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

Sit out a session in the Vaporarium at the Thermes de Luchon, the natural steam galleries driven into the mountain rock that the spa calls the only one of their kind in Europe, then swim in the rooftop thermal pool — the water comes from over eighty springs tapped in the Superbagnères mountain at between 22 and 67 degrees

Walk the Allées d'Étigny from end to end and finish at the statue in front of the Thermes, raised in 1889 to Baron Mégret d'Étigny — the intendant who forced a carriage road through here in 1759, reorganised the baths, and died ruined and disgraced at 47 with the town he invented named after him

Ride the Crémaillère Express from the middle of Luchon to the Superbagnères plateau in eight minutes, a valley lift that took over in December 2023 from the 1993 gondola and, before that, the Strub rack railway that climbed this mountain from 1912 to 1966 — the old trackbed is still walkable beside you

Find the orientation table a few hundred metres from the top station and use it to pick the Pic d'Aneto, 3,404 m and over the border in Spain, out of the Maladeta massif; then walk to the far end of the big car park by the Grand Hôtel, where the whole of Luchon lies below you 1,170 m down

Luchon takes its name from Ilixo, the local god of the springs, and the Romans lined three great pools here in marble; the pyreneist Vincent de Chausenque crowned it Queen of the Pyrenees in 1834. Over eighty springs are tapped in the mountain of Superbagnères, rising between 22 and 67 degrees, and a gondola lifts you 1,170 m out of the town to the plateau in eight minutes.

Luchon: The Queen of the Pyrenees, the Vaporarium and the Superbagnères Gondola

Go into Sant Climent de Taüll, consecrated on 10 December 1123, and look at the apse

Work out that the Pantocrator you are looking at is a projection, and that the painting itself is in Barcelona

Find out why it was moved, and what the 1907 survey of this valley was trying to prevent

Look at the bell tower and notice it is attached to the church without being part of its structure

Walk or drive between the nine listed churches — they are close enough to do several in a day

Nine Romanesque churches in one Pyrenean valley went onto the UNESCO list together in 2000. Sant Climent de Taüll was consecrated on 10 December 1123 by the bishop of Roda; its six-storey bell tower stands against the building without being structurally part of it, and its apse Pantocrator is regarded as the high point of Catalan Romanesque painting. That fresco is not in the church — it is in the MNAC in Barcelona, where it was taken for safekeeping after the valley was surveyed in 1907. What is in the apse now is a projection of it.

The Vall de Boí: Nine Romanesque Churches in One Valley

Walk out to the Estany de Sant Maurici and look across at Els Encantats, which is the park's logo

Find the meanders of the Sant Nicolau between Llong and Llebreta, which are what the park is named after

Work out how the meanders formed: a lake silted up flat and the river had nowhere to fall

Do a lake-to-lake day on the Carros de Foc refuge circuit, or a section of it

Work out that this is the only national park in Catalonia and why that is

Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici was created in 1955 and is the only national park in Catalonia — high Pyrenean granite scattered with almost two hundred lakes of Quaternary glacial origin. Between the Llong and Llebreta lakes the Sant Nicolau river runs in tight meanders across a flat where an old lake silted up, and those meanders — aigües tortes, twisted waters — give the park its name. The view across the Estany de Sant Maurici to the twin peaks of Els Encantats is the park's own logo.

Aigüestortes: Catalonia's Only National Park

Walk up to the Renclusa and look at what is left of the Aneto glacier from below

Find out how much ice the Maladeta massif has lost in the last hundred years

Climb Aneto with a guide if you are equipped for it — 3,404 metres and the highest in the Pyrenees

Walk the Estós or Vallibierna valleys if you are not, which get you into the same country on foot

Work out why this one valley has more three-thousand-metre peaks around it than any other in the range

