Take a boat tour to see the Flysch cliffs

Hike the coastal path from Deba to Zumaia

At the Algorri cliffs, find the thin black clay line cutting through the rock — the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, the asteroid impact layer that ended the age of dinosaurs 66 million years ago

The cliffs between Deba and Zumaia expose about sixty million years of seabed standing on end — layer after layer of rock tilted upright by the collision that raised the Pyrenees, so you walk along the beach and cross the millennia one stratum at a time. That makes this one of the most complete continuous rock records anywhere, and geologists come from all over the world for it. At Algorri there is a thin dark clay line in the rock face: the iridium layer left by the asteroid that ended the Cretaceous 66 million years ago, visible as a band you can put your finger on.

Zumaia: Sixty Million Years of Flysch on End

Find the statue of Juan Sebastián Elcano, first man to complete a circumnavigation of the globe, in the town square

At the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum, find Queen Fabiola of Belgium's wedding dress in the permanent collection

Climb Monte San Antón ('El Ratón') for the view back over the harbour

Watch a txakoli poured 'desde lo alto' (from height) at a harbourside bar

Juan Sebastián Elcano of Getaria sailed with Magellan in 1519, and after Magellan was killed in the Philippines it was Elcano who decided to keep going west across the Indian Ocean and brought the Victoria home — the first person to complete a circumnavigation of the earth. Four hundred years later the same town of a few thousand people produced Cristóbal Balenciaga, the couturier Dior called the master of us all. The harbour still lands fish, and the txakoli grown on the slopes behind is poured from a height to give it some fizz.

Getaria: Elcano, Balenciaga and Txakoli

Surf the beach, or take a lesson on it, which is what most people here are doing

Come in September for the Rip Curl Pro, which counts towards the world tour

Walk the whole three kilometres of sand and work out why it is called the Queen of Beaches

Find the Iñurritza biotope at the east end, one of very few surviving dune systems on this coast

Find the Palacio de Narros and work out which queens summered in it

Zarautz has the longest beach in the Basque Country at nearly three kilometres, which is why it is called the Queen of Beaches and why it has been the centre of Basque surfing for decades — the Rip Curl Pro Zarautz in September counts towards the world tour. Isabel II summered at the Palacio de Narros facing the sand, and so later did Queen Fabiola of Belgium. At the eastern end, round a golf course, the Iñurritza protected biotope has dunes, marsh and cliff together, one of very few preserved dune systems left on this coast.

Zarautz: The Queen of Beaches

Get to a village festival where aizkolaris are cutting and time a round yourself

Watch a harrijasotzaile lift and work out that the count, not the single lift, is the contest

Find out what palanka is and that the bar started out as a mining tool

Work out the role of the bet — these are not exhibitions, money is on them and always has been

See a pelota match in a village fronton afterwards, which is the other half of Basque sport

Herri kirolak are farm and quarry jobs turned into contests, and what holds the whole thing together is the bet. Aizkolaris chop through stacked logs against the clock. Harrijasotzaileak lift cylindrical and cubic stones of enormous weight, repeatedly. Teams pull on a rope in sokatira. The iron bar thrown in palanka started life as a mining tool, and in the old days the bets were settled in a meadow outside the village with no standardised weight — only the requirement that everyone in that particular wager used the same one.

Basque Rural Sports: Competitive Work

Stand between the puente viejo and Calatrava's footbridge and work out how many centuries are in view

Find out what Alfonso XI granted the town in 1335 and what the bridge had to do with it

Walk the old quarter stacked up the hill above the port

Watch the fleet unload — this is one of the main fishing ports on the Cantabrian coast

Walk round to Arrigorri beach at the mouth of the ría

Alfonso XI granted Ondarroa the rights to the traffic over the wooden bridge across the Artibai in 1335, and the stone bridge that replaced it in the 18th century — the puente viejo — is still standing. Beside it Santiago Calatrava built a white asymmetric footbridge in the 1990s, so a working Basque fishing town has a 14th-century charter, an 18th-century bridge and a piece of late-20th-century engineering all within a hundred metres. The port is among the most important on the Cantabrian coast and the old quarter is packed onto the slope above it.

Ondarroa: A Bridge by Calatrava in a Fishing Town

Go into the Santa Casa, the original tower house, still standing inside the Baroque sanctuary built round it

Find the room where Ignatius convalesced and work out what was and was not available to read in it

Work out what happened at Pamplona in 1521 and how a broken leg redirected a religious order

Walk the Baroque basilica outside and compare its scale with the house at its centre

Work out why the Jesuits enclosed the house rather than replacing it

Íñigo López de Loyola was a soldier until a cannonball smashed his leg at Pamplona in 1521. Convalescing in his family's tower house at Azpeitia with nothing to read but a life of Christ and a book of saints, he changed direction entirely and became Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. In the 17th century the family house was enclosed inside a vast Baroque sanctuary, so that the original stone tower still stands intact in the middle of the newer building — the room where he read is still there.

Loyola: Where Ignatius Was Converted

Ride or walk a vía verde end to end and notice that the gradient never really changes

Work out why: the route is a railway grade, and a steam locomotive could not pull anything steeper

Go through the tunnels and over the viaducts, which are the original railway structures

Find the old station buildings on the route and see what they have been turned into

Work out which line this was, when it closed, and what it was carrying

Spain closed a great many branch lines and mining railways in the 20th century, and rather than let the trackbeds go the country turned them into the Vías Verdes — surfaced, waymarked routes for walking, cycling and riding, on grades no steeper than a steam locomotive could pull. That constraint is the point: they are almost flat, they go through the tunnels and over the viaducts the engineers built, and they make otherwise serious terrain accessible to anyone. The Ferrocarriles Vascongados route runs 13.6 kilometres between Soraluze-Placencia de las Armas and Anzuola.

Vías Verdes: Riding Spain's Abandoned Railways

Drink at a sidrería on Calle Gascona, Oviedo's 'Boulevard of Cider'

Pour a culete of cider the Asturian way, holding the bottle high above your head so the stream hits the glass and aerates the cider

Walk up to the Plaza de la Catedral and look at the Gothic tower of San Salvador, finished in the mid-16th century

Asturias drinks around forty million litres of cider a year and it is poured, not served. The bottle is held at full arm's length above the head and the glass at hip height, so the stream falls a metre or more and breaks on the side of the glass — that aeration is the whole point, because the cider is still, dry and sharp, and without it it tastes flat. You get a couple of fingers at a time, a culete, and you drink it straight down and throw the last drop on the floor. Calle Gascona in Oviedo is a whole street of places doing it.

Oviedo: The Cider Boulevard of Calle Gascona

Cross the isthmus over the ditch cut four metres wide and three deep, the fort's first line of defence

Go through the gate in the main wall and count the round and oval houses — twenty survive

Climb the stone stairs between the two quarters, the best preserved in any Galician castro

Walk out to the tip of the peninsula and look back at the fort from the Atlantic side

Baroña is an Iron Age fort on a rocky peninsula at Porto do Son, lived in from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD. A ditch four metres wide and three deep was cut across the isthmus as the first defence, then came a double wall and the main wall with its gate. Inside, the foundations of twenty round and oval houses survive, and the stone stairs between its two quarters are the best preserved of any Galician castro. Its people lived mainly off the sea, on shellfish and fish, and left traces of metalworking, stone-working and weaving. It was first excavated in 1933.