Woody Allen Visits His Favorite Spanish City Oviedo En Route To Madrid


While Woody Allen is known to be a New Yorker through and through, he also has another favorite city: Oviedo in Asturias. He was there this week on vacation.

It was a very quick visit by Allen and part of a family vacation while en route to Madrid, where he is currently working as artistic director of the opera Gianni Schicchi. The opera will star the famous Spanish opera singer Placido Domingo and is set to premiere on Sunday, July 5.

However, according to the Spanish language Hola, while in Spain, he couldn’t resist a stop over in Oviedo.

Tweet translation: “Woody Allen began his family vacation in Europe with a visit to Oviedo.”

Ironically, he strolled through the city pretty much unrecognized with his wife Soon-Yi Previn. In the process, he thoroughly enjoyed some of the local “jamón ibérico,” (a delicious, cured Iberian ham) along with fresh seafood and the best desserts the Asturias region has to offer.

The Local reports that although many of the locals didn’t notice he was there, Woody Allen visited the famous statue of himself in the center of the city.

On that spot a while back, Woody described Oviedo as a fairy tale.

“Oviedo is a delicious, exotic, beautiful, clean, pleasant, tranquil and pedestrianized city. It is as if it did not belong to this world, as if it did not exist… Oviedo is like a fairy-tale.”

Woody Allen fell in love with Oviedo while shooting the movie Vicki Cristina Barcelona back in 2008, which starred Allen himself, along with Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, and Penélope Cruz. This is when the city decided to place a statue of the famous director and actor in its center.

In other related news, the Inquisitr reported a while back that a Woody Allen museum is to be set up in Barcelona, the main shooting location in the movie Vicki Cristina Barcelona. This museum is set to be called the Woody Allen Center.

If everything goes according to plan, the property will offer three floors of memorabilia and information on Woody Allen’s work, and a ticket price would be “similar to that of a movie ticket.”

In the meanwhile, anyone heading to Madrid this week can enjoy the opera Gianni Schicchi with Allen as the artistic director and Placido Domingo as a major operatic star from July 5.

[Image: Left CC by SA 2.0 Colin Swan, right Woody Allen statue in the rain in Oviedo, Spain CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Nextors]

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