On your left, look for a broad rectangular stone plaza framed by tall façades, especially the slate-roofed Casa Conde with its mansard roof and corner domes, and the sharp glass wedge of El Termómetro at the far corner.
This is Plaza de la Escandalera... a square that proves a city can remember an argument longer than it remembers a government. It links Oviedo’s historic core to its commercial streets, so people have always streamed through here. But the busiest thing in this place has never been carts, cars, or shoes. It has been opinion.
Here’s the detail locals treasure and most visitors miss: the name Escandalera did not start with the famous protest of March twenty-seventh, eighteen eighty-one. That demonstration filled the square with people protesting railway plans for the Puerto de Pajares, which many believed would damage Asturias’s interests. Big gathering, serious purpose, no real scandal. The actual spark came earlier, in what you might call the Escandalera uproar: a furious dispute over the alignment of a house at the corner of San Francisco and Fruela. The city council argued, the newspapers argued, the public argued... and the nickname stuck like burrs on a wool coat.
Officials tried, again and again, to dress the square in more solemn names. It became Twenty-seventh of March, then General Ordóñez, then República, then Generalísimo. The people kept calling it Escandalera anyway, and in nineteen seventy-nine the city finally surrendered and made the popular name official. That tells you a lot about Oviedo: stone can be commanded, but language has a mind of its own.
Before these streets took shape, this was just the edge of the old Campo de San Francisco, with big trees and loose boundaries. Then came the late nineteenth-century remaking of the center: Uría opened in eighteen seventy-four, Fruela in eighteen eighty, Marqués de Santa Cruz in eighteen eighty-nine, and new buildings tightened the square into the form you see now.
Look to the north side. Casa Conde, designed in nineteen oh four by Juan Miguel de la Guardia, gives the plaza a bit of Paris swagger with its mansard roof - that steep double-sloped roofline - and domed corner rotundas. If you want a closer look at its silhouette, check the image in the app
Now glance toward the corner of Fruela and San Francisco. El Termómetro earned its nickname from the long vertical strip of glass that runs up its sharp angle, like mercury in a thermometer. Vidal Saiz Heres designed it in nineteen thirty-six, but war interrupted the project, and builders only finished it in the early nineteen forties. It rose where the Hotel Inglés had burned during the revolution of October nineteen thirty-four, when soldiers ringed this square and fighting spread through nearby streets. If you peek at the app image, that pointed glass corner makes the nickname obvious
And if someone tells you Escandalera came from an escanda grain market, smile kindly and save the correction for later. Grain belonged in El Fontán, not here.
So remember this square not just as architecture, but as spoken history: rumor, protest, nicknames, official labels, and the version people refused to let go. From here, we head to the University of Oviedo... where argument puts on a gown and tries to sound respectable.
