Go into the salt mountain and work out that the rock around you is salt all the way through

Work out where the dukes' money came from and how far it took them in the Crown of Aragon

Go into Sant Vicenç inside the castle, one of the earliest Lombard Romanesque churches in Catalonia

Find the Torre de la Minyona, fifteen metres high and over ten across, built in the 11th century

Find out what happened on 18 September 1714 and why Cardona held out longest

Cardona has a mountain made of salt — a diapir of rock salt pushed up to the surface, mined since the Neolithic and the source of the dukes of Cardona's wealth, which in the 15th century made them the most important family in the Crown of Aragon after the royal house itself. Wilfred the Hairy built the castle in 886; its jewel is the 11th-century Torre de la Minyona, fifteen metres high and over ten across, and the Romanesque church of Sant Vicenç. On 18 September 1714, after a siege that wrecked the walls, Cardona was the last place in Catalonia to surrender to Philip V.

Cardona: A Mountain of Salt and the Last Castle to Fall

Go up by rack railway or funicular rather than driving — the abbey station is the terminus of a rack line from Monistrol and of two funiculars

Queue to touch the orb in the right hand of La Moreneta, the late-12th-century Romanesque Virgin who is Catalonia's patroness

Hear the Escolania, a boys' choir of nine- to fourteen-year-olds documented here since the 14th century and one of the oldest in Europe

Find the Sala del Cambril, the circular three-apse chapel built between 1876 and 1884 by Villar i Carmona with a young Antoni Gaudí as his assistant

Walk up to Sant Jeroni at 1,236 metres, the highest point of the massif

Look at the rock — conglomerate from an Eocene fan delta, eroded into the fingers that give the mountain its name

Montserrat means serrated mountain, and it is exactly that — a mass of pink conglomerate laid down in a fan delta at the edge of the Ebro basin in the middle Eocene, since eroded into hundreds of rounded fingers, with a Benedictine abbey wedged into the side of it. The late-12th-century wooden Virgin known as La Moreneta is patroness of Catalonia alongside Sant Jordi; restorers in 2001 found her face and hands had darkened over the centuries, from candle smoke or a reaction in the varnish, rather than having started that colour.

Montserrat: The Black Madonna on the Serrated Mountain

Get to the Plaça Major on a market morning, which is what the square was built for

Buy llonganissa de Vic and work out why the fog and cold of this plain are what cures it

Find the crypt and bell tower of Bishop Oliba's cathedral of 1038 inside the later building

Go into the Museu Episcopal for one of the best collections of Catalan Romanesque and Gothic art anywhere

Come for the Mercat del Ram, the old livestock fair, which is the town's original market

Bishop Oliba consecrated the Romanesque cathedral at Vic in 1038, and its crypt and bell tower are still there inside the later building. The town has always been a place of fairs and markets — the oldest is the Mercat del Ram, a livestock fair — and the Plaça Major is one of the largest arcaded squares in Catalonia, still filling with stalls twice a week. Vic is also the sausage capital of Catalonia: the llonganissa cured here has a protected designation, and the reason is the town's particular combination of cold, fog and altitude.

Vic: A Market Square and a Bishop's Museum

Put a hand near the Font del Lleó and work out how hot around 74°C actually feels coming out of the ground

Go into the Roman baths in the centre, part of which has survived continuously since antiquity

Find out that Pliny the Elder wrote about these baths as Aquae Calidae, and work out what two thousand years of continuous use means

Take a treatment at one of the working balnearis, which is the same reason the Romans stopped here

Work out why the water is that hot — how deep it has been and how fast it comes back up

Caldes de Montbui has been a spa town since it was Roman Aquae Calidae, and part of the Roman bath building in the middle of it is still standing. The water comes out of the ground at 74°C, which makes it one of the hottest springs in Europe. Pliny the Elder mentions the baths here, under the name Aquae Calidae, in his account of Roman Hispania — so the place has been written about as a spa for two thousand years and has never stopped being one.

