Walk the restored old town and the riverbank and work out what was nearly lost

Find out what the European Urbanism Prize was given for, and over how long

Find out who Manuel Blanco Romasanta was and how he became the Sacamantecas

Walk or swim the Arnoia through the middle of the town

Go to the leather museum, which is what the riverside buildings were originally for

Allariz on the Arnoia was emptying and falling down, and instead of demolishing the old town the council spent two decades restoring it, opening the riverbank and bringing people back — a project that won a European Urbanism Prize. It is now the standard example in Galicia of how to do it. The town also has its own folk devil: in the 19th century Manuel Blanco Romasanta was accused of killing people and rendering their fat to sell, which gave Spain the legend of the Sacamantecas.

Allariz: A Town That Won a Prize for Fixing Itself

Stand at As Burgas and feel how hot it actually is: 64 to 68°C, 300 litres a minute, in the middle of a city street

Find all three springs — the 17th-century Burga de Arriba, the modern Burga do Medio and the neoclassical Burga de Abaixo

Find the replica Roman altars, including the one Calpurnia Abana Aeboso dedicated to the Nymphs — the earliest named person from this city

Work out where the water has been: rain filtered down through rock fractures to over two kilometres before coming back up

Go out along the Miño to the other thermal waters — A Chavasqueira, O Tinteiro, Muíño da Veiga and Outariz — and sit in them

As Burgas come out of the ground in the centre of Ourense at between 64 and 68°C, at 300 litres a minute — rainwater that has worked down through fractures in the rock to over two kilometres deep and come back up hot. There are three springs: the Burga de Arriba from the 17th century, the modern Burga do Medio, and the neoclassical Burga de Abaixo of the 19th. The Romans left altars here, one of them dedicated to the Nymphs of the waters by Calpurnia Abana Aeboso — the first inhabitant of this city whose name we know.

Ourense: Hot Springs in the Middle of the City

Stand at one of the miradoiros above the Sil and look straight down the canyon wall at terraced vines

Work out what heroic viticulture means here: slopes too steep for any machine, worked by hand off terraces and from the river

Taste Mencía, the red that is nine-tenths of what this appellation grows

Go into Santo Estevo de Ribas de Sil and find the Romanesque cloister of the Bishops, named for the nine who came here to die between the 10th and 11th centuries

Find out what happened in late 2020 when restorers opened a reliquary on the high altar and found four of the nine lost bishops' rings inside

Take a catamaran along the canyon to see the terraces from water level, the way the people working them do

The Ribeira Sacra is the banks of the Cabe, Sil and Miño in southern Lugo and northern Ourense, and the name first appears in a charter of 21 August 1124. The Sil has cut a canyon here so steep that the vineyards are worked in terraces off ladders and boats — it is the textbook case of viticultura heroica. The Romans were already describing the wine as the liquid gold of the Sil. The grape is overwhelmingly Mencía. Santo Estevo de Ribas de Sil above the gorge is now a parador.

The Ribeira Sacra and the Sil Canyon

Eat polbo á feira from a pulpeira's copper pot — boiled whole, cut with scissors onto wood, dressed with oil, coarse salt and pimentón

Find out where it came from: maragato muleteers from León who brought the pimentón and the oil and bought the octopus cheap

Work out why it is called á feira and not anything to do with the sea — it is fair food, not port food, and O Carballiño still holds its Festa do Polbo on the second Sunday of August

Find out that queimada is not an ancient Celtic rite: distilling spirit in Galicia needs the alembic, which arrived in the 12th or 13th century, and the ritual as performed dates from about the 1950s

Look at the clay pot it is burned in — designed in 1955 by the Mondoñedo potter Tito Freire, which is how old the tradition really is

Octopus with paprika is the most Galician dish there is, and it was invented by people from León. Maragato muleteers hauling pimentón and olive oil up from Extremadura bought dried octopus cheap off Galicians who had no use for it, rehydrated it and dressed it with what they were carrying; the Galicians eventually noticed and took it over, which is why it is called á feira, at the fair. It is still cooked outdoors in copper pots by women called pulpeiras. O Carballiño holds its Festa do Polbo on the second Sunday of August.

