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The Modern Age
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
the isolation of Asturies from the decision-making centres of the Spanish
empire is such that in 1518, the Dominicans arrived in Uviéu to found a
monastery referred to "the overgrown mountain"; just as the Jesuits
would refer to the whole of Asturias as "the Indies that we have here in
Spain". This was a time of famine, epidemics and catastrophes such as the
fires of Avilés and Uviéu, which devastated their respective town
centres, being at once causes and consequences of the poverty of a population
submitted to what amounted to hard labour on land belonging mostly to the
Clergy and the Nobility.
In the midst of such affliction, however, the University of Uviéu was
founded in 1574 at the expense of the Asturian Fernando de Valdes Salas,
Inquisitor General, Archbishop of Seville and confessor to the Emperor Felipe
II. It was no doubt intended to rescue his own country from its state of
backward, secular abandon, built from a perspective which saw Asturies as a
"de-Christianised" land which, as such, qualified as a
"mission" or "land of (savage) Indians" within Spain. In
the eighteenth century, a series of circumstances favourable to the apparition
of a current of thought within certain sectors of the powerful classes which
would blossom into the birth of the philosophical and literary Illustration
movement. The traditional marine trade routes of the country favoured the entry
through its ports of the works of writers such as Rousseau, Voltaire and the
Encyclopaedists, and with them new ideas of progress from the continent. It was
the so-called "century of light", in which, from among a
constellation of names, that of Don Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was to shine
out most strongly as one of the most notable personages to come from the
Spanish peninsular. One of his principal interests was the economic and
cultural progress of Asturies, and he was to be the first to pursue a
development programme based on the recent discovery of coal deposits, planning
an infrastructure around them, establishing communications within Asturies and
with the rest of the Peninsular, and implementing the latest scientific
teachings in the technology used. On May 25th, 1808, the General Assembly of
the Princedom of Asturies proclaimed its own sovereignty in opposition to a
centralised state power bent under French authority, sent ambassadors to
England and declared war on Napoleon.
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