Stand back and work out what the three colours of the titanium are meant to represent

Go down into the original cellars of 1858 and find the oldest bottles in the collection

Walk up into Elciego village and look back at the building from the church

Decide for yourself whether it belongs here, which is an argument people in the Rioja Alavesa actually have

Taste the wine, which is the reason any of this exists

Guillermo Hurtado founded Marqués de Riscal at Elciego in 1858 — the oldest winery in Álava — after importing nine thousand French vine cuttings to experiment alongside the Tempranillo and Graciano already here. In 2006 the estate became the Ciudad del Vino, and the building everyone comes for is Frank Gehry's, sandstone under a titanium roof: pink for red wine, gold for the netting on a Riscal bottle, silver for the capsule. It holds a hotel and two restaurants and sits in the middle of the vineyards below the village of Elciego, which has nothing else remotely like it. Whether it belongs there is a live argument in the Rioja Alavesa.

Elciego: Gehry in the Vines

Go down into a calado under a house and work out how many storeys of cellar are under the street

Work out why every house has one: each family made and kept its own wine here

Walk the walls Sancho the Strong of Navarre built, and find out when the town stopped being Navarrese

Visit one of the modern architect-designed bodegas outside the walls and compare it with the calados

Taste Rioja Alavesa against Rioja Alta and work out what the difference on the ground actually is

Laguardia sits on a rise above the Ebro in the Rioja Alavesa, inside walls that Sancho the Strong of Navarre had built, and underneath it the rock is riddled with calados — hand-dug cellars going down several storeys, one under almost every house, originally for each family to make and keep its own wine. The whole town is essentially hollow. Laguardia and the Rioja Alavesa fell to Castile in 1461 when Henry IV invaded during the Navarrese civil war. It is now surrounded by some of the most ambitious modern wineries in Spain.

Laguardia: A Walled Town on Top of Its Own Cellars

Be in the village for a procession and understand before you go what you are actually going to see

Find out why this survived here when public flagellation was suppressed everywhere else in Spain

Work out what a disciplinante has to be to take part: adult, male, and vouched for by a priest

Climb to the castle and the fortified church on the rock above the Ebro

Work out what the Cofradía de la Santa Vera Cruz is and that it has organised this from the start

At Easter and on a few other days, men in white robes with hoods walk in procession through San Vicente de la Sonsierra scourging their own backs with a rope discipline, and are then pricked to draw the bruising off. It is the only place in Spain where the penance is still practised, it has always been run by the Cofradía de la Santa Vera Cruz, and it was recognised as of National Tourist Interest in 2005. Disciplinantes must be adult, male, and vouched for by a priest as a Christian acting in good faith. The village sits on a rock above the Ebro with a castle and a fortified church.

San Vicente de la Sonsierra: The Picaos

Find the cave at the back of the church and work out that the monastery was built onto it, not over it

Walk the royal pantheon and count the kings, queens and infantes in it

Go into the Claustro de los Caballeros, finished in 1517, and look at how thin the stone tracery has been cut

Find out what the king found in the cave in 1044 — an image, a spray of lilies and a bell — and where he himself is buried

Work out what the kingdom of Nájera-Pamplona was and why its royal burials are here

By tradition King García Sánchez III was hunting near Nájera in 1044 when he followed his falcon into a cave and found a small chapel cut in the rock holding an image of the Virgin, a spray of lilies and a bell. The image is called Santa María en la Cueva, the lilies became the monastery's symbol, and the cave is still there at the back of the church. The king was killed at the battle of Atapuerca and buried at the Virgin's feet, inside it. Santa María la Real became the royal pantheon of the kingdom of Nájera-Pamplona, and thirty or so kings, queens and infantes of Navarre, León and Castile are buried in it. The Claustro de los Caballeros was finished in 1517, after the abbey broke from Cluny in 1486, and its tracery is cut extraordinarily thin.

