Asturian Americans

The first Asturian immigrants came to North America as soldiers, officers and settlers with the Spanish Army in the wake of Spain's conquest of what is today Florida, Mexico and the southwestern US.

Saint Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied European-founded city anywhere in the continental United States, was founded by the Asturian Pedro Menéndez de Avilés.

In the early decades of the 20th century, thousands of Asturians left Spain and Cuba and came to work, either in the zinc and coal mines of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, or in the thriving tobacco industry of Tampa, Florida.

On Asturian immigration, the "Asturian-American Migration Forum" states: Asturias, a northern Spanish region on the Cantabrian Sea (Bay of Biscay), has been a center of mining and metallurgy for thousands of years.

These Asturian immigrants established an informal but lively network which connected Spain, Cuba, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, California, and other locations within the US.