Take the cable car and work out that it gains 753 metres in 1,840 metres of cable

Walk from El Cable towards the Áliva refuge and down to Espinama, which is the classic day

Work out that the walk you have just skipped would have taken several hours

Look for chamois on the rock above the top station, which are used to people

Walk up from Fuente Dé on foot by the canal route instead, if you want to earn it

At the head of the Liébana the mountains simply stop being walkable and become a wall, and a cable car goes up it — 753 metres of vertical in 1,840 metres of cable, from the valley floor to a station called El Cable on the rim. It is the best-known tourist installation in Cantabria and it puts you, in four minutes, in high-mountain terrain that would otherwise be several hours of climbing. From the top you can walk to the Áliva refuge and down into Espinama, or go on into the central massif of the Picos.

Fuente Dé: Seven Hundred Metres Straight Up

Walk up the old path from Poncebos, which is how the village was supplied for centuries

Take the funicular back down and work out what 402 metres of tunnel at 18.19% means

Work out what the funicular changed for fifty people, and what it may also have cost them

Walk up from Bulnes towards the Naranjo de Bulnes for the view of the face

Eat Cabrales in the village that is surrounded by the caves it is cured in

Bulnes has about fifty inhabitants and no road. For centuries the only way in was a steep path up from Poncebos, which is how everything the village used had to arrive. In the 1990s the Principality decided to end that isolation and bored a funicular through the Peña Maín: a tunnel climbing 402 metres at a gradient of 18.19%, opened in 2001, and by 2011 half a million people had used it. You can still walk the old path, and walking it is the point — it tells you what fifty people did every time they needed anything.

Bulnes: A Village Reached Through a Mountain

Walk the Ruta del Cares from Caín into the narrowest part of the gorge, along the path cut for the canal, and back

Stop at the Mirador del Tombo above the Cares, opened in 1964, and use its engraved panel to name the peaks

Find the Chorco de los lobos, the stone wolf trap near Caín that was used for centuries

Taste Valdeón, the blue cheese made at Posada de Valdeón

Caín is a hamlet of about seventy people at 460 metres in the Valdeón valley, at the León end of the Cares gorge. The path through the gorge to Poncebos, a little over 12 kilometres, began as the track for the channel feeding a small power station opened at Camarmeña-Poncebos in 1921, and was improved into a footpath between 1945 and 1950; about 300,000 people a year now walk it, and in places it runs along the cliff with an unprotected drop below. Caín's Gregorio Pérez, 'El Cainejo', made the first ascent of the Naranjo de Bulnes with Pedro Pidal on 5 August 1904.

Caín and the Cares Gorge: The Divine Gorge From the León Side

Stand where the four valleys meet and work out why Potes is where it is

Work out the microclimate: a basin ringed by the Picos, warm enough for vines and olives

Taste orujo, distilled from grape marc, and come in November for the festival built round it

Climb the Torre del Infantado in the middle of the town

Drive or walk up to Fuente Dé and take the cable car for the view back down over the whole basin

Potes sits where four valleys meet in the middle of the Liébana, ringed by the Picos de Europa on three sides, reached from the coast only through the twenty-two-kilometre La Hermida gorge. That isolation gives it a microclimate warm enough to grow vines and olives inside a mountain basin. The town is stone bridges, a medieval tower and a market that still works, and the local spirit is orujo, distilled from grape marc, with a festival devoted to it in November.

Potes and the Liébana

Drive the narrow mountain road into Tresviso, cut into the Picos de Europa cliff face — one of the most remote villages in mainland Spain

Find the natural limestone caves above the village where Picón Bejes-Tresviso is aged for two to four months at 5–10°C

Taste Picón directly from a producer in Tresviso — a blend of cow's, sheep's and goat's milk unique among Spain's blue cheeses

Continue to Bejes, the cheese's other namesake village, on the descent back toward the coast

Picón Bejes-Tresviso is a blue cheese with protected designation since 1994, cured in natural caves in the Picos de Europa exactly as Cabrales in Asturias and Valdeón in León are cured — the same mountain, three names, three appellations. The paste is white with blue-green veining from Penicillium growing in the cave air. Tresviso itself has around fifty inhabitants, and the oddity is that although it is in Cantabria there is no road to it from Cantabria: the only road in comes from Asturias, and reaching the rest of your own region by car means about forty kilometres.

Tresviso: The Cave-Aged Blue Cheese of the Picos

Drive the N-621 through all twenty-two kilometres of it and work out that you cannot see the tops of the walls from the road

Stop and look up at limestone faces over 600 metres high

Work out its strategic point: this is the only corridor from the Cantabrian coast into Liébana

Look for vultures and eagles on the updraughts, and chamois on the rock — 6,350 hectares of the gorge is a special protection area for birds

Find out who used this road in the 19th century: British travellers, climbers and hunters on their way to the Picos

The Deva has cut twenty-two kilometres of gorge through the Ándara massif between Panes and Cillorigo de Liébana, which makes it the longest defile in Spain, with near-vertical limestone walls some of them over 600 metres high — so high that from the road you cannot see the top. It is the only way in to Liébana from the Cantabrian coast, which is why the narrow N-621 runs through it. In the 19th century it was the route British travellers, mountaineers and hunters took to get at the Picos de Europa.

La Hermida: The Longest Gorge in Spain

Ride the road up from Covadonga to the Lagos de Covadonga, the twin lakes Enol and Ercina, one of the classic climbs of the Vuelta a España

Visit the Santa Cueva de Covadonga, the sanctuary cave that holds the tombs of the kings Pelagius and Alfonso I, from the 722 Battle of Covadonga that began the Reconquista

See the Basilica de Santa María la Real, the neo-Romanesque basilica built in 1886–1901 by Roberto Frassinelli

In 722 a small Visigothic force under Pelagius beat an Umayyad column in a valley below these mountains, and Spain has treated it ever since as the moment the Reconquista started — eight centuries of it, finishing at Granada in 1492. The sanctuary is built around the cave where it is said to have happened, with the tombs of Pelagius and Alfonso I inside it. The road up to the lakes above is one of the hardest finishes in the Vuelta a España: twelve kilometres with pitches over 15 per cent, ending at two glacial lakes at about 1,100 metres.

Covadonga: Pelayo's Cave and the Climb to the Lakes

Find the valley's coat of arms on house fronts and work out that every household here is entitled to it

Work out what hidalguía meant for a whole valley rather than a family

Drive between several of the fifteen places — Errazu, Arizkun, Irurita, Elbete — and see how scattered they are

Find the Bozate quarter at Arizkun and find out who lived there and why they were kept apart

Walk into the beech woods above the valley towards the French border

Baztán is a single municipality of 376 square kilometres made up of fifteen separate places, each with its own scattered hamlets and farmsteads, in the Navarrese mountains near the French border. Sancho III the Great made it a lordship, and because everyone born in the valley held hidalgo status, every household is entitled to use the valley's arms — which is why you find the same shield carved on the front of almost every house and farmstead, varied by the taste of whichever century put it up. Elizondo is the capital, at 200 metres.