Ten days in northern Portugal and Galicia: Iberia at its least Mediterranean

Arrive and go uphill, because everything in Porto is decided by which level of the city you are on. Start at the Centro Portugues de Fotografia, which occupies the old Cadeia da Relacao, the city's prison until 1974. The cells are still cells, with the doors and the bars in place, and the photographs hang inside them. It is free and almost nobody is in it.

Directly across the street is the Torre dos Clerigos, a baroque bell tower by an Italian architect who spent his career in Porto and is buried in the church under it. It is 226 steps and the staircase is narrow enough that traffic goes one way at a time. From the top the whole gorge is laid out: the six bridges, the lodges on the Gaia bank, and the ocean at the end.

Then walk down to the Ribeira for the evening. The riverfront arcade is the most photographed thing in the city and by seven it is entirely visitors, which is fine for one drink at the water. Eat one street back and uphill, where the prices halve.

Start at the top of the hill at the Se, a thirteenth century Romanesque cathedral built to be defensible, with a rose window, granite the colour of a wet pavement and a baroque cloister tiled in blue. The terrace outside it is the standard first photograph of Porto and it is worth taking before the coaches arrive at ten.

Walk down to the Palacio da Bolsa, the merchants' exchange built in the nineteenth century on the burnt out cloisters of the friary next door. You can only go in on a guided tour and the tour exists for one room: the Salao Arabe, a Moorish fantasy in gilt and stucco that took eighteen years to decorate and was built by men who had never been to Granada but had seen drawings of the Alhambra.

Next door is the Igreja de Sao Francisco, which is Gothic underneath and, inside, gilded past the point of reason: every surface of the nave carved into foliage, cherubs and vines and then covered in gold leaf. The crypt below holds an ossuary you can see through a glass floor.

Cross the bridge in the evening. The upper deck of the Dom Luis is a walkway, the view back at the city is the one on every postcard, and the port lodges on the far side pour tastings until seven.

Porto's modern buildings are as good as its old ones and get a fraction of the attention, so give the day to them, starting with breakfast in the market. Bolhao reopened in 2022 after a long restoration, back in its own iron and granite building, with the fish, fruit and flower stalls downstairs and food counters above. Go early, when it is still a market rather than a food hall.

Then the Casa da Musica, Rem Koolhaas's concert hall out on the Boavista roundabout, which looks like a faceted white meteorite dropped on a traffic island and is far stranger inside: a main hall with corrugated glass at both ends so the city is visible behind the orchestra. Guided tours run in English through the day and take an hour.

In the afternoon go to Serralves, which is three things on one site: a pink art deco villa from the 1930s, a contemporary art museum by Alvaro Siza, and eighteen hectares of park between them. The park alone justifies the ticket, and the treetop walkway through the woods is the best twenty minutes in the west of the city.

Come back along the coast at Foz if the weather holds. The Atlantic here is cold, grey and loud, which after three days of the river is the correct ending.

The Celta leaves Campanha in the morning and takes about two and a quarter hours to Vigo, running up through the Minho, over the river at Valenca where the fortress sits on the bank, and then along the ria into a city of cranes. Somewhere in there you lose an hour to Spanish time.

Vigo does not try to charm anybody, so start uphill from the port. The co-cathedral is a plain neoclassical church from 1810 that shares its status with the one at Tui up the river, and the old quarter around it is where the oyster street is. Above that, twenty minutes uphill or five in a taxi, the Castro is a park on the summit of the hill with three reconstructed round houses from the Celtic settlement that stood here before the Romans arrived, and a view down the whole inlet to the islands you are going to tomorrow.

On the way back down, stop at the Alameda for the Jules Verne monument. Verne set part of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in this bay, where a Spanish treasure fleet was sunk in 1702 and never fully recovered, and the statue has him sitting on the tentacles of a sea monster looking out at the water.

Then eat. This is the best seafood town on the route and the cheapest way into it is a tapas bar and a bottle of albarino.

Get to the Estacion Maritima for the first sailing with your permit printed or on your phone. Forty minutes later the boat rounds the headland into a lagoon between two of the islands and everything about the trip makes sense: white sand, water the colour of the Caribbean and about fifteen degrees colder, and a dune bar between two islands connected by a footbridge.

There are four marked walks and no vehicles. The one everybody does goes north to the lighthouse on Monte Faro, an hour and a half up through pine and eucalyptus with the Atlantic on one side and the ria on the other. The southern route ends at the bird cliffs, which hold one of the biggest yellow-legged gull colonies in the world and, in spring, shags nesting on the ledges.

