Watch a navaya being forged and find out why the handle is made the way it is

Find the water-driven mills, forge hammers and fulling machines still working on the streams

Work out how far back this goes: six forge hammers recorded in the Ensenada cadastre in the 18th century

Walk between the hamlets on the old paths — this is one of the greenest, wettest corners of Spain

Buy a knife made here rather than a souvenir version of one

Taramundi in the far west of Asturias had a working iron industry in the 18th century — the Ensenada cadastre records six forge hammers and a set of smithies — and it never entirely stopped. The knives and folding navayas made here are still forged by hand, and the whole trade runs on water — the mills, forge hammers and fulling machines that shape the blades are driven by the streams, as they always have been. It is one of the wettest corners of Spain, which is the reason the industry could exist here at all.

Taramundi: Knives, Water and Iron

Find the Torre de los Moreno of 1915 and work out what an indiano was

Walk the Eo estuary, which with the Oscos hills behind it is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve

Cross the Eo bridge and work out that the far side is Asturias

Go up to Santa Cruz above the town for the view over the estuary and the coast

Work out what emigration to Latin America did to towns along this coast, and what it built when it came back

Ribadeo sits at the mouth of the Eo, which is the border with Asturias, and the Eo estuary with the Oscos hills behind it is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. The town made money from emigration to Latin America and came back in the form of indianos — returning emigrants who built showy houses, of which the Torre de los Moreno of 1915 is the extravagant example. The Eo bridge is a kilometre and a half of motorway over the estuary. Praia das Catedrais is ten kilometres west.

Ribadeo and the Mariña Lucense

Check the tide table before you do anything else, and time your visit for low water

Walk under the arches — over thirty metres of eroded slate and schist, which is where the name came from

Go into the caves and sand passages that are only open at the bottom of the tide

Come back at high tide and walk the clifftop path east towards Esteiro to see the same place as an unbroken cliff

Work out why the tide is the whole point here: this stretch of the Rasa Cantábrica is almost flat, so the sea comes back across it quickly

Its real name is the beach of Augas Santas, ten kilometres west of Ribadeo on the Cantabrian coast, but nobody calls it that. At high tide it is a cliff. At low tide the sea pulls back off a long sweep of sand walled by slate and schist eroded into arches over thirty metres high that look exactly like the flying buttresses of a cathedral, with caves and sand corridors running back between the rock. On spring tides you can walk along the sand to the neighbouring beaches — and the coast here is nearly horizontal, so the water comes back fast.

Praia das Catedrais: The Beach That Only Exists at Low Tide

Stand in front of the cathedral, begun in 1219, and work out why it is nicknamed the kneeling one

Find the Gothic paintings in the nave under the organs, including the Slaughter of the Innocents

Find out who Álvaro Cunqueiro was and read something of his set in a version of this town

Eat tarta de Mondoñedo, which the town has made for generations

Walk the old quarter and work out what a Galician capital looked like before it stopped being one

Mondoñedo was one of the seven capitals of the Kingdom of Galicia and a bishop's seat, and then the world moved and it did not. What is left is a small town with a cathedral out of all proportion to it, begun in 1219 and well advanced by 1246 — Romanesque with Gothic transept, sacristy and a five-metre rose window of the 14th century in the west front. It is nicknamed the kneeling cathedral for its perfect proportions and low height. Álvaro Cunqueiro, one of the great Galician writers of the 20th century, was born here and set much of his work in a version of this town. The local sweet is the tarta de Mondoñedo.

Mondoñedo: A Capital That Stopped

Count the bridges over the Negro — there are seven in a town of this size

Walk up to the cemetery on the headland and work out why it gets called one of the best-sited anywhere

Find Severo Ochoa's grave and find out what he got the Nobel Prize for in 1959

Watch the fleet unload and eat what comes off it

Walk out to the lighthouse and the chapel on the point above the harbour

Luarca is built down both sides of the Negro river where it meets the sea in western Asturias, with seven bridges across it and a working fishing harbour at the bottom. Severo Ochoa, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959 for work on the synthesis of RNA and DNA, was born here and is buried in the cemetery on the cliff above the town — which is often called one of the most spectacularly sited cemeteries anywhere, on a headland with the Cantabrian sea on three sides.

Luarca: The Town of Seven Bridges

Apply for a permit well in advance — twenty people a day is the hard limit, and in summer the list is long

Walk the marked route through the largest oak forest in Spain and one of the best preserved in Europe

Work out what the twenty-a-day rule has bought: a wood that has been effectively unvisited since 1982

Climb towards the Candanosa at 1,640 metres and find the glacial lakes and cirques that prove the ice was here

Listen for capercaillie and black woodpecker, the two birds this forest is watched for, and read the ground for bear, wolf and wildcat

Leave it exactly as you found it — no camping, no dogs, no fishing, nothing taken out

Muniellos protects the largest oak forest in Spain and one of the best-preserved in Europe, and the way it has stayed that way is brutally simple: since 1982 no more than twenty people have been allowed in on any given day. No camping, no dogs, no fishing, no staying overnight. It was made a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2000 and an Integral Nature Reserve by law in 2002. Getting in means applying to the Principality's environment department in advance and waiting your turn, sometimes for months in summer.

Muniellos: Twenty People a Day in the Biggest Oak Wood in Spain

Watch one of the Holy Week processions of Viveiro's eight brotherhoods

Walk through the Puerta de Carlos V and find the three coats of arms

Find the monument to the Magdalena and the Palomo on the rocks by Covas beach

Drive up to the Mirador de San Roque for the view over the ría

Viveiro's Holy Week is one of the oldest religious celebrations in Galicia, held without a break since the 13th century, with eight brotherhoods carrying the processions of the Passion; it is a festival of international tourist interest. The town enters through the Puerta de Carlos V, a Plateresque gate finished in 1554 with the emperor's arms between those of Galicia and Viveiro. On the rocks by Covas beach a monument remembers the frigate Santa María Magdalena and the brig Palomo, wrecked together in a storm in 1810 with more than 500 dead.

Viveiro: A Holy Week Kept Since the 13th Century

Walk the open plaza between the dome and the auditorium and work out that the plaza is the actual building

Find out how Avilés got it: a gift from Niemeyer to the Principality after the Prince of Asturias Award of 1989

Look from the centre back across the ría at the steelworks and see the contrast Niemeyer was working against

Go into the medieval old town, which is a completely different Avilés a few hundred metres away

Work out why he rated it above everything else he did in Europe

Oscar Niemeyer won the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 1989, and on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the awards he gave the Principality a project. What he gave them was a set of white curves on the industrial riverside at Avilés — a dome, a tower, an open plaza — set against a heavy steelworks town and a medieval old quarter. It opened officially on 26 March 2011. It is the only Niemeyer building in Spain, and he said himself it was the most important thing he ever built in Europe.