Book a guided visit to the Cañaica del Calar or Fuente del Sabuco shelters

Work out what Levantine rock art is and why the 1998 listing covers so many separate sites

Come at Easter for the tamborada, part of the same UNESCO inscription as Hellín's

Drive up into the Sierra de Moratalla, which is among the emptiest country in the south-east

Moratalla is one of the largest municipalities in Spain by area and one of the emptiest, running up into the Sierra de Moratalla in the far north-west of Murcia. Its rock shelters hold Levantine paintings that are part of the Rock Art of the Mediterranean Basin on the Iberian Peninsula, listed by UNESCO in 1998 — the Cañaica del Calar and Fuente del Sabuco among them. The town itself climbs to a castle keep, and the drum festival at Easter is part of the same UNESCO tamboradas inscription as Hellín.

Moratalla: Rock Art and Empty Sierra

Go up to the Santuario de la Vera Cruz inside the castle and find the double-armed cross the whole town is built around

Work out the company it keeps: one of only five cities in the Catholic world with a perpetual jubilee, alongside Rome, Jerusalem, Santiago and Santo Toribio

Find the Templete, where the cross has been dipped in water every 3 May since 1384

Come for the Caballos del Vino in early May, where horses in heavy embroidered mantles are run up the hill to the castle

See the Renaissance church of El Salvador, among the finest in Murcia

There are five cities in the Catholic world with the perpetual right to hold a jubilee year — Rome, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, Santo Toribio de Liébana and Caravaca de la Cruz, which was granted it in 1998 and holds one every seven years. The relic is the Vera Cruz, a double-armed cross said to have been brought by angels in 1231. Every 3 May since 1384 it has been dipped in water in a ceremony at the Templete, and every May the town runs the Caballos del Vino, in which horses in embroidered mantles are raced up to the castle.

Caravaca de la Cruz: One of Five Holy Cities

Be in the street for a tamborada and work out what twenty-five thousand drums at once actually does to you

Find out what the black smock and red neckerchief mean and where the costume comes from

Be there for the climb to the Calvario in the first hours of Good Friday, which is the set piece

Find out what UNESCO inscribed in 2018, and that Tobarra, Moratalla and Mula do the same thing

Borrow or hire a drum and join in, which is the point — this is not a spectator event

For several days over Easter the town of Hellín beats drums, continuously, in the street, in enormous numbers — around twenty-five thousand drummers, individually and in peñas, drumming through the night and into the following day until their hands bleed, which is not a metaphor. One of the set pieces is the climb to the Calvario in the first hours of Good Friday. It is one of a cluster of Spanish Holy Week drum towns, and it is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list as part of the Tamboradas ritual drum-playing inscription of 2018. Standing inside it is physically overwhelming in a way that no recording conveys.

Hellín: Twenty Thousand Drums

Come in late February or March for the floración and get to a mirador above the valley floor

Work out the scale: tens of thousands of stone-fruit trees flowering within a couple of weeks of each other

Go to Medina Siyâsa above the town, an excavated Andalusi settlement with reconstructed houses

Find the rock art in the Almadenes gorge, part of the Levantine rock art World Heritage listing

Canoe or walk the Segura through the Almadenes cut

Cieza sits on the middle Segura where the river cuts through the Murcian hills, and it grows peaches, nectarines and apricots on terraces across the whole valley floor and up the slopes. For two to three weeks in late February and March the entire valley flowers at once — tens of thousands of trees in pink and white against bare rock — and the town has built a set of viewpoints and marked routes specifically to look at it. The rest of the year the same valley holds Iberian rock art in the Almadenes gorge and a Muslim town site at Medina Siyâsa.

Cieza: The Blossom of the Segura Valley

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.

Ayna: The Switzerland of La Mancha

Walk the huerta and find the azudes and channels — the irrigation the Moriscos built and the valley still runs on

Work out what happened here: exempted from the 1609 expulsion, then expelled anyway by a decree written against them in 1614

Find out who wanted their land, and what happened to it in the 18th century

Walk between the valley villages — Ricote, Ojós, Ulea, Villanueva — which sit in a line along the Segura

Come in February or March when the apricot and peach blossom is out across the whole valley floor

The Ricote valley on the middle Segura is still called the Moorish Valley, and for good reason. When the 1609 decree expelled the Moriscos from Spain, the people here argued successfully that they were genuinely Christian and were let alone — the only community in the country to manage it. It did not last. Local landowners wanted their property, a fresh decree aimed specifically at them was issued in 1614, and at the end of that year they were put on ships at Cartagena. They were the last Moriscos to leave Spain. What they left is the irrigation system that still waters the valley.

The Ricote Valley: The Last Moriscos in Spain

Get into the thermal water, which is what the place is for and has been since the Romans

Find Manuel Castaños's starred muqarnas dome, from the rebuilding of 1858 to 1878

Work out the sequence: Roman baths, disentailment sale in the 19th century, then twenty years of rebuilding

Walk the grounds by the Segura under the eucalyptus and palms

Find out what is in the water, and why hot mineral springs surface here at all

The hot springs at Archena sit beside the Segura among eucalyptus, palms and lemon trees, and the Romans found and worked them as baths. The site was sold off in the 19th-century disentailment and then completely rebuilt architecturally between 1858 and 1878 by architects including José María Aguilar y Vela, with interiors by the decorator Manuel Castaños — whose starred muqarnas dome is the thing to look at. It is still a working thermal spa rather than a monument, which means you can use it the way it was built to be used.

Archena: A Roman Spa Still Running

Be on the Cuesta de los Danzadores for the descent and work out that they are spinning the whole way down

Look at the stilts and the yellow skirts and work out how the costume is meant to work with the spin

Come in July for the Magdalena or in September for the Gracias, which are the two occasions

Walk up to the Ermita de la Magdalena and find the intermittent spring beside it

Work out why this is called the oldest folk tradition in La Rioja

Anguiano's stilt dancers are said to be the oldest folk tradition in La Rioja. Eight men in yellow skirts, on stilts about half a metre high, spin down the Cuesta de los Danzadores — a steep cobbled street running from the church to the Plaza Mayor — rotating the whole way, held up only by momentum, with the crowd packed on both sides. They do it for the Magdalena in July and again at the Gracias in September. It looks impossible and people do get hurt.

Anguiano: Dancing Down a Hill on Stilts

Walk round the gredas and work out that wind, not water, did most of this

Work out why it survives here: this is the driest corner of the Iberian peninsula

Stay off the formations themselves, which are soft and break under a hand

Walk west along the coast, which is 35 kilometres of largely undeveloped sand

Come at low sun, when the shapes read properly

At Bolnuevo, on the Mazarrón coast, a bank of clays formed from weathered igneous and metamorphic rock has been cut by wind — and much less by rain — into mushrooms, towers and overhangs standing directly behind the beach. It is one of the clearest pieces of wind erosion anywhere on the Spanish coast, and the reason it survives is that this is the driest corner of the peninsula. The Mazarrón coast behind it has 35 kilometres of mostly fine sand with almost no development on it outside the port and Bolnuevo itself.