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

Look out at the bateas and work out what is hanging under each one and how long it takes to grow

Go out on a working mussel boat and see a rope hauled

Walk the Carreirón natural park at the south end of the island for the waders and the salt marsh

Eat mussels within sight of the rafts they came off, which is the whole point of being here

Work out the scale of what this ría produces relative to the rest of Europe

A Illa de Arousa is an island in the Ría de Arousa joined to the mainland by a two-kilometre bridge opened in 1985, and the water around it is full of bateas — floating timber rafts with ropes hanging beneath them growing mussels. Galicia produces more rope-grown mussels than anywhere in Europe and this ría produces more than any other part of Galicia. The southern end of the island is the Carreirón natural park, a low headland of salt marsh and pine where waders and wintering wildfowl come in, with beaches on both sides.

A Illa de Arousa and the Mussel Rafts

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

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

Walk the boardwalks out to the mobile dune and work out how far it moves in a year

Find the two lagoons and work out that one is salt and one is fresh, and what that does to the birds

Work out why a dune this size is unusual on this coast

Go out to the Corrubedo lighthouse and read what this stretch of coast has done to shipping

Stay off the dune itself and work out from the signs why walking on it is the one thing that destroys it

The dune at Corrubedo is about a kilometre long, up to twenty metres high, and moving — a mobile dune of a size unusual on the Atlantic coast of Iberia, sitting between the sea and two lagoons, Carregal and Vixán, one salt and one fresh. The whole complex is a natural park and a Ramsar site, and the two different lagoons side by side is why the bird list is as long as it is. Behind it the coast runs out to the Corrubedo lighthouse on one of the most dangerous stretches of the Costa da Morte.

Corrubedo: The Biggest Moving Dune in Galicia

Cross the isthmus over the ditch cut four metres wide and three deep, the fort's first line of defence

Go through the gate in the main wall and count the round and oval houses — twenty survive

Climb the stone stairs between the two quarters, the best preserved in any Galician castro

Walk out to the tip of the peninsula and look back at the fort from the Atlantic side

Baroña is an Iron Age fort on a rocky peninsula at Porto do Son, lived in from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD. A ditch four metres wide and three deep was cut across the isthmus as the first defence, then came a double wall and the main wall with its gate. Inside, the foundations of twenty round and oval houses survive, and the stone stairs between its two quarters are the best preserved of any Galician castro. Its people lived mainly off the sea, on shellfish and fish, and left traces of metalworking, stone-working and weaving. It was first excavated in 1933.

Castro de Baroña: An Iron Age Fort on a Rock in the Atlantic

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

Walk the 5.3km route from Baquedano to the source of the Urederra in the Urbasa-Andía Natural Park, where the turquoise river emerges from a karst cliff in a waterfall more than 100m high; book online and park in Baquedano

Look for vultures and eagles above the beech and oak forest along the route

Look into the pools below the falls, turquoise with dissolved lime — and stay out of them, since swimming is banned

The Urederra comes out of the bottom of a karst cliff in the Urbasa massif already a full river — water that has soaked through limestone for weeks arriving in one place, so clear and so saturated with dissolved lime that it reads as turquoise. The walk up to the source is 5.3 kilometres through beech forest with a series of pools below the falls. Numbers are capped and you book online.

The Source of the Urederra: A Turquoise River Out of a Cliff

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.