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

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

Go into the wine museum in its 19th-century bodega and stand next to a tinaja three metres high

Work out what a tinaja does that a barrel does not, and why La Mancha used them

Find out what Cencibel and Airén actually are, and how much Airén there is in this one region

Work out the trade: carts of wine up the royal road to Madrid, in volume, for two centuries

Taste a modern Valdepeñas against the reputation and decide whether the reputation is out of date

Valdepeñas was the wine that Madrid actually drank — carted up the royal road in huge quantities from the 18th century onwards, cheap, light and reliable, and fermented in enormous earthenware tinajas that stood two or three metres high. The town's wine museum is in a working 19th-century bodega with the tinajas still in place. The grape is Cencibel, which is Tempranillo again under another local name, with Airén for the whites — Airén being, by planted area, one of the most widely grown white grapes in the world, almost all of it here.

Valdepeñas: The Wine That Fed Madrid

Visit the Museo del Queso Manchego in Manzanares, Ciudad Real

Taste Manchego at three ages side by side: Semicurado (three weeks to four months), Curado (three to six months) and Viejo (one to two years), all made only from Manchega sheep's milk

Look for the embossed woven-esparto pattern on the rind, left by the traditional grass baskets

Buy an artesano Manchego, the label reserved for cheese made from raw milk

Manchego is made only from the milk of Manchega sheep, a breed that can live on the dry plateau of La Mancha, and it is pressed in moulds that leave a herringbone pattern on the rind — the mark of the esparto grass baskets it was traditionally wrapped in. The age is what changes it: semicurado is mild and springy, curado is firmer and nuttier, viejo at one to two years is hard, sharp and crystalline. Tasting the three side by side is the only way to understand why the label matters.

Manzanares: Manchego at Three Ages

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

Stand in the corral de comedias and work out that this is the only complete example of its kind left, in Spain or England

Find out how it survived: banned in the 18th century, turned back into an inn, forgotten, rediscovered in the 1950s

See a play in it during the Festival de Teatro Clásico, which is what the building is actually for

Go to the Museo Nacional del Teatro, put here in 1994 because of the corral

Eat berenjenas de Almagro, the pickled aubergines the town has been known for for centuries

Find the bolillo lacework, the other trade Almagro built its name on

Spain in the 17th century and England in the age of Shakespeare both built open courtyard playhouses. Almagro's corral de comedias, made in 1628 by extending an inn called the Mesón del Toro, is the only one of that kind anywhere that survives complete — and it survives because when the corrales were banned in the 18th century it simply went back to being an inn and nobody knocked it down. It was rediscovered and restored in the 1950s. The town is named from the Arabic for red clay, which is the colour of its arcaded Plaza Mayor.

Almagro: The Only Complete Golden Age Playhouse Left

Find the ducal palace where Ana de Mendoza spent her last years and died in 1592

Find out what happened between Ana de Mendoza and Teresa of Ávila, and why Teresa pulled every nun out of the town

Go into the collegiate church for the four tapestries — eleven metres by four, woven at Tournai, recording Asilah and Tangier in 1471

Work out what makes them unusual: the first tapestry series to narrate contemporary politics in this kind of detail

Walk the two quarters of the town, the old and the ducal, which were laid out separately

Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Éboli by her marriage to Philip II's favourite Ruy Gómez de Silva, was one of the most powerful women in Spain — she and her husband founded two Discalced Carmelite convents here, then fell out so badly with Teresa of Ávila that Teresa ordered every nun out of Pastrana and left her alone in them. Ana died here in 1592. The collegiate church holds four silk and wool tapestries averaging eleven metres by four, woven in the Paschier Grenier workshop at Tournai on the order of Afonso V of Portugal, recording his conquests of Asilah and Tangier in August 1471 — the first tapestry series to narrate contemporary political events in this kind of descriptive detail.

Pastrana: A Princess Under House Arrest

Stand in the middle of the Plaza Mayor and work out that the galleries are seating, not decoration

Work out the three uses it was built for: market, religious drama and bulls

Find the Hospitaller gateway and work out what the order was doing in a town on this road

Work out why the town is where it is — the old royal road from Madrid to Andalusia runs through it

Come when the square is in use rather than empty, which is when it makes sense

Tembleque's Plaza Mayor is a rectangle ringed on three levels by open wooden galleries on stone columns, built in the 17th century, and it is the finest surviving example of the Manchegan plaza — a form designed as a multi-purpose space for markets, religious drama and bulls, with the galleries as the seating. It is still used for all three. The town also has a Hospitaller priory gateway and it sits on the old royal road from Madrid to Andalusia, which is why a village this size has a square this good.