Go down into the cellars under La Villa and work out how far the network runs under the streets

Taste Bobal as a single variety and work out why it spent a century being blended away

Walk the medieval quarter above the cellars, which is a separate town from the modern one

Work out what the altitude does here: around 700 metres, with cold nights on a hot plateau

Eat the local embutidos with the wine, which is what the cellars were stocked for

Requena sits on a plateau at around 700 metres inland from Valencia, and under its medieval quarter — La Villa — is a network of cellars cut into the rock, some of them Arab in origin, used for centuries to store wine at constant temperature. The grape here is Bobal, a thick-skinned, deeply coloured variety that was long treated as bulk material for blending and is now being taken seriously as a wine in its own right. Requena also makes embutidos, and the two go together deliberately.

Requena: Wine Cellars Under a Medieval Town

Get a ticket — since 2013 attendance has been capped at 22,000 and you cannot simply turn up

Watch the palo jabón, because the battle does not start until somebody gets the ham down

Be in the Plaza del Pueblo when the lorry beds tip and the whole load goes into the street

Work out the numbers: about 150 tonnes of tomatoes, six lorries, one hour

Stay for the hosing down afterwards and work out how the town is clean again by the afternoon

On the last Wednesday of August, during Buñol's patronal week, six lorries move slowly through the Calle San Luis, the Calle Cid and the Plaza del Pueblo distributing close to 150 tonnes of tomatoes, and 22,000 people — the cap since 2013 — throw them at each other for an hour. It starts when somebody manages to get the ham off the greased pole and the rocket goes up, usually around noon. The best moment is when the lorry beds tip and the whole load goes into the street. Then the fire brigade hoses everything down and the town is clean by mid-afternoon.

La Tomatina: A Hundred and Fifty Tonnes of Tomatoes

Stand on the bridge and look up at a village built into the wall of a river meander

Climb to the Almohad castle of the 12th or 13th century on the rock above the houses

Go into one of the cave houses and find the ones that go right through the ridge and out the other side

Work out what the name means and what it tells you about who built the place

Walk or swim the Júcar below the village, which is what the gorge is for in summer

The Júcar has cut a meander so tight into the Albacete plateau that the village of Alcalá del Júcar is built on both the inside of the bend and up its wall, with an Almohad castle of the 12th or 13th century on the crag above. The houses are pushed back into the soft rock — some of them run right through the ridge and come out as windows on the far side — and several of the cave houses are open to go into. The name is from the Arabic for castle: the castle of the river Júcar.

Alcalá del Júcar: A Village Dug Into a Gorge

Stand in the trading hall of the Llotja among its eight twisted columns, eleven metres high — meant as palm trunks holding up a sky once painted blue with gold stars

Look for the carved gargoyles on the outside of the Llotja

Shop in the Mercado Central, the modernista market finished in 1928

See the Holy Chalice in its chapel in Valencia Cathedral, given by Alfonso the Magnanimous in 1437

The Silk Exchange in Valencia, the Llotja, was designed by Francesc Baldomar around 1470 and finished after his death by Pere Compte and Joan Ivarra, on the model of the exchange in Palma: a great hall of twisted columns holding up Gothic vaults, built to house the maritime trade court and to show off the city's 15th-century wealth. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. Across the square the Mercado Central, begun in 1914 and finished in January 1928, is one of the masterpieces of Valencian modernisme and still a working food market. A few streets away, in a side chapel of the cathedral that was once its chapter house, is the Holy Chalice, dated to the 1st century and given to the cathedral by King Alfonso the Magnanimous in 1437.

Valencia: The Silk Exchange, the Central Market and the Holy Chalice

Be at Valencia Cathedral's Door of the Apostles on a Thursday at noon to see the Water Tribunal, the customary court of the Huerta's irrigation canals, thought to date from around 960 and inscribed by UNESCO as intangible heritage in 2009

Drink horchata de chufa, the tiger-nut drink, with fartons in Alboraya, the main production centre, which yields about 8,000 tonnes of chufa a year

Cycle beside the Huerta's irrigation canals (acequias) north of the city

Every Thursday, in public at the Door of the Apostles of Valencia Cathedral, elected farmers settle disputes about irrigation water. The court is purely oral — nothing is written down and no records are kept — and the whole thing is over in minutes. It is described as the oldest court in the world and the oldest democratic institution in Europe, and UNESCO inscribed it in 2009 alongside the Council of Wise Men of the Murcia plain.

