Cross the fortified bridge over the Fluvià and notice that it changes direction partway across

Go down into the mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath, which is one of very few left standing in Europe

Find the monastery church of Sant Pere and the old pilgrims' hospital of Sant Julià

Work out the political story: capital of its own county from 902, absorbed into Barcelona in 1111, and frozen afterwards

Find the Casa Cornellà, one of the best-preserved Romanesque civil buildings in Catalonia

Besalú became the capital of an independent county after Wilfred the Hairy died in 902, and lost that status in 1111 when Bernat III died without an heir and the county passed to the house of Barcelona. What is left is an unusually intact medieval town: the angled fortified bridge over the Fluvià, the monastery church of Sant Pere, the old pilgrims' hospital of Sant Julià, the Casa Cornellà, and — the rarest thing here — the Jewish ritual baths, a mikveh, one of very few surviving in Europe.

Besalú: A Medieval County Town and Its Mikveh

Walk up Montsacopa in the middle of the town and stand in the crater

Go into the crater of Santa Margarida and find the chapel built in the bottom of it

Walk into the quarried face of Croscat and read the eruption layers from the inside

Walk the Fageda d'en Jordà, the beech wood growing directly on an old lava flow

Eat cuina volcànica, which is what Olot calls its own cooking and takes seriously

The whole municipality of Olot lies inside the Garrotxa Volcanic Zone natural park, and the town has a volcano in the middle of it: Montsacopa, also called Sant Francesc, a textbook cone with a circular crater and a 360-degree view over the comarca. The French blew up the fort on top of it before finally leaving Olot on 9 March 1814. The best-known cones in the park are Santa Margarida, which has a chapel in its crater, and Croscat, cut open by quarrying so that you can walk into the inside of a volcano and read the layers.

Olot and the Garrotxa Volcanoes

Work out what the building is: the theatre he knew as a child, burned in the Civil War, and rebuilt by Dalí as one continuous work

Find the Mae West room, an anamorphic living-room installation that only resolves into a face from one exact spot

Find the Cadillac plujós, the full-size car installation based on his Rainy Taxi of 1938

Go down to the crypt below the stage, where Dalí is buried in the middle of his own museum

Stand under the glass geodesic dome over the old stage and work out that every decision in the building was his

Salvador Dalí was born in Figueres on 11 May 1904, in a first-floor flat on Carrer Monturiol. The heart of his museum is the town theatre he knew as a child, burned during the Civil War and left a ruin for decades until he rebuilt it as a single enormous work of his own — designing the rooms himself and crowning the old stage with a glass geodesic dome. It opened on 28 September 1974 and kept growing into the mid-1980s. He lived in it from 1984 until his death in 1989 and is buried in a crypt below the stage floor.

Figueres: The Museum Dalí Built for Himself

Walk the Call, one of the best-preserved medieval Jewish quarters in Spain, and find out who Nahmanides was

Climb the cathedral steps and stand under the widest Gothic nave in the world — 22.98 metres, beaten by no church but St Peter's

Walk the Passeig de la Muralla along the top of the Carolingian and late-medieval walls, with its viewpoint over the whole city

Find the confluence: Girona sits where the Ter, Onyar, Galligants and Güell all meet

Photograph the coloured houses hanging over the Onyar, which is the standard view of the city for a reason

A Jewish community is documented in Girona from about 885, and by the 12th century the town held one of the most important Kabbalistic schools in Europe; its rabbi, Moshe ben Nahman — Nahmanides — was made Great Rabbi of Catalonia. It ended in 1492 with the Alhambra Decree. The Call is one of the best-preserved Jewish quarters in Spain. The cathedral above it has the widest Gothic nave in the world at 22.98 metres, second-widest of any church after St Peter's, redesigned by Pere Sacoma in 1312 with a vault 35 metres up.

Girona: The Call and the Widest Gothic Nave on Earth

In the Musée d'Art moderne de Céret find Picasso's bullfighting coupelles, given by the artist in 1953, his Nature morte au crâne et au pichet, Matisse's Barques à Collioure and Soutine's Vue sur Céret, la vieille ville, then walk out and stand where Soutine painted it

Walk across the Pont du Diable over the Tech, built between 1321 and 1341, whose single 45.45 m arch held the world record for a stone span until the Scaliger bridge took it in 1356, and look down the 22.30 m from the crown to the river the Devil is said to have left one stone short

Visit the Musée de la Musique in the old Saint-Pierre hospital of 1649, where about five hundred of its three thousand instruments are on show, and work through the oboes of the world collected over thirty years by Heinz Stefan Herzka and Verena Nil — one of the largest collections of the family anywhere — then find the Catalan tenora and tible played in a cobla