Polbo á Feira and the Truth About Queimada

Go into the Colegio and find the blank space in the Moure altarpiece where the Jesuit emblem was erased

Work out why a town this size has a building this size: a cardinal, the Jesuits, and a school that ran until 1767

Climb to San Vicente do Pino and find out what the Irmandiña rebels did to the keep, and what they were made to do afterwards

Cross the old bridge over the Cabe — universally called the Roman bridge, and medieval

Find the paintings in the college collection and work out what a Galician market town is doing with them

Cardinal Rodrigo de Castro founded the Colegio de Nuestra Señora de la Antigua at Monforte and gave it to the Jesuits — Jesuit architects drew it and Jesuit masters ran the school until 1767. It is Herreran, severe and enormous for the town, and it is called the Galician Escorial for exactly that reason. Its altarpiece is by Francisco de Moure, and there is a blank space at the centre of it where the emblem of the Society of Jesus was scrubbed out after the order was expelled from Spain. Above the town are the keep and walls of San Vicente do Pino, pulled down in the Irmandiña revolt and rebuilt by the rebels once it was crushed.

Monforte de Lemos: The Galician Escorial

Walk to the Soajo espigueiros at dusk — 24 stone granaries on a granite outcrop above the village, used for drying maize for centuries, with the dark sky opening in all directions above

Photograph the Milky Way from the Castro Laboreiro plateau — a high granite moorland above 1000m at the northern edge of the park, with no village within 10km

Visit the Santuário de Nossa Senhora da Peneda — a Baroque pilgrimage sanctuary built directly into a granite cliff face in a remote valley, accessible only by a single narrow road

Walk a section of the Via Romana XVII through the Gerês — the Roman road that once connected Braga to Astorga, with original milestones still standing in the mountainside

Portugal's only National Park holds a certified Class 2a dark sky at its Porta do Mezio gateway — the wild Gerês granite plateau has stone espigueiro granaries, Roman road sections, and Baroque sanctuaries tucked into remote valleys

Peneda-Gerês Stellar Park

Hike to Pitões das Júnias, its waterfall and the ruins of the Santa Maria das Júnias monastery, in Peneda-Gerês, Portugal's only national park, created in 1971

Look for the free-roaming Garrano ponies, descendants of prehistoric wild horses

Walk the Roman road, the Via Nova, in the park's Mata da Albergaria, with its milestones and intact bridges

Swim in the pools below the Cascata do Arado, the waterfall in the Gerês mountains

Hike through Portugal's only national park

Peneda-Gerês National Park Trek

Be in Betanzos on the night of 16 to 17 August for the launch — 25 metres of brown paper stuck together with rye paste

Read the sixteen painted panels before it goes up — local artists satirising the year just gone

Go into San Francisco and find the tomb of Fernán Pérez de Andrade, carried by a boar and a bear

Work out what Betanzos was: capital of one of the seven provinces of the old Kingdom of Galicia, and the capital of Galician Gothic

Eat the tortilla, which Betanzos is argued about across Spain for — deliberately undercooked in the middle

Betanzos was capital of one of the seven provinces of the old Kingdom of Galicia, and it keeps one of the best-preserved historic centres in the region — enough that it gets called the capital of Galician Gothic. On the night of 16 to 17 August, for San Roque, the town launches the Globo de Betanzos — an unmanned paper hot-air balloon up to 25 metres tall and 16 across, made of sixteen panels of brown paper stuck together with rye-flour paste and reinforced with cotton tape, each panel painted with a satirical cartoon by a local artist. Claudino Pita Pandelo made the 1875 balloon and every one from 1877 on; his descendants have rebuilt his design every year since, with breaks only for the Civil War and COVID.