Caldes de Montbui: The Hottest Spring in the Peninsula

Go into the cathedral, the only entirely Romanesque one left in Catalonia, and find the open gallery across the apse

Work out that the bishop of this town is a co-prince of Andorra and what that actually means

Drive or walk to a viewpoint on the Cadí wall and look along twenty kilometres of unbroken limestone

Find the Pedraforca and work out why a mountain with two prongs got that name

Look for chamois on the Cadí, which holds one of the densest populations in the Pyrenees

La Seu d'Urgell sits where the Valira meets the Segre below Andorra, and its bishop is still one of the two co-princes of Andorra — a head of state living in a Catalan market town. Its 12th-century cathedral is the only entirely Romanesque cathedral left in Catalonia and is unique there for how Italian it looks — a contract of 1175 gave one Ramon Llambard seven years to close the vaults and raise the towers, and he was probably Lombard, which is where the style came from. The church was never finished. East of the town the Cadí-Moixeró natural park runs along a limestone wall over twenty kilometres long, with the Pedraforca — a mountain split into two prongs — as its landmark, and one of the strongest chamois populations in the Pyrenees.

La Seu d'Urgell and the Cadí

Stand in front of the 12th-century portal and work out that it is laid out as a Roman triumphal arch

Read the carving as a programme rather than decoration, and work out what it is narrating

Find the tombs of the counts of Barcelona and Besalú

Find out what the scriptorium here produced and why Ripoll is named beside Fleury and Montecassino

Go on to Sant Joan de les Abadesses, which Wilfred founded for his daughter Emma

Wilfred the Hairy reconquered and repopulated the Ripoll valley and the Vic plain between 878 and 881 and founded this monastery around 880, probably on a Visigothic site. It became the burial place of the counts of Barcelona and of Besalú, and its scriptorium made it one of the great cultural centres of medieval Europe, in the same conversation as Saint-Denis, Fleury and Montecassino. In the 12th century it got a new doorway built as a triumphal arch — a vast carved programme that is one of the major works of Catalan Romanesque sculpture.

Ripoll: The Cradle of Catalonia

Go down into a cellar and work out how many storeys below the town you actually are

Find out what the traditional method is, and why the second fermentation happens in the bottle you buy

Learn the three grape varieties — Macabeo, Xarel·lo, Parellada — and taste a cava made only from them

See disgorging done, which is how the dead yeast comes out without losing the pressure

Taste across the ageing categories and work out what extra time on the lees actually does

Cava is made by the traditional method — second fermentation in the bottle it is sold in, exactly as in Champagne — from Macabeo, Xarel·lo and Parellada, and the great majority of it comes from the Penedès, with Sant Sadurní d'Anoia as its centre. The town is undermined by kilometres of cellars going several storeys down, because the wine needs constant cool temperature and darkness while it ages on its lees. The cellars are the real attraction: you go down in a small train and come back up into a normal Catalan town.

Sant Sadurní d'Anoia: Cava Under the Town

Walk the Gothic cloister and work out how much carving a Cistercian house was supposed to permit

Find out who Reinard de Fonoll was, what an English mason was doing in 14th-century Catalonia, and what was demolished to let him build

Find the royal pantheon built for Peter III the Great, and the tombs of James II and Blanche of Anjou

Find the abbot's rooms James II turned into a royal palace, and the walls Peter IV threw round the lot

Do the Ruta del Císter properly and add Poblet and Vallbona de les Monges

Santes Creus is the second of the three great Cistercian houses of the Catalan Ruta del Císter, with Poblet and Vallbona, and the one with the finest Gothic cloister — built by the English master Reinard de Fonoll with Guillem de Seguer after James II had the Romanesque cloister pulled down to make room for it. Peter III the Great asked to be buried here and the royal pantheon was built for him in the 13th century; his son James II and James's queen Blanche of Anjou lie here too. James also turned the abbot's rooms into a royal palace, and Peter IV walled the whole place. The monastery is unusual in having a village living inside its walls, in the buildings the community left behind.

Santes Creus: The Other Cistercian Pantheon

Find the medieval wall and the two ruined towers that Gaudí built the house around

Work out what Gaudí thought was wrong with Gothic and how the building argues the point

Go up onto the roof terrace for the view over Barcelona

Find Domingo Sugrañes's tiled benches at the entrance and Joan Rubió's viaduct on the estate

Work out who Martin the Humane was and why the end of his line mattered to Catalonia

Martin the Humane, the last king of the house of Barcelona, had a residence on this hill under Collserola. By 1900 all that was left was some wall and two half-ruined towers — and Gaudí, commissioned to build the Casa Figueras here, incorporated them into the new house. Bellesguard belongs to his neo-Gothic period, and it is the clearest surviving statement of what he thought about Gothic: he had studied Catalan, Balearic, Roussillon, Leonese and Castilian Gothic closely and concluded it was an imperfect style, only half solved. This building is his attempt to finish the job.