The Benasque valley holds the highest ground in the Pyrenees: Aneto at 3,404 metres, the highest peak in the range, with Posets and Maladeta behind it, and the Aneto glacier — what is left of it — on the north face. The Maladeta massif has lost most of its ice in a century, and what remains is one of the clearest things in Spain to point at when talking about what is happening to mountain glaciers. Benasque itself is the base for all of it, and the Posets-Maladeta natural park has more three-thousand-metre peaks than anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

Benasque: The Roof of the Pyrenees

Start up the Riberot valley from the Pla de la Lau car park at Bordes-Uchentein, the one standard way in, and follow it towards the col de Faustin on the south side

Sleep at the refuge des Estagnous at 2,246 m, and if you have the gear and the head for a route graded D, take the via ferrata built in 2000 between the refuge and the étang Long — 1,200 m of it, 620 m equipped, hanging over the étang Rond

Reach the 2,839 m summit and find the cross standing there now, inaugurated in September 2012 after the granite one of 1987 was smashed by vandals in 2011 — the latest of a line that is said to start with the bishop Valerius and includes the marble cross Bernard Coignet de Marmiesse raised in the 1670s

Walk a stretch of the Chemin de la Liberté where it crosses the Valier massif, and from high ground pick out the line it takes from Saint-Girons towards the col de la Pale de la Clauère and over into Catalonia at Esterri d'Àneu — the way 782 people got out between 1940 and 1944

From the summit ridge look down the north-east flank onto the glacier d'Arcouzan, the most easterly glacier left in the Pyrenees — about 2.8 hectares in 2013, lying between 2,350 and 2,500 m

Mont Valier stands 2,839m over the Couserans in the Ariège and takes its name from Valerius, the legendary first bishop of Couserans, who the story says climbed it in the 5th century; a later bishop had a marble cross put up there in the 1670s. These same mountains carried the Chemin de la Liberté, the escape route named in 1994, over which 782 people got out to Spain between 1940 and 1944.

Mont Valier: The Ariège Summit and the Freedom Trail

Ride or drive the Louron side from Avajan, 9.85 km at 6.7 per cent, and stop at the Loudervielle hairpin at 1,157m to look back down the whole of the road you have come up, then take the last straight to the top — dead straight, exposed to the wind and over 7.5 per cent

Eat a crêpe at the stall at the top of the col

From the summit look down the Louron and put names to the water and the villages below — the lac de Génos-Loudenvielle in the valley floor, the plan d'eau d'Avajan beyond it and Vielle-Louron on the slope

Drop towards Bagnères-de-Luchon down the Larboust side, the line Antoine Mégret d'Étigny had surveyed in the 18th century when he was intendant of Gascony, and stop at the two chapels on the way down — Saint-Pierre de la Moraine with the memorial stone to the writer Pierre de Gorsse beside it, and lower down Saint-Aventin

The Col de Peyresourde crosses at just under 1,570m between the Larboust valley above Bagnères-de-Luchon and the Louron, its summit on the D618 marking the line between the Haute-Garonne and the Hautes-Pyrénées. The name means, literally, deaf stone. The Tour de France has crossed it 71 times since 1910, more than almost any pass in the central Pyrenees, and there is a crêperie at the top.

The Col de Peyresourde: Between Louron and Larboust

Ride the Rinocerontes gondola line from Station 4 and photograph the karst lapiaz formations above Lago Sexta

Ride the Elefantes gondola line to Mirador del Rubí for the panoramic view over the Bay of Santander

Walk to the Recinto de los Osos, one of Europe's largest brown bear enclosures, built into the old quarry walls

Find remnants of the 19th–20th century open-pit iron workings, mined until 1989, still visible from the park's roads

Walk one of the marked botanical routes (yew–oak, birch–beech, or chestnut–pine) through the reforested former mine slopes

Cabárceno is a 750-hectare wildlife park built inside a former open-pit iron mine, worked from Roman times until the quarries finally closed in 1989. Rhinos, elephants, bears and lions roam across the old excavation pits and karst gorges, and two gondola lines carry visitors above the enclosures instead of behind fences.

Cabárceno: Wildlife Park in a Reclaimed Iron Mine

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.