Tour the González Byass bodega in Jerez de la Frontera, founded in 1835 and maker of Tío Pepe

Watch a flamenco show at the Andalusian Centre of Flamenco in Jerez, established in 1993

See the Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art in Jerez, home of the Carthusian horse

Sherry is made in a triangle of three towns between Jerez, Sanlúcar and El Puerto de Santa María, and it is unlike any other wine because of the solera: barrels stacked in tiers, wine drawn only from the bottom row and topped up from the row above, so nothing is ever a single vintage and every glass contains a trace of everything that came before. Some soleras have been running since the 19th century. Fino and manzanilla age under flor, a living yeast cap that keeps the air off the wine.

Jerez: Sherry, Flamenco and the Royal School of Equestrian Art

Get to Bajo de Guía for the August races and work out that the start time is set by the tide

Work out what sailed from here: Magellan's expedition out, and the Victoria back, the first circumnavigation

Take the boat across the Guadalquivir to Doñana, which is directly opposite

Drink manzanilla with langostinos at Bajo de Guía, which is the local pairing and not a tourist one

Work out why manzanilla tastes different from fino made a few kilometres inland

Magellan's expedition sailed from Sanlúcar and the Victoria came back to it, which makes this the start and end point of the first circumnavigation of the earth. Since the 19th century the town has also run horse races along the beach at Bajo de Guía on the sand exposed at low tide, in August, timed by the tide rather than the clock. They are a Festival of International Tourist Interest. The Guadalquivir estuary is here, with Doñana directly across the water, and the town's own wine is manzanilla.

Sanlúcar de Barrameda: Horses on the Beach

Get to the Gran Teatro Falla for a session of the COAC, the competition the whole carnival is built round

Find the difference between a chirigota, a comparsa, a coro and a cuarteto, which matters here

Listen to what they are actually singing about — this year's politics, in verse, written to be understood once

Follow a coro on its float through the streets, which is how the coros perform

Find out how many times the Crown tried to ban all this, starting in 1716, and how well that went

Cádiz Carnival has been going since at least the 17th century — a 1636 document records the authorities admitting they could not stop it, and a general complained in 1652 that dockworkers refused to fix his ship because it was carnival. Masked balls were banned by the Crown in 1716 and the bans were repeated all century and in 1816, and none of them worked. What it is now is competitive satirical singing: chirigotas, comparsas, coros and cuartetos writing new words every year, mostly about politics. It was made a Festival of International Tourist Interest in 1980.

Cádiz Carnival: Political Satire Sung in the Street

Stand on the balcony of the Plaza del Cabildo and look straight down the cliff at the Guadalete

Work out what de la Frontera means, and what happened to the 1253 treaty that let the Moors stay

Find out that this was its own taifa from 1012 under a Berber ruler until Seville absorbed it in 1069

Walk the old town lanes, which are narrow enough that buses have to fold their mirrors in

Go into Santa María and San Pedro, the two churches that compete for the skyline

Arcos sits on a sandstone spur above a loop of the Guadalete with a sheer drop on one side, and it is the gateway to the route of the pueblos blancos. After the caliphate of Córdoba collapsed, the taifa of Arcos was proclaimed in 1012 under Ben Jazrum, a Berber; al-Mutadid of Seville swallowed it in 1069. Castile took it by treaty in 1253 on terms allowing any Moor who wished to stay — terms Alfonso X did not keep — and he retook it outright in October 1264 during the Mudéjar revolt. The Plaza del Cabildo at the top has the castle, the church of Santa María, the parador and a balcony straight over the drop.