Rodas beach is the one a British newspaper named the best in the world in 2007, which was overstating it slightly and not by much. There is a single kiosk and a campsite shop, so bring lunch.

Boats back run through the late afternoon and the last one is not negotiable. Be early for it.

An hour and a half up the Atlantic Axis line, past Pontevedra and Vilagarcia, and you are in Santiago before lunch. The station is fifteen minutes downhill from the old town.

Go to the cathedral in the afternoon, when the morning pilgrim mass is over and the Praza do Obradoiro has emptied slightly. Building started in 1075 and it was not consecrated until 1211, so it is Romanesque at heart under a baroque west front added six centuries later. Inside the west door is the Portico da Gloria, carved by Master Mateo and finished in 1188, two hundred figures of the apocalypse in granite that until recently were black with candle smoke and have now been cleaned back to their original paint.

The botafumeiro, the giant censer that eight men swing across the transept on a rope, comes out on major feast days and whenever a group pays for it. Ask at the desk which masses have it scheduled; watching it is worth rearranging an afternoon for.

Then cross the square behind to San Martino Pinario, a Benedictine monastery so large it dwarfs the cathedral from some angles, with two enormous baroque retables and a choir stall carved for a church that no longer needs it. It is quiet, cheap and half empty.

Start at the Museum of the Galician People, in the former convent of Santo Domingo de Bonaval on the edge of the old town. The collection is the trades and the domestic life of rural Galicia, which is more interesting than it sounds when it includes the boats, the shoes and the bagpipes, but the building is the reason to go: a triple helix staircase from the seventeenth century, three separate stone spirals winding up the same tower without ever meeting, each leading to a different floor.

Walk down through the park behind it and into the Alameda for the Two Marias, a bright painted statue of two sisters who came out at exactly two o'clock every afternoon for decades, dressed in colours, after the dictatorship broke their family. It is a small thing and the city is fond of it.

In the afternoon take the bus out to the Cidade da Cultura on Monte Gaias. Peter Eisenman won the competition in 1999 with a design that folded the old town's street plan into a hill; the budget ran to hundreds of millions, two of the six buildings were cancelled outright in 2013, and what stands is a half realised megaproject in stone and glass with wonderful views and almost nobody in it. It is the most interesting failure in Galicia and free to walk around.

Forty minutes on the train, and A Coruna announces itself with sea on both sides of the track. Drop bags and walk into the old town, which is granite, small and sits behind the harbour.

The house of Maria Pita is a museum to a single afternoon. In May 1589 the English launched a counter-Armada against a weakened Spain and stormed the lower town; when the standard bearer reached the top of the breach, a local woman killed him, the defenders rallied and the siege broke. She got a pension and a captaincy, and the city named its main square after her.

Then walk out to the lighthouse. The Torre de Hercules stands alone at the end of the sea wall, half an hour on foot from the old town, and it has been showing a light since the first or second century AD, which makes it the oldest working lighthouse in the world. The Romans built it, the eighteenth century wrapped it in a neoclassical shell to stop it collapsing, and the original masonry is still inside. Climb it if it is open, and walk the sculpture park around the base either way.

Eat in the old town afterwards, standing up if the bar is busy.

Start at the Castelo de San Anton, a sixteenth century fort built on an island in the harbour mouth and now joined to the shore by a causeway. It was a prison for two centuries and is now the city's archaeology museum, with Bronze Age gold from the region in the vaults and cannon on the ramparts.

Then the Fine Arts Museum, which is central, cheap and has a room of Goya's etchings, including a full set of the Caprichos, printed in his lifetime. Spanish nineteenth century painting fills the rest of it and the building is a converted convent with a good courtyard.

In the afternoon go up to Monte de San Pedro, on the headland west of the city. It was a coastal artillery battery until the 1990s, with two enormous naval guns still in place on the summit, and it is now a park with a glass lift running up the cliff from the promenade. From the top the whole isthmus is visible, the lighthouse at one end and the port at the other, and it is the best sunset in the city.

Come down for a last long dinner. A Coruna eats later than Porto and earlier than Seville.

One last thing, five minutes from anywhere in the old town. The Church of Santiago is late twelfth century, the oldest surviving church in A Coruna, Romanesque with a rose window and an equestrian St James over the north door, and it has been altered so many times that the joins are the interesting part.

Have breakfast in the Plaza de Maria Pita afterwards, under the arcades, and watch the city start. Then the station.

A Coruna's airport is fifteen minutes out and flies mostly domestically; Santiago's, forty minutes away by bus, has the international routes and is the sensible way home. The high speed line south to Madrid takes about three and a half hours if you would rather keep going by train.