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

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

Walk the towers and the wall walks and work out how much of the silhouette is decoration rather than defence

Find the black mulberry inside, which is protected as a natural monument of Navarre

Work out what was lost in 1813, when Espoz y Mina had the palace burnt to deny it to the French

Find out what Charles III put in here that a castle would never have had — gardens, a menagerie, hanging gardens

Come in summer for the Festival de Teatro Clásico, which uses the palace as its main venue

Charles III of Navarre turned an existing castle at Olite into a permanent royal seat in the 15th century and gave it everything a court of the period was supposed to have: towers, gardens, moats, hanging gardens, even a menagerie. The silhouette of towers above the walls is why it is probably the most emblematic civil building in Navarre and its most visited monument. In 1813 the guerrilla leader Espoz y Mina had it burnt, to stop Napoleon's troops fortifying it — so the towers survive and the interior decoration and the gardens are gone for good.

Olite: The Palace the Kings of Navarre Built for Themselves

Drive or cycle the tracks through the Bardena Blanca, the central and most desert part of the whole area

Find Castildetierra, the isolated eroded spire that is the single most photographed thing here

Work out the geology: sediment dumped into a closed inland sea as the Pyrenees rose, then drained and eroded ever since

Go up to a mirador on the edge of the plateau and see the whole thing laid out below

Check what the military firing range is doing before you plan a route — part of the Bardenas is still one

The Bardenas are badlands in southern Navarre — clay, gypsum and sandstone with almost no vegetation, eroded by water and wind into ravines, flats and isolated cabezos, and traditionally divided into three: El Plano, the Bardena Blanca and the Bardena Negra. The ground is Tertiary and Quaternary material dumped into the Ebro basin when the Pyrenees and the Iberian range rose and closed it off into an inland sea; the sea drained, and the erosion that started then is still going. It was made a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve on 6 November 2000. It looks like nowhere else in Europe and is used constantly as a film location for exactly that reason.

Bardenas Reales: The Desert in 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

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 into the cloister and work out why the mosque underneath had to be demolished rather than adapted — the two buildings faced different ways

Find the Puerta del Juicio on the west front and read the relief of the damned

Find out who Benjamin of Tudela was and how far he travelled in the 12th century

Eat the vegetables — this is the Ribera, and the artichokes, borage and asparagus are the point of the place

Come in spring for the vegetable season, which is short and taken very seriously here

Tudela was a major Muslim town on the Ebro, and its cathedral — late Romanesque on Cistercian lines, begun at the end of the 12th century under Sancho VI and finished under two successors — was built on the site of the Great Mosque of the 9th to 11th centuries. Because the two buildings did not face the same way the mosque had to come down, and only some of its foundations were reused. The Judgement Doorway on the west front carries a crowded relief of the damned. Benjamin of Tudela, the 12th-century Jewish traveller whose account of a journey across the Mediterranean and the Near East is a major medieval source, was born here. The town is also the vegetable capital of the Ebro.

Tudela: Mudéjar on the Ebro

Cross the harbour mouth between San Pedro and San Juan in the small passenger boat

Walk the old village of Pasai Donibane, left unburned when the French took the port in 1794

Look out over the harbour mouth Lafayette sailed out of in April 1777, bound for the American Revolution

Walk up onto the slopes of Mount Jaizkibel above San Juan for the view down into the harbour

Pasaia is a natural harbour behind a mouth less than 200 metres wide, sheltered between Mount Ulía and Mount Jaizkibel, and its two old fishing villages face each other across it: San Pedro on one side, San Juan — Pasai Donibane — on the other. Going round by road is seven kilometres, so people cross in a small boat. The admiral Blas de Lezo was born here in 1689, and in April 1777 the Marquis de Lafayette sailed from San Juan to join the American Revolution. When French troops took Pasaia in 1794, San Juan was not burned, which is why its old village is intact.

Pasaia: A Harbour Mouth You Cross by Boat

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.