Stand where the four valleys meet and work out why Potes is where it is

Work out the microclimate: a basin ringed by the Picos, warm enough for vines and olives

Taste orujo, distilled from grape marc, and come in November for the festival built round it

Climb the Torre del Infantado in the middle of the town

Drive or walk up to Fuente Dé and take the cable car for the view back down over the whole basin

Potes sits where four valleys meet in the middle of the Liébana, ringed by the Picos de Europa on three sides, reached from the coast only through the twenty-two-kilometre La Hermida gorge. That isolation gives it a microclimate warm enough to grow vines and olives inside a mountain basin. The town is stone bridges, a medieval tower and a market that still works, and the local spirit is orujo, distilled from grape marc, with a festival devoted to it in November.

Potes and the Liébana

Drive the N-621 through all twenty-two kilometres of it and work out that you cannot see the tops of the walls from the road

Stop and look up at limestone faces over 600 metres high

Work out its strategic point: this is the only corridor from the Cantabrian coast into Liébana

Look for vultures and eagles on the updraughts, and chamois on the rock — 6,350 hectares of the gorge is a special protection area for birds

Find out who used this road in the 19th century: British travellers, climbers and hunters on their way to the Picos

The Deva has cut twenty-two kilometres of gorge through the Ándara massif between Panes and Cillorigo de Liébana, which makes it the longest defile in Spain, with near-vertical limestone walls some of them over 600 metres high — so high that from the road you cannot see the top. It is the only way in to Liébana from the Cantabrian coast, which is why the narrow N-621 runs through it. In the 19th century it was the route British travellers, mountaineers and hunters took to get at the Picos de Europa.

La Hermida: The Longest Gorge in Spain

Drive the narrow mountain road into Tresviso, cut into the Picos de Europa cliff face — one of the most remote villages in mainland Spain

Find the natural limestone caves above the village where Picón Bejes-Tresviso is aged for two to four months at 5–10°C

Taste Picón directly from a producer in Tresviso — a blend of cow's, sheep's and goat's milk unique among Spain's blue cheeses

Continue to Bejes, the cheese's other namesake village, on the descent back toward the coast

Picón Bejes-Tresviso is a blue cheese with protected designation since 1994, cured in natural caves in the Picos de Europa exactly as Cabrales in Asturias and Valdeón in León are cured — the same mountain, three names, three appellations. The paste is white with blue-green veining from Penicillium growing in the cave air. Tresviso itself has around fifty inhabitants, and the oddity is that although it is in Cantabria there is no road to it from Cantabria: the only road in comes from Asturias, and reaching the rest of your own region by car means about forty kilometres.

Tresviso: The Cave-Aged Blue Cheese of the Picos

Take the cable car and work out that it gains 753 metres in 1,840 metres of cable

Walk from El Cable towards the Áliva refuge and down to Espinama, which is the classic day

Work out that the walk you have just skipped would have taken several hours

Look for chamois on the rock above the top station, which are used to people

Walk up from Fuente Dé on foot by the canal route instead, if you want to earn it

At the head of the Liébana the mountains simply stop being walkable and become a wall, and a cable car goes up it — 753 metres of vertical in 1,840 metres of cable, from the valley floor to a station called El Cable on the rim. It is the best-known tourist installation in Cantabria and it puts you, in four minutes, in high-mountain terrain that would otherwise be several hours of climbing. From the top you can walk to the Áliva refuge and down into Espinama, or go on into the central massif of the Picos.

Fuente Dé: Seven Hundred Metres Straight Up

Walk up the old path from Poncebos, which is how the village was supplied for centuries

Take the funicular back down and work out what 402 metres of tunnel at 18.19% means

Work out what the funicular changed for fifty people, and what it may also have cost them

Walk up from Bulnes towards the Naranjo de Bulnes for the view of the face

Eat Cabrales in the village that is surrounded by the caves it is cured in

Bulnes has about fifty inhabitants and no road. For centuries the only way in was a steep path up from Poncebos, which is how everything the village used had to arrive. In the 1990s the Principality decided to end that isolation and bored a funicular through the Peña Maín: a tunnel climbing 402 metres at a gradient of 18.19%, opened in 2001, and by 2011 half a million people had used it. You can still walk the old path, and walking it is the point — it tells you what fifty people did every time they needed anything.

