Get into the thermal water, which is what the place is for and has been since the Romans

Find Manuel Castaños's starred muqarnas dome, from the rebuilding of 1858 to 1878

Work out the sequence: Roman baths, disentailment sale in the 19th century, then twenty years of rebuilding

Walk the grounds by the Segura under the eucalyptus and palms

Find out what is in the water, and why hot mineral springs surface here at all

The hot springs at Archena sit beside the Segura among eucalyptus, palms and lemon trees, and the Romans found and worked them as baths. The site was sold off in the 19th-century disentailment and then completely rebuilt architecturally between 1858 and 1878 by architects including José María Aguilar y Vela, with interiors by the decorator Manuel Castaños — whose starred muqarnas dome is the thing to look at. It is still a working thermal spa rather than a monument, which means you can use it the way it was built to be used.

Archena: A Roman Spa Still Running

Walk the huerta and find the azudes and channels — the irrigation the Moriscos built and the valley still runs on

Work out what happened here: exempted from the 1609 expulsion, then expelled anyway by a decree written against them in 1614

Find out who wanted their land, and what happened to it in the 18th century

Walk between the valley villages — Ricote, Ojós, Ulea, Villanueva — which sit in a line along the Segura

Come in February or March when the apricot and peach blossom is out across the whole valley floor

The Ricote valley on the middle Segura is still called the Moorish Valley, and for good reason. When the 1609 decree expelled the Moriscos from Spain, the people here argued successfully that they were genuinely Christian and were let alone — the only community in the country to manage it. It did not last. Local landowners wanted their property, a fresh decree aimed specifically at them was issued in 1614, and at the end of that year they were put on ships at Cartagena. They were the last Moriscos to leave Spain. What they left is the irrigation system that still waters the valley.

The Ricote Valley: The Last Moriscos in Spain

Come in late February or March for the floración and get to a mirador above the valley floor

Work out the scale: tens of thousands of stone-fruit trees flowering within a couple of weeks of each other

Go to Medina Siyâsa above the town, an excavated Andalusi settlement with reconstructed houses

Find the rock art in the Almadenes gorge, part of the Levantine rock art World Heritage listing

Canoe or walk the Segura through the Almadenes cut

Cieza sits on the middle Segura where the river cuts through the Murcian hills, and it grows peaches, nectarines and apricots on terraces across the whole valley floor and up the slopes. For two to three weeks in late February and March the entire valley flowers at once — tens of thousands of trees in pink and white against bare rock — and the town has built a set of viewpoints and marked routes specifically to look at it. The rest of the year the same valley holds Iberian rock art in the Almadenes gorge and a Muslim town site at Medina Siyâsa.

Cieza: The Blossom of the Segura Valley

Look up at the cathedral's 93-metre bell tower, the third tallest in Spain

Stand in front of the Baroque main façade, then find the chapel of the Vélez inside

Find the urn in the main chapel that holds the heart of Alfonso X the Wise

Go to the Museo Salzillo and find his nativity of 556 pieces and the processional figures of Good Friday

Murcia's cathedral was consecrated in 1467 and built up over the next three centuries, so its Gothic core carries Renaissance, Baroque and neoclassical additions: the bell tower, 93 metres high and the third tallest in Spain; the Baroque main façade, counted one of the masterpieces of Spanish Baroque; and the chapel of the Vélez. In the main chapel an urn holds the heart and entrails of Alfonso X the Wise. Across the old town the Museo Salzillo is given over to the city's Baroque sculptor Francisco Salzillo: the processional figures of the Cofradía de Nuestro Padre Jesús, which still go out on the morning of Good Friday, his nativity scene of 556 pieces, and some fifty of his preparatory models.

