El Salvador and the Road to Santiago

The present cathedral, a Flamboyant Gothic building with a single soaring tower, was raised over and around the old palace chapel between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, keeping the Camara Santa embedded in its transept. Because Oviedo held such concentrated relics of the Saviour, a medieval saying held that a pilgrim who went to Santiago de Compostela but not to San Salvador honoured the servant and neglected the Lord, "Quien va a Santiago y no al Salvador, visita al criado y deja al Senor."

The San Salvador route linking Leon to Oviedo became a recognised branch of the Camino de Santiago, and pilgrims still divert to the cathedral to venerate the relics before continuing north-west to Compostela. The cathedral remains the active metropolitan seat of the Archbishop of Oviedo, and the Sudarium is among the most closely studied of the claimed relics of the Passion precisely because it offers a physical object with a long, if not first-century, record.