Stand in the Plaza Mayor and work out that the palaces around you were paid for with American silver

Find the equestrian statue of Francisco Pizarro and read what is said about him on the plinth and what is not

Find out who Francisco de Orellana was, what happened on 12 February 1542, and how he died four years later

Climb to the castle, an Arab alcázar before it was a Christian one, for the view over the plain

Go into Santa María la Mayor, the 13th-century church in the upper town, and find the tombs of the families who financed the expeditions

Francisco Pizarro, who took Peru, was born in Trujillo. So was Francisco de Orellana, born here in 1511, who came down the Amazon in 1542 and died on it in 1546. A great many other men left this small, poor town on the Extremaduran plain for the Indies, and the ones who came back rich built the palaces that now line the Plaza Mayor — which is why a town of a few thousand people has a square of that scale. Pizarro's equestrian statue stands in the middle of it. Above the town is the castle, originally an Arab alcázar.

Trujillo: The Town That Conquered Peru

Order Torta del Casar, the Extremaduran sheep's milk cheese made with cardoon rennet, protected since 1999 and matured for at least 60 days; slice the top off and scoop out the creamy centre

Try Iberian ham, one of Extremadura's best-known products, in Cáceres' old town

Walk the UNESCO-listed old town, on the list since 1986, through the 18th-century Arco de la Estrella and past the 12th-century Torre de Bujaco

Visit Casar de Cáceres, the town that gives the cheese its name

Torta del Casar is made with cardoon rennet rather than animal rennet, which breaks the curd down differently and leaves the inside of the cheese almost liquid — so it is served by cutting the top off the disc like a lid and scooping the middle out with bread. It has been protected since 1999 and must mature at least sixty days. Around it Extremadura produces the other thing it is known for: acorn-fed Iberian ham from pigs run in the dehesa oak pasture, which is the best ham in the world and priced accordingly.

Cáceres: Torta del Casar and the Walled Old Town

Watch the vultures at Peña Falcón, the rock face above the Tagus, in Monfragüe National Park, home to the world's largest colony of cinereous vultures with over 300 pairs

Climb to the Castle of Monfragüe at the park's eastern end for views over the Tagus valley

Look for Spanish imperial eagles and black storks around Villarreal de San Carlos, the only village in the park, with a population of 28

Stay after dark for the stars, since Monfragüe was recognised as a dark-sky preserve in 2016

Monfragüe is dehesa — the Iberian oak savannah that centuries of grazing and pig-keeping produced, open woodland over grass — plus the gorge where the Tagus cuts through a quartzite ridge. The combination makes it the best raptor site in Europe: over three hundred pairs of cinereous vulture, the largest colony of the species in the world, along with griffon vultures, Egyptian vultures, black storks and Spanish imperial eagles. You watch them from the road at Peña Falcón, at eye level, which is not an experience most places can offer.

Monfragüe: Vultures, Eagles and Dark Skies

Go into the Mudéjar cloister — the sanctuary was rebuilt in Toledan Mudéjar, which is not what anyone expects of a royal Castilian monastery

Go into the sacristy, built 1636–45, which is reckoned one of the most dazzling Baroque sacristies in Spain

Work out the sequence of styles piled on one building between the 14th and 18th centuries

Find out how it started — a shepherd, a hidden image, and a king who won a battle in 1340 and paid up

Drive or walk into the Villuercas around it and see how remote a place this actually is

Alfonso XI credited his victory at the Salado in 1340 to a Virgin found years earlier by a shepherd near the river Guadalupe, and built a church where the hermitage stood. What grew out of it over the next four centuries is a monastery containing Gothic, Mudéjar, Renaissance, Baroque and neoclassical work layered on top of one another, in a village in the middle of the Villuercas mountains. It was made a basilica by Pius XII in 1955 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993, and the Virgin is patron of Extremadura.

Guadalupe: The Monastery in the Mountains

Walk among the bolos — granite weathered over millions of years into free-standing rounded blocks

Go into the Museo Vostell Malpartida in the old wool-washing works on the waterside

Find out what Fluxus was, and what a German video-art pioneer was doing in Extremadura in 1976

Watch the white storks nesting on top of the granite bolos — one of the most important rock-nesting colonies in Europe, which got Malpartida named European village of the storks in 1997

Work out the sequence: the museum brought the attention, and the attention brought the protection in 1996

Los Barruecos is a field of granite that has been weathering for millions of years into huge rounded boulders — bolos, with names like the Mushroom and the Treasure Rocks — sitting around a set of pools fourteen kilometres from Cáceres. In 1976 Wolf Vostell, a German artist of the Fluxus movement and a pioneer of installation and video art who had settled in Extremadura, put his museum in the old wool-washing works on the edge of the water. The publicity that generated is largely why the place was made a natural monument in February 1996.

Los Barruecos: Granite Boulders and a Fluxus Museum

Walk out to the dam and find the Roman intake tower standing in the water

Work out how a dam of this age is still functioning, and what kept it in repair

Walk the dehesa trails and count raptors — black vulture and imperial eagle both breed in the park

Look for black stork, which is the rarer of the two storks and nests in this kind of country

Work out why both Roman dams are part of the Mérida World Heritage listing rather than separate sites

Cornalvo is the other Roman dam serving Mérida, east of the city, and unlike Proserpina it sits inside a natural park of dehesa, scrub and Mediterranean woodland with almost nobody in it. The dam has an intake tower standing out in the water. The park is a Special Protection Area for birds, and the combination of open dehesa, water and thick cover supports black vulture, Spanish imperial eagle, black stork and a very long list of others. Both dams are inside the Mérida World Heritage listing of 1993.

Cornalvo: A Roman Dam in a Natural Park

Walk from the new cathedral into the old one and find the join where the building stops

Work out what happened: a replacement begun in 1498, the money gone, and the old church kept

Find Rodrigo Alemán's choir stalls and look closely at what is actually carved on them

Walk the walls and work out what happened in 1196, when the Almohads took the town ten years after it was founded

Come for the Martes Mayor, the August market day that is a festival of tourist interest in its own right

Alfonso VIII founded Plasencia in 1186 and stamped its arms with the motto Ut placeat Deo et hominibus — that it may please God and men. Clement III created the diocese in 1189; the Almohads took the town in 1196 after the Castilian defeat at Alarcos, and Alfonso VIII got it back. Placentia in Newfoundland and Placentia in California are both named from it. It has two cathedrals joined together: the old Romanesque-Gothic one of the 13th century, and a new one begun in 1498 to replace it that was never finished, so the money ran out and the two were simply left stuck to each other, with the join visible. The new one has choir stalls by Rodrigo Alemán carved with scenes nobody expects to find in a cathedral.

Plasencia: A Cathedral Left Half Built

Drive the N-621 through all twenty-two kilometres of it and work out that you cannot see the tops of the walls from the road

Stop and look up at limestone faces over 600 metres high

Work out its strategic point: this is the only corridor from the Cantabrian coast into Liébana

Look for vultures and eagles on the updraughts, and chamois on the rock — 6,350 hectares of the gorge is a special protection area for birds

Find out who used this road in the 19th century: British travellers, climbers and hunters on their way to the Picos

The Deva has cut twenty-two kilometres of gorge through the Ándara massif between Panes and Cillorigo de Liébana, which makes it the longest defile in Spain, with near-vertical limestone walls some of them over 600 metres high — so high that from the road you cannot see the top. It is the only way in to Liébana from the Cantabrian coast, which is why the narrow N-621 runs through it. In the 19th century it was the route British travellers, mountaineers and hunters took to get at the Picos de Europa.