Find the cave where, after testimony described it as a night-time meeting place, the 1610 trial investigated 53 people for witchcraft

Walk inside the cave — a natural tunnel 120m long — following the Olabidea stream, known locally as "Infernuko erreka" ("Hell's stream" in Basque)

Visit the Zugarramurdi Witchcraft Museum, which documents the trial and its six executed victims

The Basque witch trials opened at Logroño in January 1609, and the first phase ended in 1610 with an auto-da-fé against thirty-one of the accused, five or six of whom were burned. The cave they were said to have met in is a natural tunnel 120 metres long with a stream running through it that locals still call Infernuko erreka, hell's stream. What matters as much is what happened next: the junior inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías was sent to examine it, spent 1611 travelling the country under an Edict of Grace, and concluded there was nothing there.

Zugarramurdi: The Witches' Cave and the Inquisitor Who Doubted

Ride the 1924 train the 4.2 km up from the col de Saint-Ignace — thirty-five minutes at about 8 km/h on a Strub rack holding a gradient of 250 mm per metre — and inside the carriage find the varnished Ardèche chestnut panelling and count the six compartments of ten seats

Walk the last stretch up from the station to the summit itself and from there trace the Basque coast all the way from San Sebastián round to the mouth of the Adour and the Landes, then find the frontier line that crosses the ridge between Labourd and Haute-Navarre

Walk up on one of the waymarked paths from Sare, Ascain or the col de Saint-Ignace, climbing more than 700 m to the ridge, and time yourself against the train's thirty-five minutes — the Défi de la Rhune is run every year by people trying to beat it on foot

On the open slopes find the pottok ponies, then pick out the manech sheep by their black or russet heads and corkscrew horns, and in the wet ground beside the path look for the round-leaved sundew, a carnivorous plant that grows up here

At the top, find the radio and television masts that cover the whole coastal strip from Hendaye to Bayonne, then look for a road coming up and confirm there is none — Sare voted a summit road down by referendum in 1978, which is why the train survived

The rack railway of La Rhune, inaugurated in 1924 and one of the few rack railways still running in France, climbs 4.2 km of metre-gauge track with its original rolling stock, in the tourist season only, from the col de Saint-Ignace at 169 m — between Ascain and Sare, about 10 km east of Saint-Jean-de-Luz — to a station at 905 m just below the summit of La Rhune, which stands at about 900 m on the Franco-Spanish border between Labourd and Haute-Navarre. Many paths also climb the mountain, from Ascain, Sare and the col de Saint-Ignace, and pottok ponies and manech sheep graze its slopes.

La Rhune: The Rack Railway to the Border Summit

Find all three forms the AOC allows at Espelette, the only spice in France with a protected appellation: whole fresh peppers, a corde of between twenty and a hundred strung together, and the ground powder, and buy the form you would actually use

Walk Ainhoa's single street and work out which two buildings survived the Thirty Years' War: the church and the maison Machitorenea. Everything else is 17th-century Labourdine rebuild, and the pelota fronton at the end leans against the churchyard wall

Go room by room through Arnaga and name the style Rostand gave each one, English in the hall, Chinese in the smoking room, Empire in the study, Louis XVI in the dining room, and find in the library the Cesar Gerard Depardieu won for Cyrano in 1991 and gave to the museum

Walk the long canal of Arnaga's French garden to the pergola at the far end, copied from the monument that closes the view at Schonbrunn, and find the three poets named on the trellis of the Coin des poetes facing the orangery

At Espelette the red peppers, the only spice in France with a protected appellation, have had their AOC since 1 June 2000 and hang to dry on the house fronts from September. Close by, Ainhoa, one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France, was destroyed in the Thirty Years' War and rebuilt, so its main street is a line of 17th-century Labourdine houses, and at Cambo-les-Bains Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, built the neo-Basque Villa Arnaga between 1903 and 1906, owned by the town since 1961 and set in a 15-hectare park with a French garden on one side and an English one on the other.

Espelette, Ainhoa and Cambo: Red Peppers, a Labourdine Village and Rostand's Villa

Find the valley's coat of arms on house fronts and work out that every household here is entitled to it

Work out what hidalguía meant for a whole valley rather than a family

Drive between several of the fifteen places — Errazu, Arizkun, Irurita, Elbete — and see how scattered they are

Find the Bozate quarter at Arizkun and find out who lived there and why they were kept apart

Walk into the beech woods above the valley towards the French border

Baztán is a single municipality of 376 square kilometres made up of fifteen separate places, each with its own scattered hamlets and farmsteads, in the Navarrese mountains near the French border. Sancho III the Great made it a lordship, and because everyone born in the valley held hidalgo status, every household is entitled to use the valley's arms — which is why you find the same shield carved on the front of almost every house and farmstead, varied by the taste of whichever century put it up. Elizondo is the capital, at 200 metres.

The Baztán Valley: Fifteen Places and a Coat of Arms

Walk the rue Gambetta along the old south wall — the only part of the medieval church still standing — and find the doorway cut in 1650 and bricked up around 1669 so that nobody could marry through it again; the town archives never recorded whether the parish did that itself or was told to

Count your way across the altarpiece: eighteen saints, two allegories, the dove of the Holy Spirit, God the Father and the pelican, set round a double-drum tabernacle between twisted columns — it took five cartloads to bring it from Bayonne in 1669

Stand in the nave and work out the old seating: until the 1970s the three tiers of galleries were for men only and the floor was for the women, each of whom set her chair on her family's jarleku, the grave slab that belonged to her house — the galleries you are looking at were rebuilt identically in 1857 with help from Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie

Step back from the 35 m bell tower and notice that it has no spire, only a low flat tiled roof: lightning set the old one alight on 27 November 1706, the bells were saved by wrapping them in wet ships' sails, and the temporary tiled cap put on afterwards is still there

Hunt along the west and south walls for the leftovers of the 15th-century Gothic church — a pier, stone ribs, blocked windows, and high on the south wall three worked windows with coussièges, stone benches facing each other inside the embrasure — then find the altar frontal embroidered with tiny coloured glass beads, said to be Louis XIV's wedding gift to the church

On 9 June 1660, Louis XIV married the Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain in the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, then halfway through an enlargement begun in 1630 for a town of 12,000 made rich by whaling, cod and the West Indies trade. The couple entered by a door opened in 1650, and around 1669 it was walled up so that no other couple could ever pass through it. Inside, the altar stands twelve steps above the nave with the sacristy underneath it, in front of a 17th-century gilded altarpiece, probably the most monumental in the Basque Country, and wooden galleries run round three sides of the nave in the manner of Labourd churches — a feature said to be unique in Europe — giving the whole interior the look of a theatre.

Saint-Jean-de-Luz: The Church Where Louis XIV Married

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

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

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 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.