Region-wide based museum whose aim is to preserve the memory of the people of Asturias. It was founded in 1969 by the City Council of Gijón and it has important collections of ethnographic materials, traditional music instruments, ancient photographs, testimonies of oral memory and traditional music, graphic arts and written documents either personal, commercial and of rural industries.

It has a park surface of 32,000 m2 in which are set several buildings that lodge temporary and permanent exhibitions: the 17th century House of the Valdés family, is devoted to photographic exhibitions; the House of the González de la Vega family, from 1757, that lodges the Museo de la Gaita, with a permanent exhibition of bagpipes from Europe and Africa and musical instruments from Asturias; the Asturian Pavilion in the Expo92, and three pavilions lodging agricultural implements and pre-industrial wagons, tools, machines and industrial wagons, harnesses and carriers.

In the precincts of the museum you can also visit these buildings: a rural earthen house, that belongs to a very representative model of central Asturias and whose household goods are typical of a house of the second half of the 19th century; a pisón or hand-mill, to husk the escanda (kind of wheat hard to husk); a llagar (ciderpress) with several presses for cider together with the tools to elaborate and drink it, and three hórreos and two paneras (raised granaries) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some decorated with lively carvings. At last, the precinct also has a bowling alley for the cuatreada kind and a pond of brackish water, the only remaining of the marshy scenery that dominated this zone of Gijón. The museum has a library and an archive of oral memory and of traditional asturian music.