Tour the castle and its museum on the life of Francis Xavier

Find the dance of death painted on the walls of the Torre del Santo Cristo, the only one of its kind in Spain

Walk through the Foz de Lumbier, the Irati's gorge, and watch the vultures on its walls

Francis Xavier was born in this castle in 1506 and took his name from it, and went on to carry Christianity to India and Japan. The castle goes back to the 10th century; in 1516 Cardinal Cisneros ordered it pulled down because its lords had fought for Navarre's independence, and his men razed the outer wall and filled the moat but left the core standing. In the Torre del Santo Cristo are a late-Gothic crucifix and wall paintings of the dance of death, the only ones of their kind in Spain. Eight kilometres west, the Irati has cut the Foz de Lumbier, a gorge just over a kilometre long between walls 150 to 400 metres high where griffon and Egyptian vultures nest.

Javier: Francis Xavier's Castle and the Foz de Lumbier

Go down into the 11th-century crypt and look at the column proportions, which look impossible until you work out what they carry

Find the royal pantheon of the early kings of Navarre

Go to an office and hear the community sing, which they have done again since 1954

Work out the monastery's political role in the making of the kingdom of Pamplona and then Navarre

Walk out to the viewpoint above the Yesa reservoir and the Aragón valley the Camino comes down

Leyre stands above the Yesa reservoir on a branch of the Camino that runs down the Aragón valley from Jaca, and it was central to the making of the kingdom of Pamplona and then of Navarre, and to the early stages of the reconquest. Its 11th-century crypt is the thing to come for: short, immensely thick columns with enormous capitals, holding up a low vault — a structure that looks wrong until you understand it was built to carry the church above. The monastery nearly disappeared in the 19th-century disentailments and Benedictines returned to it in 1954.

Leyre: The Crypt Under the Kingdom of Navarre

Go into the Palacio de Sada and find the room where Ferdinand the Catholic was born in 1452

Work out how the town got the second half of its name and when

Go into San Esteban and down into the crypt, which is the best thing in the town

Walk the walls and the Plaza de la Villa, protected as an ensemble since 1968

Work out what the Cinco Villas are and why Sos became their capital in 1711

Ramiro I took Sos into the kingdom of Aragon in 1044. In 1452, in the middle of the Navarrese civil war, Queen Juana Enríquez came to the town — then simply Sos — and gave birth to the infante Ferdinand, later Ferdinand the Catholic, in the Palacio de Sada. That birth added del Rey Católico to the name. It became capital of the Cinco Villas in 1711, and the whole historic centre was protected in 1968: walls, churches, the Plaza de la Villa and a church with a crypt and a cloister that opens off the street climbing from it.

Sos del Rey Católico: Where Ferdinand Was Born

Go into the church and find the casket at the head of it holding the heart of Charles II of Navarre

Walk the fortified gallery round the outside of the church and look out over the Bardenas

Work out what Cisneros ordered demolished and what survived the order

Find out about the Estudio General Charles II began here and why it stopped

Eat the sugared almonds and the migas the village is known for

Ujué sits on a hill in the Navarrese Ribera with a fortified church of two crenellated towers looking out over the Bardenas and, on a clear day, the Pyrenees. The kings of the house of Évreux were attached to it: Charles II, known to history as the Bad, gave his heart to the Virgin here and it is still kept in a casket at the head of the church. He also started a university in the village, abandoned for lack of money. Cardinal Cisneros ordered the fortress demolished; the church with its towers and the parish house survived the order. The romería from the surrounding villages still walks here every year.

Ujué: A Fortified Church With a King's Heart In It

Taste Roncal, the first cheese in Spain to get a denominación de origen, in 1981

Go to Gayarre's house museum and his mausoleum by Benlliure, and find out who he was

Be at boundary marker 262 on the Ernaz pass on 13 July for the Tribute of the Three Cows

Work out what is being enacted: an arbitral sentence of 16 October 1375, on a ceremony older than the sentence

Drive up into the Belagua valley and the Larra massif above, which is high karst

Roncal was the first cheese in Spain to be granted a denominación de origen, in 1981, and the point of it was to stop other cheeses calling themselves roncal. It is made by hand from raw Latxa sheep's milk in the Navarrese Pyrenees under the Mesa de los Tres Reyes. In 882 Sancho García granted the valley the right to bring its flocks down to winter in the Bardenas Reales, which they had earned fighting the Saracens. The valley also produced Julián Gayarre, the greatest Spanish tenor of the 19th century, whose mausoleum by Mariano Benlliure is in the village of Roncal. And every 13 July, at boundary marker 262 on the Ernaz pass — standing in for the lost Stone of San Martín — the men of the French Barétous valley hand three cows to the men of Roncal, under an arbitral sentence of 16 October 1375 that is considered the oldest treaty in Europe still in force. The ceremony itself is older than the sentence. Navarre made it intangible cultural heritage on 24 January 2011.

