20 Unusual Things to Do in Spain

Spain is famous for flamenco, paella, and sun-drenched beaches, but the country’s most memorable experiences are rarely the ones in the guidebook. Scratch the surface and you find a completely different country: wild, strange, ancient and endlessly surprising.

At Siesta Campers, we’ve spent years exploring the Iberian Peninsula, and the unusual things to do in Spain are often the ones that stay with you longest. The places you stumble into by accident, or find by following a winding road with no particular plan. The kind of travel that changes how you see things.

1. Drive the Wild Road to Picos de Europa

The Picos de Europa national park in northern Spain is one of the country’s best-kept secrets — a landscape of sheer limestone peaks, deep river gorges and remote villages that feels completely removed from modern life. The drive up through Asturias is extraordinary in itself, rising through green valleys before the mountains close in around you.

Stop at the Cares Gorge trail, which carves for 12 kilometres through the rock with drops of hundreds of metres on either side. Eagles overhead. Cowbells echoing off the cliffs. Tiny villages serving home-made cheese and cold cider. This is the Spain most people never see — and it’s all the better for it. Pack everything you need and stay as long as you can. This is the kind of place you come back from different.

2. Watch the Sunrise Over the Bardenas Reales Desert

Most people don’t associate Spain with desert landscapes, but the Bardenas Reales in Navarre is a semi-arid wilderness unlike anything else in Western Europe. Eroded rock formations, deep gullies, crumbling clay towers and vast open plains stretch out in every direction, and at sunrise, the whole thing turns gold, orange and deep red. You might recognise it from Game of Thrones, and standing in the landscape, that makes complete sense.

The Bardenas is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, which means the light, the silence and the sheer scale of it are protected. Early morning is the time to go, before the heat builds and the tour groups arrive. Bring coffee, drive in slowly, and watch the desert wake up. One of the most visually stunning unusual things to do in Spain.

3. Explore the Flamenco Caves of Jerez

Everyone knows flamenco, but fewer people have seen it performed the way it was meant to be. The tablaos of Jerez de la Frontera go deep into the gypsy roots of the art form, with intimate performances held in candlelit cave spaces that feel nothing like a tourist stage show.

Jerez is widely regarded as the spiritual home of flamenco, and the performers here have often spent their whole lives with the music. You feel that immediately. The footwork is louder, the emotion rawer, the connection between musicians and dancers something that’s hard to explain until you’ve sat three metres away from it.

Book ahead, arrive early and let your eyes adjust to the low light. This is one of the best activities in Spain for anyone who wants the real thing, not the packaged version.

4. Take a Road Trip in a Siesta Camper

Spain is one of Europe’s great road trip destinations — and one of the best ways to see it is at your own pace, in your own time, with everything you need on board. Campervan hire in Spain with Siesta Campers lets you move between landscapes without rushing. Wake up in the mountains. Drive to the coast by afternoon. Sleep somewhere you didn’t plan the night before.

Many of the vans are built by hand with sustainable materials and a genuine love for the road. The country opens up differently when you’re not tied to a hotel or a fixed itinerary, and the best things to do in Spain become a lot easier to find when you can simply follow your instincts and see where the road takes you.

5. Walk the Edge of the World at Cabo Ortegal

At the northwestern tip of Spain, the cliffs of Cabo Ortegal drop dramatically into the Atlantic from heights of over 600 metres. The light here is completely different to the rest of Spain, softer, greener, wilder, with a constant Atlantic wind that makes everything feel more alive.

The coastline is part of the broader Rías Altas, a stretch of Galicia that rivals anywhere in Europe for sheer dramatic beauty. The roads are narrow, the villages are quiet, and the seafood is extraordinary. Most travellers skip Galicia entirely, heading south for the sun rather than northwest for something genuinely different. That’s exactly why you should go. Stand at the cliffs and look out at the open ocean. It really does feel like the edge of the world.

6. Wander the Abandoned City of Belchite

The ruins of Belchite in Aragon were destroyed during the Spanish Civil War and left standing exactly as they fell, a deliberate, haunting memorial to the conflict. Hollow church towers, collapsed doorways, crumbling streets of stone and silence. A new village was built alongside the ruins after the war, but the old town was never demolished. Walking through it today is one of the most quietly powerful things to see in Spain.

Guided tours are available and worth taking, the history here is complex, and having someone to walk you through it makes a real difference. The silence when you’re standing among the ruins is something you won’t forget quickly. It asks questions that don’t have easy answers, and that’s exactly the point.

7. Swim in the Pozas de la Fervenza Natural Pools

Hidden in the forests of Galicia, the natural rock pools of Pozas de la Fervenza are fed by clear mountain streams and carved into the landscape by thousands of years of moving water. The pools are cool, clean and completely free, linked by small cascades and surrounded by dense woodland, with the sound of water everywhere.

