Walk the full 240m length of the station building and count some of its 365 windows

Find the section preserved as a small museum, documenting the station's role smuggling Nazi gold and hiding refugees between 1942–1944

Look for the plaque honouring Albert Le Lay, the French border guard called "the Schindler of Canfranc" for helping refugees escape

Walk a stretch of the disused rail line heading toward the sealed French border tunnel — the international route has been closed since 1970

Canfranc International station is 241 metres long with seventy-five doors on each side, built to the design of the engineer Fernando Ramírez de Dampierre and modelled on 19th-century French palace architecture. It took five years and was inaugurated on 18 July 1928. International services stopped between 1945 and 1949 over a falling-out with the French government, and then ended altogether on 27 March 1970 when a French freight train derailed and brought down the L'Estanguet bridge on the far side of the border. A new passenger station opened on 15 April 2021 in two rehabilitated freight sheds, and in 2023 a luxury hotel opened inside the old building itself.

Canfranc: The Belle Époque Station on the Border

Drive the full 40 km of the Aspe valley from Escot up to the col, and ignore the signs for the 8.6 km tunnel that has taken the traffic off this road since it opened on 7 February 2003 — the old pass road is the quiet one now

Stand on the frontier at the col by the Ermita del Pilar, the one building up here, and work out what the pilgrims coming up the Via Tolosane from Oloron-Sainte-Marie were facing: 840 km still to Santiago, down into Aragon on the Camino aragonés

Walk a stretch of the waymarked pilgrims' way down from the col towards Urdos, and find the abandoned works of the Pau to Canfranc railway in the valley beside it — opened in 1928 and shut after a goods train brought down the Estanguet bridge on 27 March 1970

Walk Borce for its medieval houses and the ecomuseum room on the pilgrim road, then cross to Etsaut and look up at the Fort du Portalet clamped to the gorge wall — known as the fort d'Urdos although almost all of it stands in Etsaut

Walk the Chemin de la Mâture above Etsaut, the ledge cut straight into the rock in 1772 so that trees from the bois du Pacq could be brought down to be made into ships' masts, and work out how a mast was got along it

The Somport sits at about 1,632m on the Spanish border where the Aspe valley opens into Aragon, and the Roman road up to it, the Via Tolosane, was the most popular of all the crossings for pilgrims heading to Compostela until the 12th century, when Roncesvalles became the safer choice. The Vandals, Alans, Suebi and Visigoths all came the other way through it in the early fifth century. The Aspe below is still wild country, and for a long time it was the refuge of the Pyrenean brown bear.

The Col du Somport: The Pilgrims' Pass Above the Aspe Valley

Walk the classic 14 km loop from the Lac de Bious-Artigues past the six lacs d'Ayous — Roumassot, du Miey, Gentau, Castérau, Paradis and Bersau — and find the one where the north face of the Pic du Midi d'Ossau stands whole in the water; the boundary of the Pyrenees National Park is at the far end of the Gentau, so the lakes themselves are outside it

Take the cable car up from the Lac de Fabrèges at 1,240 m, then ride the 10 km of 500 mm track to the Lac d'Artouste, looking straight down into the Soussouéou valley the whole way and through the 315 m Tunnel de l'Ours — the line was laid in 1920 to haul cement up for the dam, and only put to work carrying tourists in 1932

Walk up to the foot of the pic and stand in the cirque de l'Embarradère, the 200-hectare hollow between the Moundelhs and Peyreget arcs that is the actual crater of the Ossau volcano — then look up and pick out the notch of the Fourche, 180 m below the summit, that separates the Grand Pic from the Petit Pic

It was probably first climbed in June 1790 by a shepherd from the Aspe valley with one or two others, sent up by the surveyor Louis-Philippe-Reinhard Junker to plant a signal for the commission that was drawing the French-Spanish frontier; Junker recorded sighting that signal the next day. The first ascent anyone wrote down was Guillaume Delfau's, on 3 October 1796, with his guide Mathieu.

The Ossau Valley: A Volcano's Remains, the Lacs d'Ayous and the Artouste Train

Drive the eight kilometres up the dead-end valley and work out that the spa is in a cirque with no way on

Take the waters, which the Romans were already exploiting here

Work out what the 19th century did to this valley and how many people the spa supported

Walk up to the ibones above the resort, which are glacial lakes at altitude

Come in winter for the Panticosa-Los Lagos ski area on the other side of the valley

Eight kilometres up a dead-end valley from Panticosa, in a glacial cirque ringed by peaks, is a thermal spa built in the 19th century on a Roman-era exploitation of the same springs. The 19th century was its high point — the village itself is mostly buildings from that period, when Panticosa held nearly nine hundred people on the back of the spa. The waters come out of the mountain in a place where there is nothing else, and the ibones, the high glacial lakes above the resort, are a short and very steep walk further up.

