Opened in 1984, the museum is located in Grandas de Salime, a small town of 640 inhabitants, capital of a 114 km2 county with 1.400 inhabitants. José María Naveiras Escanlar had the idea of a museum to gather and show tools, machines and implements of rural life present in Eastern Asturias.

 The museum contains a large collection of materials coming from several counties located in the frontier between Asturias and Galicia: the Asturian Grandas de Salime, Allande, Pezós, Santalla, San Martín and Vilanova de Ozcos, and the Gallaecian A Fonsagrada and Negueira de Muñiz.

The museum exhibits implements used in a country house that works as the core of production and consumption for a family. We also find a sample of the tools used by artisans common to this rural world, and a recreated former way of life full of details: the lareira or kitchen, the hórreo (raised granary) with rye thatched roof and the slate panera (similar construction to the hórreo), the cellar, the mill, the market, the school, the barber’s shop, the forge, the carpenter’s shop, fishing and hunting, lathe workshop or manufacturing of wooden containers, beekeeping, farm equipment, etc.

The materials exhibited were recovered after being abandoned, fulfilling thus the main objective of the museum, i.e. to preserve and to spread the ethnographic heritage of the area and to favour the knowledge of this Asturian zone and the economic development of its inhabitants. In Castro (Grandas de Salime) you can visit the hill-fort of Chao de San Martín. Its occupation started at the end of the Bronze Age and continued up to the middle of the IIc AC.