Walk La Mina and work out that a town of this size drove a tunnel through a mountain between 1555 and 1560

Work out what the problem was that made it necessary

Go into the basilica of Santa María de los Sagrados Corporales and find the apse, the first surviving Romanesque-to-Mudéjar transition

Walk the walls up over San Jorge and San Cristóbal, which is a considerable climb

Find out what the Sagrados Corporales relic is and why this basilica was built round it

Daroca is strung along a valley between two hills, San Jorge at 855 metres and San Cristóbal at 931, with walls running up over both. The problem with a town in a valley is that the valley floods, so between 1555 and 1560 the townspeople drove a tunnel — La Mina — straight through the hill to carry floodwater out the other side. It is reckoned one of the most important public works of the 16th century anywhere in Europe. The basilica holds the Sagrados Corporales relic, and its apse is the first surviving example of the transition from Romanesque to Aragonese Mudéjar.

Daroca: A Tunnel Through a Mountain, in 1560

Walk the gorge path down past the waterfalls to the Cola de Caballo and go in behind the fall

Go through the caves and grottoes the river has cut below the monastery

Find out what happened here in 1534 — the first chocolate cooked in Europe, from cacao sent home by a friar who sailed with Cortés

Go into the Cistercian buildings and work out the founding: twelve monks out of Poblet on 10 May 1194

Watch the birds of prey flown in the grounds, and then go back and do the water route in the opposite direction

Twelve Cistercian monks walked out of Poblet on 10 May 1194 under their first abbot and founded this house on the Piedra river, in a castle Alfonso II had given the order eight years earlier. The river has cut the gorge below the monastery into a chain of waterfalls, caves and pools, which a 19th-century owner laid out as a park. The other thing that happened here: in 1534, chocolate was cooked in Europe for the first time, from cacao and a recipe sent back to the abbot by Fray Jerónimo de Aguilar, who had gone to Mexico with Cortés.

Monasterio de Piedra: Waterfalls and the First Chocolate in Europe

Go into the house Goya was born in, built at the beginning of the 18th century

Find the font in the village church where he was baptised

Go to the Museo del Grabado, opened in 1989, and look at the print series rather than the paintings

Work out what the Caprichos and the Disasters of War were for, and why he did not publish some of them in his lifetime

Look at the country around the village and work out how far it is from there to court painter in Madrid

Francisco de Goya was born in a small stone house in Fuendetodos, a village on the dry plain south of Zaragoza, in a building put up at the start of the 18th century. The font he was baptised in is still in the church. A few metres from the house is a museum of engraving, opened in 1989, showing his graphic work — the Caprichos, the Disasters of War, the Tauromaquia — which is where the argument for Goya as the first modern artist is actually made, and which you can look at here at the scale he made it.

Fuendetodos: Where Goya Came From

Walk the castle enclosure and work out how much ground it actually covers

Work out the political story: Aragonese in 1128, Castilian, Almoravid, then an independent lordship from about 1139

Drive into the Alto Tajo and find the river canyons, which are among the deepest in inland Spain

Find out what the proposed Molina-Alto Tajo geopark covers — seventy municipalities and over four thousand square kilometres

Find the Romanesque bridge and the Torre de Aragón above the town

Alfonso I of Aragon took Molina in 1128; his brother Ramiro II handed the lands to Castile; the Almoravids took them back; and around 1139 Manrique de Lara took them again and made the place an independent lordship with himself as its first lord. The Señorío de Molina kept a separate identity for centuries and the town still uses the name. Its castle is one of the largest in Spain by enclosed area. It sits beside the Alto Tajo natural park, one of the greatest concentrations of river canyons in inland Iberia, and inside a proposed geopark covering seventy municipalities and 4,186 square kilometres.

Molina de Aragón: A Lordship of Its Own

Work out where it sits: 10th-century Córdoba, 11th-century Zaragoza, 14th-century Granada — and this is the only taifa palace left

Find the Salón Dorado, the throne room al-Muqtádir named himself, and the small private mosque beside its portico

Find the Mudéjar work the Christian kings of Aragon added after 1118, and see how directly it grew out of what was already there

Go up to the palace the Catholic Monarchs built on the upper floor in 1492, which cost the taifa arches below their crowns

Work out that the building is still in use — the Cortes de Aragón, the regional parliament, sit in it

Everyone knows the Mezquita of Córdoba and the Alhambra. Between them, chronologically and architecturally, sits the Aljafería — built in Zaragoza between 1065 and 1081 by al-Muqtádir of the Banu Hud as a pleasure palace called Qasr al-Surur, the Palace of Joy. It is the only great Hispano-Muslim building of the taifa period to survive anywhere, which makes it the third member of a set of three, not a lesser also-ran. Alfonso I took Zaragoza in 1118 and the Christian kings of Aragon moved in, turning it into the fountainhead of Aragonese Mudéjar; the Catholic Monarchs built a palace on top of it in 1492. UNESCO listed its Mudéjar remains in 1986.