The Roncal Valley: Cheese, a Tenor and a Cattle Tribute

Go into the abbey church and see how little decoration the Cistercians allowed themselves

Walk the Gothic cloister, begun in the 14th century and finished around 1500

Find the chapter house off the east walk, older than the cloister built around it

La Oliva was the first Cistercian foundation in the kingdom of Navarre, founded by García Ramírez between about 1145 and 1150. Its abbey church, paid for by Sancho VI the Wise and Sancho VII the Strong, is a severe building of three naves in the passage from Romanesque to Gothic, with almost no decoration. The Gothic cloister was begun in the mid-14th century and finished under abbot Pedro de Eraso, who ruled from 1468 to 1502. The monks were driven out by the confiscations of 1835 and the buildings fell into ruin; Trappist monks came back in 1927, and they still live here and make wine.

La Oliva: The First Cistercian Abbey in Navarre, Still Working

Walk into the beech and fir and work out the scale: 17,179 hectares, second only to the Black Forest

Come in the last week of October or the first of November, when the beech turns and the whole forest changes colour

Find the ruins of the Orbaizeta arms factory in the middle of the wood

Look for the associated species under the canopy — yew, holly, birch, lime, maple, rowan

Work out what UNESCO added it to in 2017, and what a primeval beech forest actually means

Irati is 17,179 hectares of beech and silver fir in the Navarrese Pyrenees — the largest forest in Navarre and the second-largest beech-fir wood in Europe, beaten only by the Black Forest. Birch, yew, holly, maple, lime, bramble and rowan fill in under the canopy wherever there is enough humidity, which there generally is. In 2017 it was added to the UNESCO list as part of the Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe. Carlos III planned an arms depot at the Orbaizeta forge in the late 18th century, and the ruins of it are still in the wood.

The Irati Forest: The Second-Largest Beech-Fir Wood in Europe

Climb to the Castillo del Rey above San Vicente de la Barquera and look down on the Puente de la Maza's 28 stone arches

Walk the dune trail between Valdearenas and Canallave beaches in the Liencres Dunes Natural Park

Take the Los Reginas ferry across Santander Bay from Somo to the city, a crossing that's run for over 50 years, arriving beside the Botín Center

Tour the Palacio de la Magdalena on its own peninsula, built in 1911 as the Spanish royal family's summer residence, and find its lighthouse and the three replica galleons

Walk the Santoña marshes boardwalk, one of the most important wintering wetlands in northern Spain, then taste the anchovies the town has canned for generations

Cross Castro Urdiales' single-arched 'Roman Bridge' — actually medieval Gothic despite the name — linking the Castle of Santa Ana to the Church of Santa María

A week along the whole Cantabrian coast, west to east. San Vicente de la Barquera and its 13th-century castle, the protected dune system at Liencres where the Pas meets the sea, Santander and the royal Magdalena peninsula, the Santoña marshes — a Ramsar site since 1994 — and the anchovy curing houses in the town behind them, and finally Castro Urdiales with its Gothic church and medieval bridge almost on the Basque border. It is under two hundred kilometres end to end and there is a reason to stop roughly every twenty.

Cantabrian Coastal Camper Trail

Ride the road up from Covadonga to the Lagos de Covadonga, the twin lakes Enol and Ercina, one of the classic climbs of the Vuelta a España

Visit the Santa Cueva de Covadonga, the sanctuary cave that holds the tombs of the kings Pelagius and Alfonso I, from the 722 Battle of Covadonga that began the Reconquista

See the Basilica de Santa María la Real, the neo-Romanesque basilica built in 1886–1901 by Roberto Frassinelli

In 722 a small Visigothic force under Pelagius beat an Umayyad column in a valley below these mountains, and Spain has treated it ever since as the moment the Reconquista started — eight centuries of it, finishing at Granada in 1492. The sanctuary is built around the cave where it is said to have happened, with the tombs of Pelagius and Alfonso I inside it. The road up to the lakes above is one of the hardest finishes in the Vuelta a España: twelve kilometres with pitches over 15 per cent, ending at two glacial lakes at about 1,100 metres.