It takes a short hike through the trees to reach them, which is part of what keeps them quiet. On a warm afternoon in summer, there are few better places in Spain to slow down and do absolutely nothing. Pack a picnic, bring a book, and stay far longer than you planned. This is what slow travel is actually made for, not sightseeing, but sitting somewhere genuinely beautiful with nowhere else to be.

8. Visit the Painted Cave of Altamira

The Museum of Altamira in Cantabria is home to a full-scale, painstakingly accurate replica of one of the world’s most significant prehistoric cave paintings, 14,000-year-old bison, horses and human hands rendered in red and black ochre directly onto the cave ceiling. The original cave is almost entirely closed to protect the paintings from the humidity caused by human breath, but the reproduction built alongside it is extraordinary.

The scale, the detail and the darkness of the space make it feel genuinely ancient. Wandering through it, you’re confronted with the fact that human creativity is not a modern invention — it goes back further than most of us ever stop to consider. One of the most thought-provoking and unusual things to see in Spain, and one that stays with you long after you leave.

9. Discover the Pink Lakes of Torrevieja

The salt lakes of Torrevieja on the Costa Blanca turn a vivid flamingo pink in the summer months, the colour driven by a particular combination of algae and extreme salt concentration. Thousands of actual flamingos gather along the shoreline, picking their way through the shallows while the water glows around them. The whole scene looks almost too surreal to be real, like somewhere that should require a long-haul flight to reach.

The best light is in the early morning or late afternoon, when the colour is most intense and the heat is manageable. Entry is free, and the site is easy to reach from the coast. It’s one of those genuinely fun things to do in Spain that leaves you wondering how more people don’t know about it, and quietly glad that they don’t.

10. Follow the Camino de Santiago on Two Wheels

Most people walk the Camino, but cycling it is a completely different experience, faster, freer, and with a very different relationship to the landscape around you. The Camino Francés by bike passes through some of Spain’s most varied and beautiful countryside: the vineyards of Rioja, the wide meseta plains of Castile, the green hills of Galicia. You cover ground quickly enough to feel like you’re travelling, but slowly enough that the landscape actually registers.

Pilgrim hostels along the route are open to cyclists as well as walkers, keeping the cost low and the community spirit high. It’s one of the best activities in Spain for anyone who wants a genuine adventure rather than a holiday, and the finish in Santiago de Compostela hits just as hard on a bike as it does on foot.

11. Drink Cider the Asturian Way

In Asturias, cider, or sidra, isn’t just a drink. It’s a ritual. The traditional pour involves holding the bottle high above the head and the glass at waist height, letting the cider fall in a thin stream to aerate it before drinking it immediately in one swift go. Bars across the region perform this act dozens of times a night, and it’s one of the most joyfully unusual things to do in Spain simply for the spectacle of it.

Head to Gijón or Oviedo and find a traditional sidrерía, a cider house, where the floors are deliberately wet, the noise is constant and the atmosphere is like nothing else in the country. Pair it with a thick fabada stew and you’ve got one of the great food and drink experiences of Spain.

12. Walk Through the Painted Forest of Oma

In the Basque Country, artist Agustín Ibarrola spent years painting the trunks and surfaces of the pine trees in the Oma Forest, creating an outdoor gallery unlike anything else in the world. The paintings are designed to reveal themselves only when viewed from specific points along the path, faces, animals and geometric shapes emerge as you align with the right angle, then disappear again as you move on. Walking through it alone is already atmospheric; realising the images only at the exact right moment makes it quietly astonishing.

The forest is accessed via a short trail near the town of Kortezubi, and the whole experience takes a couple of unhurried hours. It’s one of the most unexpectedly moving things to do in Spain, and the kind of place that changes how you look at a forest afterwards.

13. Discover the Sunken Village of Sau

In northeast Catalonia, the ruins of a medieval village emerge from the surface of the Sau Reservoir whenever water levels drop sufficiently, typically during dry summers or drought years. The old Romanesque church tower is the most striking sight, standing alone in the water, half-submerged, as if it simply refused to disappear when the valley was flooded in 1962. Local families were displaced to build the reservoir, and their former village has been slowly re-emerging ever since, rising and sinking with the seasons. It’s eerie, beautiful and genuinely moving.

The drive through the Guilleries Natural Park to reach the viewpoint is worth it on its own. If you’ve already explored the unusual things to do in Barcelona, the road to Sau makes for a perfect day trip from the city.

14. Visit the Witches’ Village of Zugarramurdi

The village of Zugarramurdi in Navarre has a long and unsettling history. A series of witchcraft trials in 1609 led to one of the largest Inquisition proceedings in Spanish history, resulting in multiple executions. The caves outside the village, where the accused were said to have gathered, are now open to explore, and the Witchcraft Museum in the village centre is one of the most genuinely fascinating things to do in Spain for anyone drawn to folklore, history or the darker corners of European culture.