See the Roman baths at Amélie-les-Bains, listed as a monument historique since 1905 and still standing beside the army thermal hospital, on the hot springs that gave the town its old name, Els Banys d'Arles

Visit the abbey of Sainte-Marie at Arles-sur-Tech, founded on this site in 820 by abbot Sunifred after the first monastery was destroyed, and find the Sainte-Tombe, the 5th-century sarcophagus of blue Céret marble beneath the effigy of Gaucelme de Tallet, which fills with water that seeps through its porous lid

Picasso, Braque, Soutine and Chagall all worked in Céret, and Pierre Brune and Frank Burty Haviland opened its Musée d'Art moderne in a 17th-century Carmelite convent on 18 June 1950; Picasso gave it his tauromachy coupelles in 1953. The town's Pont du Diable of 1321–1341 held the world record for the longest stone arch, and since May 1932 Céret has sent the President of the Republic the first crate of cherries of the year.

Céret: Picasso's Cherry Town and the Devil's Bridge

Walk the Greek Neapolis and then the Roman town and work out where one ends and the other begins

Find the Palaiapolis at San Martí d'Empúries — the original island colony, now a village on a low rise

Work out what happened here in 218 BC and why it mattered to the whole peninsula

Find the mosaics and the Asklepios statue, and then find out which one on site is a copy

Stand on the beach the Romans landed on and work out why they chose an existing Greek port

In 575 BC the last wave of Greek colonisation reached the peninsula — Phocaeans out of Massalia, trading at long range — and they put their first settlement on an island off this coast, the Palaiapolis, which is now San Martí d'Empúries and is still inhabited. The Neapolis, the new town, grew on the mainland south of it, trading with the Indiketa people already there. The Romans landed here in 218 BC at the start of the Second Punic War and eventually built their own city beside the Greek one. It is the only site in Iberia where a Greek and a Roman town sit side by side.

Empúries: Where Greece Landed in Iberia

Put a hand on the forged iron cross at 2,785 m and work out what it took to get it there: the Notre-Dame-la-Real scout troop of Perpignan carried it up from their meeting rooms in the town in 1943, in the middle of the occupation — and look at what it is bolted into, an orthogneiss that began as granite 425 million years ago and was cooked into its present state when the Pyrenees' ancestors were built

From the summit, work round the horizon and see how far you can honestly claim: the Conflent and the Roussillon plain below, the Empordà over the border, Barcelona to the south on a clear day, and north-east at sunrise the Massif Central and Mont Ventoux — in the right refraction, the Écrins

Walk the 250 metres up from Casteil to Saint-Martin-du-Canigou and find the thing that makes it rare: two churches stacked one on the other, the lower one cut partly into the rock and dedicated to the Virgin, the upper one to Saint Martin, consecrated in November 1009 — then count the cloister galleries and work out which three are original

Go up for the night of 22 June, stay with the fire the crowd lights on the summit and keeps watch over until dawn, and then follow one of the groups that sets off downhill with a torch — each one carrying the flame to a different Saint John's fire somewhere in Catalonia

Look into the north cirque between the Canigou and the pic Barbet at 2,712 m and find the hanging patch of old snow at around 2,450 m — all that is left of the glacier that once filled the whole bowl — then count the climate bands you have driven and walked through on the way up, Mediterranean to about 1,000 m, montane to 1,700, subalpine to 2,300 and alpine above that, with no permanent snow zone at all

The Canigou is the most easterly of the high Pyrenean summits at 2,785m, standing over the Conflent with a forged iron cross on top that Perpignan scouts carried up in 1943. It was made a Grand Site de France in 2012 as the sacred mountain of Catalan country: on the eve of Saint John, 22 June, hundreds climb to the summit, and at daybreak groups come down with torches to light the Saint John's fires across Catalonia.

The Pic du Canigou: The Catalans' Sacred Mountain

Go into Sant Climent de Taüll, consecrated on 10 December 1123, and look at the apse

Work out that the Pantocrator you are looking at is a projection, and that the painting itself is in Barcelona

Find out why it was moved, and what the 1907 survey of this valley was trying to prevent

Look at the bell tower and notice it is attached to the church without being part of its structure

Walk or drive between the nine listed churches — they are close enough to do several in a day

Nine Romanesque churches in one Pyrenean valley went onto the UNESCO list together in 2000. Sant Climent de Taüll was consecrated on 10 December 1123 by the bishop of Roda; its six-storey bell tower stands against the building without being structurally part of it, and its apse Pantocrator is regarded as the high point of Catalan Romanesque painting. That fresco is not in the church — it is in the MNAC in Barcelona, where it was taken for safekeeping after the valley was surveyed in 1907. What is in the apse now is a projection of it.