Go into one of the cave houses under the old quarter, which are cut into the rock and still occupied

Climb to the castle and find out what the keep was used for in the 19th century

Work out the reversal: Chinchilla was the town and Albacete the village, and then it went the other way

Walk the Plaza de la Mantelería and the 16th-century streets around it

Look out over the Albacete plain and work out why anyone put a town on this particular hill

Chinchilla sits on a hill above the Albacete plain and was the important town here long before Albacete was anything — it gave its name to the whole district. Under the old quarter is a network of cave houses cut into the soft rock, still lived in, and above it a castle with a keep that later served as a military prison. The Plaza de la Mantelería and the streets round it are a compact 16th-century ensemble that has survived because the town stopped growing when Albacete took over.

Chinchilla de Montearagón: A Town Over Its Own Caves

Stand on the bridge and look up at a village built into the wall of a river meander

Climb to the Almohad castle of the 12th or 13th century on the rock above the houses

Go into one of the cave houses and find the ones that go right through the ridge and out the other side

Work out what the name means and what it tells you about who built the place

Walk or swim the Júcar below the village, which is what the gorge is for in summer

The Júcar has cut a meander so tight into the Albacete plateau that the village of Alcalá del Júcar is built on both the inside of the bend and up its wall, with an Almohad castle of the 12th or 13th century on the crag above. The houses are pushed back into the soft rock — some of them run right through the ridge and come out as windows on the far side — and several of the cave houses are open to go into. The name is from the Arabic for castle: the castle of the river Júcar.

Alcalá del Júcar: A Village Dug Into a Gorge

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

Climb up to the castle on its crag above the town

Find Juan Pacheco's coat of arms on the vault keystones and on the four faces of the keep

Walk the barbican and the round towers he added between 1449 and 1454

Visit the interpretation centre at the foot of the castle on the battle of 25 April 1707

Almansa's castle stands on a crag above the town. Its oldest walls, of rammed earth, were long taken for Almohad work, but tests during the 2008 restoration dated them to the first decades of Christian rule, around 1300; Don Juan Manuel rebuilt it in the 14th century, and Juan Pacheco, second Marquis of Villena, gave it its present shape between 1449 and 1454, with the keep, the round towers and the barbican, his arms carved on the vault keystones and on all four faces of the keep. On 25 April 1707, on the plain below, the Duke of Berwick's army for Philip V beat the forces of Archduke Charles in one of the great battles of the War of the Spanish Succession.

Almansa: The Castle on the Rock and the Battle of 1707

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

Go into the municipal archaeological museum and find out which pieces are still there after the theft of 27 August 2026

Work out why the iron pieces matter: the oldest found in Spain, from when iron was still a precious metal

Find out who José María Soler García was and what he found near this town in 1963

Climb to the Atalaya castle on the hill above the town

Come for the Moros y Cristianos, which is one of the biggest in the Valencian country

The Villena archaeologist José María Soler García found the treasure in 1963: fifty-nine objects in gold, silver, iron and amber weighing almost ten kilos, the most important gold vessel hoard in Spain and the second in Europe after the royal tombs at Mycenae. Its iron pieces are the oldest found in Spain, from a period when iron was still a precious metal worth hoarding. On the night of 27 August 2026 much of it was stolen — mostly the gold, with several silver pieces left behind — so check what is actually on display before you go.

Villena: A Bronze Age Hoard of Gold

Come in late February or March for the floración and get to a mirador above the valley floor

Work out the scale: tens of thousands of stone-fruit trees flowering within a couple of weeks of each other

Go to Medina Siyâsa above the town, an excavated Andalusi settlement with reconstructed houses

Find the rock art in the Almadenes gorge, part of the Levantine rock art World Heritage listing

Canoe or walk the Segura through the Almadenes cut

Cieza sits on the middle Segura where the river cuts through the Murcian hills, and it grows peaches, nectarines and apricots on terraces across the whole valley floor and up the slopes. For two to three weeks in late February and March the entire valley flowers at once — tens of thousands of trees in pink and white against bare rock — and the town has built a set of viewpoints and marked routes specifically to look at it. The rest of the year the same valley holds Iberian rock art in the Almadenes gorge and a Muslim town site at Medina Siyâsa.

Cieza: The Blossom of the Segura Valley

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.