Salamanca

An eighteenth-century Baroque square whose arches carry round medallions carved with kings, generals and scholars. Franco's medallion came down in 2017, leaving that one space blank. When the lights come on at night, students sit in groups on the paving.

The old university building's front is carved Plateresque, dense as silverwork. Legend says finding the frog perched on a skull in it means passing your exams, so people stand there pointing upward. Inside, a sixteenth-century lecture hall survives intact.

The Gothic new cathedral stands wall to wall with the Romanesque old one, both seen on a single ticket. An astronaut hides in the carving of the north Ramos door, added by a stonemason in the 1992 restoration. A separate visit walks passages up in the towers.

Hundreds of carved scallops, emblem of the knights of St James, stud the walls of this fifteenth-century mansion. Being a public library, it lets anyone in free, and its two-storey arcaded courtyard is open. The Clerecia towers opposite rise above it.

A Baroque Jesuit church and college, now used by the Pontifical University. The tower visit called Scala Coeli climbs narrow stairs to the top, where the cathedral towers and old town roofs spread out at eye level. Sunset slots sell out first.

A small garden on the old city wall, linked by legend to the lovers of the play La Celestina. Below the wall run the Tormes and the Roman bridge, and it is also the closest view of the cathedral's back. Admission is free.

A Roman bridge over the Tormes, closed to cars and crossed on foot. A stone bull from the Iberian era stands at the town end; in the novel Lazarillo de Tormes, the boy has his head knocked against it. The view back to the old town from the far bank is fine.

An early twentieth-century house on the old wall, now a museum of Art Nouveau and Art Deco decorative arts. The whole river side is iron and stained glass, so rooms take on colour when the sun comes through. Glass figures and porcelain fill the cases.

A Dominican friary whose church front is carved over its full height like a giant altarpiece. When Columbus came to argue his voyage plans, the friars here are said to have backed him. From the upper cloister you see the framework under the church roof.

Stone and timber houses in the Sierra de Francia, ninety-odd minutes' drive from Salamanca. On 13 June a pig is turned loose and fed by everyone in the streets for over half a year, then raffled on 17 January, St Anthony's day. You may meet it in the lanes.

What remains of a fifteenth-century ceiling fresco by Fernando Gallego, of constellations and the zodiac, once on the university library vault. It now sits off the Escuelas Menores courtyard, facing the university front, kept dim so eyes must adjust.

A Renaissance cloister built as a lopsided pentagon to fit its plot, the upper capitals crowded with monsters, devils and twisted faces. The cathedral towers loom close above the upper gallery, and at the entrance hatch the nuns sell sweets they bake.

A walled town near the Portuguese border, roughly an hour southwest of Salamanca by car. A path atop the walls loops right round the old quarter; cannon scars from the 1812 siege still pit the cathedral tower. February's carnival runs bulls in the streets.

A Sierra de Francia village of timber-framed houses, where a local-born painter turned 1960s identity photos of residents into hundreds of portraits, each hung on a facade. Every face marks its sitter's own house, so old villagers seem to watch the lanes.