The 26 Best Things to Do in Spain

The Santiago Calatrava roof ripples like a wave above the vines, making Bodegas Ysios one of the more photogenic reasons to rent a car in Rioja Alavesa. It's a working winery open for guided tastings and vineyard walks, with a wine bar perched above the barrel room for anyone who'd rather just stare at the Sierra de Cantabria with a glass in hand. Ranked third on the World's 50 Best Vineyards list, and the vines out front have been at it for over a century.

Ribera del Duero sits at around 850 meters, which explains why the Tinto Fino ripens the way it does across Carraovejas's 180 steeply terraced hectares. This is a working winery visit, ranked 18th on the World's 50 Best Vineyards list, where tours wind through the gravity-flow cellars and the vineyards before landing at a tasting. The on-site Ambivium restaurant pairs dishes to each wine, for those who consider a three-hour tour with seven pairings a reasonable Tuesday afternoon.

A near-perfect horseshoe cove tucked between limestone cliffs and pine forest on Menorca's southern coast, ranked twelfth on the World's 50 Best Beaches list. The enclosed bay produces glassy, calm water even when the rest of the Mediterranean is choppy, which explains why everyone seems to end up here eventually. A protected area designation keeps the development at bay, so it still looks the way you'd want a Mediterranean cove to look.

A miniature train carries you through one of Jerez's great sherry houses, past casks that have been quietly doing their thing for generations. The tour is the draw here, though the estate also offers spa treatments using wine byproducts, a roof terrace looking up at the cathedral, and a pool when the weather cooperates. Ranked 21st on the World's 50 Best Vineyards list, this is the place to start if sherry still feels like something your grandmother kept on a dusty shelf.

Sandwiched between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean, this sprawling estate in Empordà is one of Spain's oldest wine regions, and it takes that heritage seriously enough to have built an entire world around it. Tasting tours wind through a modern winery with raised walkways, then pause at a candlelit space called The Temple for guided pours. The castle, Gothic cloisters, wine spa, golf course, and summer opera festival suggest the family never quite learned to underdo anything. Ranked 22nd on the World's 50 Best Vineyards list.

A Museum of Wine Culture with 4,000 square metres of permanent exhibition space anchors this Rioja winery, alongside a Garden of Bacchus planted with 220 grape varieties. It lands at number 24 on the World's 50 Best Vineyards list. The museum, the gardens, a gastrobar, and a restaurant sit inside a sprawling modern complex, making it the kind of place you arrive at for an hour and leave several hours later, marginally wiser about terroir.

A Cava producer in Alt Penedès, about 30km south of Barcelona, where the vineyards are still ploughed by horses and sheep wander between the rows. Gramona is a family house known for extended-aged cavas, some resting for well over a decade before release. Guided visits let you ride through the vines on horseback, which is either charmingly old-world or the most relaxing afternoon you'll have in Catalonia. It ranks among The World's 50 Best Vineyards.

A raw stretch of Fuerteventura coastline backed by the volcanic ridges of the Jandía Peninsula, Cofete runs for kilometers without a hotel, a chiringuito, or a parking lot in sight. Getting here means a long, bone-rattling dirt road, which is precisely why it stays quiet. The Atlantic hits hard and the wind rarely lets up, but that's the whole point. It ranks among Europe's 50 Best Beaches, and the scale alone explains why.

The Ygay Estate is one of the largest single vineyards in La Rioja, a few kilometers outside Logroño, and this is where modern Rioja wine effectively began. Visits take in both the working winery and the original cellars, now a museum. A wine bar handles the casual end; a seven-course tasting menu with the estate's limited releases handles the less casual end. It landed on the World's 50 Best Vineyards list, if you need a reason to book ahead.

SHA is less spa day, more full diagnostic workup with better lighting. Expect intake testing, a roster of onsite doctors, and a multi-page menu of IV drips and hyperbaric chambers before anything resembling relaxation appears. The premise is cellular-level optimization, the kind where "longevity treatments" means intermittent hypoxia, not a hot stone massage. Vogue named it among the 100 best spas in the world, which is one way to describe it.

RoseBar, the longevity clinic inside Six Senses Ibiza, runs on the premise that aging is more of a suggestion than a rule. The setup is minimalist cream and jute, the equipment decidedly less serene: hyperbaric oxygen chambers, automated ice baths, red-light panels, and genetic screening sent off to an actual lab. It's biohacking with a five-star thread count, and Vogue named it among the 100 best spas in the world.

Wild boar and deer roam the La Planta estate while you taste your way through the cellar at this Ribera del Duero winery, which also runs a hotel, two restaurants, and a spa built around vinotherapy. Tasting workshops come with tapas, and cellar tours wind past thousands of bottles laid down in the dark. A named spot on the World's 50 Best Vineyards list, it makes a convincing case for spending an entire day without leaving the property.

Frank Gehry's rippled titanium roof catches the light above one of Rioja's oldest estates, which makes for a slightly surreal arrival at what is, underneath it all, a nineteenth-century bodega with cellars full of aged wine. Winery tours go by foot, bike, or horseback through the vineyards, and the grounds spread into medieval villages, a spa, and golf. The kind of place that earns a second day without trying.

Parés Baltà is an organic and biodynamic winery sitting on one of the prettier stretches of Penedès, where the family runs tastings that pair wine and cava with chocolate or cheese, 4x4 tours through the countryside, and vineyard walks that end with a glass on the patio. It's the kind of place that treats guests the way it treats its land, which is to say with some actual care.