Each August, the village hosts a witches’ festival with fire, costumes and traditional music that draws visitors from across the country. Even outside festival season, Zugarramurdi has an atmosphere that’s hard to shake, strange, green and quietly unsettling in the best way.

15. Visit the Hanging Houses of Cuenca

Perched on the edge of a sheer limestone gorge in Castilla-La Mancha, the Casas Colgadas of Cuenca are one of Spain’s most genuinely startling sights. Built in the 15th century when the town had nowhere left to expand, the houses were pushed to the very cliff edge — and then beyond it, with wooden balconies cantilevering out over a drop of more than 40 metres. One of them now houses the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art, which means you can walk around a Tàpies painting while suspended above a gorge.

The best view is from the iron Bridge of Saint Paul, which crosses the ravine directly opposite. Cuenca’s medieval old town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the whole city rewards a slow wander, particularly at night, when the cobblestoned lanes empty out and the houses glow against the cliff face.

16. Walk the Caminito del Rey

Carved into the sheer walls of the El Chorro gorge in Málaga province, the Caminito del Rey is one of the most dramatic walks in Europe. The path, originally built in the early 1900s for workers maintaining the hydroelectric infrastructure, pins itself to vertical rock faces hundreds of metres above the river below, passing through tunnels, over suspension bridges and along ledges barely wide enough for two people to pass. It fell into disrepair for decades and became notorious as one of the most dangerous paths in the world before a full restoration reopened it in 2015.

Today it's fully safe, properly managed and absolutely unmissable. The 7.7 kilometre route takes around three to four hours, the scenery is genuinely breathtaking, and it's one of those fun things to do in Spain that reminds you the country's landscapes can be as dramatic as anywhere on earth. Book well in advance, it sells out weeks ahead.

17. Take a Thermal Bath in the Arnedillo Hot Springs

Deep in the mountains of La Rioja, the thermal baths of Arnedillo have been drawing visitors for centuries, fed by hot sulphurous water rising naturally from the rock face. The outdoor pools sit in a dramatic limestone gorge, with the cold river running alongside and the canyon walls rising steeply on both sides. It’s one of those places that combines geology, history and simple physical pleasure in a way that’s hard to beat.

The water temperature hovers around 34–36°C, warm enough to ease tired legs after a day of driving or hiking without feeling uncomfortably hot. The village of Arnedillo itself is tiny and unhurried, a single street, a handful of restaurants, a slow pace of life that matches the landscape. A slow afternoon here is the definition of good travel.

18. Hike the Roman Gold Mines of Las Médulas

In the hills of León, the ancient landscape of Las Médulas looks like it belongs on another planet. Soaring red and orange rock formations rise from dense green chestnut forests, the result of Rome’s most ambitious gold-mining operation, which extracted an estimated three million kilograms of gold over two centuries using a technique called ruina montium: flooding entire mountains with pressurised water to collapse them from within. The scale of what remains is extraordinary.

Tunnels carved by hand into the rock are still walkable, and the Mirador de Orellán viewpoint gives a panoramic view across the entire reddened landscape at golden hour that is worth the drive alone. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997, Las Médulas remains almost entirely unknown outside of the country, one of the most extraordinary and unusual things to see in Spain, hiding quietly in the northwest.

19. Camp Under the Stars in the Tabernas Desert

Europe’s only true desert sits in the heart of Almería — Tabernas, a landscape so wild and dramatically lunar that it was used as the backdrop for hundreds of Spaghetti Westerns. Clint Eastwood rode through here. Sergio Leone filmed here. The old western sets are still standing, and some offer guided visits. But the real reason to come is the silence and the sky.

At night, with no light pollution and the desert completely still around you, the stars overhead are overwhelming — a proper dark sky that most people living in Europe rarely get to see. This is one of those experiences that reminds you what travel is actually for. Wake up to a desert sunrise, make coffee in the quiet, and let the day begin without a plan. Van life at its most elemental.

20. Walk the Playa de las Catedrales at Low Tide

Near Ribadeo on the Galician coast, the Playa de las Catedrales, is one of the most strikingly unique beaches in Europe. At high tide it disappears almost entirely beneath the Atlantic. At low tide, the ocean retreats to reveal a network of extraordinary rock arches and sea caves up to 30 metres high, carved by centuries of wave action into shapes that genuinely resemble the flying buttresses of a cathedral.

Walking beneath them while the light shifts through the openings and the sand is still wet from the tide is unforgettable, but requires a little planning. Numbers are limited, entry must be booked in advance in summer, and the window of low tide is narrow. Get the timing right and it’s unforgettable.

Spain is Better Without a Fixed Plan

The country is too big, too varied and too full of hidden corners to rush through. The best things to do in Spain are rarely the ones you plan in advance — they’re the places you find because you took the wrong turn, or stopped because something caught your eye from the road.

Siesta Campers gives you the freedom to travel that way. Pick up a campervan in Málaga, or Barcelona, and follow the road wherever it takes you.

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