Get to a village festival where aizkolaris are cutting and time a round yourself

Watch a harrijasotzaile lift and work out that the count, not the single lift, is the contest

Find out what palanka is and that the bar started out as a mining tool

Work out the role of the bet — these are not exhibitions, money is on them and always has been

See a pelota match in a village fronton afterwards, which is the other half of Basque sport

Herri kirolak are farm and quarry jobs turned into contests, and what holds the whole thing together is the bet. Aizkolaris chop through stacked logs against the clock. Harrijasotzaileak lift cylindrical and cubic stones of enormous weight, repeatedly. Teams pull on a rope in sokatira. The iron bar thrown in palanka started life as a mining tool, and in the old days the bets were settled in a meadow outside the village with no standardised weight — only the requirement that everyone in that particular wager used the same one.

Basque Rural Sports: Competitive Work

Go into the Santa Casa, the original tower house, still standing inside the Baroque sanctuary built round it

Find the room where Ignatius convalesced and work out what was and was not available to read in it

Work out what happened at Pamplona in 1521 and how a broken leg redirected a religious order

Walk the Baroque basilica outside and compare its scale with the house at its centre

Work out why the Jesuits enclosed the house rather than replacing it

Íñigo López de Loyola was a soldier until a cannonball smashed his leg at Pamplona in 1521. Convalescing in his family's tower house at Azpeitia with nothing to read but a life of Christ and a book of saints, he changed direction entirely and became Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. In the 17th century the family house was enclosed inside a vast Baroque sanctuary, so that the original stone tower still stands intact in the middle of the newer building — the room where he read is still there.

Loyola: Where Ignatius Was Converted

Ride or walk a vía verde end to end and notice that the gradient never really changes

Work out why: the route is a railway grade, and a steam locomotive could not pull anything steeper

Go through the tunnels and over the viaducts, which are the original railway structures

Find the old station buildings on the route and see what they have been turned into

Work out which line this was, when it closed, and what it was carrying

Spain closed a great many branch lines and mining railways in the 20th century, and rather than let the trackbeds go the country turned them into the Vías Verdes — surfaced, waymarked routes for walking, cycling and riding, on grades no steeper than a steam locomotive could pull. That constraint is the point: they are almost flat, they go through the tunnels and over the viaducts the engineers built, and they make otherwise serious terrain accessible to anyone. The Ferrocarriles Vascongados route runs 13.6 kilometres between Soraluze-Placencia de las Armas and Anzuola.

Vías Verdes: Riding Spain's Abandoned Railways

Take a boat tour to see the Flysch cliffs

Hike the coastal path from Deba to Zumaia

At the Algorri cliffs, find the thin black clay line cutting through the rock — the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, the asteroid impact layer that ended the age of dinosaurs 66 million years ago

The cliffs between Deba and Zumaia expose about sixty million years of seabed standing on end — layer after layer of rock tilted upright by the collision that raised the Pyrenees, so you walk along the beach and cross the millennia one stratum at a time. That makes this one of the most complete continuous rock records anywhere, and geologists come from all over the world for it. At Algorri there is a thin dark clay line in the rock face: the iridium layer left by the asteroid that ended the Cretaceous 66 million years ago, visible as a band you can put your finger on.

Zumaia: Sixty Million Years of Flysch on End

Surf the beach, or take a lesson on it, which is what most people here are doing

Come in September for the Rip Curl Pro, which counts towards the world tour

Walk the whole three kilometres of sand and work out why it is called the Queen of Beaches

Find the Iñurritza biotope at the east end, one of very few surviving dune systems on this coast

Find the Palacio de Narros and work out which queens summered in it

Zarautz has the longest beach in the Basque Country at nearly three kilometres, which is why it is called the Queen of Beaches and why it has been the centre of Basque surfing for decades — the Rip Curl Pro Zarautz in September counts towards the world tour. Isabel II summered at the Palacio de Narros facing the sand, and so later did Queen Fabiola of Belgium. At the eastern end, round a golf course, the Iñurritza protected biotope has dunes, marsh and cliff together, one of very few preserved dune systems left on this coast.

Zarautz: The Queen of Beaches

Find the statue of Juan Sebastián Elcano, first man to complete a circumnavigation of the globe, in the town square

At the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum, find Queen Fabiola of Belgium's wedding dress in the permanent collection

Climb Monte San Antón ('El Ratón') for the view back over the harbour

Watch a txakoli poured 'desde lo alto' (from height) at a harbourside bar

Juan Sebastián Elcano of Getaria sailed with Magellan in 1519, and after Magellan was killed in the Philippines it was Elcano who decided to keep going west across the Indian Ocean and brought the Victoria home — the first person to complete a circumnavigation of the earth. Four hundred years later the same town of a few thousand people produced Cristóbal Balenciaga, the couturier Dior called the master of us all. The harbour still lands fish, and the txakoli grown on the slopes behind is poured from a height to give it some fizz.

Getaria: Elcano, Balenciaga and Txakoli

Tour the Idiazabal Cheese Interpretation Centre and taste raw-milk Latxa sheep cheese, D.O. since 1987

Find the reconstructed shepherd's txabola hut inside the museum

Drive the short pastoral route to the Ecomuseum of Pastoreo in Telleriarte

Buy a wheel of naturally smoked Idiazabal directly from a producer along the route

Idiazabal has been a protected designation since 1 October 1987, and the rules are strict: raw, unpasteurised sheep's milk only, and only from the latxa and carranzana breeds. It takes around seven litres of that milk to make a kilo of properly matured cheese. About five hundred farms and more than a hundred dairies work under the appellation, most of them making the cheese from their own flock alone. The smoked version, which is what most people picture, started as a by-product of curing cheese in shepherds' huts with a fire in them. In 1995 it took first prize at Parma as the best European sheep's cheese.

Idiazabal: The Shepherd's Cheese Route

Be in position on a ridge before first light with a scope, which is the only way this works

Work out the scale of the reserve: about 70,000 hectares, continuing into Portugal as the Serra de Montesinho

Learn to read the ground — tracks, scat and kill sites tell you more in a morning than an evening of looking

Listen at dusk, because you are far more likely to hear wolves than to see them

Talk to the local shepherds about what living alongside the population actually involves

Look for red and roe deer as well — the wolves are here because the prey is

The Sierra de la Culebra runs across north-west Zamora to the Portuguese border, where it continues as the Serra de Montesinho — roughly 70,000 hectares, of which 61,305 are a Site of Community Importance and 67,340 a Regional Hunting Reserve. The tops barely clear a thousand metres, with Peña Mira the highest at 1,241. It holds one of the densest Iberian wolf populations in western Europe, and it is the most reliable place on the continent to see a wild wolf — which still means being on a ridge before dawn with a scope and a good deal of patience.

Sierra de la Culebra: Wolf Country

Get a place on the Concha shore or the Paseo Nuevo for one of the two Sundays in September

Work out what a trainera actually is — a Basque coastal fishing boat, thirteen oars and a coxswain

Follow one crew across both days, because the result is the aggregate of the two

Find out how far back it goes: rowed here since 1879, with a women's competition since 2008

Work out why the rivalries are as sharp as they are — these are village crews, not clubs

The Bandera de la Concha has been rowed in San Sebastián bay on the first two Sundays of September since 1879, with a women's competition added in 2008. Traineras are heavy Basque coastal fishing boats, thirteen rowers and a coxswain, and the crews are village crews with real rivalries behind them. It is rowed in two heats of four boats over three nautical miles across two days, and locally it is called the Olympics of rowing. The bay fills with people on the shore and the whole city stops for it.