Work out the dating from the coats of arms — the third wife of 1472 is not on the building anywhere

Find where the design accommodates artillery, which was a new problem in the 1450s

Work out that this is a palace as much as a fortress, and where one becomes the other

Find out who Eugenia de Montijo was and why an empress of the French restored a castle in Cuenca

Go down to the collegiate church in the village, which Hanequín de Bruselas also worked on

Juan Pacheco, first Marquis of Villena, started this castle on the Cerro de San Cristóbal in 1455 and the work ran to about 1468 — you can date it from the heraldry, because his third wife, married in 1472, appears nowhere in it. Hanequín de Bruselas was the architect, and Juan Guas probably finished it. It was built as a fortress-palace and specifically adapted for the coming of artillery, which was a new problem at the time. Eugenia de Montijo, empress of the French, inherited the house of Villena and restored it.

Belmonte: A Castle Built for Artillery

Go into the Casa de Dulcinea and work out what a 16th-century Manchegan house actually contained

Find the library of Don Quixote in over sixty languages and see which heads of state sent which

Read the chapter where Quixote and Sancho get lost in these streets at night, standing in them

Work out the oddity: a real village living with the identity of a character who was herself imagined by a character

Walk out into the vines and olives around it, which is what the Mancha actually looks like

Cervantes gave Don Quixote's imagined lady a home village, and it is this one — Dulcinea del Toboso, in a place that already existed and has been living with it ever since. The town has a Casa de Dulcinea, a 16th-century Manchegan house furnished as she might have kept it, and a library of Don Quixote in more than sixty languages, many of them presented by heads of state. There is also a chapter in the book where Quixote and Sancho blunder about these streets at night unable to find the house, which is worth reading in situ.

El Toboso: Dulcinea's Village

Sit in the theatre and find out which local family paid for it and what they had made their money from

Work out what lapis specularis was and why translucent gypsum was worth that much to Rome

Walk the amphitheatre and the forum, both finished by the end of Vespasian's reign

Go to one of the lapis specularis mines in the area and see where the sheets came out of the ground

Work out what happened to the town — the population simply moved three kilometres to Saelices, next to the spring

Pliny records that Segóbriga mined lapis specularis — translucent selenite gypsum, split into sheets and used as window glazing across the Roman world. It made the town rich enough that some local families put senators into Rome. Manius Octavius Novatus, son of a praefectus fabrum of the same name, paid for the theatre; his cognomen survives in the place name Noheda, where his family's villa was. By the end of Vespasian's reign the theatre and amphitheatre were finished and the town was fully integrated into the empire. After the reconquest the population moved three kilometres north to Saelices.

Segóbriga: The Town That Glazed Rome's Windows

Walk the Sierra de los Molinos and find the Burleta, the Infanto and the Sardinero — the three that are genuinely 16th century

Go inside a working mill and watch the mechanism turn the sails into stone on grain

Read chapter eight of Don Quixote standing where it is set

Walk down into the Albaicín quarter below the ridge, whitewashed with blue paintwork

Come at sunset, when the mills and the plain do the thing everyone comes for

Don Quixote charges the windmills in chapter eight, and the ridge above Campo de Criptana is where Cervantes is held to have got them. Ten mills stand on the Sierra de los Molinos, and three of them — the Burleta, the Infanto and the Sardinero — are 16th-century originals rather than reconstructions. The town runs down the slope beneath them from the Albaicín quarter, whitewashed with blue doors. It is the single most recognisable image of La Mancha, and it is worth working out what a windmill of that date actually did.

Campo de Criptana: The Giants

Go into the monastery begun on 7 May 1529 and find the Plateresque east wing, which was built first

Work out what Caput Ordinis meant and what the Order of Santiago ran from this hill

Find the older Muslim and military fabric underneath the Renaissance building

Look at the carved wooden ceiling in the refectory, which is the thing people come for

Find out where the Camino de Uclés starts and how long it takes to walk

Alfonso VIII gave the castle at Uclés to the Order of Santiago in 1174, and it became the Caput Ordinis — the head of the order, its most important house anywhere. The present monastery was begun on 7 May 1529, under Charles I, starting with the Plateresque east wing, on a hill above the village with the older Muslim and military fabric underneath and around it. It gets called the Escorial of La Mancha. The Camino de Uclés, a pilgrimage route from the church of Santiago in Madrid, ends here.

Uclés: The Escorial of La Mancha

Walk in through the successive gates strung along the neck and work out that there is no other way in

Look down at the Júcar and work out how nearly the loop closes

Work out why the place was called impregnable, and that Alfonso VIII still took it in 1184

Go into the 8th-century Muslim castle at the end of the spur, a parador since 1966

Count the churches in a village of a few hundred people and work out what that implies

The Júcar loops almost completely round the promontory Alarcón stands on, which made the place effectively impregnable — the castle is Muslim work of the 8th century and Alfonso VIII took it in 1184. The way in is still through successive gates strung along the neck of the meander. The castle at the point of the spur opened as a parador in 1966 and is now what the town largely lives on. The village inside the walls has a few hundred people and four churches, which tells you what size it used to be.

Alarcón: A Fortress in a River Loop

Walk between several of the sixteen lagoons and find the tufa barriers each one spills over

Work out how the barriers formed: the water itself deposits the rock that dams it

Go down into the Cueva de Montesinos, which Cervantes lowers Don Quixote into

Find the castle of Peñarroya and the ruins of Rochafrida inside the park

Swim in one of the permitted lagoons, and work out why swimming is not permitted in all of them

Sixteen pools run down the valley of the Guadiana Viejo, separated and connected by barriers of tufa and travertine that the water itself has deposited, so each lagoon spills into the next over a natural dam of its own making. They are a natural park spread across five municipalities in a landscape that has almost no other surface water. Inside the park are the castle of Peñarroya, the ruins of Rochafrida, and the Cueva de Montesinos, the cave Don Quixote is lowered into in the novel.

The Lagunas de Ruidera

Walk the castle enclosure and work out how much ground it actually covers

Work out the political story: Aragonese in 1128, Castilian, Almoravid, then an independent lordship from about 1139

Drive into the Alto Tajo and find the river canyons, which are among the deepest in inland Spain

Find out what the proposed Molina-Alto Tajo geopark covers — seventy municipalities and over four thousand square kilometres

Find the Romanesque bridge and the Torre de Aragón above the town

Alfonso I of Aragon took Molina in 1128; his brother Ramiro II handed the lands to Castile; the Almoravids took them back; and around 1139 Manrique de Lara took them again and made the place an independent lordship with himself as its first lord. The Señorío de Molina kept a separate identity for centuries and the town still uses the name. Its castle is one of the largest in Spain by enclosed area. It sits beside the Alto Tajo natural park, one of the greatest concentrations of river canyons in inland Iberia, and inside a proposed geopark covering seventy municipalities and 4,186 square kilometres.

Molina de Aragón: A Lordship of Its Own

Count the bridges over the Negro — there are seven in a town of this size

Walk up to the cemetery on the headland and work out why it gets called one of the best-sited anywhere

Find Severo Ochoa's grave and find out what he got the Nobel Prize for in 1959

Watch the fleet unload and eat what comes off it

Walk out to the lighthouse and the chapel on the point above the harbour

Luarca is built down both sides of the Negro river where it meets the sea in western Asturias, with seven bridges across it and a working fishing harbour at the bottom. Severo Ochoa, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959 for work on the synthesis of RNA and DNA, was born here and is buried in the cemetery on the cliff above the town — which is often called one of the most spectacularly sited cemeteries anywhere, on a headland with the Cantabrian sea on three sides.