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

Visit the ruins of Scala Dei Charterhouse, founded in 1194, whose Carthusian monks introduced viticulture to the region and gave Priorat its name from the prior's authority over seven villages

Taste a Priorat DOQ wine in Gratallops, where René Barbier and Álvaro Palacios led the region's revival in the 1980s

Walk the terraced vineyards on llicorella, the black and red slate soil laced with mica that forces the Garnacha and Cariñena vines deep

Carthusian monks founded Scala Dei in 1194 and planted vines, and the priory's authority over seven villages gave the region its name — Priorat. The soil is llicorella, black and red slate shot through with mica, which holds almost no water and forces old Garnacha and Cariñena vines to send roots metres down to find it. The result is concentrated and expensive. The region had all but died by the 1970s; René Barbier, Álvaro Palacios and a handful of others revived it in the 1980s, and it is now one of only two DOQ regions in Spain.

Priorat: Scala Dei and the Llicorella Vineyards

Stand under the royal tombs raised on arches across the transept — the pantheon of the Crown of Aragon

Walk the cloister and work out what the Cistercians were actually after: water, isolation and farmland

Find the monks' dormitory, which is one of the largest surviving Cistercian dormitories anywhere

Work out the founding: given to monks from Fontfroide in 1149, community established 1153

Remember that this is a working monastery again, and that some of what you cannot see is why

Ramon Berenguer IV gave this site to Cistercian monks from Fontfroide in 1149 and the community was established under its first abbot in 1153 — it met everything the order asked for in a foundation: isolation, plenty of water and land to farm. It became the royal pantheon of the Crown of Aragon from the end of the 14th century until the royal house died out, and it is the prototype of the Spanish Cistercian abbey. UNESCO listed it in 1991. Cistercians live in it again, so parts of it are enclosure and closed to visitors.

Poblet: The Royal Pantheon of the Crown of Aragon

Walk along the top of the channel and work out that nothing in the structure is mortared

Work out the fall — forty centimetres over 217 metres, which is what kept the water moving

Stand underneath and look up 27 metres at two tiers of arches

Work out where the water was coming from: twenty-five kilometres away, along the Francolí

Find out why it is locally called the Devil's Bridge, which is a common name for Roman work nobody could explain

Four kilometres north of Tarragona, in pine woods off the old road, a Roman aqueduct arcade stands almost intact: 217 metres long, 27 metres at its highest, two tiers of arches in dry-jointed ashlar with no mortar anywhere in it, and a fall of forty centimetres from the north end to the south to keep the water moving. It carried water twenty-five kilometres into Tarraco along the Francolí. Locally it is the Pont del Diable, the Devil's Bridge, because a Roman structure that good in the middle of a wood needed explaining.

The Ferreres Aqueduct in the Woods

Sit in the amphitheatre, built around the turn of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD below the walls and facing straight out to sea

Find the remains of the Roman circus where the chariot races were run — the medieval town grew over and around them, so they sit inside the old quarter now

Walk the archaeological promenade along the top of the Roman walls

Go out to the Pont del Diable, the Ferreres aqueduct — 217 metres long, 27 metres high, two tiers of arches in dry-jointed ashlar, part of a system that brought water 25 kilometres

Find out about castells, the human towers that started at Valls just up the road as the Ball dels Valencians, first documented in 1712 and on the UNESCO intangible heritage list since 2010

The Romans developed Tarraco during the Second Punic War and it became the gateway through which they took and held the Iberian peninsula — first Colonia Iulia Urbs Triumphalis Tarraco, capital of Hispania Citerior, then capital of the province named after it, Hispania Tarraconensis. It stands on a rock 75 to 90 metres above the sea, which earned it the epithet arce potens Tarraco, Tarraco the mighty citadel. The archaeological ensemble went onto the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2000.

Tarragona: Tarraco, Gateway to Roman Spain

Walk the Gothic cloister and work out how much carving a Cistercian house was supposed to permit

Find out who Reinard de Fonoll was, what an English mason was doing in 14th-century Catalonia, and what was demolished to let him build

Find the royal pantheon built for Peter III the Great, and the tombs of James II and Blanche of Anjou

Find the abbot's rooms James II turned into a royal palace, and the walls Peter IV threw round the lot

Do the Ruta del Císter properly and add Poblet and Vallbona de les Monges

Santes Creus is the second of the three great Cistercian houses of the Catalan Ruta del Císter, with Poblet and Vallbona, and the one with the finest Gothic cloister — built by the English master Reinard de Fonoll with Guillem de Seguer after James II had the Romanesque cloister pulled down to make room for it. Peter III the Great asked to be buried here and the royal pantheon was built for him in the 13th century; his son James II and James's queen Blanche of Anjou lie here too. James also turned the abbot's rooms into a royal palace, and Peter IV walled the whole place. The monastery is unusual in having a village living inside its walls, in the buildings the community left behind.

Santes Creus: The Other Cistercian Pantheon

Walk the cloister and work out that it is on the outside of the church, looking out over the plain

Climb the octagonal bell tower for the view over Lleida and the Segrià

Work out what the bare interior means: this was a barracks for more than a century after Philip V took it

Find the carved capitals that survived the conversion, and the ones that did not

Look down at the modern city and work out why the cathedral is up here and nothing else is

The old cathedral of Lleida stands on the hill above the city with a cloister on the outside of the church rather than tucked behind it — an open arcaded gallery with a view over the plain, which is unusual to the point of being unique. After the War of the Spanish Succession Philip V turned the whole complex into a military barracks, and it stayed one for well over a century, which is why the interior is bare. It was slowly recovered in the 20th century. The octagonal bell tower is one of the tallest Gothic bell towers in Catalonia.

La Seu Vella: A Cathedral Used as a Barracks

Find the Romanesque Christ of Mijaran inside the Church of Sant Miquèu, alongside its Gothic altarpiece

Find the fortified bell tower Ferdinand the Catholic ordered built in 1506 as a defensive symbol against France

Order a meal listing dishes in Aranese, the only place in the world where this Gascon-Occitan variety is an official language

Find the original Vielha tunnel entrance, opened in 1948 and now bypassed by the 2007 Túnel Juan Carlos I

The Val d'Aran is on the northern slope of the Pyrenees — the only comarca in Catalonia that drains largely into the Atlantic, down the Garonne, rather than the Mediterranean. Three languages are official in it: Spanish, Catalan, and Aranese, a variety of Gascon Occitan, which makes this the only place in the world where Occitan holds official status. Until the Vielha tunnel opened in 1948 the valley was cut off from the rest of Spain by snow for months at a time and its dealings were with France, which is why it kept its own language, its own law and its own institutions.

Vielha: Capital of a Hidden Valley

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.