Walk up to the Renclusa and look at what is left of the Aneto glacier from below

Find out how much ice the Maladeta massif has lost in the last hundred years

Climb Aneto with a guide if you are equipped for it — 3,404 metres and the highest in the Pyrenees

Walk the Estós or Vallibierna valleys if you are not, which get you into the same country on foot

Work out why this one valley has more three-thousand-metre peaks around it than any other in the range

The Benasque valley holds the highest ground in the Pyrenees: Aneto at 3,404 metres, the highest peak in the range, with Posets and Maladeta behind it, and the Aneto glacier — what is left of it — on the north face. The Maladeta massif has lost most of its ice in a century, and what remains is one of the clearest things in Spain to point at when talking about what is happening to mountain glaciers. Benasque itself is the base for all of it, and the Posets-Maladeta natural park has more three-thousand-metre peaks than anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

Benasque: The Roof of the Pyrenees

Sit out a session in the Vaporarium at the Thermes de Luchon, the natural steam galleries driven into the mountain rock that the spa calls the only one of their kind in Europe, then swim in the rooftop thermal pool — the water comes from over eighty springs tapped in the Superbagnères mountain at between 22 and 67 degrees

Walk the Allées d'Étigny from end to end and finish at the statue in front of the Thermes, raised in 1889 to Baron Mégret d'Étigny — the intendant who forced a carriage road through here in 1759, reorganised the baths, and died ruined and disgraced at 47 with the town he invented named after him

Ride the Crémaillère Express from the middle of Luchon to the Superbagnères plateau in eight minutes, a valley lift that took over in December 2023 from the 1993 gondola and, before that, the Strub rack railway that climbed this mountain from 1912 to 1966 — the old trackbed is still walkable beside you

Find the orientation table a few hundred metres from the top station and use it to pick the Pic d'Aneto, 3,404 m and over the border in Spain, out of the Maladeta massif; then walk to the far end of the big car park by the Grand Hôtel, where the whole of Luchon lies below you 1,170 m down

Luchon takes its name from Ilixo, the local god of the springs, and the Romans lined three great pools here in marble; the pyreneist Vincent de Chausenque crowned it Queen of the Pyrenees in 1834. Over eighty springs are tapped in the mountain of Superbagnères, rising between 22 and 67 degrees, and a gondola lifts you 1,170 m out of the town to the plateau in eight minutes.

Luchon: The Queen of the Pyrenees, the Vaporarium and the Superbagnères Gondola

Ride or drive the Louron side from Avajan, 9.85 km at 6.7 per cent, and stop at the Loudervielle hairpin at 1,157m to look back down the whole of the road you have come up, then take the last straight to the top — dead straight, exposed to the wind and over 7.5 per cent

Eat a crêpe at the stall at the top of the col

From the summit look down the Louron and put names to the water and the villages below — the lac de Génos-Loudenvielle in the valley floor, the plan d'eau d'Avajan beyond it and Vielle-Louron on the slope

Drop towards Bagnères-de-Luchon down the Larboust side, the line Antoine Mégret d'Étigny had surveyed in the 18th century when he was intendant of Gascony, and stop at the two chapels on the way down — Saint-Pierre de la Moraine with the memorial stone to the writer Pierre de Gorsse beside it, and lower down Saint-Aventin

The Col de Peyresourde crosses at just under 1,570m between the Larboust valley above Bagnères-de-Luchon and the Louron, its summit on the D618 marking the line between the Haute-Garonne and the Hautes-Pyrénées. The name means, literally, deaf stone. The Tour de France has crossed it 71 times since 1910, more than almost any pass in the central Pyrenees, and there is a crêperie at the top.

