Perched above a hidden labyrinth of vaulted rooms, the cellar door in the village of Matapozuelos leads visitors to a treasure of wine barrels.

We continued westwards across the rolling and barren landscape until we reach Peñafiel. Here we witness the first glimpse, high up on the hill, a besieged castle stands tall furnished with a crown of turrets. We skate around the waters of Río Arandilla and Río Pilde until we enter the  Rio Lobos Canyon Natural Park with its limestone gorge carved out over the centuries by the torrent river. Close to the park, we visit San Leonardo de Yagüe, with its origins dating back to the tenth century when a hospital was built for pilgrims, before becoming a sanctuary of Santiago de Compostela.

On the third day of travel, we arrive in a city flanked by an Arabic footprint preserved in the Mudejar style of architecture. The city of Soria displays Moorish influences in the horseshoed intertwined arches of the cloister of San Juan de Duero, the decorations outside the highly sculpted apse of the San Juan de Rabanera church and the facade of its chapterhouse.

Leaving Soria, we head to Ágreda, Ejea de Los Caballeros and Huesca, where King Peter IV of Aragon founded the Sertorian University in 1354. Housed since the sixteenth century in the royal palace with its characteristic elongated hexagonal plan, the university welcomed the painter, engraver, architect and essayist Francisco José de Artiga in 1690 who soon planned an extension of the university: adding a grandiose regular octagon with a sumptuous Baroque austerely built facade.

Juan Almenar was born in the province of Huesca, although many from Valencia falsely claim the 15^th-century Spanish physician as one of their own. Dr Almenar graduated from the University of Padua on February 4, 1501. In Venice of the following year, he published Libellus ad evitandum et expellendum morbum Gallicum. For the first time, it was here that researched proposed therapies to combat syphilis. Girolamo Fracastoro would call Almenar a contemporary during his studies in Padua.

We finally arrive in Barbastro, a city that lies on the last foothills of the Pyrenees. Birthplace of Bartolomé Juan Leonardo de Argensola, the Spanish historian and poet who in 1615 befriended Galileo Galilei while in Rome. On behalf of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Galileo negotiated with the Spanish Crown to provide Spanish navigators with the answer needed to navigate the seas, the ability to locate “the ultimate and imaginary line of longitude”.

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