ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER / ARTICULO EN EL GUARDIAN

[granda]

Hola, no tengo mucho tiempo ultimamente para escribir en el foro, pero este articulo del Guardian me parece muy bonito..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/jul/12/asturias-spain-food-drink?page=all


Dear All, I don't have much time nowadays to spent on the forum but I quite like this article from The Guardian newspaper


http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/jul/12/asturias-spain-food-drink?page=all

[Is]

Thanks for posting it, Granda. It's one of the better articles I've seen about Asturias until now. He even mentions what I presumed to be a secret about Asturias' best wild beach: Barayo, between the counties of Navia and L.luarca/Luarca.

I especially enjoyed this paragraph on the high incidence of hair perms. We've discussed the New Jersey and Maryland versions of the beehive. But there's not been clarification about the Asturian perm:

"If Asturias is a series of pleasant surprises, Oviedo often comes as the first of them. It's a compact, handsome little city, charmingly buttoned-up, with a provincial and bourgeois air, where people stop on street corners and the women wear their hair in perms. It says something about the fastidious character of Oviedo that here, uniquely for Spain, rubbish collection happens on a daily basis. (It routinely wins awards for Europe's cleanest city.)"

[Is]

Paul Richardson's story in The Guardian, which Granda posted here a few weeks back, is carried by LNE (La Nueva Espana, right-of-center Asturian daily) today, July 29, 2009:

http://www.lne.es/verano/2009/07/29/asturias-costa-azul-cantabrico/788555.html

They make an interesting conclusion: that Asturias would benefit from a special kind of marketing because it is often the opposite of what most foreigners think of when they imagine Spain. In many ways, Asturias-Galicia is the absolute flip side of the Mediterranean.

The latest campaign for Xixon/Gijon tourism is an example of what NOT to do when trying to boost tourism: rely on cliches and platitudes that have 0 resonating power. Another conclusion is that articles like Paul Richardson's are much more effective in generating interest...and a lot cheaper.