The Aljafería: The Missing Piece of Hispano-Muslim Spain

Walk the wall up the ridge above the town and look back down into it

Work out the political anomaly: an Islamic taifa handed to a Christian family by agreement, then held independent of Castile and Aragon from 1170, with its own bishop

Find the rodeno — the reddish local stone that gives every building in the town the same colour

Go into the Cathedral of El Salvador in the middle of the old town

Look at the forged ironwork on the houses, which is the local vernacular and is everywhere once you notice it

Albarracín is named after the Banu Razin, a Berber clan who made themselves the sovereign dynasty of their own taifa here in the 11th century. What happened next is the unusual part: the taifa passed to the Azagra, a Christian family of Navarrese lineage, by cession rather than conquest, and from 1170 they held it independent of both Castile and Aragon — to the point of running their own bishopric. The town is built of rodeno, the local reddish stone, and is walled, vertical and almost entirely intact.

Albarracín: The Taifa That Stayed Independent

Walk through the Roman arch, the only one in Spain with three openings

Stand in the Plaza Mayor under the balconies of the Ducal Palace

Walk the lanes narrow enough to touch both walls with your arms out

Walk out to the old castle, the alcazaba where Almanzor is said to have died, now the town cemetery

Medinaceli sits on a hill at about 1,200 metres above the Jalón valley, and at its edge stands a Roman arch built between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD — the only Roman arch in Spain with three openings. The Romans also started working the salt pans in the valley, which went on until 1994. The town was a frontier between Christians and Muslims for centuries; some authors say Almanzor came to die in its alcazaba in 1002. The alcazaba later became the counts' castle and is now the cemetery; the counts moved to the Ducal Palace, whose balconies look onto the Plaza Mayor. Some of the lanes are so narrow you can touch both sides at once.

Medinaceli: Spain's Only Three-Arched Roman Gate

Go into the cathedral and work out that a village of a few dozen people once had its own diocese, for 193 years and fifteen bishops

Go down into the crypts under the three apses, finished early in the 12th century

Find the Romanesque portal and read its carved capitals, which run from the Annunciation to the apocalyptic dragon

Find out that the scriptorium here was copying Plautus, Terence and Horace, and work out what that says about the place

Look out from the terrace at the Isábena valley and the Pyrenees behind it

The first cathedral here was consecrated on 30 November 956 under the counts of Ribagorza, and in 1006 Abd al-Malik, son of Almanzor, burned it along with the rest of the county. It was rebuilt under Sancho III the Great, and its scriptorium was busy enough to be copying Plautus, Terence and the Epistles of Horace. The three naves and the crypts under the three apses were finished early in the 12th century. The diocese lasted 193 years and fifteen bishops, among them San Ramón de Roda and Ramiro II the Monk, cleric and king of Aragon. The village that is left has a few dozen people. The village sits above the Isábena with the Pyrenees behind.

Roda de Isábena: The Smallest Cathedral Village in Spain

Go into the Palacio de Sada and find the room where Ferdinand the Catholic was born in 1452

Work out how the town got the second half of its name and when

Go into San Esteban and down into the crypt, which is the best thing in the town

Walk the walls and the Plaza de la Villa, protected as an ensemble since 1968

Work out what the Cinco Villas are and why Sos became their capital in 1711

Ramiro I took Sos into the kingdom of Aragon in 1044. In 1452, in the middle of the Navarrese civil war, Queen Juana Enríquez came to the town — then simply Sos — and gave birth to the infante Ferdinand, later Ferdinand the Catholic, in the Palacio de Sada. That birth added del Rey Católico to the name. It became capital of the Cinco Villas in 1711, and the whole historic centre was protected in 1968: walls, churches, the Plaza de la Villa and a church with a crypt and a cloister that opens off the street climbing from it.