Valencia's Huerta: Water Tribunal and Horchata

Cycle or run the old riverbed end to end, and work out where the water used to be relative to the city

Work out what almost happened instead: the 1960s plan was an urban motorway straight down the old channel

Ride under the historic bridges and notice that they now cross a park

Get to the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències at the seaward end and see what Calatrava and Candela built in a dry river

Find the Gulliver playground, which is a giant tied-down figure you climb over

On 14 October 1957 the Turia flooded Valencia and killed around a hundred people. The river was diverted south of the city — the works finished in 1972 — leaving kilometres of empty riverbed through the middle of town. The plan of the 1960s was to run an urban motorway down it; the new ring road made that idea redundant and the city got a park instead, founded in 1986, and the old channel is now a continuous green corridor with pitches, running tracks, cycle paths and gardens, passing under the historic bridges that no longer cross anything. At the seaward end Santiago Calatrava and Félix Candela built the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències in the dry bed.

Valencia's Turia: A Riverbed Turned Into a Park

Take a traditional boat trip on the Albufera lagoon, the freshwater lake 11km south of Valencia in a 21,120-hectare natural park

Look for waterbirds — more than 250 species have been recorded at the Albufera

Walk the dunes and pinewoods of the Devesa del Saler, the coastal strip separating the lagoon from the sea

Visit a barraca, the traditional thatched house of the Albufera

The Albufera is a freshwater lagoon eleven kilometres south of Valencia, separated from the sea by a wooded dune bar and surrounded by rice fields — 21,120 hectares of natural park, with over 250 bird species recorded. It was a royal hunting preserve for centuries, which is why it survived. Flat-bottomed boats still work it, the barracas with their steep thatched roofs are the traditional houses of the people who fished and farmed it, and the sunset over the lagoon from El Palmar is genuinely worth arranging a day around.

The Albufera: Boats on the Lagoon and the Barracas

Walk the upper gallery and work out that this is a palace wearing a castle's clothes

Find the Romanesque-Mudéjar church swallowed inside the structure when the castle was built over it

Work out Juan Guas's Isabelline Gothic and its Hispano-Muslim borrowings, and what he did next at Guadalajara

Find the remains of the old castle nearby, which this one replaced

Walk up into La Pedriza behind it, the granite massif the family's land ran into

The Mendoza were one of the most powerful families in late medieval Castile, and in the last third of the 15th century they replaced their old fortress at Manzanares with something grander — a palace-fortress built over a Romanesque-Mudéjar church, which was simply absorbed into the structure. Juan Guas drew it in Isabelline Gothic with Hispano-Muslim influence, and it is regarded as the precursor of his Palacio del Infantado at Guadalajara, where he settled the template for a Catholic Monarchs palace. It stands under the Guadarrama beside the Santillana reservoir, with La Pedriza behind it.

Manzanares el Real: A Castle Built to Be Lived In

Eat gamba roja in Dénia and find out why it costs what it does

Go to the fish auction in the port and watch the boxes go

Climb into the Montgó natural park behind the town for the view along the coast to Ibiza on a clear day

Walk the Les Rotes coast north of town, which is rock and coves rather than sand

Go into the castle between the town and the port and work out how many periods are in the walls

Dénia sits under the Montgó, a limestone massif rising straight off the sea, with a castle between the town and the port and the Balearics a short crossing away. It is a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, and the thing it is known for is the gamba roja — a deep-water red prawn taken off this stretch of coast, sold at auction in the port and treated with a seriousness that surprises people the first time they see the price. North of the town the Les Rotes coast is rock and small coves; south of it the beach runs for kilometres of sand.