Go into the house Goya was born in, built at the beginning of the 18th century

Find the font in the village church where he was baptised

Go to the Museo del Grabado, opened in 1989, and look at the print series rather than the paintings

Work out what the Caprichos and the Disasters of War were for, and why he did not publish some of them in his lifetime

Look at the country around the village and work out how far it is from there to court painter in Madrid

Francisco de Goya was born in a small stone house in Fuendetodos, a village on the dry plain south of Zaragoza, in a building put up at the start of the 18th century. The font he was baptised in is still in the church. A few metres from the house is a museum of engraving, opened in 1989, showing his graphic work — the Caprichos, the Disasters of War, the Tauromaquia — which is where the argument for Goya as the first modern artist is actually made, and which you can look at here at the scale he made it.

Fuendetodos: Where Goya Came From

Work out where it sits: 10th-century Córdoba, 11th-century Zaragoza, 14th-century Granada — and this is the only taifa palace left

Find the Salón Dorado, the throne room al-Muqtádir named himself, and the small private mosque beside its portico

Find the Mudéjar work the Christian kings of Aragon added after 1118, and see how directly it grew out of what was already there

Go up to the palace the Catholic Monarchs built on the upper floor in 1492, which cost the taifa arches below their crowns

Work out that the building is still in use — the Cortes de Aragón, the regional parliament, sit in it

Everyone knows the Mezquita of Córdoba and the Alhambra. Between them, chronologically and architecturally, sits the Aljafería — built in Zaragoza between 1065 and 1081 by al-Muqtádir of the Banu Hud as a pleasure palace called Qasr al-Surur, the Palace of Joy. It is the only great Hispano-Muslim building of the taifa period to survive anywhere, which makes it the third member of a set of three, not a lesser also-ran. Alfonso I took Zaragoza in 1118 and the Christian kings of Aragon moved in, turning it into the fountainhead of Aragonese Mudéjar; the Catholic Monarchs built a palace on top of it in 1492. UNESCO listed its Mudéjar remains in 1986.

The Aljafería: The Missing Piece of Hispano-Muslim Spain

Walk La Mina and work out that a town of this size drove a tunnel through a mountain between 1555 and 1560

Work out what the problem was that made it necessary

Go into the basilica of Santa María de los Sagrados Corporales and find the apse, the first surviving Romanesque-to-Mudéjar transition

Walk the walls up over San Jorge and San Cristóbal, which is a considerable climb

Find out what the Sagrados Corporales relic is and why this basilica was built round it

Daroca is strung along a valley between two hills, San Jorge at 855 metres and San Cristóbal at 931, with walls running up over both. The problem with a town in a valley is that the valley floods, so between 1555 and 1560 the townspeople drove a tunnel — La Mina — straight through the hill to carry floodwater out the other side. It is reckoned one of the most important public works of the 16th century anywhere in Europe. The basilica holds the Sagrados Corporales relic, and its apse is the first surviving example of the transition from Romanesque to Aragonese Mudéjar.

Daroca: A Tunnel Through a Mountain, in 1560

Walk the gorge path down past the waterfalls to the Cola de Caballo and go in behind the fall

Go through the caves and grottoes the river has cut below the monastery

Find out what happened here in 1534 — the first chocolate cooked in Europe, from cacao sent home by a friar who sailed with Cortés

Go into the Cistercian buildings and work out the founding: twelve monks out of Poblet on 10 May 1194

Watch the birds of prey flown in the grounds, and then go back and do the water route in the opposite direction

Twelve Cistercian monks walked out of Poblet on 10 May 1194 under their first abbot and founded this house on the Piedra river, in a castle Alfonso II had given the order eight years earlier. The river has cut the gorge below the monastery into a chain of waterfalls, caves and pools, which a 19th-century owner laid out as a park. The other thing that happened here: in 1534, chocolate was cooked in Europe for the first time, from cacao and a recipe sent back to the abbot by Fray Jerónimo de Aguilar, who had gone to Mexico with Cortés.

Monasterio de Piedra: Waterfalls and the First Chocolate in Europe

Walk the castle enclosure and work out how much ground it actually covers

Work out the political story: Aragonese in 1128, Castilian, Almoravid, then an independent lordship from about 1139

Drive into the Alto Tajo and find the river canyons, which are among the deepest in inland Spain

Find out what the proposed Molina-Alto Tajo geopark covers — seventy municipalities and over four thousand square kilometres

Find the Romanesque bridge and the Torre de Aragón above the town

Alfonso I of Aragon took Molina in 1128; his brother Ramiro II handed the lands to Castile; the Almoravids took them back; and around 1139 Manrique de Lara took them again and made the place an independent lordship with himself as its first lord. The Señorío de Molina kept a separate identity for centuries and the town still uses the name. Its castle is one of the largest in Spain by enclosed area. It sits beside the Alto Tajo natural park, one of the greatest concentrations of river canyons in inland Iberia, and inside a proposed geopark covering seventy municipalities and 4,186 square kilometres.

Molina de Aragón: A Lordship of Its Own

Go into the cloister and work out why the mosque underneath had to be demolished rather than adapted — the two buildings faced different ways

Find the Puerta del Juicio on the west front and read the relief of the damned

Find out who Benjamin of Tudela was and how far he travelled in the 12th century

Eat the vegetables — this is the Ribera, and the artichokes, borage and asparagus are the point of the place

Come in spring for the vegetable season, which is short and taken very seriously here

Tudela was a major Muslim town on the Ebro, and its cathedral — late Romanesque on Cistercian lines, begun at the end of the 12th century under Sancho VI and finished under two successors — was built on the site of the Great Mosque of the 9th to 11th centuries. Because the two buildings did not face the same way the mosque had to come down, and only some of its foundations were reused. The Judgement Doorway on the west front carries a crowded relief of the damned. Benjamin of Tudela, the 12th-century Jewish traveller whose account of a journey across the Mediterranean and the Near East is a major medieval source, was born here. The town is also the vegetable capital of the Ebro.

Tudela: Mudéjar on the Ebro

Drive or cycle the tracks through the Bardena Blanca, the central and most desert part of the whole area

Find Castildetierra, the isolated eroded spire that is the single most photographed thing here

Work out the geology: sediment dumped into a closed inland sea as the Pyrenees rose, then drained and eroded ever since

Go up to a mirador on the edge of the plateau and see the whole thing laid out below

Check what the military firing range is doing before you plan a route — part of the Bardenas is still one

The Bardenas are badlands in southern Navarre — clay, gypsum and sandstone with almost no vegetation, eroded by water and wind into ravines, flats and isolated cabezos, and traditionally divided into three: El Plano, the Bardena Blanca and the Bardena Negra. The ground is Tertiary and Quaternary material dumped into the Ebro basin when the Pyrenees and the Iberian range rose and closed it off into an inland sea; the sea drained, and the erosion that started then is still going. It was made a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve on 6 November 2000. It looks like nowhere else in Europe and is used constantly as a film location for exactly that reason.