Climb to the castle of the Order of Santiago on the cone above the village

Find the Arab bath house in the village, which is still standing and still recognisable

Find out who Jorge Manrique was and read the Coplas where he was born

Look out over the largest protected area in Spain and work out how far you can actually see

Find the rectangular bullring below the village, which is not the shape bullrings are

Segura de la Sierra stands at over 1,100 metres on a cone of rock inside the Cazorla, Segura and Las Villas natural park, with a castle of the Order of Santiago on the summit and an Arab bath house still standing in the village below. Jorge Manrique, who wrote the Coplas on the death of his father — one of the great poems in Spanish — was born here. The park around it is the largest protected area in Spain, and from the village you can see a very long way into it.

Segura de la Sierra: A Village at the Head of Two Rivers

Go round the old works and work out what the site had to have: water, timber, calamine and copper, all in one valley

Find out who Juan Jorge Graubner was and what Charles III gave him permission to build in 1772

Walk up to the Nacimiento del Río Mundo and see a river come straight out of a cliff

Find out what the reventón is and what conditions have to line up for it

Walk the Calares del Mundo y de la Sima park above, which is the limestone country the water comes through

In 1772 Charles III gave royal permission to the Austrian engineer Juan Jorge Graubner to build brass works at Riópar — the Reales Fábricas de Bronce y Latón de San Juan de Alcaraz, the first brass and bronze factory in Spain and the second in Europe after Goslar in Germany. The site was chosen for what it had beside it: running water, timber, and a calamine deposit for the zinc, with copper for the alloy. A whole industrial village grew with it and worked for two centuries. Above the village the Mundo river comes out of the mountain at the Nacimiento del Río Mundo, a cave mouth in a limestone cirque with a waterfall dropping from it, which in the right conditions blows out in a phenomenon called the reventón.

Riópar: A Royal Brass Factory in the Sierra

Walk up the Borosa from the fish farm through the narrows of the Cerrada de Elías

Pass the waterfalls of the Salto de los Órganos

Go through the tunnels at about 1,500 metres to the reservoir of Aguas Negras

Reach the lagoon of Valdeazores at the top of the walk

The Borosa is a small river, eleven kilometres long, that rises in the Sierra de Cazorla and joins the Guadalquivir above the Tranco reservoir, and the path up it is one of the best-known walks in the Sierras de Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas. From the fish farm at the bottom it climbs past the pools of the Charco de la Cuna and the Gracea, through the narrows of the Cerrada de Elías and the stone bridges of Puente Piedra and Puente Toba, below the falls of the Salto de los Órganos and through tunnels at about 1,500 metres to the reservoir of Aguas Negras and the lagoon of Valdeazores, where the streams meet.

The Río Borosa: Gorges, Tunnels and Two Mountain Lakes

Stand in the roofless shell of Vandelvira's Santa María and work out what happened to the roof

Climb to the Castillo de la Yedra above the town

Drive up to the source of the Guadalquivir and work out how small the biggest river in Andalusia starts

Look for Spanish ibex and red deer in the valleys above the town

Work out the scale of what starts here: the largest protected area in Spain

Cazorla is wedged against a cliff at the mouth of the Sierras de Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas — the largest protected area in Spain and the second largest in Europe. The town has a Moorish castle on the rock above and, in the middle of it, the roofless shell of Santa María, a church by Andrés de Vandelvira that a flood wrecked in the 17th century and which is now used as a venue with the sky for a ceiling. The Guadalquivir rises a short way up the valley.