Nájera: The Cave That Became a Royal Pantheon

Walk the length of Calle del Laurel and eat the speciality in at least four different bars

Find the Blanco y Negro, the oldest bar in Logroño

Stand in front of Santa María de la Redonda and its twin towers by Martín de Beratúa

Go inside and look up at the Gothic central nave, built between 1516 and 1538

Calle del Laurel in Logroño's old town is little more than 200 metres long, and with the streets around it holds more than 65 bars. The custom is that each one serves one or two specialities — mushrooms, pinchos morunos, pig's ear, patatas bravas — so an evening here is a walk from bar to bar rather than a meal. The street was rebuilt after the town walls came down in 1862, and the demolition of 1878 that finally opened it to the next street produced the Blanco y Negro, still the oldest bar in Logroño. A few minutes away, the twin towers Martín de Beratúa built for the co-cathedral of Santa María de la Redonda are the emblem of the city.

Logroño: Calle del Laurel and the Twin Towers of La Redonda

Come on 29 June, wear white, and accept that the white will not survive the morning

Walk out to the Riscos de Bilibio where it happens, at the point the Ebro enters La Rioja

Find out who Felices de Bilibio was — the 6th-century hermit who taught San Millán and died on this spot

Do a bodega tour in the town and taste Rioja where it is actually made

Work out the ageing classifications — crianza, reserva, gran reserva — and taste the same wine across all three

On the morning of 29 June, the feast of St Peter, the people of Haro dress in white with a red neckerchief, walk or ride six kilometres north to the Riscos de Bilibio where the Ebro enters La Rioja, and spend the morning drenching each other in red wine until everybody is purple. It is a Festival of National Tourist Interest. The rest of the year Haro is simply the capital of Rioja Alta and one of the densest concentrations of serious wineries in Spain, most of them within walking distance of each other.

Haro and the Battle of Wine

Walk the Barrio de la Estación in Haro, the station quarter of seven bodegas that includes López de Heredia (1877) and CVNE (1879), and tour one of them

Visit the Vivanco Museum of Wine Culture in Briones, opened in 2004

Walk up through the hilltop village of Briones to the church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción

Rioja has been making wine since at least the 9th century — there is a document from 873 recording vines here — and it was the first Spanish region to get the top qualified designation. What makes Haro worth the trip specifically is the Barrio de la Estación: seven historic bodegas clustered round the railway station, put there in the 1870s because the line meant they could ship to France when phylloxera had wiped out Bordeaux. López de Heredia opened in 1877 and CVNE in 1879 and both are still in the same quarter.

Haro's Station Quarter and the Vivanco Museum at Briones

Cross the medieval bridge and find the gate tower built into the middle of it

Work out what the tower was for and what the town charged for

Come on Good Friday for the Vía Crucis Viviente, performed through the streets by several hundred locals

Work out what it means that this was the first chartered town in Biscay, in 1199

Walk the old quarter and the riverside, which is what the road and the bridge built

Lope Sánchez de Mena chartered Balmaseda in 1199, making it the first town in what is now Biscay to receive a fuero, and it grew on the natural pass between the Castilian meseta and the Cantabrian coast — which is what the medieval toll bridge over the Cadagua with a gate tower in the middle of it was for. Its Good Friday Passion play is one of the oldest and largest in Spain, with several hundred townspeople taking the parts, performed through the streets of the old quarter rather than on a stage, and it draws thousands.

Balmaseda: A Passion Play and a Toll Bridge

Go into the Sancti Spiritus university building, founded by papal bull in 1540 and closed in 1842

Work out what five faculties in a Gipuzkoan town of this size actually meant

Find out what conditions the town attached to joining Gipuzkoa in 1540

Go into the Arrikrutz cave under the town

Drive up the valley to Arantzazu, which is the other half of a day here

In 1540 Bishop Rodrigo Mercado de Zuazola founded the University of Sancti Spiritus at Oñati by bull of Paul III — the first university in the Basque Country, with faculties of law, canons, arts, medicine and theology, running until it closed in 1842. The town negotiated its own annexation to Gipuzkoa in 1540 on conditions including a road and an increased endowment for the university. It was a Carlist stronghold in the 19th century and the Pretender's headquarters. The Arrikrutz cave beneath it is open, and Arantzazu is up the valley.