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

Take a pintxos crawl through San Sebastián's Old Town along Calle 31 de Agosto and Fermín Calbetón, trying at least five different bars

Eat at one of San Sebastián's three-Michelin-starred restaurants — Arzak, Akelarre or Martín Berasategui — or one of their more casual sister venues in town

Eat the cider-house menu at a sagardotegi in Astigarraga — cod omelette, steak, Idiazabal with quince and walnuts — and in season catch your cider from the barrel at the call of txotx

San Sebastián's Parte Vieja is packed with pintxo bars along Calle 31 de Agosto and Fermín Calbetón, and the city has more Michelin stars per head than almost anywhere. A few kilometres inland, Astigarraga is the heart of the Basque cider tradition, with most of the sagardotegis clustered round it and Hernani. Basque cider is still, not sparkling. In a traditional cider house you eat a cod omelette, a steak, and Idiazabal cheese with quince and walnuts, and every time someone calls txotx you get up and catch a thin stream from the tap in the barrel as low in the glass as you can. The new cider is opened on 19 January and the season runs until April or May.

San Sebastián and Astigarraga: Pintxos and the Cider-House Txotx

Find your first scallop-shell Camino waymark at the Basilica of Santa María del Coro in the Old Town

Walk the coastal stage from San Sebastián to Orio via Ondarreta beach and the Igueldo headland

Get your pilgrim credential stamped at a Camino-registered stop along the way

At Orio, find the waterfront trainera rowing-club boathouse — a reminder that pilgrims once crossed the ría by boat before the modern bridge was built

The coastal Camino de Santiago route begins in San Sebastián and follows the Bay of Biscay west — a harder, wilder alternative to the inland Camino Francés, with daily ascents and descents along cliff paths between fishing towns.

The Camino del Norte: San Sebastián to Orio

Get a place on the Concha shore or the Paseo Nuevo for one of the two Sundays in September

Work out what a trainera actually is — a Basque coastal fishing boat, thirteen oars and a coxswain

Follow one crew across both days, because the result is the aggregate of the two

Find out how far back it goes: rowed here since 1879, with a women's competition since 2008

Work out why the rivalries are as sharp as they are — these are village crews, not clubs

The Bandera de la Concha has been rowed in San Sebastián bay on the first two Sundays of September since 1879, with a women's competition added in 2008. Traineras are heavy Basque coastal fishing boats, thirteen rowers and a coxswain, and the crews are village crews with real rivalries behind them. It is rowed in two heats of four boats over three nautical miles across two days, and locally it is called the Olympics of rowing. The bay fills with people on the shore and the whole city stops for it.

La Concha: The Rowing Regatta San Sebastián Stops For

Walk the meadows and woods among the 40 outdoor sculptures and put your hands on them — touching is allowed

Find Buscando la luz, 8 metres high and 22 tonnes, and Lotura XXXII, 64 tonnes

Go inside Zabalaga, the farmhouse of 1543 Chillida restored, for the work in wood, alabaster and wool

Find the Peine del Viento, Chillida's sculptures on the rocks at the far end of La Concha in San Sebastián

Eduardo Chillida found Zabalaga, a farmhouse of 1543 near Hernani, in ruins, restored it with the architect Joaquín Montero, and laid his work out in the 13 hectares of meadow and wood around it. The museum opened on 16 September 2000, closed at the end of 2010 in the financial crisis and reopened on 17 April 2019. Outside stand 40 sculptures in steel and granite, from Estela V at about a metre high to Lotura XXXII at 64 tonnes, and visitors may touch them; the fragile work in wood, alabaster and wool is kept inside the farmhouse.

Chillida Leku: Sculpture You Are Allowed to Touch

Walk from the Santa María Gate to the San Nicolás Gate through the walled old town

Find the balconied fishermen's houses of the Marina quarter, painted in the traditional red, green and blue of Basque boats

Find the 10th-century quadrangular tower at the core of the Castle of Charles V, now the Parador hotel on Plaza de Armas

From the harbour promenade, spot Pheasant Island in the Bidasoa — the world's smallest condominium, which switches sovereignty between Spain and France every six months, and the site of the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees

A walled fishing port on the Bidasoa estuary, facing France across a river that has marked the border since 1659 — and hiding, in the water between the two banks, the world's smallest condominium territory.

Hondarribia: The Border Castle on the Bidasoa

Drive the RD912 from where it crosses the Untxin, up onto the pointe de Socoa 24m above the water, then past the cove called the viviers basques, Haizabia, the Abbadia estate and the baie de Lohia down to Hendaye-Plage

Walk the inland alternative over the first line of hills — the historic clifftop path is closed — and from the ridge look down on the tilted flysch beds and the coves cut into them, as far as the Maison de la Corniche at Asporotsttipi where the path onto the Abbadia estate begins

Walk the path across the 65 hectares of the Domaine d'Abbadia, passing its three houses — Asporotsttipi, Nekatoenea and Larretxea — and climb to the château-observatoire on top of it, the house Antoine d'Abbadie commissioned from Viollet-le-Duc in 1864 after his years in Ethiopia

Take binoculars and look one to two kilometres straight out from the corniche for the Belharra reef, a shoal 14 to 18 m down that throws up waves of up to 20 m on a big winter swell — on the days it works, this is where people come to watch the surfers on it

Finish on the beach at Hendaye and walk back out to the pointe Sainte-Anne to find the concrete the German army left when it built the Corniche into the Atlantic Wall — the eastern end of a line of works that runs all the way back to the pointe de Socoa

The Corniche Basque is a protected stretch of 445 hectares on the communes of Ciboure, Urrugne and Hendaye, where the cliffs run six kilometres from the port of Socoa to Hendaye beach. They are built of flysch — rock laid down in thin alternating beds and then tilted on end — cut into coves and spurs, with pasture, woodland and vines on top and the RD 912 running along the edge.

The Corniche Basque: Flysch Cliffs Between Socoa and Hendaye

Watch the Bufones de Pría, the sea geysers in the clifftop, in a northerly swell

Walk down to the Playa de Gulpiyuri, the beach a hundred metres inland with no sea in sight

In Llanes harbour, find Agustín Ibarrola's Cubos de la Memoria, the breakwater blocks painted since 2001

The eastern Asturian coast is limestone, and the sea has got underneath it — which produces two things you find almost nowhere else. The bufones are blowholes on the clifftop, where swell forced up through a shaft fires spray twenty metres into the air with a noise like a train. Gulpiyuri is the opposite: a collapsed cave that left a perfect crescent of sand a hundred metres inland, with no sea in sight, that fills and empties with the tide through the rock. Between them runs a coastal path past a string of small beaches.

The Llanes Coast: The Bufones de Pría, Gulpiyuri and the Cubes of Memory

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.