Walk the signposted path up to the source of the Cuervo

Look for the orchids that grow in the damp around the falls

The Río Cuervo rises at about 1,469 metres on the western slope of the Muela de San Felipe, beside Vega del Codorno in the Serranía de Cuenca, and its source has been a Natural Monument since 1999. When there is water it comes out of a travertine spring and pours over great stalactites of tufa covered in moss, and in winter the long falls freeze. There are caves behind the cascades, sinkholes around them, and a damp microclimate that shelters several species of orchid along with lime, hazel, yew and holly among the pines. Now and then the tufa barriers collapse on their own.

The Source of the Río Cuervo: Waterfalls Over Moss and Tufa

Walk the castle enclosure and work out how much ground it actually covers

Work out the political story: Aragonese in 1128, Castilian, Almoravid, then an independent lordship from about 1139

Drive into the Alto Tajo and find the river canyons, which are among the deepest in inland Spain

Find out what the proposed Molina-Alto Tajo geopark covers — seventy municipalities and over four thousand square kilometres

Find the Romanesque bridge and the Torre de Aragón above the town

Alfonso I of Aragon took Molina in 1128; his brother Ramiro II handed the lands to Castile; the Almoravids took them back; and around 1139 Manrique de Lara took them again and made the place an independent lordship with himself as its first lord. The Señorío de Molina kept a separate identity for centuries and the town still uses the name. Its castle is one of the largest in Spain by enclosed area. It sits beside the Alto Tajo natural park, one of the greatest concentrations of river canyons in inland Iberia, and inside a proposed geopark covering seventy municipalities and 4,186 square kilometres.

Molina de Aragón: A Lordship of Its Own

Walk the circuit and work out that every shape in it was cut by water out of a seabed

Work out the sequence: Tethys seafloor 90 million years ago, lifted by the alpine orogeny, then karst weathering ever since

Find the fossils in the rock, which are the direct evidence of what this was

Work out why it was protected as early as 11 June 1929, which is very early for a Spanish natural site

Go on into the wider Serranía de Cuenca and find the Ventano del Diablo over the Júcar gorge

Ninety million years ago this was the floor of the Tethys sea. The alpine orogeny at the end of the Cretaceous lifted it out of the water, and karst weathering since has cut the limestone into freestanding blocks, mushrooms, corridors and arches at 1,500 metres among pine forest near Valdecabras. It was declared a Natural Site of National Interest on 11 June 1929 and now sits inside the Serranía de Cuenca natural park. The land is private and there is a modest entry charge, which is worth knowing before you drive out.

The Ciudad Encantada: A Cretaceous Seabed, Weathered

Walk to the Casas Colgadas, the 15th-century hanging houses overlooking the gorge of the Huécar

Visit the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in the Casas Colgadas, established in 1966 by Fernando Zóbel

Visit Cuenca Cathedral, known as the first Gothic cathedral in Spain thanks to Anglo-Norman influence

Walk the old town on its narrow escarpment between the Júcar and Huécar rivers, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996

Cuenca is built on a spit of rock between two river gorges with nowhere to expand, so it built outwards over the edge — the Casas Colgadas hang off the cliff above the Huécar on wooden balconies, which is a 15th-century solution to a housing shortage. In 1966 Fernando Zóbel put the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art inside them, which turned out to be an inspired pairing, and the old town went onto the World Heritage list in 1996. The cathedral is claimed as the first Gothic in Spain, built with Anglo-Norman influence.

Cuenca: Hanging Houses and Abstract Art

Walk the wall up the ridge above the town and look back down into it

Work out the political anomaly: an Islamic taifa handed to a Christian family by agreement, then held independent of Castile and Aragon from 1170, with its own bishop

Find the rodeno — the reddish local stone that gives every building in the town the same colour

Go into the Cathedral of El Salvador in the middle of the old town

Look at the forged ironwork on the houses, which is the local vernacular and is everywhere once you notice it

Albarracín is named after the Banu Razin, a Berber clan who made themselves the sovereign dynasty of their own taifa here in the 11th century. What happened next is the unusual part: the taifa passed to the Azagra, a Christian family of Navarrese lineage, by cession rather than conquest, and from 1170 they held it independent of both Castile and Aragon — to the point of running their own bishopric. The town is built of rodeno, the local reddish stone, and is walled, vertical and almost entirely intact.

Albarracín: The Taifa That Stayed Independent

Walk round the upper lagoons — the Gitana, the Tejo and the little Tejo — and name the colour of each

Look down into the lagoons from the rim and work out how a collapsed sinkhole fills with groundwater

Walk among the Torcas de los Palancares, the dry sinkholes of the same geology

The lagoons of Cañada del Hoyo are seven karst lakes — five lagoons and two smaller lagunillos — in the Palancares hills 40 kilometres from Cuenca, fed from underground and by rain, and a Natural Monument since 2007. Each looks a different colour because of microorganisms, submerged plants, the light and the season, though a glass of water from any of them is clear: the Tejo is dark blue, the little Tejo black, Cardenillas sky blue, the Parra blue. The Gitana was blue too, and has been green since the 1980s from the number of people bathing in it. Their levels drop a little every year as the aquifer is pumped. Eight kilometres away the Torcas de los Palancares are the same sinkholes without the water.

Cañada del Hoyo: Seven Lagoons, Seven Colours

Get to a lavender field in the second or third week of July, when the whole plateau turns

Go down into the Cuevas Árabes and work out that nobody is certain when they were cut or why

Find the Real Fábrica de Paños of 1750 and its circular garden

Walk the walls and the gates of the old town above the Tajuña

Come outside July as well, because the town is worth it without the flowers

Brihuega grows about a thousand hectares of lavender on the Alcarria plateau, and for two or three weeks in July the fields above the town go solid purple — which has turned a small Guadalajara town into one of the most photographed places in Spain every summer. Under the town is something older and stranger: a network of tunnels cut into the rock, of uncertain date, usually called the Cuevas Árabes, running for kilometres beneath the streets. The town also has a Royal Cloth Factory of 1750 with a circular garden.

Brihuega: The Lavender and the Caves

Walk the Vila Vella of Tossa de Mar, the only fortified medieval town still standing on the Catalan coast, with its 12th-century walls, four turrets and three cylindrical towers of the 14th century

Visit the Tossa Municipal Museum, with its work by Marc Chagall and the mosaics from the 1st-century Roman villa of Els Ametllers

Walk a stage of the Camí de Ronda, the coastal path along the 214km Costa Brava between Blanes and the French border, around Tossa's coves

Tossa de Mar has the only fortified medieval town still standing on the whole Catalan coast — 12th-century walls with three cylindrical towers running down to the sea, enclosing a knot of lanes on a headland. The Costa Brava got its reputation in the 1960s and has spent decades living it down, but the 214 kilometres between Blanes and the French border are genuinely rugged, and the Camí de Ronda that runs along them was a coastguard and smugglers' path long before it was a walking route. Marc Chagall came here in the 1930s and called it a blue paradise.