Look out over the reservoir and work out where the nine villages were

Find the churches of Pedrosa del Rey and La Puerta, moved up to the new Riaño

Find out how the valley protested against the dam

Drive the N-625 north from Riaño towards the Picos de Europa

The Riaño reservoir, at the head of the Esla in the mountains of León, closed on 31 December 1987 to water 84,000 hectares of the Tierra de Campos. It drowned nine villages — Anciles, Salio, Huelde, Éscaro, La Puerta, Burón, Pedrosa del Rey, Riaño and part of Vegacerneja — after years of protest in the valley. Old Riaño was demolished in July 1987. Everything was knocked down except five monumental buildings, which were moved above the waterline: the hermitage of Quintanilla and the churches of Pedrosa del Rey and La Puerta to the new Riaño, built from 1980, and the school and church to the new Burón.

Riaño: The Nine Villages Under the Reservoir

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 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

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

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

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

Stand under the so-called Roman bridge and find out that it is medieval, and that everybody calls it Roman anyway

Work out what happened here: the capital of the kingdom of Asturias from 722 until 774, the only Christian state left in Iberia

Find the cross hanging beneath the central arch of the bridge — a copy of the Victory Cross, which began as the oak cross Pelayo carried at Covadonga

Go into the chapel of Santa Cruz, raised over a dolmen of the third millennium BC by King Favila and Queen Froiluba and consecrated on 27 October 737 to hold Pelayo's cross

Drink sidra poured properly — from arm's length, a couple of fingers at a time, drunk immediately

After the victory at Covadonga in 722 Pelayo made Cangas de Onís his capital, reusing the Roman settlement already there, and it stayed the capital of the kingdom of Asturias until 774 — which makes this small town on the Sella the first seat of the only Christian kingdom left in Iberia. The famous humpbacked bridge over the river is universally called the Roman bridge and is not: it was built in the Middle Ages. Pelayo's tomb is up the valley at Covadonga.

Cangas de Onís: The First Capital of Christian Spain

Walk the Vía de la Plata through the excavated town

Find out what happened to Cáparra's second arch

Work out why a pre-Roman trading place became a Roman town

Cáparra lies on the Vía de la Plata, the Roman road that runs as the main axis of its grid from north to south. Its name is not Latin but pre-Roman, probably Vettonian, and may mean a place of exchange — it stands where the road to the Jerte valley met the roads north. After Vespasian's edict of 74 AD it became a municipium, and it was built up as a Roman town; its arch is its unmistakable symbol. Renaissance writers recorded two arches here; only one stands now.

Cáparra: A Roman Town on the Vía de la Plata

Climb to Begur castle and find the watchtowers built against the pirates

Walk the streets of the indianos' houses in Begur

Hear the habaneras at the Port Bo in Calella de Palafrugell

Walk the garden at Cap Roig above the sea

Begur grew rich on the indianos — local men who crossed the Atlantic, above all to Cuba, made their fortunes and came home to build — and five watchtowers against Moorish pirates stand round its castle. Below it are some of the best-known coves of the Costa Brava: Sa Riera, Aiguafreda, Sa Tuna, Fornells and Aiguablava, where a parador was built on the cliff in 1966. A few kilometres south, Calella de Palafrugell has kept the feel of a fishing village; on the first Saturday of July it holds the Cantada d'havaneres, the songs popular in Catalonia's fishing villages, in the Port Bo, and above it on Cap Roig are the botanical garden and the summer festival.