Put a hand near the Font del Lleó and work out how hot around 74°C actually feels coming out of the ground

Go into the Roman baths in the centre, part of which has survived continuously since antiquity

Find out that Pliny the Elder wrote about these baths as Aquae Calidae, and work out what two thousand years of continuous use means

Take a treatment at one of the working balnearis, which is the same reason the Romans stopped here

Work out why the water is that hot — how deep it has been and how fast it comes back up

Caldes de Montbui has been a spa town since it was Roman Aquae Calidae, and part of the Roman bath building in the middle of it is still standing. The water comes out of the ground at 74°C, which makes it one of the hottest springs in Europe. Pliny the Elder mentions the baths here, under the name Aquae Calidae, in his account of Roman Hispania — so the place has been written about as a spa for two thousand years and has never stopped being one.

Caldes de Montbui: The Hottest Spring in the Peninsula

Walk between the pavilions above ground and then find the tunnels that connect them underneath

Work out the argument the building is making: that light, air and gardens are medical equipment

Find where Domènech's own work stops in 1913 and his son's more restrained version takes over from 1920

Look at the mosaic, stained glass and ceramic work and work out how much of it is inside patient wards

Work out why the full project was never finished, and which parts are missing

Lluís Domènech i Montaner's idea was that patients recover better among gardens and light than in a corridor, so he built a hospital as a set of separate pavilions in parkland, connected underground. Construction ran from 1902 to 1930: thirteen Modernista buildings by Domènech himself between 1902 and 1913, then six more from 1920 by his son Pere Domènech i Roura in a restrained version of the style. The full plan was never built. With the Institut Pere Mata in Reus, also his, it is one of the largest ensembles of Catalan Modernisme anywhere. UNESCO listed it in 1997.

Sant Pau: A Hospital Built as a Garden City

Find the medieval wall and the two ruined towers that Gaudí built the house around

Work out what Gaudí thought was wrong with Gothic and how the building argues the point

Go up onto the roof terrace for the view over Barcelona

Find Domingo Sugrañes's tiled benches at the entrance and Joan Rubió's viaduct on the estate

Work out who Martin the Humane was and why the end of his line mattered to Catalonia

Martin the Humane, the last king of the house of Barcelona, had a residence on this hill under Collserola. By 1900 all that was left was some wall and two half-ruined towers — and Gaudí, commissioned to build the Casa Figueras here, incorporated them into the new house. Bellesguard belongs to his neo-Gothic period, and it is the clearest surviving statement of what he thought about Gothic: he had studied Catalan, Balearic, Roussillon, Leonese and Castilian Gothic closely and concluded it was an imperfect style, only half solved. This building is his attempt to finish the job.

Bellesguard: Gaudí on a Royal Ruin

See the Sagrada Família, begun in 1882 and taken over by Gaudí in 1883, whose central Tower of Jesus Christ reached structural completion on 20 February 2026 at 172.5m, the tallest church in the world

Walk the Hypostyle Room, with its 86 Doric columns, and the mosaic serpentine bench at Park Güell, built between 1900 and 1914 and opened as a public park in 1926

Climb to the roof of Casa Milà (La Pedrera) among the chimneys known as the 'garden of warriors', and see the attic's 270 parabolic vaults

Visit Casa Batlló, remodelled by Gaudí in 1904–1906

Gaudí was not a decorator, he was a structural engineer who thought in catenary curves — the shape a hanging chain makes, inverted, which carries load in pure compression and needs no buttressing. He worked out his forms with upside-down models made of string and weighted bags. That is why the Sagrada Família's columns lean and branch like trees and why the attic of La Pedrera is 270 parabolic arches. He took the Sagrada Família over in 1883 and was still on it when a tram killed him in 1926; the central tower only reached structural completion on 20 February 2026.

Barcelona's Gaudí: The Sagrada Família, Park Güell, La Pedrera and Casa Batlló

Go up by rack railway or funicular rather than driving — the abbey station is the terminus of a rack line from Monistrol and of two funiculars

Queue to touch the orb in the right hand of La Moreneta, the late-12th-century Romanesque Virgin who is Catalonia's patroness

Hear the Escolania, a boys' choir of nine- to fourteen-year-olds documented here since the 14th century and one of the oldest in Europe

Find the Sala del Cambril, the circular three-apse chapel built between 1876 and 1884 by Villar i Carmona with a young Antoni Gaudí as his assistant

Walk up to Sant Jeroni at 1,236 metres, the highest point of the massif

Look at the rock — conglomerate from an Eocene fan delta, eroded into the fingers that give the mountain its name

Montserrat means serrated mountain, and it is exactly that — a mass of pink conglomerate laid down in a fan delta at the edge of the Ebro basin in the middle Eocene, since eroded into hundreds of rounded fingers, with a Benedictine abbey wedged into the side of it. The late-12th-century wooden Virgin known as La Moreneta is patroness of Catalonia alongside Sant Jordi; restorers in 2001 found her face and hands had darkened over the centuries, from candle smoke or a reaction in the varnish, rather than having started that colour.

Montserrat: The Black Madonna on the Serrated Mountain

Go into the crypt and look at the leaning brick columns, none of which is vertical

Work out why the columns lean: they follow the line of force, so nothing needs buttressing

Find the hanging chain model and work out how Gaudí designed a building upside down

Walk the colony around it — the houses, the school, the co-operative — built by Gaudí's collaborators

Work out what was never built here and how much of it went into the Sagrada Família instead

Eusebi Güell built a textile colony outside Barcelona with houses, a school, a co-operative and a cultural centre, and gave Gaudí the church. Gaudí did the site planning with Berenguer, Rubió and Canaleta, and designed the church himself — but only the crypt was ever built, because Güell died in 1918 and his sons dropped the project. That crypt is where Gaudí worked out the leaning columns, the branching structure and the hanging chain models that the Sagrada Família is built on. Everything he later did at scale was tested here first.

Colònia Güell: The Crypt That Became the Sagrada Família

Get to the Plaça Major on a market morning, which is what the square was built for

Buy llonganissa de Vic and work out why the fog and cold of this plain are what cures it

Find the crypt and bell tower of Bishop Oliba's cathedral of 1038 inside the later building

Go into the Museu Episcopal for one of the best collections of Catalan Romanesque and Gothic art anywhere

Come for the Mercat del Ram, the old livestock fair, which is the town's original market

Bishop Oliba consecrated the Romanesque cathedral at Vic in 1038, and its crypt and bell tower are still there inside the later building. The town has always been a place of fairs and markets — the oldest is the Mercat del Ram, a livestock fair — and the Plaça Major is one of the largest arcaded squares in Catalonia, still filling with stalls twice a week. Vic is also the sausage capital of Catalonia: the llonganissa cured here has a protected designation, and the reason is the town's particular combination of cold, fog and altitude.

Vic: A Market Square and a Bishop's Museum

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 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.