Stand in front of Oteiza's facade and count the apostles — there are fourteen, which is two too many

Work out why the frieze is at road level: the facade starts below the path you arrive on

Find Chillida's doors and then Lucio Muñoz's apse inside

Go down into the crypt for Basterretxea's wall paintings

Work out what it means that a religious building of 1950 was given to the artists it was given to

In April 1950 the Franciscan provincial proposed a new basilica at Arantzazu, high in the Gipuzkoan mountains, and the job went to the architects Sáenz de Oíza and Luis Laorga. What is remarkable is who else worked on it: Jorge Oteiza carved the main facade, with a frieze of fourteen apostles set at road level because the front starts below the path; Eduardo Chillida made the main doors; Lucio Muñoz painted the apse; Néstor Basterretxea did the crypt walls and Xabier Egaña the murals. It is effectively the Basque avant-garde of the 20th century working on one building.

Arantzazu: A Basilica Built by the Basque Avant-Garde

Go into the Sancti Spiritus university building, founded by papal bull in 1540 and closed in 1842

Work out what five faculties in a Gipuzkoan town of this size actually meant

Find out what conditions the town attached to joining Gipuzkoa in 1540

Go into the Arrikrutz cave under the town

Drive up the valley to Arantzazu, which is the other half of a day here

In 1540 Bishop Rodrigo Mercado de Zuazola founded the University of Sancti Spiritus at Oñati by bull of Paul III — the first university in the Basque Country, with faculties of law, canons, arts, medicine and theology, running until it closed in 1842. The town negotiated its own annexation to Gipuzkoa in 1540 on conditions including a road and an increased endowment for the university. It was a Carlist stronghold in the 19th century and the Pretender's headquarters. The Arrikrutz cave beneath it is open, and Arantzazu is up the valley.

Oñati: The First University in the Basque Country

Tour the Idiazabal Cheese Interpretation Centre and taste raw-milk Latxa sheep cheese, D.O. since 1987

Find the reconstructed shepherd's txabola hut inside the museum

Drive the short pastoral route to the Ecomuseum of Pastoreo in Telleriarte

Buy a wheel of naturally smoked Idiazabal directly from a producer along the route

Idiazabal has been a protected designation since 1 October 1987, and the rules are strict: raw, unpasteurised sheep's milk only, and only from the latxa and carranzana breeds. It takes around seven litres of that milk to make a kilo of properly matured cheese. About five hundred farms and more than a hundred dairies work under the appellation, most of them making the cheese from their own flock alone. The smoked version, which is what most people picture, started as a by-product of curing cheese in shepherds' huts with a fire in them. In 1995 it took first prize at Parma as the best European sheep's cheese.

Idiazabal: The Shepherd's Cheese Route

Ride or walk a vía verde end to end and notice that the gradient never really changes

Work out why: the route is a railway grade, and a steam locomotive could not pull anything steeper

Go through the tunnels and over the viaducts, which are the original railway structures

Find the old station buildings on the route and see what they have been turned into

Work out which line this was, when it closed, and what it was carrying

Spain closed a great many branch lines and mining railways in the 20th century, and rather than let the trackbeds go the country turned them into the Vías Verdes — surfaced, waymarked routes for walking, cycling and riding, on grades no steeper than a steam locomotive could pull. That constraint is the point: they are almost flat, they go through the tunnels and over the viaducts the engineers built, and they make otherwise serious terrain accessible to anyone. The Ferrocarriles Vascongados route runs 13.6 kilometres between Soraluze-Placencia de las Armas and Anzuola.

Vías Verdes: Riding Spain's Abandoned Railways

Go into the Santa Casa, the original tower house, still standing inside the Baroque sanctuary built round it

Find the room where Ignatius convalesced and work out what was and was not available to read in it

Work out what happened at Pamplona in 1521 and how a broken leg redirected a religious order

Walk the Baroque basilica outside and compare its scale with the house at its centre

Work out why the Jesuits enclosed the house rather than replacing it

Íñigo López de Loyola was a soldier until a cannonball smashed his leg at Pamplona in 1521. Convalescing in his family's tower house at Azpeitia with nothing to read but a life of Christ and a book of saints, he changed direction entirely and became Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. In the 17th century the family house was enclosed inside a vast Baroque sanctuary, so that the original stone tower still stands intact in the middle of the newer building — the room where he read is still there.

Loyola: Where Ignatius Was Converted

Get to a village festival where aizkolaris are cutting and time a round yourself

Watch a harrijasotzaile lift and work out that the count, not the single lift, is the contest

Find out what palanka is and that the bar started out as a mining tool

Work out the role of the bet — these are not exhibitions, money is on them and always has been

See a pelota match in a village fronton afterwards, which is the other half of Basque sport

Herri kirolak are farm and quarry jobs turned into contests, and what holds the whole thing together is the bet. Aizkolaris chop through stacked logs against the clock. Harrijasotzaileak lift cylindrical and cubic stones of enormous weight, repeatedly. Teams pull on a rope in sokatira. The iron bar thrown in palanka started life as a mining tool, and in the old days the bets were settled in a meadow outside the village with no standardised weight — only the requirement that everyone in that particular wager used the same one.

Basque Rural Sports: Competitive Work

Cycle or walk the full Anillo Verde circuit round the edge of the city

Go to the Salburua wetlands, one of the most important breeding sites for waterbirds in the Basque Country, with around two hundred species recorded

Come in autumn for the deer rut at Salburua — the animals were introduced in the late 1990s and the berrea now happens inside the city boundary

Walk the medieval almond — the old town's concentric streets running round the hill

Work out what forty-two square metres of green space per inhabitant means when you are standing in the middle of it

Vitoria-Gasteiz was the European Green Capital in 2012, and the reason is the Anillo Verde — a ring of restored parks and wetlands right round the edge of the city, made mostly out of degraded ground: old gravel pits, drained marsh, industrial land. Counting it, Vitoria has about forty-two square metres of green space per inhabitant, among the highest in Europe. Salburua inside the ring is one of the most important sites in the Basque Country for breeding waterbirds, with around two hundred species, plus European mink and red deer introduced in the late 1990s whose autumn rut now draws people out of the city. Inside the ring is a medieval almond-shaped old town built in concentric streets on a hill.

Vitoria-Gasteiz: The Green Ring

Check the tide and walk the causeway across to the island of San Nicolás

Go into the basilica of Santa María and look at the altarpiece, among the largest in Spain

Watch the boats come in and work out what a working Basque fishing port still looks like

Find out what the Antzar Eguna in September is and how it is done now

Walk the coast path along the cliffs either side of the town

Lekeitio has two beaches with the island of San Nicolás between them, and at low tide a stone causeway comes out of the water so you can walk across to it. The town is a working fishing port with a late Gothic basilica whose altarpiece is one of the largest in Spain. Its September festival includes the Antzar Eguna, in which crews in boats grab at a goose suspended over the harbour — now done with a dead bird, having been done otherwise for a very long time, which is the sort of thing Basque coastal towns do not apologise for.