Monastery of Santa Maria de Villamayor

The foundation of this monastery of Benedictine nuns can be dated to between the 12th and 13th centuries, a chronological period in which late Romanesque aesthetic postulates dominated. The female monastery of Villamayor was dissolved in the 14th century by Bishop Gutierre de Toledo, and definitively annexed to San Pelayo de Oviedo/Uviéu in 1530.

Later it was reduced to a priory and the church, which remained unused, and would go through several destinies being a cemetery until the disentailment. Later, a reconstruction was carried out on the space of the nave, which was first used as a prison and in 1910 as a school.

Today, the chevet and the beginning of the nave with the south doorway of the church are preserved from the Romanesque building. In plan, the layout consists of a single rectangular nave with a presbytery composed of a straight section and a semicircular apse. The nave of the church is covered with a barrel vault, as is the straight section of the apse, and a quarter-sphere vault is used in the semicircular apse.

On the outside, the apse has two attached columns topped by vegetal capitals, a chequered cornice with corbels and metopes, a central window with columns and vegetal capitals and two bands of chequered work running around the perimeter. The interior is covered by a blind arcade with eight arches, and still has the triumphal arch bent with chess-worked dust capitals and vegetal capitals.

Only the south doorway remains, which opens onto the square and the new parish church. It consists of three undecorated archivolts and is protected by a cornice with corbels and metopes. The capitals are decorated with vegetal or historiated motifs, including the one on the right jamb with The Farewell of the Knight, a historiated scene of a lady and a knight with a falcon.