Go into the Monastery of Santa Clara, where Columbus kept an all-night vigil after the Niña came home

Find out who the Niño brothers were, and which ship of the three was theirs

Go to the Casa Museo Zenobia y Juan Ramón Jiménez and read a page of Platero y yo where it is set

Work out that a town this size supplied a ship, its officers and much of its crew to the 1492 voyage

Walk the streets named in the book and find how much of Moguer is still recognisable from it

Two quite different things came out of this small Huelva town. The Niño brothers of Moguer owned the caravel La Niña, fitted her out in Moguer harbour in July 1492, sailed on her — Juan as master, Francisco as pilot — and talked most of the town's sailors into signing on. And Juan Ramón Jiménez was born here, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956, and wrote Platero y yo, which is about a man walking round this town with a donkey, and which generations of Spanish children have read.

Moguer: The Niña, and Platero

Go into the monastery and work out what the friars here actually did for Columbus's project

Find the room where the plan was argued over, and who else in this building backed it

Go down to the Muelle de las Carabelas and aboard the replicas of the three ships

Work out who else passed through here — Cortés, Sandoval and Pizarro, coming back

Do the rest of the Lugares Colombinos: Palos de la Frontera and Moguer, both within a few kilometres

Columbus came to this Franciscan house at Palos de la Frontera years before he sailed, when his project was being turned down everywhere, and the friars here took him in and argued his case. Hernán Cortés, Gonzalo de Sandoval and Francisco Pizarro all came here too, on their way back. The building went up in the 14th and 15th centuries, though the order's own 16th-century historian dated the foundation to 1261 and tradition puts St Francis himself here with twelve disciples. It is the heart of the Lugares Colombinos, with the Palos quay and Moguer a short way off.

La Rábida: The Monastery That Argued for Columbus

Walk the wall circuit — about two kilometres of rammed earth and brick with fifty towers

Find the five gates and work out which is Roman and which Muslim work

Work out what the taifa of Niebla was: independent from 1234, reaching to Cape St Vincent, and still holding out after Córdoba and Seville had gone

Cross the old bridge over the Tinto and look at the colour of the water coming down from the mines

Go into the church of Santa María de la Granada, which was a mosque and before that a Visigothic church

Niebla has about two kilometres of almost complete wall in rammed earth and brick, with fifty towers and five gates, wrapped round a small town above the Tinto — the same red river that comes down from the mines. It was capital of a cora under the caliphate and then of the taifa of Niebla, which in 1234 recovered its independence under Abenmahfot and ran from the mouth of the Guadalquivir to Cape St Vincent, taking in much of what is now the Algarve — and held out against Castile for decades after Córdoba and Seville had fallen. Alfonso X finally took it in 1262 after a nine-month siege.

Niebla: Roman, Muslim and Still Walled

Take a guided 4x4 safari through Doñana National Park, the 543km² reserve UNESCO listed as a World Heritage Site in 1994

Walk the trails and bird observatories from the El Acebuche visitor centre

Look for the Iberian lynx and the Spanish imperial eagle among the park's more than 300 bird species

Visit El Rocío, the village that draws about a million pilgrims to its annual pilgrimage

Doñana is where the Guadalquivir meets the Atlantic — 543 square kilometres of marsh, shifting dunes and pine and cork woodland, and the most important wetland in Europe for migrating birds, sitting on the route between Europe and Africa beside the Strait of Gibraltar, with over 300 species recorded annually and up to 200,000 waterfowl wintering in the marshes. It is also a stronghold of the Iberian lynx and the Spanish imperial eagle, both of which came very close to disappearing. The park is under constant pressure from aquifer extraction for strawberry farming, which is the fight that decides whether it survives.

Doñana: The Marshes Between Europe and Africa

Stand at the water and look at a river with a pH of under 3 that is full of life

Work out what lives in it — acidophile organisms that eat minerals, some of them endemic to this river

Find out why NASA studies this valley and what it has to do with Mars

Look into Corta Atalaya, at one time the largest open-cast mine in Europe

Ride the restored Riotinto mining railway, built by the Rio Tinto Company Limited to get ore to Huelva

Find the English quarter the British company built for its managers and engineers from 1873 onwards

The Tinto runs deep red with a pH between 1.7 and 2.7 and a heavy load of iron, copper, cadmium and manganese — the product of weathering pyrite and chalcopyrite in the ore bodies along it. Nothing should live in that, and yet it is full of acidophile micro-organisms, prokaryote and eukaryote both, including fungi and algae endemic to the river, which feed on minerals alone. NASA picked it as a habitat to study for its possible resemblance to conditions on Mars. Above it sits Corta Atalaya, once the largest open-cast mine in Europe.

Río Tinto: The River NASA Studies to Understand Mars

Walk the trails of the Castro Marim Nature Reserve, the salt marsh and salt pans on the Guadiana, and look for flamingos and avocets

Buy flor de sal at the salt pans of Castro Marim

Watch birds of prey migrating over Sagres and Cabo de São Vicente in autumn, at the Sagres bird festival in October, if in season

Visit Castro Marim Castle, the 13th-century fortress above the salt marsh

Watch flamingos in the Castro Marim salt marsh and raptors migrating over Sagres

Castro Marim and Sagres: Algarve Birding

Kayak the Guadiana from Alcoutim downstream toward Vila Real de Santo António, on the river that forms the border with Spain

Take the small ferry across the Guadiana from Alcoutim to Sanlúcar de Guadiana in Spain

Walk the grid of Vila Real de Santo António, the town laid out on a Pombaline plan in 1774, at the river's mouth

Paddle the Guadiana border river past Spanish villages down to the Pombaline town of Vila Real de Santo António