pulls upward. The walls are tall and narrow, the buttresses run in long vertical lines, and the roof sits high. Builders of the time rarely reached for height like this.

Now, here is the first surprise. What you see is only part of the original church. Historians believe the building was once much longer. At some point in the Middle Ages, probably several centuries after it was built, a large section collapsed. Most likely the foundations or the vaults failed. What survives is mainly the western end, the entrance part. The eastern end was later closed up in a simpler way. So you are looking at a fragment, not a complete building.

Walk to the doorway and look closely at the stone jambs on either side. These are the uprights of the door frame. They carry some of the most unusual carvings of the period. You will see small figures in panels. One seems to be an official, seated, holding something up. Below him, smaller figures perform. There is an acrobat, and a man with an animal. These are scenes from games or a circus, carved in mirror image on both sides.

And here is the second surprise. These carvings were copied from an object made far away. Scholars have traced them to a Byzantine ivory, a type of carved panel called a consular diptych. In the late Roman and early Byzantine world, new consuls handed out these ivories to celebrate taking office. Somehow one reached Asturias, and a sculptor here copied it into stone. A Roman image of public games ended up at the door of a mountain church.

Next, look for the windows. Some of them are filled with stone screens, cut with patterns of small openings. In Spanish these are called celosías, which means lattices. Each screen was carved from stone, with circles and arches pierced right through. On a bright day, the light comes into the church in small patterned shapes. On a grey Asturian afternoon, the effect is softer, almost like light through lace.

As you move around the walls, notice the twisted stone bands carved on the columns and arches. They look like rope. This rope pattern appears again and again in Asturian buildings of this time. It is one of the signatures of the style. You can find it at Santa María del Naranco too, just down the hill. Once you start looking for it, you will notice it everywhere on these monuments.

If you are able to go inside, the space feels surprisingly tall for such a small church. Barrel vaults, which are long, half-round stone ceilings, cover parts of the interior. There are traces of old wall paintings, faint now, in earthy colours. A raised gallery at the western end may once have been reserved for the king and his family. From there, they would have looked down on the service below, set apart from everyone else.

The church did not stay forgotten. Over the centuries, it was used, repaired, and studied. In the twentieth century, restorers worked to protect what remained. In 1985, San Miguel de Lillo became part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing, together with other early Asturian monuments in and around Oviedo. That recognition placed this modest hillside church alongside some of the most important buildings in Europe from its era.

Take a moment to look outward too. From this hillside, you can see across to Oviedo and the green hills around it. The meadows, the chestnut trees, and the mist that often settles in the valleys give you a sense of the landscape Ramiro knew. The city has grown enormously since then. But the slope, the soft rain, and the smell of wet grass have not changed very much at all.

Before you leave, stand back and look at the church once more. Notice how the morning or evening light catches the buttresses and throws long shadows down the walls. Look at the rope carvings, the lattice windows, the worn door jambs with their tiny acrobats. As you walk down toward Santa María, you are following a path that kings, monks, and pilgrims walked more than a thousand years ago... and the stone is still here.