Visit the Museo del Jurásico de Asturias (MUJA) in Colunga, opened in 2004 in a building shaped like a giant dinosaur footprint

Walk the Playa de la Griega at low tide to find the dinosaur footprints on the rock platform

Follow the coast to Lastres, the fishing village on Asturias's Jurassic coast

Between Gijón and Ribadesella the Jurassic rock reaches the shore, and the flat platforms at the foot of the cliffs carry hundreds of dinosaur footprints — some of the largest sauropod tracks anywhere, printed into what was a tidal flat 150 million years ago and exposed at low tide. This is one of the most important dinosaur track sites in the world. The museum at Colunga was built in 2004 in the shape of a three-toed footprint, which is either clever or very silly depending on where you stand, and holds the finds from the whole coast.

The MUJA and La Griega: Dinosaur Tracks at Colunga

Paddle the Arriondas to Ribadesella run yourself — the river is open all summer and outfitters rent everything

Come for the race on the first Saturday of August after the 2nd and watch the noon start — paddles locked in a frame that releases when the light goes green, after Dionisio de la Huerta's verses are read out

Ride the Tren Fluvial from Arriondas, which runs beside the river with stops to get out and watch

Find out how it started: a few friends going down the river for fun in 1929, fixed at this course in 1932

Finish at Ribadesella and work out how twenty kilometres of river feels from inside a boat

In 1929 Dionisio de la Huerta and a few friends paddled down the Sella for the fun of it. They repeated it in 1930 and 1931, fixed the start and finish at Arriondas and Ribadesella in 1932, and turned it into a race with thirteen paddlers. It now runs twenty kilometres down the river on the first Saturday of August following the 2nd, has been a Festival of International Tourist Interest since 1980, and finishes under the bridge at Ribadesella. Renfe runs a Tren Fluvial down the valley beside the race so the crowd can follow the boats.

Descenso del Sella: Twenty Kilometres of Canoes

Find the Jurassic dinosaur footprints on the rocks of the beach at low tide

Watch the small boats come in to the harbour and its fish market

Walk up through the San Miguel and San Roque quarters and work out where Charles V is supposed to have landed

Walk out to the Tazones lighthouse on the headland

Tazones is a fishing village of about 250 people between two headlands on the coast of Villaviciosa, its houses stepped up the slope from the harbour, and it has been one of the Most Beautiful Villages in Spain since 2019. It was once a whaling port. It is believed to be where the young Charles I — later the Emperor Charles V — first set foot in Spain, arriving from Flanders in 1517, and the landing is commemorated every year at the fiestas of San Roque. On the rocky shore of its beach are Jurassic dinosaur footprints, part of the Costa de los Dinosaurios.

Tazones: The Fishing Village Where Charles V First Landed

Go to Tazones and find the house with the carved facade marking where Charles I came ashore in 1517

Go into a llagar during pressing season and find out how Asturian cider is actually made

Learn to pour it yourself — from arm's length, a couple of fingers at a time, drunk straight away

Work out why the pour matters and what it is doing to the cider

Get to Rodiles beach at the mouth of the ría, which is one of the best waves in northern Spain

In 1517 a storm pushed the fleet carrying the young Charles I of Spain off course for Santander and put him ashore at Tazones, the fishing port of Villaviciosa — his first landing in the country he had just inherited, in a village he had never heard of. Villaviciosa is the apple capital of Asturias and the centre of the cider industry: llagares pressing the fruit, cider poured from a height to break the surface and drunk immediately, and twenty-eight kilometres of coast behind it with Rodiles among the best surf beaches in northern Spain.

Villaviciosa: The Emperor Landed by Mistake

Go into Tito Bustillo and find the main panel of horses and deer

Work out how it was found: young cavers in 1968, and who the cave is named after

Walk the seafront and find the indiano houses built with American money

Be at the bridge in August for the finish of the Descenso del Sella

Find the dinosaur footprints on the rocks along this coast, which are signposted from the town

A group of young cavers found the painted gallery at Tito Bustillo in 1968 and named it after one of their number who died on a later expedition. It holds Palaeolithic painting of the first rank — a main panel of horses and deer in red and black, and a separate chamber of vulval engravings — and it is part of the Altamira World Heritage listing. The town sits where the Sella reaches the sea, so it is also the finish of the Descenso del Sella every August, and it has a seafront of indiano mansions built with money from the Americas.

Ribadesella: A Cave, a River and a Race

Stand under the so-called Roman bridge and find out that it is medieval, and that everybody calls it Roman anyway

Work out what happened here: the capital of the kingdom of Asturias from 722 until 774, the only Christian state left in Iberia

Find the cross hanging beneath the central arch of the bridge — a copy of the Victory Cross, which began as the oak cross Pelayo carried at Covadonga

Go into the chapel of Santa Cruz, raised over a dolmen of the third millennium BC by King Favila and Queen Froiluba and consecrated on 27 October 737 to hold Pelayo's cross

Drink sidra poured properly — from arm's length, a couple of fingers at a time, drunk immediately

After the victory at Covadonga in 722 Pelayo made Cangas de Onís his capital, reusing the Roman settlement already there, and it stayed the capital of the kingdom of Asturias until 774 — which makes this small town on the Sella the first seat of the only Christian kingdom left in Iberia. The famous humpbacked bridge over the river is universally called the Roman bridge and is not: it was built in the Middle Ages. Pelayo's tomb is up the valley at Covadonga.

Cangas de Onís: The First Capital of Christian Spain

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

Take the summer boat from Vigo to the Cíes Islands in the Atlantic Islands of Galicia National Park, and swim at Praia de Rodas, called the best beach in the world by The Guardian in 2007

Walk to the lighthouse on the Illa do Faro, the middle island of the Cíes, and carry out any litter, since the islands have no waste bins

Walk the Rodas sandbar that joins Monteagudo to the Illa do Faro

The Atlantic Islands of Galicia became a national park in 2002 and the Cíes are the best known of them — three granite islands across the mouth of the Ría de Vigo, with cliffs over a hundred metres on the Atlantic side and a beach on the sheltered side that The Guardian called the best in the world in 2007. Visitor numbers are capped, you need a permit, and there are no bins, so whatever you take you carry out.