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

Walk round the walls of the empty village

Go up to the castle at the north-west corner, built on the Almohad alcazaba

Walk the empty main street and work out when the last people left

Look out over the reservoir that was supposed to flood the village and never did

Granadilla was founded by the Muslims in the 9th century on a slate hill above the Alagón, a stronghold on the road between the Vía de la Plata and the Hurdes. Ferdinand II of León took it in 1160, walled it and made it a town in 1170; it was called Granada until the fall of the other Granada in 1492, then Granadilla to avoid the confusion. When the Gabriel y Galán reservoir was built it was declared liable to flooding, expropriated in 1960 and emptied of its people — and the water has never reached it, not even with the reservoir full. It was declared a historic site in 1980, and since 1984 it has been in the national programme for bringing abandoned villages back to use.

Granadilla: A Walled Village Emptied for a Flood That Never Came

Walk from the new cathedral into the old one and find the join where the building stops

Work out what happened: a replacement begun in 1498, the money gone, and the old church kept

Find Rodrigo Alemán's choir stalls and look closely at what is actually carved on them

Walk the walls and work out what happened in 1196, when the Almohads took the town ten years after it was founded

Come for the Martes Mayor, the August market day that is a festival of tourist interest in its own right

Alfonso VIII founded Plasencia in 1186 and stamped its arms with the motto Ut placeat Deo et hominibus — that it may please God and men. Clement III created the diocese in 1189; the Almohads took the town in 1196 after the Castilian defeat at Alarcos, and Alfonso VIII got it back. Placentia in Newfoundland and Placentia in California are both named from it. It has two cathedrals joined together: the old Romanesque-Gothic one of the 13th century, and a new one begun in 1498 to replace it that was never finished, so the money ran out and the two were simply left stuck to each other, with the join visible. The new one has choir stalls by Rodrigo Alemán carved with scenes nobody expects to find in a cathedral.

Plasencia: A Cathedral Left Half Built

Come in the second half of March for the Cerezo en Flor and get up onto a terrace above the valley floor

Work out the number: about a million and a half trees flowering almost in unison across a fortnight

Find out what a picota is and why it comes off its stalk on the tree

Walk up into the Garganta de los Infiernos reserve to the Los Pilones rock pools

Come back in June for the fruit, which is the other half of the year here

The Jerte valley runs between the Sierra de Gredos and the Sierra de Tormantos, terraced from the river to well up the slopes with about a million and a half cherry trees. In the second half of March they flower almost in unison and the valley turns white for about a fortnight — the Cerezo en Flor, a festival of National Tourist Interest and one of the few genuinely mass floral events in Europe. The cherries themselves have a protected designation; the picota varieties come off the stalk on the tree, which is what distinguishes them. Above the valley the Garganta de los Infiernos is a reserve of rock pools cut by the stream.

The Jerte Valley: A Million Cherry Trees at Once

Walk the judería down to the river and look at how the chestnut frames are built

Work out why the houses lean towards each other over the lane

Walk into the chestnut forest above the town, which is where the building timber came from

Come in late October or November for the Otoño Mágico, when the chestnut valley turns

Find the Convento de los Trinitarios and the old bridge over the Ambroz

A substantial Jewish community established itself beside the Ambroz in the 15th century, and Hervás has one of the best-preserved Jewish quarters in Spain — steep, narrow lanes of houses framed in chestnut timber with adobe infill, leaning into each other over the street, dropping down to the river. The valley behind is chestnut forest, which is where the timber came from and which turns colour spectacularly in autumn. The town is the main settlement of the Ambroz valley in the northern edge of Cáceres province, under the Sierra de Béjar.

Hervás: A Jewish Quarter of Chestnut Beams

Drive the slate valleys and look at the terracing — every scrap of flat ground here was made by hand

Find out what the black legend was and what it was used to argue in the 16th and 17th centuries

Watch Buñuel's Las Hurdes, tierra sin pan of 1932 before you come, then work out what he staged and what he did not

Find the hurdano houses in the alquerías — built entirely of slate and roofed with slate slabs

Find the rock carvings cut into flat slate and schist outcrops at ground level, and walk up towards Rongiero at 1,622 metres — this is a beautiful place, which is the part the legend left out

Las Hurdes is a knot of steep slate valleys in northern Cáceres that has carried a black legend for four centuries. In the 16th and 17th centuries, while Europe argued about whether the peoples of America were fully human, writers used isolated corners of Iberia — this one above all — as proof that savagery existed in Europe too. Alfonso XIII came in 1922 after medical reports by Gregorio Marañón and others. Then in 1932 Luis Buñuel filmed Las Hurdes, tierra sin pan here, and fixed the region in the Spanish mind as the definition of rural backwardness. It is a beautiful place, and worth coming to on its own terms.

Las Hurdes: The Black Legend and Buñuel's Camera

Go into the imperial apartments and find the window through which Charles V heard Mass from his bed

Find the chair built for a man who could no longer walk and had to be carried

Work out what he gave up: Spain, the Netherlands, Naples, the Empire — abdicated, then this

Walk the gardens and the pool he had made below the terrace

Drive the Vera valley around it and work out why, of everywhere he owned, he chose here

Charles V ruled Spain, the Netherlands, much of Italy and the Holy Roman Empire, abdicated the lot, and came to a Hieronymite monastery in a wooded valley in northern Extremadura to wait for the end. He lived here from 1556 until he died on 21 September 1558. He was crippled with gout, so his rooms were built beside the church choir with a window through which he could hear Mass from his bed, and a chair was made specially so he could be carried. Yuste was named a European Heritage site in 2007.

Yuste: Where the Emperor Went to Die

Drive the road down to Sa Calobra and through the Nus de sa Corbata

Walk from Sa Calobra into the mouth of the Torrent de Pareis

Find out why the Torrent de Pareis produces a quarter of Mallorca's rescues

Look for the plants found only in the Balearics on the gorge walls

The road down to Sa Calobra, a cove in Escorca on the north coast of Mallorca, has more than eight hundred bends counted from Palma, and at the Nus de sa Corbata, the tie knot, it loops round and passes under itself. At the bottom the Torrent de Pareis reaches the sea: a gorge that starts at S'Entreforc, where the Gorg Blau and the torrent of Lluc meet, and holds more than 300 plant species, a tenth of them found only in the Balearics. It has been a natural monument since 2003. Walkers descend it from Escorca to Sa Calobra — and it accounts for a quarter of all mountain rescues on Mallorca.

Sa Calobra and the Torrent de Pareis

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.