Walk the Call, one of the best-preserved medieval Jewish quarters in Spain, and find out who Nahmanides was

Climb the cathedral steps and stand under the widest Gothic nave in the world — 22.98 metres, beaten by no church but St Peter's

Walk the Passeig de la Muralla along the top of the Carolingian and late-medieval walls, with its viewpoint over the whole city

Find the confluence: Girona sits where the Ter, Onyar, Galligants and Güell all meet

Photograph the coloured houses hanging over the Onyar, which is the standard view of the city for a reason

A Jewish community is documented in Girona from about 885, and by the 12th century the town held one of the most important Kabbalistic schools in Europe; its rabbi, Moshe ben Nahman — Nahmanides — was made Great Rabbi of Catalonia. It ended in 1492 with the Alhambra Decree. The Call is one of the best-preserved Jewish quarters in Spain. The cathedral above it has the widest Gothic nave in the world at 22.98 metres, second-widest of any church after St Peter's, redesigned by Pere Sacoma in 1312 with a vault 35 metres up.

Girona: The Call and the Widest Gothic Nave on Earth

Walk the lanes of Peratallada round its castle

Climb up through the Gothic quarter of Pals to the Torre de les Hores

Buy Arròs de Pals, the rice grown in the fields below the village

Go to Peratallada's medieval market on the first weekend of October

Inland from the Costa Brava two medieval villages stand seven kilometres apart. Peratallada, first recorded for its 10th-century castle, was declared a historic-artistic ensemble as one of the most important and best preserved medieval centres in Spain, and holds a medieval market on the first weekend of October. Pals has a Gothic quarter of cobbled streets, pointed windows and stone balconies round the Romanesque Torre de les Hores, built between the 11th and 13th centuries, and the rice fields below it grow Arròs de Pals.

Pals and Peratallada: The Medieval Villages of the Empordà

Cross the fortified bridge over the Fluvià and notice that it changes direction partway across

Go down into the mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath, which is one of very few left standing in Europe

Find the monastery church of Sant Pere and the old pilgrims' hospital of Sant Julià

Work out the political story: capital of its own county from 902, absorbed into Barcelona in 1111, and frozen afterwards

Find the Casa Cornellà, one of the best-preserved Romanesque civil buildings in Catalonia

Besalú became the capital of an independent county after Wilfred the Hairy died in 902, and lost that status in 1111 when Bernat III died without an heir and the county passed to the house of Barcelona. What is left is an unusually intact medieval town: the angled fortified bridge over the Fluvià, the monastery church of Sant Pere, the old pilgrims' hospital of Sant Julià, the Casa Cornellà, and — the rarest thing here — the Jewish ritual baths, a mikveh, one of very few surviving in Europe.

Besalú: A Medieval County Town and Its Mikveh

Walk the Greek Neapolis and then the Roman town and work out where one ends and the other begins

Find the Palaiapolis at San Martí d'Empúries — the original island colony, now a village on a low rise

Work out what happened here in 218 BC and why it mattered to the whole peninsula

Find the mosaics and the Asklepios statue, and then find out which one on site is a copy

Stand on the beach the Romans landed on and work out why they chose an existing Greek port

In 575 BC the last wave of Greek colonisation reached the peninsula — Phocaeans out of Massalia, trading at long range — and they put their first settlement on an island off this coast, the Palaiapolis, which is now San Martí d'Empúries and is still inhabited. The Neapolis, the new town, grew on the mainland south of it, trading with the Indiketa people already there. The Romans landed here in 218 BC at the start of the Second Punic War and eventually built their own city beside the Greek one. It is the only site in Iberia where a Greek and a Roman town sit side by side.

Empúries: Where Greece Landed in Iberia

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.

Tossa de Mar: The Walled Vila Vella and the Camí de Ronda

Climb to Begur castle and find the watchtowers built against the pirates

Walk the streets of the indianos' houses in Begur

Hear the habaneras at the Port Bo in Calella de Palafrugell

Walk the garden at Cap Roig above the sea

Begur grew rich on the indianos — local men who crossed the Atlantic, above all to Cuba, made their fortunes and came home to build — and five watchtowers against Moorish pirates stand round its castle. Below it are some of the best-known coves of the Costa Brava: Sa Riera, Aiguafreda, Sa Tuna, Fornells and Aiguablava, where a parador was built on the cliff in 1966. A few kilometres south, Calella de Palafrugell has kept the feel of a fishing village; on the first Saturday of July it holds the Cantada d'havaneres, the songs popular in Catalonia's fishing villages, in the Port Bo, and above it on Cap Roig are the botanical garden and the summer festival.

Begur and Calella: The Indianos, the Coves and the Habaneras

Work out what the building is: the theatre he knew as a child, burned in the Civil War, and rebuilt by Dalí as one continuous work

Find the Mae West room, an anamorphic living-room installation that only resolves into a face from one exact spot

Find the Cadillac plujós, the full-size car installation based on his Rainy Taxi of 1938

Go down to the crypt below the stage, where Dalí is buried in the middle of his own museum

Stand under the glass geodesic dome over the old stage and work out that every decision in the building was his

Salvador Dalí was born in Figueres on 11 May 1904, in a first-floor flat on Carrer Monturiol. The heart of his museum is the town theatre he knew as a child, burned during the Civil War and left a ruin for decades until he rebuilt it as a single enormous work of his own — designing the rooms himself and crowning the old stage with a glass geodesic dome. It opened on 28 September 1974 and kept growing into the mid-1980s. He lived in it from 1984 until his death in 1989 and is buried in a crypt below the stage floor.

Figueres: The Museum Dalí Built for Himself

Go up by rack railway or funicular rather than driving — the abbey station is the terminus of a rack line from Monistrol and of two funiculars

Queue to touch the orb in the right hand of La Moreneta, the late-12th-century Romanesque Virgin who is Catalonia's patroness

Hear the Escolania, a boys' choir of nine- to fourteen-year-olds documented here since the 14th century and one of the oldest in Europe

Find the Sala del Cambril, the circular three-apse chapel built between 1876 and 1884 by Villar i Carmona with a young Antoni Gaudí as his assistant

Walk up to Sant Jeroni at 1,236 metres, the highest point of the massif

Look at the rock — conglomerate from an Eocene fan delta, eroded into the fingers that give the mountain its name

Montserrat means serrated mountain, and it is exactly that — a mass of pink conglomerate laid down in a fan delta at the edge of the Ebro basin in the middle Eocene, since eroded into hundreds of rounded fingers, with a Benedictine abbey wedged into the side of it. The late-12th-century wooden Virgin known as La Moreneta is patroness of Catalonia alongside Sant Jordi; restorers in 2001 found her face and hands had darkened over the centuries, from candle smoke or a reaction in the varnish, rather than having started that colour.