Go down into a cellar and work out how many storeys below the town you actually are

Find out what the traditional method is, and why the second fermentation happens in the bottle you buy

Learn the three grape varieties — Macabeo, Xarel·lo, Parellada — and taste a cava made only from them

See disgorging done, which is how the dead yeast comes out without losing the pressure

Taste across the ageing categories and work out what extra time on the lees actually does

Cava is made by the traditional method — second fermentation in the bottle it is sold in, exactly as in Champagne — from Macabeo, Xarel·lo and Parellada, and the great majority of it comes from the Penedès, with Sant Sadurní d'Anoia as its centre. The town is undermined by kilometres of cellars going several storeys down, because the wine needs constant cool temperature and darkness while it ages on its lees. The cellars are the real attraction: you go down in a small train and come back up into a normal Catalan town.

Sant Sadurní d'Anoia: Cava Under the Town

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 Cau Ferrat and work out that the wrought iron collection is the reason the house is called that

Find the two El Grecos Rusiñol paraded through the streets when he brought them here

Work out what the Festes Modernistes from 1892 were for and what came out of them

Go next door into the Maricel and out along the seafront the pair of them face

Come for Carnival in February, which is one of the biggest in Catalonia

Santiago Rusiñol bought two fishermen's cottages on the seafront at Sitges, knocked them together and made the Cau Ferrat — part studio, part museum of the wrought iron he collected, and the venue for the Festes Modernistes from 1892, where Catalan Modernisme was effectively launched as a movement. Two El Greco paintings hang in it, which he carried through the streets in procession. Next door is the Maricel, and the town behind is a compact white grid on a headland. Sitges also has one of the largest carnivals in Catalonia and is a long-established gay resort.

Sitges: The Town Modernisme Was Argued Out In

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

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

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

Walk the towers and the wall walks and work out how much of the silhouette is decoration rather than defence

Find the black mulberry inside, which is protected as a natural monument of Navarre

Work out what was lost in 1813, when Espoz y Mina had the palace burnt to deny it to the French

Find out what Charles III put in here that a castle would never have had — gardens, a menagerie, hanging gardens

Come in summer for the Festival de Teatro Clásico, which uses the palace as its main venue

Charles III of Navarre turned an existing castle at Olite into a permanent royal seat in the 15th century and gave it everything a court of the period was supposed to have: towers, gardens, moats, hanging gardens, even a menagerie. The silhouette of towers above the walls is why it is probably the most emblematic civil building in Navarre and its most visited monument. In 1813 the guerrilla leader Espoz y Mina had it burnt, to stop Napoleon's troops fortifying it — so the towers survive and the interior decoration and the gardens are gone for good.

Olite: The Palace the Kings of Navarre Built for Themselves

Climb to the monastery and look back down over the bay of Roses and the Cap de Creus

Work out why a church this size is on a remote headland at all — the answer involves relics shipped out of Rome in 610

Walk up to the ruined castle of Sant Salvador de Verdera above it, which is what protected the monastery

Work out why it was built here rather than in the valley, and what it was watching

Find out what happened after 1793, when the Benedictines left, and what the excavations after 1990 turned up in the lower cloister

Sant Pere de Rodes stands high on the northern flank of the Serra de Rodes, above El Port de la Selva, with the whole bay of Roses and the Cap de Creus laid out beneath it. It was repeatedly plundered from the 17th century and the Benedictines finally left in 1793. Excavations after 1990 turned up gold and silver coins, old ceramic tiles and Romanesque painting in a lower cloister nobody knew existed until the middle of the 20th century — and the scale of the church, absurd for so isolated a spot, is explained by relics identified as St Peter's, taken out of Rome by sea in 610.