Stand in front of the 12th-century portal and work out that it is laid out as a Roman triumphal arch

Read the carving as a programme rather than decoration, and work out what it is narrating

Find the tombs of the counts of Barcelona and Besalú

Find out what the scriptorium here produced and why Ripoll is named beside Fleury and Montecassino

Go on to Sant Joan de les Abadesses, which Wilfred founded for his daughter Emma

Wilfred the Hairy reconquered and repopulated the Ripoll valley and the Vic plain between 878 and 881 and founded this monastery around 880, probably on a Visigothic site. It became the burial place of the counts of Barcelona and of Besalú, and its scriptorium made it one of the great cultural centres of medieval Europe, in the same conversation as Saint-Denis, Fleury and Montecassino. In the 12th century it got a new doorway built as a triumphal arch — a vast carved programme that is one of the major works of Catalan Romanesque sculpture.

Ripoll: The Cradle of Catalonia

Take the cremallera up from Ribes de Freser, because there is no road into the valley

Put your head under St Giles's pot and ring the bell, which is what the sanctuary is actually known for

Find out what was drafted here in 1931 and why it is called the Statute of Núria

Walk up towards the Puigmal on the ridge above the valley

Work out the story: a hermit around 700, four objects hidden, and a shepherd finding them in 1079

Núria is a valley at 2,000 metres in the eastern Pyrenees with no road into it — you arrive by rack railway from Ribes de Freser or you walk. The sanctuary at the top is where the first Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia was drafted in 1931, which is why it is called the Statute of Núria. The tradition is older: St Giles is said to have reached the valley around the year 700, leaving behind a Virgin, a cross, a bell and the pot he cooked in, all of them found in 1079. Women wanting children put their head under the pot and ring the bell.

Vall de Núria: A Rack Railway to a Statute

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

Walk the valley up from Eyne village along the riu d'Eina, a tributary of the Sègre — 6 km long and about 2 km wide, running north-west to south-east from the village to the Spanish frontier, with the reserve taking the upper part from 1,700 m up

Out of the 892 flowering species the reserve counts, find three of its own: the Adonis des Pyrénées and the Jonc des Pyrénées in the meadows, and the Pavot des Alpes on the limestone screes higher up

Follow Eyne's sentier archéologique round the granite dolmens and menhirs with their cup marks — the Dolmen de La Borda, the single remaining course of the Dolmen de Lo Pou, the Menhir de la Font del Sastre on the Bolquère road — and call in at the Maison de la Vallée for the valley's interpretation

Watch the rock faces for a wallcreeper and the sky for red-billed choughs, a golden eagle or a short-toed snake eagle among the valley's 82 nesting species, and on the open ground look for isard, mouflon and marmots and for the two Apollo butterflies

Botanists have been coming to the Vallée d'Eyne in the Cerdagne since the 18th century — Augustin Pyrame de Candolle and Hippolyte Coste among them — for the number of rare plants packed into it, and the reserve that manages it calls the place the vallée des fleurs, with 892 flowering species recorded. The national nature reserve created by decree on 18 March 1993 covers close to 1,200 hectares from 1,700m to 2,800m, 58 per cent of the commune, inside the Catalan Pyrenees regional park, and 82 bird species nest there.

The Vallée d'Eyne: The Botanists' Valley

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

Board the Train Jaune at Mont-Louis-La Cabanasse, in an open carriage if the season allows, and ride down the Tet valley over the 253m Pont Gisclard and the 236.7m masonry Pont Sejourne at Fontpedrouse

Get off at Bolquere-Eyne, at 1,592m the highest station on the SNCF network, and walk up onto the Col de la Perche above it where the gradients on either side reach 60 in a thousand

Walk the ramparts of Mont-Louis, Vauban's citadel at about 1,600m, UNESCO-listed since 2008 and still home to the army's commando training centre

Visit the solar furnace inside the walls at Mont-Louis, the one Felix Trombe built in 1949 to prove the idea after his 1946 experiment at Meudon, and which the big furnace at Odeillo was then modelled on

See the Odeillo solar furnace at Font-Romeu, in service since 1969 and with Parkent in Uzbekistan one of the two largest in the world: a parabola 60m across facing 63 steerable mirrors on the hillside, concentrating 10,000 times the power of the sun onto a spot a metre wide and up to 3,300 degrees C

The Train Jaune climbs through the Pyrenees from Villefranche-de-Conflent to Latour-de-Carol on a metre-gauge line opened between 1910 and 1927, fed by a third rail at 850 volts, through 19 tunnels and over the last railway suspension bridge left on a working line in France - the Pont Gisclard, named for the commandant who designed it and was killed on it in the load trial of 31 October 1909. At the top of the line are Vauban's citadel of Mont-Louis and two solar furnaces.

The Train Jaune: Over the Pyrenees to the Highest Station on the SNCF Network

Walk the platforms at Latour-de-Carol–Enveitg and find all three gauges in the same station — standard, metre and Iberian, which no other station in France has, since Hendaye and Cerbère manage only two — then work out which of the three direct-current supplies, 1.5 kV, 3 kV or 850 V, feeds each of them, and look for the side third rail that powers the Cerdagne line

Ride the Train Jaune east off the end of the metre-gauge Cerdagne line and tick off three things from the window: Bolquère-Eyne, the highest station on the whole SNCF network at 1,592 m, the 236-metre masonry arches of the Pont Séjourné, and seven kilometres further the Pont Gisclard, the last railway suspension bridge in France still carrying trains

Cross the border into Puigcerdà, founded by Alfonso II of Aragon about 1177 and made capital of Cerdagne in place of Llívia, and find the bell tower of Santa Maria standing alone — the 12th-century church beneath it was pulled down in the anarchist months of 1936 and never rebuilt

Go round the convent of Sant Domènec, founded in 1290, and the Museu Cerdà, then walk down to where the Carol runs into the Segre below the town — the stream that gives Latour-de-Carol its name, joining the river that will end up in the Ebro

At 1,231m in the Cerdagne, the station of Latour-de-Carol–Enveitg is the only one in France with three track gauges, standard, metre and Iberian: night trains and regional trains arrive from Toulouse and Paris, the Train Jaune from Villefranche-de-Conflent ends here, and Catalan trains leave for Barcelona. A few kilometres away across the border, Puigcerdà, founded around 1177, is the capital of the Cerdanya.

Latour-de-Carol: The Station of Three Gauges on the Spanish Border

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 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.