Watch one of the Holy Week processions of Viveiro's eight brotherhoods

Walk through the Puerta de Carlos V and find the three coats of arms

Find the monument to the Magdalena and the Palomo on the rocks by Covas beach

Drive up to the Mirador de San Roque for the view over the ría

Viveiro's Holy Week is one of the oldest religious celebrations in Galicia, held without a break since the 13th century, with eight brotherhoods carrying the processions of the Passion; it is a festival of international tourist interest. The town enters through the Puerta de Carlos V, a Plateresque gate finished in 1554 with the emperor's arms between those of Galicia and Viveiro. On the rocks by Covas beach a monument remembers the frigate Santa María Magdalena and the brig Palomo, wrecked together in a storm in 1810 with more than 500 dead.

Viveiro: A Holy Week Kept Since the 13th Century

Walk out past the lighthouse to the northernmost point of the Iberian peninsula

Sit at the headland with binoculars and count the gannets and shearwaters passing

Find the ruins of the American LORAN station

Look back along the coast towards Cabo Ortegal

Estaca de Bares, in Mañón, is the northernmost point of Spain and of the Iberian peninsula, and its lighthouse is the most northerly on the peninsula. It is also an outstanding place to watch seabirds on migration: more than 280,000 have been counted passing in a year, gannets above all, with Manx and Cory's shearwaters. From the early 1960s the US Coast Guard ran a LORAN navigation station here, taken over by the US Air Force in 1978; its buildings are ruins now.

Estaca de Bares: The Northernmost Point of Spain

Go to the Festival do Mundo Celta and hear the pipe bands from the Celtic nations

Find out how a town pipe band started a free festival in 1978

Walk Morouzos beach and the pine wood where the festival camps

Walk along the ría de Ortigueira, Galicia's largest Ramsar wetland

Find the castro of Punta dos Prados and its ritual steam bath

The Festival Internacional do Mundo Celta was started in 1978 by the Santa Marta de Ortigueira pipe band, and it has been free since 1985: a festival of the folk music of the Celtic nations, usually on the second weekend of July, declared of international tourist interest in 2005. People camp on Morouzos beach and in the pine wood behind it. The rest of the year Ortigueira is a quiet town at the head of its ría, the largest of Galicia's five Ramsar wetlands, with the 19th-century Teatro de la Beneficencia in a wing of the building that also holds the town hall and the Iron Age castro of Punta dos Prados, which had a ritual steam bath, on the far shore.

Ortigueira: The Festival of the Celtic World

Walk out to the lighthouse and look down on Os Aguillóns, the three stacks

Stand on the line between the Atlantic and the Cantabrian Sea and look both ways

Look east over the ría de Ortigueira, a wetland of international importance

Cabo Ortegal, in the municipality of Cariño, is the symbolic dividing line between the Atlantic Ocean and the Cantabrian Sea. The cape is a wide arc of cliff between two rocky points; on the eastern one stands the lighthouse, a red and white cylinder, and in front of it are Os Aguillóns, three sharp stacks being worn down by the sea. To the east opens the ría de Ortigueira, the largest of Galicia's five Ramsar wetlands.

Cabo Ortegal: Where the Atlantic Meets the Cantabrian Sea

Stand in front of the cathedral, begun in 1219, and work out why it is nicknamed the kneeling one

Find the Gothic paintings in the nave under the organs, including the Slaughter of the Innocents

Find out who Álvaro Cunqueiro was and read something of his set in a version of this town

Eat tarta de Mondoñedo, which the town has made for generations

Walk the old quarter and work out what a Galician capital looked like before it stopped being one

Mondoñedo was one of the seven capitals of the Kingdom of Galicia and a bishop's seat, and then the world moved and it did not. What is left is a small town with a cathedral out of all proportion to it, begun in 1219 and well advanced by 1246 — Romanesque with Gothic transept, sacristy and a five-metre rose window of the 14th century in the west front. It is nicknamed the kneeling cathedral for its perfect proportions and low height. Álvaro Cunqueiro, one of the great Galician writers of the 20th century, was born here and set much of his work in a version of this town. The local sweet is the tarta de Mondoñedo.

Mondoñedo: A Capital That Stopped

Walk the path in and add a stone to one of the milladoiros, which is what pilgrims have always done

Learn the saying and work out what it actually commits you to

Find out why people here step carefully round lizards and insects on this particular path

Buy a sanandresiño, the bread-crumb figure made for the pilgrimage

Walk out onto the Herbeira cliffs above the village, among the highest sea cliffs in Europe

The saying in Galicia is vai de morto quen non foi de vivo — whoever did not go alive goes dead. San Andrés de Teixido is a hamlet on the Serra da Capelada above the cliffs, and the belief is that if you fail to make the pilgrimage in life your soul must make it after death, often in the form of an animal, which is why Galicians here will not step on a lizard or a beetle in case. Relatives can carry a dead person's soul instead, inviting it from the grave before setting out. Pilgrims add a stone to the milladoiros along the path — there are about twenty of them between Veniño and Teixido.

San Andrés de Teixido: Go Dead If You Did Not Go Alive

Check the tide table before you do anything else, and time your visit for low water

Walk under the arches — over thirty metres of eroded slate and schist, which is where the name came from

Go into the caves and sand passages that are only open at the bottom of the tide

Come back at high tide and walk the clifftop path east towards Esteiro to see the same place as an unbroken cliff

Work out why the tide is the whole point here: this stretch of the Rasa Cantábrica is almost flat, so the sea comes back across it quickly

Its real name is the beach of Augas Santas, ten kilometres west of Ribadeo on the Cantabrian coast, but nobody calls it that. At high tide it is a cliff. At low tide the sea pulls back off a long sweep of sand walled by slate and schist eroded into arches over thirty metres high that look exactly like the flying buttresses of a cathedral, with caves and sand corridors running back between the rock. On spring tides you can walk along the sand to the neighbouring beaches — and the coast here is nearly horizontal, so the water comes back fast.

Praia das Catedrais: The Beach That Only Exists at Low Tide

Climb to Olvera castle for the view over the white town

Cycle or walk the Vía Verde from Olvera through the tunnels

Reach the Peñón de Zaframagón and watch the griffon vultures on the rock

Find out why Olvera is the starting point of the Camino de la Frontera to Santiago

Taste the olive oil of the Sierra de Cádiz in Olvera

Olvera, one of the white towns of the Sierra de Cádiz, stands on its hill under a castle that Don Juan Manuel looked at in the summer of 1326 and decided not to attack. It is the end of the Vía Verde de la Sierra, just over 36 kilometres of the old Jerez–Almargen railway, turned into a path for walkers, cyclists and riders: 29 tunnels, the longest 990 metres, four viaducts and five stations. It was named the best greenway in Europe in 2005 and 2009. On the way it passes the Peñón de Zaframagón, a nature reserve since 1989 with the largest colony of griffon vultures in Andalusia — around 200 breeding pairs.