Segovia

A Roman aqueduct of granite blocks fitted together without mortar, at its tallest over Plaza del Azoguejo. Steps beside the plaza lead onto the wall, where the arches lie below you at the point the channel enters the town. It is floodlit at night.

A castle standing like a ship's prow on the rock where two rivers meet, rebuilt after an 1862 fire with sharply pointed roofs. The Tower of Juan II takes a separate ticket and a narrow spiral stair, and the top shows the town and the Guadarrama range together.

Begun in 1525, it was the last Gothic cathedral built in Spain, and its pale golden stone earned it the nickname the lady of cathedrals. A guide takes the tower climb at fixed hours, and the route passes the old bell-ringer's room before the top.

A twelve-sided Romanesque church on the hill outside the walls, consecrated in the early 1200s. In the middle stands a separate two-storey chamber where knights are said to have kept vigil. From its door you face the Alcazar head-on.

A sixteenth-century mint on the Eresma that struck coins with water-driven machines, with Juan de Herrera among its designers. Now a museum, it has a restored waterwheel that really turns and drives a rolling mill. It joins the riverside path.

The boarding house where the poet Machado lodged while teaching French, his room kept as it was down to the bed and stove. The room is tiny, so a guide leads small groups in turn. From the cathedral it takes minutes on foot.

Its whole facade is studded with granite cut into diamond points, so from a distance the surface looks thorny. It was a fifteenth-century noble house and is now an art school, and during exhibitions you can go in as far as the courtyard.

A palace in the mountain foothills about twenty minutes by bus from Segovia, built by Philip V with Versailles in mind. The sculpted garden fountains run only on set days to save water, so check the dates before you go. The royal glass factory is nearby.

A riverside meadow right below the rock of the Alcazar, the angle from which the castle towers straight overhead. It is about a twenty-minute walk down from town along the path outside the walls. At sunset the walls turn red.

The Jewish quarter filled the lanes by the wall south of the cathedral, and its old main synagogue is now the Corpus Christi convent. After the visitor centre, leave by the wall gate and the hill of the old Jewish cemetery faces you across the valley.

Romanesque work of the twelfth century in the southern quarter outside the walls, with roofed, colonnaded galleries along both flanks. Such porches mark Segovian Romanesque, and this pair is counted the most intact. Their carved capitals sit at eye level.

A fifteenth-century Hieronymite monastery in the Eresma valley facing the Alcazar, where monks still live and keep the hours of prayer. The altarpiece of its Gothic church is lavish, and from the lane outside the Alcazar and walls line up along the clifftop.

Built in the fifteenth century as Enrique IV's hunting lodge, then handed to nuns, southeast of the aqueduct. Gilded Mudejar ceilings of interlocking wood, made by Islamic craft methods, survive in several rooms, easy to miss behind plain walls.

A walled village forty minutes' drive northeast, entered by one gate. Roast lamb restaurants ring its arcaded Plaza Mayor; painter Ignacio Zuloaga lived in the crag-top castle. On two Saturday nights in early July, lights go off and candles burn.

Beside Sepulveda the Duraton river has carved deep loops into limestone, and its cliffs host one of Europe's largest colonies of griffon vultures. Walk to the hermitage ruins of San Frutos on the rim for the river bends below; canoes run on the water.

A pink palace built in the eighteenth century for Isabel Farnese, Philip V's queen, amid a vast oak-wood hunting estate. It holds a hunting museum, and driving in through the woods you pass fallow deer grazing by the road. Far fewer come than to La Granja.