Panticosa: A Roman Spa in a Glacial Cirque

Walk the star-shaped ramparts of the Citadel of Jaca (Castle of San Pedro) — designed for Philip II in 1592 and never involved in a battle

Find the moat and drawbridge of the pentagonal fort, still the only way in

Inside Jaca Cathedral, find the carved capitals of the 11th-century Romanesque nave

Walk the arcaded main street connecting the cathedral to the citadel

Two buildings five minutes apart. The cathedral of San Pedro was begun in the last quarter of the 11th century on the initiative of Sancho Ramírez, at almost the same moment as Santiago de Compostela, and it carries the architectural vocabulary that then travelled the whole Camino — the chequerboard billet moulding and the ball ornament on the interior supports. The citadel is a five-pointed star fort on the Italian model, built outside the town walls and preserved essentially intact: ditch, bastions, scarps and counterscarps, barracks, powder stores and tunnels, entered across a three-arched bridge and a drawbridge. The Spanish army held it into modern times.

Jaca: Citadel and Cathedral

Go to the costume museum in Ansó church and work out how many pieces the traditional dress has

Come on the last Sunday in August, when the village wears it

Find out what cheso is and how a dialect survives in one valley and not the next

Look at the chimneys on the houses and work out what they were built that size for

Drive up into the Selva de Oza and walk to the Boca del Infierno gorge

Ansó and Hecho are the two westernmost valleys of the Aragonese Pyrenees, and they kept a distinct identity long after the rest — their own dialect, Aragonese in a form called cheso in Hecho, and a traditional women's costume of such complexity that it is one of the most elaborate surviving folk dresses in Europe, still brought out for the last Sunday in August. The villages are stone and slate with enormous chimneys. Behind them the Selva de Oza and the Valles Occidentales park run up to the French border.

Ansó and the Western Valleys

Drive up from Laruns through Eaux-Bonnes and Gourette to the col at 1,709 m, under the Pic de Ger — the Tour crossed here every single year from 1910 to 1958 and has rated it hors catégorie from both sides since 2002 — and on the way find the hôtel des Crêtes blanches, built on a bend in 1950 and stripped of its 30-tonne roof by the first storm that hit it

Find the three giant bicycles in the Tour's colours — yellow, white with red polka dots, and green — and the memorial to Lucien Buysse

Drive the D918 east from the col, the corniche cut across the Cirque du Litor in the head of the Ouzom valley, to the Col du Soulor 6.6 km away, and count the avalanche scars and snow fences on the way: this is the stretch that vanishes each winter under the snow that comes down off the cirque, and the reason the pass shuts

From the col, look up at the Pic de Ger, 2,613 m to the south, and find the hole that goes right through the rock below its summit at about 2,500 m, and under it the shape the locals read as a woman's face in a shawl — the story that an old woman called Clara threw her stick through the mountain to frighten off a bear is not sourced, but the hole is there

The road over the Col d'Aubisque was built as a spa road: Empress Eugénie wanted Eaux-Bonnes linked to the Argelès valley and its thermal towns, and Route Thermale No. 3 was finished in 1864 with up to 500 men on the job. It stayed little more than a track until the 1930s. The Tour de France first dared the high Pyrenees in 1910 and has crossed the Aubisque 74 times since — more than one year in two. The pass is at 1,709 metres under the Pic de Ger, and beyond it the road runs as a corniche across the Cirque du Litor to the Col du Soulor. Snow closes it every winter.

The Col d'Aubisque: An Empress's Road and 74 Tours de France

Find what is left of the castle, the last Muslim stronghold in Catalonia

Go into the Romanesque church of Santa Maria de Siurana

Look down from the cliff to the Siurana reservoir far below

Siurana is a hamlet of a few dozen people at about 740 metres on the edge of a limestone cliff at the end of the Prades mountains, above the Siurana river. Its castle, on a rise in front of the village, guards the only natural way in, and the Christian walls are built over a Muslim fortress: Siurana was the last Muslim stronghold in Catalonia, taken by Ramon Berenguer IV's forces in 1153–1154 after a siege, some years after Tortosa and Lleida had fallen. The Romanesque church of Santa Maria stands in the village, and the Siurana reservoir lies far below, at about 470 metres.

Siurana: The Last Muslim Stronghold in Catalonia

Walk the cobbled Plaza Mayor, arcaded on all sides since the 12th–13th centuries

Find the 11th-century keep of Aínsa Castle, built on the site of a former Arab fortress

Walk the town's second defensive wall, added between the 14th and 15th centuries when the castle was integrated with the square

Walk down from the square to the confluence of the Ara and Cinca rivers, the defensible position the medieval town was built to guard

Aínsa stands on a promontory above the meeting of the Cinca and the Ara, and it was the capital of the old county of Sobrarbe. The whole medieval centre is a protected historic ensemble: two almost parallel streets, the Calle Mayor and the Calle Santa Cruz, running into a single arcaded Plaza Mayor, with the castle spreading west of it across a wide open platform. It is the point where the Ordesa valley, the Sobrarbe canyons and the Sierra de Guara all become reachable, which makes it the practical base for the whole of northern Huesca.