Heritage towns in País Vasco (Basque Country)

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.

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.

A medieval hill town in Álava where a perfectly preserved three-street layout, a parish church, a sanctuary, and fragments of old walls tell a story stretching from prehistoric caves to the counts of Ayala.

The Basque Country's inland capital, Vitoria-Gasteiz holds two cathedrals, a Gothic old quarter built on a hill with medieval walls, and a place on the UNESCO-recognised Camino de Santiago routes.

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 Basque town founded by the Lord of Vizcaya in 1356, its medieval streets lined with more than twenty palaces and sixty-nine heraldic shields, the stone-built legacy of families who traded with the New World.

A Basque port town on the Nervión estuary, home to the world's oldest transporter bridge and a medieval old quarter whose commercial history stretches back to the wool and iron trades of the Middle Ages.

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 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.

A Basque fishing town on the Coastal Camino de Santiago where pilgrims have crossed the Oria river by boat since medieval times, and whose rowing club holds more victories in the great San Sebastián regatta than any other.

A Basque coastal town on the Camino del Norte, where stone-coated manor houses, a Gothic military tower, and a still-active archaeological site spanning the Iron Age to the Middle Ages line its old streets above the Bay of Biscay.