Arcos de la Frontera: A Town on a Cliff

Buy alfajores from a bakery in the town and find out what is actually in one

Work out how old the recipe is and which tradition it comes out of

Go down into the Roman sewers under the town, which you can walk through

Find out what the seventh duke told Philip II about commanding the Armada, and what happened next

Climb to the castle for the view over the Janda and the whole Cádiz countryside

The dukes of Medina Sidonia were for centuries the most powerful noble house in Spain and held the senior dukedom in the kingdom; the seventh duke commanded the Armada in 1588, having told Philip II plainly that he was the wrong man for it. The town is on a hill over the Janda with Roman sewers you can walk through underneath it. Its other claim is confectionery: the alfajor de Medina Sidonia, an almond, honey and spice roll with a protected geographical indication and a recipe that comes straight out of al-Andalus.

Medina Sidonia: The Highest Title in Spain

Walk the walls and the 11th-century castle gate, and work out how little the street plan has changed

Find out what the cobijada was and why it left only one eye showing

Climb to a viewpoint on the ramparts for the Barbate valley and the Atlantic beyond it

Eat retinto beef, the local breed, which is what this part of Cádiz province is known for

Walk out to the windmills on the ridge above the town

Vejer stands on a hill above the Barbate with the Atlantic a few kilometres away, walled, whitewashed and almost entirely intact — the historic centre was protected in 1976 and the town has been in the Most Beautiful Villages of Spain association since 2014. The castle gate is 11th century and stretches of the walls and the street plan go back to the same period. Until well into the 20th century women here wore the cobijada, a black cloak leaving one eye visible, which is unlike anything else in Spain and is still brought out for the town's festivals.

Vejer de la Frontera: The White Town on the Hill

Take a guided 4x4 safari through Doñana National Park, the 543km² reserve UNESCO listed as a World Heritage Site in 1994

Walk the trails and bird observatories from the El Acebuche visitor centre

Look for the Iberian lynx and the Spanish imperial eagle among the park's more than 300 bird species

Visit El Rocío, the village that draws about a million pilgrims to its annual pilgrimage

Doñana is where the Guadalquivir meets the Atlantic — 543 square kilometres of marsh, shifting dunes and pine and cork woodland, and the most important wetland in Europe for migrating birds, sitting on the route between Europe and Africa beside the Strait of Gibraltar, with over 300 species recorded annually and up to 200,000 waterfowl wintering in the marshes. It is also a stronghold of the Iberian lynx and the Spanish imperial eagle, both of which came very close to disappearing. The park is under constant pressure from aquifer extraction for strawberry farming, which is the fight that decides whether it survives.

Doñana: The Marshes Between Europe and Africa

Walk the Caminito del Rey, 2.9km of walkway pinned to the walls of the gorge more than 100m above the river, reopened on 29 March 2015 after a €9 million restoration; book ahead

Look for the original concrete path beside the new boardwalk, built between 1901 and 1905 for hydroelectric workers and named after King Alfonso XIII's crossing in 1921

Walk the approach through the El Chorro area near Ardales

The Caminito del Rey was built between 1901 and 1905 so hydroelectric workers could get along the gorge, and named after Alfonso XIII crossed it in 1921. Then it was abandoned. By the 2000s it was a metre-wide concrete ledge with the handrail gone and holes straight through to the river a hundred metres below, people were dying on it, and it was officially closed and illegally climbed. A €9 million rebuild put a boardwalk alongside the original and it reopened on 29 March 2015 — and you can still see the old path underneath you.

The Caminito del Rey: A Walkway Pinned to the Gorge

Walk to the Cabo de Gata lighthouse on the volcanic headland of the natural park

Snorkel in the marine reserve, 12,000 of the park's 49,512 hectares

Visit Rodalquilar, the abandoned gold-mining village where operations ceased in the mid-1960s

Look for flamingos on the Las Salinas salt flats

Cabo de Gata is the driest place in Europe — under 200mm of rain a year — and it is volcanic, so the coast is black and red rock broken by coves of pale sand with nothing built on them. It became a natural park in 1987, which is why the stretch between Almería and Mojácar is the only substantial piece of the Spanish Mediterranean coast never developed. Rodalquilar was a gold-mining village until the mid-1960s and is now largely abandoned buildings among the cactus, which is exactly as strange as it sounds.