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 Palace of the Kings of Navarre, one of the few Romanesque civil buildings left in Spain

Climb the steps to San Pedro de la Rúa and look at the cloister

Work out what Estella was for: a burgh founded around 1090 and deliberately settled with Franks under a charter copied from Jaca

Go out to the Fuente del Vino at Irache and take the pilgrim's measure, not more

Find out what Estella was in the Carlist wars and why it mattered

Estella was founded around 1090 by Sancho Ramírez of Aragon and Pamplona, the first Pamplonese burgh to be formed, beside the older settlement of Lizarra — and it filled with settlers from elsewhere, many of them Franks from southern France, under a charter modelled on the one the same king had given the Franks of Jaca. It has more Romanesque civil architecture than almost anywhere in Spain, including the Palace of the Kings of Navarre, one of the very few Romanesque secular buildings left in the country. It was the Carlist capital in the 19th century. Just outside, at Irache, a winery keeps a fountain that runs wine for pilgrims.

Estella: The Town Built for the Camino

Tour the Idiazabal Cheese Interpretation Centre and taste raw-milk Latxa sheep cheese, D.O. since 1987

Find the reconstructed shepherd's txabola hut inside the museum

Drive the short pastoral route to the Ecomuseum of Pastoreo in Telleriarte

Buy a wheel of naturally smoked Idiazabal directly from a producer along the route

Idiazabal has been a protected designation since 1 October 1987, and the rules are strict: raw, unpasteurised sheep's milk only, and only from the latxa and carranzana breeds. It takes around seven litres of that milk to make a kilo of properly matured cheese. About five hundred farms and more than a hundred dairies work under the appellation, most of them making the cheese from their own flock alone. The smoked version, which is what most people picture, started as a by-product of curing cheese in shepherds' huts with a fire in them. In 1995 it took first prize at Parma as the best European sheep's cheese.

Idiazabal: The Shepherd's Cheese Route

Stand in front of Oteiza's facade and count the apostles — there are fourteen, which is two too many

Work out why the frieze is at road level: the facade starts below the path you arrive on

Find Chillida's doors and then Lucio Muñoz's apse inside

Go down into the crypt for Basterretxea's wall paintings

Work out what it means that a religious building of 1950 was given to the artists it was given to

In April 1950 the Franciscan provincial proposed a new basilica at Arantzazu, high in the Gipuzkoan mountains, and the job went to the architects Sáenz de Oíza and Luis Laorga. What is remarkable is who else worked on it: Jorge Oteiza carved the main facade, with a frieze of fourteen apostles set at road level because the front starts below the path; Eduardo Chillida made the main doors; Lucio Muñoz painted the apse; Néstor Basterretxea did the crypt walls and Xabier Egaña the murals. It is effectively the Basque avant-garde of the 20th century working on one building.

Arantzazu: A Basilica Built by the Basque Avant-Garde

Walk across the 11th-century bridge, which is the whole reason the town exists

Find the monument at the junction where the Francés and the Aragonés become one road

Work out who built the bridge and why nobody can say which queen it was

Go into the church of the Crucifijo, built by the Templars, and find the Y-shaped crucifix

Walk a stretch of the Camino out of town westwards and watch how the pilgrim traffic doubles here

Two routes cross the Pyrenees from France — the Camino Francés over Roncesvalles and the Camino Aragonés over Somport — and they merge just before this town, which is why every pilgrim on both routes walks through it. The Romanesque bridge over the Arga that gives the place its name was built in the 11th century, by tradition at the order of an unnamed queen of Navarre, specifically so that pilgrims could cross safely. A monument at the edge of town marks the junction with the inscription that from here on there is only one way to Santiago.

Puente la Reina: Where the Two Caminos Meet

Go into the Sancti Spiritus university building, founded by papal bull in 1540 and closed in 1842

Work out what five faculties in a Gipuzkoan town of this size actually meant

Find out what conditions the town attached to joining Gipuzkoa in 1540

Go into the Arrikrutz cave under the town

Drive up the valley to Arantzazu, which is the other half of a day here

In 1540 Bishop Rodrigo Mercado de Zuazola founded the University of Sancti Spiritus at Oñati by bull of Paul III — the first university in the Basque Country, with faculties of law, canons, arts, medicine and theology, running until it closed in 1842. The town negotiated its own annexation to Gipuzkoa in 1540 on conditions including a road and an increased endowment for the university. It was a Carlist stronghold in the 19th century and the Pretender's headquarters. The Arrikrutz cave beneath it is open, and Arantzazu is up the valley.

Oñati: The First University in the Basque Country

Walk the Citadel's five bastions — San Antón, La Victoria, San Juan, Santa María and Santiago — from the Vuelta del Castillo park

Walk the full 825m of Calle Estafeta, the most famous stretch of the San Fermín bull-running route

Find the Hemingway statue outside the Plaza de Toros

Order a coffee at Café Iruña on Plaza del Castillo, open since 1888

A Renaissance star fortress and a narrow medieval street that becomes the world's most famous bull run for nine days each July — Pamplona outside San Fermín is a quiet walled city with both still there to see.

Pamplona: The Citadel and the Bull-Run Streets

Drive the narrow mountain road into Tresviso, cut into the Picos de Europa cliff face — one of the most remote villages in mainland Spain

Find the natural limestone caves above the village where Picón Bejes-Tresviso is aged for two to four months at 5–10°C

Taste Picón directly from a producer in Tresviso — a blend of cow's, sheep's and goat's milk unique among Spain's blue cheeses

Continue to Bejes, the cheese's other namesake village, on the descent back toward the coast

Picón Bejes-Tresviso is a blue cheese with protected designation since 1994, cured in natural caves in the Picos de Europa exactly as Cabrales in Asturias and Valdeón in León are cured — the same mountain, three names, three appellations. The paste is white with blue-green veining from Penicillium growing in the cave air. Tresviso itself has around fifty inhabitants, and the oddity is that although it is in Cantabria there is no road to it from Cantabria: the only road in comes from Asturias, and reaching the rest of your own region by car means about forty kilometres.

Tresviso: The Cave-Aged Blue Cheese of the Picos

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.