Cazorla: The Gateway to the Largest Park in Spain

Go into the convent of Santo Domingo and find Quevedo's connection with the town

Read the opening line of Don Quixote and then find out why Francisco Parra Luna's Complutense team put it here in 2004

Work out how contested that claim is, and which other towns say the same thing

Walk the Plaza Mayor and the Renaissance streets around it

Read something of Quevedo where he died, and work out what he was actually like

Villanueva de los Infantes was a serious cultural centre of the Golden Age — Quevedo, Cervantes and Lope de Vega are all associated with it, along with Thomas of Villanova and the humanist Bartolomé Jiménez Patón. It was declared a historic-artistic ensemble in 1974, and in 2004 a Complutense team led by the sociologist Francisco Parra Luna — himself from the town — concluded that this is the unnamed lugar de la Mancha that Cervantes refuses to identify in the first line of Don Quixote. The claim is contested, which is half the fun of it.

Villanueva de los Infantes: Where Quevedo Died

Stand at the Mirador del Diablo above the village and look down at the Mundo gorge

Walk the village and work out that the houses are built against the cliff rather than on ground

Watch Amanece, que no es poco before you come and then find where it was shot

Swim in the Mundo below the village, which is what the gorge is for in summer

Drive on into the Sierra del Segura, which is empty in a way most of Spain no longer is

Ayna is built onto the wall of the Mundo river gorge in the Sierra del Segura, a long way in every sense from the flat Mancha most people picture when they think of Albacete province. Houses are stacked against the rock with the river far below and the cliffs going up behind. It was the location for the 1985 film Amanece, que no es poco, which has become a genuine cult object in Spain, and the village has leaned into it. The whole Sierra del Segura here is gorge, pine forest and water, and it is one of the least-visited corners of the country.

Ayna: The Switzerland of La Mancha

Book a guided visit to the Cañaica del Calar or Fuente del Sabuco shelters

Work out what Levantine rock art is and why the 1998 listing covers so many separate sites

Come at Easter for the tamborada, part of the same UNESCO inscription as Hellín's

Drive up into the Sierra de Moratalla, which is among the emptiest country in the south-east

Moratalla is one of the largest municipalities in Spain by area and one of the emptiest, running up into the Sierra de Moratalla in the far north-west of Murcia. Its rock shelters hold Levantine paintings that are part of the Rock Art of the Mediterranean Basin on the Iberian Peninsula, listed by UNESCO in 1998 — the Cañaica del Calar and Fuente del Sabuco among them. The town itself climbs to a castle keep, and the drum festival at Easter is part of the same UNESCO tamboradas inscription as Hellín.

Moratalla: Rock Art and Empty Sierra

Get to the Mirador de las Peñas and work out what National Geographic was looking at in 2015

Go into the Iglesia de la Encarnación, a round neoclassical church built on the model of the Pantheon

Climb to the Nasrid castle on the rock and find the church the Catholic Monarchs put inside it

Work out what the name means and whether the village lives up to it in January

Eat the local cheese and the morcilla, which is what the inland Granada kitchen runs on

In October 2015 National Geographic put Montefrío on a list of the ten best village views in the world, and the reason is a single composition: a round neoclassical church in the middle of the town, modelled on the Pantheon, with a Nasrid castle on a bare rock directly above it, and white houses filling everything between. The Catholic Monarchs built a church inside the castle after taking it, as they generally did. The name means exactly what it looks like — cold mountain.

Montefrío: Ten Best Views in the World

Walk the excavated streets inside the walls and work out that this was the whole town, not a garrison

Work out the dates: besieged 1340, starved into surrender 1341, front line until 1492, then gradually abandoned because it was no longer needed

Go into the abbey church and look down through the glass floor at the graves under it

Climb the keep for the view towards Granada, which is what this place was watching

Work out why the town moved downhill and what that tells you about what walls were for

Alfonso XI besieged Alcalá la Real in 1340 and it capitulated to hunger in 1341, becoming from then until 1492 one of Castile's principal frontier posts facing the Nasrid kingdom of Granada — and Castile paid for it generously, adding works such as the Torre Nueva. The whole medieval town lived inside the walls; once Granada fell, the fortress was let go and the population drifted down to the suburbs on the plain, so what you walk through now is the excavated street plan of a town that emptied itself. The church inside has a glass floor over the burials beneath it.