The Col de Peyresourde: Between Louron and Larboust

Find the Romanesque Christ of Mijaran inside the Church of Sant Miquèu, alongside its Gothic altarpiece

Find the fortified bell tower Ferdinand the Catholic ordered built in 1506 as a defensive symbol against France

Order a meal listing dishes in Aranese, the only place in the world where this Gascon-Occitan variety is an official language

Find the original Vielha tunnel entrance, opened in 1948 and now bypassed by the 2007 Túnel Juan Carlos I

The Val d'Aran is on the northern slope of the Pyrenees — the only comarca in Catalonia that drains largely into the Atlantic, down the Garonne, rather than the Mediterranean. Three languages are official in it: Spanish, Catalan, and Aranese, a variety of Gascon Occitan, which makes this the only place in the world where Occitan holds official status. Until the Vielha tunnel opened in 1948 the valley was cut off from the rest of Spain by snow for months at a time and its dealings were with France, which is why it kept its own language, its own law and its own institutions.

Vielha: Capital of a Hidden Valley

Go into Sant Climent de Taüll, consecrated on 10 December 1123, and look at the apse

Work out that the Pantocrator you are looking at is a projection, and that the painting itself is in Barcelona

Find out why it was moved, and what the 1907 survey of this valley was trying to prevent

Look at the bell tower and notice it is attached to the church without being part of its structure

Walk or drive between the nine listed churches — they are close enough to do several in a day

Nine Romanesque churches in one Pyrenean valley went onto the UNESCO list together in 2000. Sant Climent de Taüll was consecrated on 10 December 1123 by the bishop of Roda; its six-storey bell tower stands against the building without being structurally part of it, and its apse Pantocrator is regarded as the high point of Catalan Romanesque painting. That fresco is not in the church — it is in the MNAC in Barcelona, where it was taken for safekeeping after the valley was surveyed in 1907. What is in the apse now is a projection of it.

The Vall de Boí: Nine Romanesque Churches in One Valley

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

Drive the D921 up from Gèdre and then the D922 through the Héas valley to where the tarmac ends at the auberge du Maillet, leave the vehicle there, and cover the last 275 metres of climb the way everyone now has to — forty minutes on foot, or on the tourist train

Walk the circuit of the cirque floor — four kilometres across at about 2,200 m — and notice what is missing the whole way round: not a single tree or tall bush anywhere inside the ring, because of the climate trapped in it

Stand on the floor and read the rim round: the Pic de la Munia at 3,133 m is the highest, with the Petite Munia at 3,096 m, the Serre Mourène at 3,090 m and the Pic Heid at 3,022 m all over three thousand beside it — then find the muraille de Barroude, the single wall made by the Pic Heid, the Petit pic Blanc and the Pic de Gerbats together

Climb to the lacs des Aires at 2,342 m, the highest of the cirque's lakes, and on the way down find the lac de Serre Longue at 2,190 m and the lac d'Esbarris at 2,139 m — then work out where the Maillet, the Gabiédou, the Cot and the gave des Touyères come together to make the gave de Héas

Find the Hail de Pout, where a dig in 2018 turned up pottery showing that shepherds were living up here in small summer dwellings for some two hundred years between 2300 and 2100 BC, and work out from the ground why they put their huts where they did

Troumouse is one of the largest glacial cirques in the Pyrenees and in Europe, four kilometres across with a floor at about 2,200 m, ringed by summits from the Pic de Bounèu at 2,726 m round by the Pène Blanque, the Mont Arrouy, the Pic de la Munia at 3,133 m and the Petite Munia to the Pic de la Sède. Its climate leaves it without a tree or a large bush anywhere in it. Gavarnie, one valley west, is among the most visited sites in the whole range; Troumouse is reached up a toll road that ends in a car park and a shuttle, and feels like another country.

The Cirque de Troumouse: The Quiet Giant Next to Gavarnie

Go to the costume museum in Ansó church and work out how many pieces the traditional dress has

Come on the last Sunday in August, when the village wears it

Find out what cheso is and how a dialect survives in one valley and not the next

Look at the chimneys on the houses and work out what they were built that size for

Drive up into the Selva de Oza and walk to the Boca del Infierno gorge

Ansó and Hecho are the two westernmost valleys of the Aragonese Pyrenees, and they kept a distinct identity long after the rest — their own dialect, Aragonese in a form called cheso in Hecho, and a traditional women's costume of such complexity that it is one of the most elaborate surviving folk dresses in Europe, still brought out for the last Sunday in August. The villages are stone and slate with enormous chimneys. Behind them the Selva de Oza and the Valles Occidentales park run up to the French border.