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 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

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

Book a guided visit to the Cañaica del Calar or Fuente del Sabuco shelters

Work out what Levantine rock art is and why the 1998 listing covers so many separate sites

Come at Easter for the tamborada, part of the same UNESCO inscription as Hellín's

Drive up into the Sierra de Moratalla, which is among the emptiest country in the south-east

Moratalla is one of the largest municipalities in Spain by area and one of the emptiest, running up into the Sierra de Moratalla in the far north-west of Murcia. Its rock shelters hold Levantine paintings that are part of the Rock Art of the Mediterranean Basin on the Iberian Peninsula, listed by UNESCO in 1998 — the Cañaica del Calar and Fuente del Sabuco among them. The town itself climbs to a castle keep, and the drum festival at Easter is part of the same UNESCO tamboradas inscription as Hellín.

Moratalla: Rock Art and Empty Sierra

Go up to the Santuario de la Vera Cruz inside the castle and find the double-armed cross the whole town is built around

Work out the company it keeps: one of only five cities in the Catholic world with a perpetual jubilee, alongside Rome, Jerusalem, Santiago and Santo Toribio

Find the Templete, where the cross has been dipped in water every 3 May since 1384

Come for the Caballos del Vino in early May, where horses in heavy embroidered mantles are run up the hill to the castle

See the Renaissance church of El Salvador, among the finest in Murcia

There are five cities in the Catholic world with the perpetual right to hold a jubilee year — Rome, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, Santo Toribio de Liébana and Caravaca de la Cruz, which was granted it in 1998 and holds one every seven years. The relic is the Vera Cruz, a double-armed cross said to have been brought by angels in 1231. Every 3 May since 1384 it has been dipped in water in a ceremony at the Templete, and every May the town runs the Caballos del Vino, in which horses in embroidered mantles are raced up to the castle.

Caravaca de la Cruz: One of Five Holy Cities

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

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

Walk the path in and add a stone to one of the milladoiros, which is what pilgrims have always done

Learn the saying and work out what it actually commits you to

Find out why people here step carefully round lizards and insects on this particular path

Buy a sanandresiño, the bread-crumb figure made for the pilgrimage

Walk out onto the Herbeira cliffs above the village, among the highest sea cliffs in Europe

The saying in Galicia is vai de morto quen non foi de vivo — whoever did not go alive goes dead. San Andrés de Teixido is a hamlet on the Serra da Capelada above the cliffs, and the belief is that if you fail to make the pilgrimage in life your soul must make it after death, often in the form of an animal, which is why Galicians here will not step on a lizard or a beetle in case. Relatives can carry a dead person's soul instead, inviting it from the grave before setting out. Pilgrims add a stone to the milladoiros along the path — there are about twenty of them between Veniño and Teixido.

San Andrés de Teixido: Go Dead If You Did Not Go Alive

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.