Bulnes: A Village Reached Through a Mountain

Go in on the mine train through the old gallery, which is the only way in

Find the helictites — eccentric stalactites that grow sideways instead of down

Find the draperies, translucent sheets of calcite hanging like flags from the roof

Work out how it was found: miners cutting for zinc and lead broke into a cavity that blew air at them, which is what soplao means

Work out the scale of what is behind the lit section: about twenty kilometres of cave, of which four are open

El Soplao was cut into by accident during zinc and lead mining, and soplao was the miners' word for a karst cavity that blew a strong draught when they broke into it. It runs to about twenty kilometres of which four are open, and what makes it exceptional is the formations: helictites — eccentric stalactites that grow sideways and defy gravity — and translucent draperies hanging from the roof. You go in on a mine train, through a working gallery, into a cave the people who found it had no idea was there.

El Soplao: The Cave the Miners Found by Accident

Walk the Ruta del Cares from Caín into the narrowest part of the gorge, along the path cut for the canal, and back

Stop at the Mirador del Tombo above the Cares, opened in 1964, and use its engraved panel to name the peaks

Find the Chorco de los lobos, the stone wolf trap near Caín that was used for centuries

Taste Valdeón, the blue cheese made at Posada de Valdeón

Caín is a hamlet of about seventy people at 460 metres in the Valdeón valley, at the León end of the Cares gorge. The path through the gorge to Poncebos, a little over 12 kilometres, began as the track for the channel feeding a small power station opened at Camarmeña-Poncebos in 1921, and was improved into a footpath between 1945 and 1950; about 300,000 people a year now walk it, and in places it runs along the cliff with an unprotected drop below. Caín's Gregorio Pérez, 'El Cainejo', made the first ascent of the Naranjo de Bulnes with Pedro Pidal on 5 August 1904.

Caín and the Cares Gorge: The Divine Gorge From the León Side

Go to Tazones and find the house with the carved facade marking where Charles I came ashore in 1517

Go into a llagar during pressing season and find out how Asturian cider is actually made

Learn to pour it yourself — from arm's length, a couple of fingers at a time, drunk straight away

Work out why the pour matters and what it is doing to the cider

Get to Rodiles beach at the mouth of the ría, which is one of the best waves in northern Spain

In 1517 a storm pushed the fleet carrying the young Charles I of Spain off course for Santander and put him ashore at Tazones, the fishing port of Villaviciosa — his first landing in the country he had just inherited, in a village he had never heard of. Villaviciosa is the apple capital of Asturias and the centre of the cider industry: llagares pressing the fruit, cider poured from a height to break the surface and drunk immediately, and twenty-eight kilometres of coast behind it with Rodiles among the best surf beaches in northern Spain.

Villaviciosa: The Emperor Landed by Mistake

Find the panel of more than fifty negative hands and work out how they were made

Work out what Dean Snow concluded from the hand proportions, and what that does to the usual assumption

Find the figure read as Corona Borealis, possibly among the oldest star representations known

Work out what the dating means: some of this may be over 40,000 years old

Go into one of the other caves on the same hill — this is a complex, not a single cave

Hermilio Alcalde del Río found the cave of El Castillo at Puente Viesgo in 1903, and it went onto the UNESCO list in July 2008 as part of the Altamira group. Its most striking feature is a panel of more than fifty hands stencilled in negative, some of them possibly over 40,000 years old and therefore among the oldest known paintings anywhere. Dean Snow's analysis of hand proportions concluded that most of them are women's — which undercuts the long-standing assumption that cave artists were men. There is also a figure read as the constellation Corona Borealis, potentially one of the oldest star maps known.