Climb to the 14th-century castle above the harbour, built to keep the pirates out

Find the monolith to the French prisoners of 1808–1814, fewer than half of whom survived the island

Cabrera is the largest island of a small archipelago south of Mallorca, and because the army has held it since 1916 its coast is one of the best preserved in the Mediterranean. It became a national park on 29 April 1991, and the protected area was made eight times larger in 2019. In the 14th century a castle was built at the harbour mouth to stop Barbary pirates using the natural harbour as a base. After the battle of Bailén in 1808 the French prisoners were shipped out here with no prison at all — the island was the prison — and by the time peace came in 1814 fewer than half were still alive; a monolith stands to them. The old winery of the Feliu family, who owned the island at the end of the 19th century, is now a museum.

Cabrera: A National Park Island That Was a Prison Camp

Work out what it is standing on — Roman and Renaissance sea walls, which no other Gothic cathedral does

Look at the rose window: thirteen metres across, the largest original one in the Gothic world

Come on a morning in early February or November when the light through the rose window lands under the one opposite

Find Gaudí's interventions in the interior and work out which parts are his and which are medieval

Find out where the stone came from — sea caves quarried into a cliff at Portals Vells and shipped round the bay

Palma cathedral is Levantine Gothic built on the edge of the bay, standing on the Roman and Renaissance walls that defended the city — the only Gothic cathedral anywhere that does. It holds the largest original rose window in the Gothic world at thirteen metres across; there are bigger ones, but they are neo-Gothic. Its nave is among the tallest in European Gothic. Some of the stone came from sea caves cut into the cliff at Portals Vells and shipped round to Palma. Gaudí was brought in at the start of the 20th century to rework the interior, and left before finishing.

La Seu: The Cathedral That Stands on the Sea Wall

Sit on the Llac Martel for the daily classical concert, played from boats out on the water

Work out the dimensions: 115 metres by 30, and one of the largest underground lakes in the world

Take the boat across the lake afterwards, which is how you leave

Find out who Martel was and what he and Louis Armand did here

Read what Jules Verne wrote about these caves in 1895 and work out how much of it he had actually seen

Four caves run 2.4 kilometres into the rock near Porto Cristo, 25 metres down, with 1.2 kilometres of it open. The name first appears in 1632. Édouard-Alfred Martel, with Louis Armand, found two of the caves and an underground lake now named after him — Llac Martel, about 115 metres long and 30 wide, one of the largest underground lakes in the world. Jules Verne wrote about the caves in 1895, listing their lakes, stalactite chapels and theatre. There is a live classical concert on the lake every day, played from boats.

Coves del Drac: A Concert on an Underground Lake

Walk a stretch of the GR 221, the Ruta de Pedra en Sec, on the mule paths and stone steps the terracing was built with

Look at a terrace wall closely and work out that there is no mortar anywhere in it

Find the cisterns, water channels and charcoal-burning platforms that made a vertical mountain farmable

Go into the Real Cartuja at Valldemossa and find the cells where Chopin and George Sand spent the winter of 8 November 1838 to 13 February 1839

Read what George Sand wrote about the Mallorcans in A Winter in Majorca, and work out why the island has mixed feelings about her

Work out the rainfall difference: up to 1,507mm a year here against under 400mm in parts of southern Mallorca

The Tramuntana runs ninety kilometres along the north-west of Mallorca and it was listed by UNESCO on 27 June 2011 not for the rock but for what people did to it — a thousand years of dry-stone terracing, water channels, cisterns, charcoal platforms and mule paths, built without mortar to make a near-vertical limestone range produce olives and oranges. The technique has its own name, pedra en sec, and it is still practised. This is also the wet side of the island: up to 1,507 millimetres of rain a year against under 400 in parts of the south.

The Serra de Tramuntana: A Mountain Range Built by Hand

Visit Son Marroig, the Archduke Ludwig Salvator's estate, and look down on Sa Foradada

The English poet and novelist Robert Graves was one of the first foreigners to settle in Deià, on the Tramuntana coast of Mallorca, where he and Laura Riding ran the Seizin Press. His house is now a museum. Since the 1960s and 70s artists have followed him to the village. Along the coast is Son Marroig, the great estate of the Archduke Ludwig Salvator, with the headland of Sa Foradada below it.