Murcia: Salzillo's Nativity and the Cathedral Tower

Walk into the pine forest and work out that every tree here was planted deliberately from 1889

Find out who Ricardo Codorníu was and what the massif looked like before he started

Find the pozos de la nieve, first built at the end of the 16th century, and work out how ice got from here to the hospitals of Murcia

Look for the arruí, the Barbary sheep introduced here, and for the Spanish ibex that has come back on its own

Climb towards Espuña itself for the view over the whole restored massif

Sierra Espuña was bare, eroded rock at the end of the 19th century, stripped by centuries of grazing and felling, and flooding off it was wrecking the towns below. From 1889 the engineer Ricardo Codorníu began a reafforestation that put pines back across the whole massif — a project that became a model for its time, and the reason there is a forest here at all; it was made a natural site of national interest in 1931 and a regional park in 1992. The pozos de la nieve inside it are stone wells begun at the end of the 16th century, where snow was packed in winter and distributed as ice to the hospitals and towns of the Kingdom of Murcia.

Sierra Espuña: A Forest That Was Planted on Purpose

Get to a hide at El Hondo at first light, which is when the ducks are on the open water

Look for marbled teal and white-headed duck, two species that nearly went and largely did not

Work out that these reservoirs were built for irrigation and became a reserve by accident

Go across to the Santa Pola salinas for the flamingos and the waders

Work out how the three wetlands function as one system for birds moving through

El Hondo, the Santa Pola salinas and the La Mata and Torrevieja lagoons form a triangle of wetlands on the Alicante coast that is critical to the biological cycles of a very large number of birds — on migration, breeding and wintering. El Hondo is the freshwater end of it, a set of reservoirs and reedbeds built for irrigation that turned into one of the most important bird sites in Spain, and it holds one of the few reliable populations of marbled teal and white-headed duck in Europe, both of which came close to disappearing.

El Hondo and the Santa Pola Salt Pans

Go up to the Santuario de la Vera Cruz inside the castle and find the double-armed cross the whole town is built around

Work out the company it keeps: one of only five cities in the Catholic world with a perpetual jubilee, alongside Rome, Jerusalem, Santiago and Santo Toribio

Find the Templete, where the cross has been dipped in water every 3 May since 1384

Come for the Caballos del Vino in early May, where horses in heavy embroidered mantles are run up the hill to the castle

See the Renaissance church of El Salvador, among the finest in Murcia

There are five cities in the Catholic world with the perpetual right to hold a jubilee year — Rome, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, Santo Toribio de Liébana and Caravaca de la Cruz, which was granted it in 1998 and holds one every seven years. The relic is the Vera Cruz, a double-armed cross said to have been brought by angels in 1231. Every 3 May since 1384 it has been dipped in water in a ceremony at the Templete, and every May the town runs the Caballos del Vino, in which horses in embroidered mantles are raced up to the castle.

Caravaca de la Cruz: One of Five Holy Cities

Take the waters at the balneario, which is why the town exists as it does

Walk between the public fountains in the town and taste the difference between the springs

Work out what the name means, and that it was describing the springs long before anyone bottled them

Come for the carrera del agua on the night of San Juan, when the town throws buckets of water over everybody in the street — while the rest of Spain spends that night round a fire

Use it as the gateway it is and go on up into the Alpujarra afterwards

Lanjarón is probably an Arabic rendering of a pre-Roman word meaning a place full of springs, and the name has turned out to be the whole story: the town sits on the western edge of the Alpujarra below the Sierra Nevada, its spa has drawn people for two centuries, and the one industry in the place bottles the water and sells it across Spain. It is the gateway to the Alpujarra proper, so it is also the sensible place to start anything going further up the valley.

Lanjarón: The Water Town of the Alpujarra

Walk in to the Circo de Gredos and the Laguna Grande in the floor of it

Work out the vegetation bands as you climb: holm oak, then Pyrenean oak, then broom, then bare grass

Get close to the western ibex, which will not move for you, and work out why the largest population of the subspecies is on this one range

Climb towards the Almanzor at 2,592 metres if the weather and your legs allow

Come back at dusk and listen to the rut in autumn, which carries a long way in a cirque

Gredos runs across Ávila, Cáceres, Madrid and Salamanca, topping out at the Almanzor at 2,592 metres, with the Circo de Gredos — a glacial cirque with a lagoon in the floor of it — in the central sector. The vegetation stacks in clear bands: holm oak to about 550 metres, Pyrenean oak from there to 1,800, broom scrub to 2,300 and bare summit grassland above that. The western ibex, Capra pyrenaica victoriae, has its largest population here across Ávila and Cáceres, and the animals on the high ground are entirely unbothered by walkers.