Day trips from Bilbao

A medieval trading town on the Camino de Santiago in Bizkaia, where a Romanesque-Gothic bridge still spans the Cadagua river beside a walled centre that has anchored this corner of the Basque Country since 1199.

A walled city on the ancient wool road from Castile to the sea, Orduña stands in Bizkaia as a strategic mountain gateway whose commercial and defensive past is written into every stone of its historic centre.

A small Burgos town that once sat on the front line between Franco's Nationalist territory and the Republican regions of Cantabria and the Basque Country.

A mountain town in northern Burgos with more listed monuments than anywhere else in the province outside the capital — towers, palaces, and fortified houses rising above the river Trueba.

A small walled town on the border of old Castile and Navarre, its medieval street plan still contained within the original walls above the river Zadorra.

The former seat of the powerful Velasco lords, Medina de Pomar rises above the Las Merindades comarca of Burgos with a fortified castle-museum, a seven-century-old Clarisas monastery, and a medieval old town declared a national Historic-Artistic Monument.

A Basque fishing town on the Gipuzkoa coast, birthplace of the first man to circumnavigate the globe and home to a Gothic church that doubles as a tunnel to the harbour below.

An enclave of Burgos province surrounded entirely by the Basque Country, Condado de Treviño carries a territorial oddity rooted in medieval law, with Romanesque hermitages, cave dwellings, and ancient oak forests scattered across its comarca.

Founded by Alfonso X in 1256 on a hilltop that has seen Roman roads, medieval walls, and the Camino de Santiago pass through it, Salvatierra carries five thousand years of history within its fortified streets in the Basque province of Álava.

Perched on a rock above the Ebro river in Burgos province, Frías crowns its crag with a medieval castle, two surviving town gates, and streets of timber-framed houses that still hang from the cliff face.

The administrative capital of the ancient Siete Merindades of Castilla la Vieja, Villarcayo holds Gothic tombs, a tent-shaped modernist church, and the second most important historical archive in the province of Burgos.

A La Rioja town whose very name traces back to a queen's residence, with a Dominican convent consecrated by a pope and a history stretching from Roman roads to the Wars of Castile.

A hilltop town in La Rioja whose name traces back to an ancient pre-Roman tribe, its streets shaped by centuries of conflict between the kingdoms of Castile and Navarre.

A Navarrese border stronghold above the Ebro, its walled hilltop enclosure, ruined castle, and La Rioja's finest Romanesque hermitage marking seven centuries of contested frontier history.

A walled hilltop town in Álava's Basque Country, its medieval streets and fortified walls rising above one of Spain's oldest pre-Roman Celtic settlements.

A medieval town in Burgos whose grid of streets, laid out by a Portuguese princess in 1305, became the model for the Spanish grid cities of the Americas — and whose monastery church holds what locals call the Escorial of altarpieces.

A cathedral city on the Camino de Santiago in La Rioja, built around the legacy of a medieval saint whose 69-metre freestanding baroque tower is the tallest in the region and visible for miles.

A fortified medieval town on the Bidasoa river in Gipuzkoa, its intact walls, Gothic-baroque church, and Carlos V castle standing where Castile and France have faced each other across the water for eight centuries.

A fortified Navarran town where Roman and Celtic layers lie beneath Gothic church towers, and where César Borgia himself is buried beneath the western portal of the main church.

A former royal capital of medieval Navarre, Nájera rises above the Río Najerilla in La Rioja with a cave-born monastery that became the burial place of kings and a key stop on the Camino de Santiago.

Built around a medieval collegiate church holding the relics of a Galilean martyr, and neighbour to the Palaeolithic cave paintings of Altamira, Santillana del Mar is one of Cantabria's most complete historic towns.

A fortified Navarrese town on the Camino de Santiago whose church of Santa María layers Romanesque origins beneath Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque additions accumulated over six centuries.

A royal Navarrese town on the Camino de Santiago, built across the river Ega in distinct medieval quarters, its Romanesque churches still standing where pilgrims and Frankish settlers once moved through the same streets.

A La Rioja mountain town shaped by Basque roots, medieval wool-making, and an 18th-century royal textile factory that tripled its population and left behind monuments still standing in its centre today.

Where the French and Aragonese routes of the Camino de Santiago have merged into one since medieval times, Puente la Reina is defined by its six-arch Romanesque bridge over the Arga river, still carrying pilgrims toward Santiago as it has for nearly a thousand years.

Artajona rises above the Navarrese plain behind medieval walls that enclose a Gothic church, a stone-arched fountain, and dolmens that predate any city in Spain.

Capital of Castilla y León and cradle of the first Europeans, Burgos rises above the Arlanzón river with a UNESCO cathedral, a royal Cistercian monastery, and centuries of Castilian history written in Gothic stone.

A walled medieval town in Palencia where six of the original seven gates still stand, a Premonstratensian monastery anchors the old centre, and a hilltop castle overlooks the Pisuerga river.

The royal palace of the Kings of Navarre rises above Olite's walled medieval streets, its towers and gardens once counted among the finest in Europe.

A fortified hill town in Soria whose medieval gates, castle, and stone streets once made it powerful enough to appear in Don Quixote — and whose monuments earned it a place among Spain's most beautiful villages.

Known as the cradle of Castile, this Arlanza-river village guards a rare 10th-century defensive tower and a timber-framed old town tied to Count Fernán González.

A long, thin town strung along a hillside under a ruined castle, and one of the quieter, more atmospheric stops on the Camino Francés.

A fortified Romanesque church crowns this hilltop village in Navarra, its battlemented towers and three ancient apses watching over the plains of the Ribera below.

A coastal Asturian town with medieval walls, a ruined ducal palace, and a harbour history that once sent its ships to the ports of Andalusia, Portugal, Flanders, and England.

A Benedictine monastery town famed for its two-storey Romanesque cloister and the Gregorian chant of its monks, set in the quiet hills south of Burgos.