Deià: Robert Graves's Village

Ride the Ferrocarril de Sóller from Palma through thirteen tunnels in the original wooden carriages

Take the open-sided tram of 1913 from Sóller down through the streets to Port de Sóller

Work out why the line exists: the orange growers built it themselves to get their fruit off an island valley with no road worth using

Drink a fresh orange juice in the Plaça and find the Modernista bank and church front by a pupil of Gaudí

Walk up to the Mirador de Ses Barques above the port for the view back down the valley

Sóller sits in a bowl in the Tramuntana that was effectively cut off from the rest of Mallorca until 1912, when the orange growers paid for their own railway and drove thirteen tunnels through the mountain to reach Palma. It is still running, on the original wooden rolling stock, and it is one of the great short train journeys in Europe. At the other end an open-sided tram of 1913 rattles down through the town to the port. The valley is still full of orange and lemon groves, which is what the railway was built to move.

The Sóller Railway and the Orange Valley

Walk the canal paths into the reed bed at first light, which is when the marsh is actually working

Work out what the canals are: a 19th-century drainage scheme that the park now uses to manage water levels

Get to a hide on the lagoon and work out which birds are resident and which are simply passing through

Walk the complete medieval circuit of walls round Alcúdia old town

Find the Roman town of Pollentia outside the walls, with its forum and theatre

S'Albufera de Mallorca is the largest wetland in the Balearics — reed bed, canal and lagoon behind the bay of Alcúdia, and a natural park protecting 1,687 species across its marshes and dunes. The canals through it are a 19th-century drainage scheme, now used in reverse to manage water levels for conservation, and the marsh is a major stopover for birds crossing the western Mediterranean. Behind it Alcúdia still has its complete medieval walls, and the Roman town of Pollentia sits just outside them.

Alcúdia and S'Albufera

Work out why the capital moved to Maó in 1708 and what that preserved here

Find out what happened in 1558 when the Ottoman fleet took the town

Come for Sant Joan in June and watch the horses reared upright in the Plaça des Born

Walk the old town, which is Catalan Gothic and Baroque rather than Georgian

Go down to the long narrow harbour and work out why the British preferred Maó's

Ciutadella was the capital of Menorca until the British took the island in 1708 and moved the capital to Maó for the harbour — which is why Ciutadella kept its Spanish and Catalan character while Maó acquired sash windows. The Ottoman fleet sacked it in 1558 and carried off most of the population, an event the town still commemorates. Its Sant Joan festival in June is one of the oldest and wildest in the Mediterranean: horses reared upright into a packed crowd in the Plaça des Born, done by riders whose families have done it for generations.

Ciutadella: The Menorca Britain Did Not Choose

Taste Roncal, the first cheese in Spain to get a denominación de origen, in 1981

Go to Gayarre's house museum and his mausoleum by Benlliure, and find out who he was

Be at boundary marker 262 on the Ernaz pass on 13 July for the Tribute of the Three Cows

Work out what is being enacted: an arbitral sentence of 16 October 1375, on a ceremony older than the sentence

Drive up into the Belagua valley and the Larra massif above, which is high karst

Roncal was the first cheese in Spain to be granted a denominación de origen, in 1981, and the point of it was to stop other cheeses calling themselves roncal. It is made by hand from raw Latxa sheep's milk in the Navarrese Pyrenees under the Mesa de los Tres Reyes. In 882 Sancho García granted the valley the right to bring its flocks down to winter in the Bardenas Reales, which they had earned fighting the Saracens. The valley also produced Julián Gayarre, the greatest Spanish tenor of the 19th century, whose mausoleum by Mariano Benlliure is in the village of Roncal. And every 13 July, at boundary marker 262 on the Ernaz pass — standing in for the lost Stone of San Martín — the men of the French Barétous valley hand three cows to the men of Roncal, under an arbitral sentence of 16 October 1375 that is considered the oldest treaty in Europe still in force. The ceremony itself is older than the sentence. Navarre made it intangible cultural heritage on 24 January 2011.