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.

The Cíes Islands: Praia de Rodas and the Illa do Faro

Go aboard the replica of the Pinta moored in the harbour

Work out the significance of 1 March 1493 — the first place in the Old World to get the news

Walk the walls of Monterreal, the fortress on Monte Boi that guarded the ría, now a parador

Find the statue of Martín Alonso Pinzón, given to the town by Palos de la Frontera as a token of the twinning

Come for A Arribada on the first weekend of March, when the old town becomes a medieval fair

On 1 March 1493 Martín Alonso Pinzón brought the Pinta into Baiona, which made this the first town in the Old World to learn that there was a New one. Columbus's own ship made landfall in Portugal days later; the news broke here. Baiona has been twinned with Palos de la Frontera, where the caravels sailed from on 3 August 1492, since 1 March 1977, and the first weekend of March the whole old town turns itself into a medieval fair called A Arribada to mark it.

Baiona: Where Europe First Heard About America

Look at the cathedral from a distance and work out that the towers of 1408 and 1424 are not decoration

Find the west portal, finished by 1225 and reckoned the first Gothic sculptural ensemble in the Iberian peninsula

Walk the international bridge across the Miño to Valença and back, which is what the Portuguese Way does

Work out why a cathedral needed arrow slits, and who was on the other side of the river

Follow the Portuguese Way out of the town, which is the busiest Camino route after the Francés

Tui faces Valença across the Miño, which is to say it faces Portugal, and for centuries that meant being fortified — which is why its cathedral has crenellations, towers and arrow slits and reads from a distance as a castle. It was one of the seven capitals of the old Kingdom of Galicia. The west portal, finished by 1225 when Bishop Esteban Egea consecrated the building, is considered the first Gothic sculptural ensemble in the Iberian peninsula, and the defensive look was reinforced later with the tower of Soutomaior in 1408 and San Andrés in 1424. The Portuguese Way crosses the international bridge here into Valença.

Tui: A Cathedral Built as a Fortress

Walk the waterfront and count the hórreos standing in a row above the water

Work out how one actually works — raised on legs, capped to stop rats, slatted to let the wind through and dry the grain

Find the cruceiros, the stone crosses the village is equally protected for

Walk the old lanes behind the front, where the houses are built against and into the bare granite

Look out across the Ría de Pontevedra at the rafts moored in it, and work out what is being farmed underneath them

Combarro on the Ría de Pontevedra is protected both as a Historic Ensemble and as a Historic Site, and what it is protected for is a concentration of hórreos and stone crosses unlike anywhere else. The hórreo is a granary raised on legs with flat stone caps to stop rats climbing in and slatted sides to let Atlantic wind dry the maize — a piece of ordinary engineering that Galicia solved once and never needed to change. In Combarro they stand in a line along the waterfront with their backs to the sea.

Combarro: A Village Built Out of Granaries

Visit the Pazo de Fefiñáns, the noble house in Cambados' old town that produces Albariño de Fefiñanes

See the ruins of Santa Mariña Dozo, Cambados's ruined church and cemetery

Eat cockles and clams gathered at low tide in O Serrido on the Ría de Arousa

Taste an Albariño at a bodega in Cambados

Albariño is a thick-skinned white grape that copes with the rain and the salt air of this coast, and the Rías Baixas are where it is grown — on granite posts and pergolas high off the ground so the sea breeze gets under the vines and keeps rot off them. Cambados is the capital of it. The rías themselves are drowned river valleys, the most productive shellfish water in Europe, so the wine and what it is drunk with come out of the same few kilometres of coast.

Cambados: The Capital of Albariño

Walk the whole historic centre and work out how long it takes before you see a car

Work out what changed: a policy decision about who the streets are for, not a pedestrian zone bolted on

Find the Santuario da Peregrina, the scallop-shaped church on the edge of the old town

Walk out to the Illa das Esculturas in the Lérez, an island of commissioned sculpture

Work out why the French press call it the city where the pedestrian is king, and whether they are right

Pontevedra took cars out of its centre and rebuilt the city round people walking, and the French press named it the city where the pedestrian is king. Traffic deaths in the centre fell to nothing, air quality changed and the historic core — one of the best preserved in Galicia — became usable again rather than a car park. Jean Froissart called it Boa Vila in the 14th century for its position and its prosperity. It is the capital of the Rías Baixas, on the Lérez, and it has a sculpture island in the river.

Pontevedra: The City Where the Pedestrian Is King

Drink from the Fuente de Gándara, which is what the whole municipality is built on

Work out that this is the smallest municipality in Galicia at 2.31 square kilometres

Find the Palacio del Agua, the old bottling plant for Aguas de Mondariz

Look at the old Gran Hotel and work out who was coming here in its period

Find out why the spa was made a separate municipality from Mondariz in the 1920s

Mondariz-Balneario covers 2.31 square kilometres and has about seven hundred inhabitants, which makes it the smallest municipality in Galicia — and it exists because of the water. The Peinador family developed the springs from the 19th century into a resort that drew the Spanish and Portuguese elite, and the town was separated from Mondariz in the 1920s specifically so that the spa could govern itself. What is left is the Gándara and Troncoso springs, the Palacio del Agua bottling plant and the shell of the old Gran Hotel.

Mondariz-Balneario: The Smallest Municipality in Galicia

Walk the length of Calle del Laurel and eat the speciality in at least four different bars

Find the Blanco y Negro, the oldest bar in Logroño

Stand in front of Santa María de la Redonda and its twin towers by Martín de Beratúa

Go inside and look up at the Gothic central nave, built between 1516 and 1538

Calle del Laurel in Logroño's old town is little more than 200 metres long, and with the streets around it holds more than 65 bars. The custom is that each one serves one or two specialities — mushrooms, pinchos morunos, pig's ear, patatas bravas — so an evening here is a walk from bar to bar rather than a meal. The street was rebuilt after the town walls came down in 1862, and the demolition of 1878 that finally opened it to the next street produced the Blanco y Negro, still the oldest bar in Logroño. A few minutes away, the twin towers Martín de Beratúa built for the co-cathedral of Santa María de la Redonda are the emblem of the city.

Logroño: Calle del Laurel and the Twin Towers of La Redonda

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.