The Somiedo ecomuseum aims to further the understanding of every ethnographic element (from a basket to a braña) that belongs and sustains a rural culture trending to disappear though still present in the villages and the landscape of Somiedo.

The museum, created in 1996 by the Town Council of Somiedo, is meant to recover the various crafts and traditional activities of the county, besides the types of dwellings and how they evolved, all that related to subsistence economy. The museum wants to preserve and display a way of life that although for many years took advantage of the environment sources, sometimes hostile, avoided any damage and made a unique landscape where human traces equal those of nature: brañas, mills, pot makers, beetles (for paving), roads and paths available from the ethnographic routes. It has two main seats: the one in Pola de Somiedo, exhibits tools and implements used by madreñeiros (wooden shoemakers), goxeiros (basket makers), ferreiros (black smiths), carpinteiros (carpenters), filanderas (spinners), etc donated by the Somiedo inhabitants.

The second seat, located in Veigas, exhibits three houses furnished and distributed according to the tradition; their differences allow seeing the evolution through time in Somiedo of this kind of buildings. The houses are brush thatched (teito de escoba). These vegetal coverings, very common in houses, schools, mills, hórreos, or huts started little by little to be substituted by tile and slate; the teito de escoba remained in the cabanas of the brañas (groups of thatched huts), scattered all over the Somiedo county. There is also a hórreo (raised granary) in Urria and a mill in Valle del Lago with the same covering.