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 to the Festival do Mundo Celta and hear the pipe bands from the Celtic nations

Find out how a town pipe band started a free festival in 1978

Walk Morouzos beach and the pine wood where the festival camps

Walk along the ría de Ortigueira, Galicia's largest Ramsar wetland

Find the castro of Punta dos Prados and its ritual steam bath

The Festival Internacional do Mundo Celta was started in 1978 by the Santa Marta de Ortigueira pipe band, and it has been free since 1985: a festival of the folk music of the Celtic nations, usually on the second weekend of July, declared of international tourist interest in 2005. People camp on Morouzos beach and in the pine wood behind it. The rest of the year Ortigueira is a quiet town at the head of its ría, the largest of Galicia's five Ramsar wetlands, with the 19th-century Teatro de la Beneficencia in a wing of the building that also holds the town hall and the Iron Age castro of Punta dos Prados, which had a ritual steam bath, on the far shore.

Ortigueira: The Festival of the Celtic World

Walk out to the lighthouse and look down on Os Aguillóns, the three stacks

Stand on the line between the Atlantic and the Cantabrian Sea and look both ways

Look east over the ría de Ortigueira, a wetland of international importance

Cabo Ortegal, in the municipality of Cariño, is the symbolic dividing line between the Atlantic Ocean and the Cantabrian Sea. The cape is a wide arc of cliff between two rocky points; on the eastern one stands the lighthouse, a red and white cylinder, and in front of it are Os Aguillóns, three sharp stacks being worn down by the sea. To the east opens the ría de Ortigueira, the largest of Galicia's five Ramsar wetlands.

Cabo Ortegal: Where the Atlantic Meets the Cantabrian Sea

Walk out past the lighthouse to the northernmost point of the Iberian peninsula

Sit at the headland with binoculars and count the gannets and shearwaters passing

Find the ruins of the American LORAN station

Look back along the coast towards Cabo Ortegal

Estaca de Bares, in Mañón, is the northernmost point of Spain and of the Iberian peninsula, and its lighthouse is the most northerly on the peninsula. It is also an outstanding place to watch seabirds on migration: more than 280,000 have been counted passing in a year, gannets above all, with Manx and Cory's shearwaters. From the early 1960s the US Coast Guard ran a LORAN navigation station here, taken over by the US Air Force in 1978; its buildings are ruins now.

Estaca de Bares: The Northernmost Point of Spain

Watch one of the Holy Week processions of Viveiro's eight brotherhoods

Walk through the Puerta de Carlos V and find the three coats of arms

Find the monument to the Magdalena and the Palomo on the rocks by Covas beach

Drive up to the Mirador de San Roque for the view over the ría

Viveiro's Holy Week is one of the oldest religious celebrations in Galicia, held without a break since the 13th century, with eight brotherhoods carrying the processions of the Passion; it is a festival of international tourist interest. The town enters through the Puerta de Carlos V, a Plateresque gate finished in 1554 with the emperor's arms between those of Galicia and Viveiro. On the rocks by Covas beach a monument remembers the frigate Santa María Magdalena and the brig Palomo, wrecked together in a storm in 1810 with more than 500 dead.

Viveiro: A Holy Week Kept Since the 13th Century

Walk the river path along the Eume through what is considered one of the best thermophilic Atlantic forests left in Europe

Count ferns — around twenty different species grow here, which is the signature of this kind of woodland

Walk up to San Xoán de Caaveiro, a 12th-century monastery founded for anchorites, built on a crag so steep its walls needed buttresses and underground chambers

Look for fire-salamanders and Galician salamanders on the damp ground, and listen for goshawk and long-eared owl

Find the ground burned in the fire of 31 March 2012 and work out how much has come back

The Fragas do Eume are reckoned one of the best surviving examples of thermophilic Atlantic forest on the European continent — a riverside woodland in the climax stage of Galician vegetation, with around twenty species of fern, oak and birch, and a biodiversity that riparian forest of this kind almost nowhere still has. Fire-salamanders and the Galician salamander are common in it, goshawks and long-eared owls hunt through it. A fire that started at A Capela on 31 March 2012 burned part of the park, which is worth knowing while you are standing in it.

Fragas do Eume: Atlantic Rainforest

Climb the tower and work out what you are standing in: 34 metres of Roman masonry inside a 21-metre 18th-century casing

Find out what makes it unique — the only fully preserved Roman lighthouse still working as a navigational light

Walk the sculpture garden on the headland below, with work by Pablo Serrano and Francisco Leiro

Walk the seafront promenade round the peninsula and see why a lighthouse had to go here

Look at the galerías on the Avenida de la Marina — white-painted wooden balconies closed in glass, a technique brought to Ferrol in the mid-18th century for glazing galleon sterns and then used on houses

The Tower of Hercules on the headland at A Coruña is the only fully preserved Roman lighthouse anywhere still used for maritime signalling — it has been warning ships off this coast for the best part of two thousand years and has not stopped. It stands 55 metres, of which 34 metres is surviving Roman masonry and 21 metres was added in an 18th-century renovation that cased the Roman core in a neoclassical shell. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site on 27 June 2009, and A Coruña calls it the oldest working lighthouse in the world.

A Coruña: The Roman Lighthouse Still Doing Its Job

Go into a palloza and work out how a round drystone house with a thatched roof works in this climate

Go into Santa María, the first church on Galician soil on the Camino Francés

Find the chalice of the Eucharistic Miracle and the tombs of the people in the story

Work out what the Catholic Monarchs heard here in 1486 and what they did about it

Look back east at the climb the pilgrims have just done, which is the hardest ascent on the Galician Camino

O Cebreiro was founded as a hospice for pilgrims on the Camino Francés soon after the tomb of St James was found, and the crown showered it with land and tax exemptions until it became the most important place in its district. Santa María is the first church on Galician soil on the Camino Francés. It keeps the chalice of the 15th-century Eucharistic Miracle — the legend of the Galician Holy Grail — with the tombs of the people in the story beside it and a 12th-century Virgin. The Catholic Monarchs stopped here on their way back from Santiago in 1486 and heard the story told. The village also keeps pallozas, round drystone houses with thatched roofs, of a type otherwise gone.

O Cebreiro: Pallozas and a Eucharistic Miracle

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.