Walk the 46,000 square metres of the enclosure and work out that it is a monastery and a fortress at once

Work out who built it: prisoners taken at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, working from 1213 to 1217

Look across at Salvatierra opposite and work out why this hill was chosen over that one

Go into the church and find the rose window, which is the best thing in the building

Find out what a military order actually was, and what the Order of Calatrava ran from here

After the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 the knights of Calatrava built themselves a new headquarters on a hill in Ciudad Real, between 1213 and 1217 — 46,000 square metres of fortress and convent, put up largely by prisoners taken in that battle. It became the seat of the order and one of the most important fortresses in Castile. It faces the castle of Salvatierra across the valley, which the Muslims had retaken in 1211 and which did not come back to Christian hands until 1226; that is precisely why this hill mattered.

Calatrava la Nueva: Built by Prisoners of War

Find a hervidero and work out that the water is bubbling from gas rather than heat

Go to a maar — a crater blasted out by steam rather than built up by lava — and work out the difference

Go up Cerro Gordo, which is the volcano this region is usually shown by

Look at the black volcanic soil in the fields and work out where the vines are planted on it

Work out why almost nobody knows La Mancha is volcanic

Almost nobody knows that La Mancha has a volcanic field. The Campo de Calatrava is a volcanic region of cones and lagoons in the middle of Ciudad Real province, and Cerro Gordo is the one everyone is sent to. Carbon dioxide still comes up through the ground in places, in cold gas springs the locals call hervideros, where the water appears to boil without being anywhere near warm — which is the clearest sign that this field is geologically recent rather than finished.

Almagro to Valdepeñas: The Campo de Calatrava Volcanoes

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

Sit out at first light on the Jándula road, which is where the sightings happen

Work out how to tell a lynx from a wildcat at distance — the ear tufts, the ruff and the tail

Look for Spanish imperial eagle and black vulture, both of which breed here

Find out what nearly finished the lynx off, and what brought it back

Come in the mating season in winter, when the animals move most and call at night

The Iberian lynx came within a few hundred animals of extinction and the Sierra de Andújar in north-west Jaén is its principal reserve — an almost perfect equilateral triangle of dehesa and Mediterranean scrub across the municipalities of Andújar, Baños de la Encina, Marmolejo and Villanueva de la Reina, with the Jándula running through it. Alongside the lynx the park holds wolves, mongoose, wildcat, otter, black vulture and Spanish imperial eagle, plus red deer, fallow deer, mouflon and boar. It is one of the densest concentrations of rare mammals and raptors in Europe.

Sierra de Andújar: The Iberian Lynx Stronghold

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

Walk the boardwalks out across the tablas and work out what a tabla fluvial actually is

Work out why it forms here: two rivers meeting on flat ground with almost nowhere to drain

Count wildfowl from the hides — over two thousand species live in the park

Find out what happened to the aquifer underneath and what the 2007 complaint to UNESCO said

Decide for yourself whether a wetland that depends on groundwater can survive irrigated farming around it

Tablas fluviales form where a river spills over its own banks in its middle course on almost flat ground with nowhere to drain, and Las Tablas de Daimiel — at the meeting of the Guadiana and the Cigüela — is one of the last surviving examples of that ecosystem anywhere. Over two thousand species live in it. It is also in serious trouble: the aquifer underneath has been over-pumped for irrigation for decades, and in 2007 four conservation organisations complained to UNESCO that La Mancha Húmeda and Daimiel in particular had degraded to the point of losing the values they were listed for.

Las Tablas de Daimiel: A Wetland Being Drained

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

Be in the street for a tamborada and work out what twenty-five thousand drums at once actually does to you

Find out what the black smock and red neckerchief mean and where the costume comes from

Be there for the climb to the Calvario in the first hours of Good Friday, which is the set piece

Find out what UNESCO inscribed in 2018, and that Tobarra, Moratalla and Mula do the same thing

Borrow or hire a drum and join in, which is the point — this is not a spectator event

For several days over Easter the town of Hellín beats drums, continuously, in the street, in enormous numbers — around twenty-five thousand drummers, individually and in peñas, drumming through the night and into the following day until their hands bleed, which is not a metaphor. One of the set pieces is the climb to the Calvario in the first hours of Good Friday. It is one of a cluster of Spanish Holy Week drum towns, and it is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list as part of the Tamboradas ritual drum-playing inscription of 2018. Standing inside it is physically overwhelming in a way that no recording conveys.

Hellín: Twenty Thousand Drums

Go underground into the workings and work out what mercury mining actually did to the people doing it

Learn the Arabic words still used here — azogue, jabeca, aludel — and what each one means

Work out the chain: mercury from here refined American silver, and American silver paid for the empire

Find out what the Real Cárcel de Forzados of 1754 was for and who was in it

Find out that penal labour detachments were still working here in the 1940s

Work out why UNESCO listed Almadén and Idrija together in 2012

Almadén sits on the largest cinnabar reserves in the world, and they were being worked when Strabo, Vitruvius and Pliny wrote about them. The Arabic vocabulary still used in the mines — azogue for mercury, jabeca for the furnace, aludel for the pipe, and almadén itself, meaning the mine — records who ran them next. Mercury was essential to the silver refining that funded the Spanish empire, and the work was done substantially by convicts: the Real Cárcel de Forzados was built here in 1754, and penal labour detachments were still operating in the 1940s. UNESCO listed the mines in 2012 alongside Idrija in Slovenia.