Xixón does not ask permission. The city carries its industrial past like a well-worn leather jacket — unapologetic, broken in, quietly cool — and then it hands you the AS-19 and steps aside. The Ruta de la Costa Verde unspools westward from the city's edge with a kind of deliberate ferocity: cliffside bends that demand your full attention, stretches of Cantabrian coastline that appear without warning between pine breaks, and a rhythm that rewards the car beneath you as much as the driver behind the wheel. This is Asturias at its most unfiltered, and it earns every kilometer. Before you leave, the NH Collection Gijón anchors you to the city's more composed side — a seafront address that frames the bay of San Lorenzo with the kind of architectural restraint that only confidence can produce. Take breakfast there and watch the fishing boats still working the same water your route will trace at speed. Xixón is a city mid-reinvention, and the road out of it is the best argument for what it is becoming: raw, direct, and entirely without pretense.