Hill of Crosses, Lithuania: The Site the Soviet Union Bulldozed Five Times and Failed to Erase On April 5, 1961, three days after Easter, Soviet bulldozers arrived at Kryžių Kalnas, a low mound in northern Lithuania. Workers burned the wooden crosses and carted the metal ones to scrap yards. By nightfall the hill was bare. It did not stay bare. In the weeks that followed, people began slipping...

Cloud Gate, Chicago: The Sculpture That Replaced a 150-Foot Playground Slide Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate was not the obvious choice. When Millennium Park officials reviewed proposals in 1999, they also considered a 150-foot glass-and-steel playground slide by Jeff Koons, complete with an observation deck accessible by elevator. The committee chose Kapoor’s liquid-mercury-inspired bean...

Drakensberg: The Barrier of Spears and What It Takes to Walk One Tugela Falls drops 948 metres over the basalt face of the Amphitheatre in a series of five cascades. That makes it the world’s highest waterfall by a margin significant enough that the debate is settled. The hike to the top starts at roughly 2,500 metres above sea level, ascends another 550 metres over approximately six...

The Incas designed their capital in the shape of a puma. Sacsayhuaman, the massive zigzagging fortress whose stones weigh up to 125 tonnes each, forms the puma’s head. The historic center below makes the body, and two rivers converge at the tail to the south. Wander the streets long enough and you start to feel the geometry working on you, as if the city is still exerting some original...

March 2026 changed Disneyland Paris more than any single year since 1992 When the gates of Euro Disneyland first opened on 12 April 1992, 25,000 visitors streamed in before 10am. French intellectuals had already been in the press calling it a “cultural Chernobyl.” The park survived that criticism, absorbed a near-bankruptcy, and spent three decades becoming the most visited theme park...

The fishermen on Inle Lake row standing up. One leg is planted on the stern; the other wraps around the oar, leaving both hands free. The technique developed because the lake is shallow (averaging just three metres deep) and thick with reeds and floating vegetation. Sitting down, you cannot see over the waterplants. Standing up and using your leg to steer lets you navigate and look ahead...

The whole thing was sketched on pub napkins in 1996. Tim Smit, the man behind the idea, sat in a St Austell bar and convinced people to build two enormous bubbles inside a worked-out china clay pit in one of the most economically depressed corners of England. The engineering argument for the hexagonal ETFE pillow structure was borrowed from soap bubble physics: bubbles can settle on any surface,...

Nyungwe Forest National Park: Where 400 Colobus Monkeys Move Together In 1984, a Wildlife Conservation Society survey in Nyungwe recorded a single troop of Angola colobus monkeys numbering approximately 400 individuals. Four hundred primates moving together through the canopy of a montane rainforest is not something the scientific literature had prepared anyone for. It remains one of the largest...

Jane Austen wrote in secret. She used small pieces of paper so that the pages could be quickly concealed when a visitor arrived; the door to her sitting room had a creaking hinge that she deliberately did not repair, because the squeak gave her a few seconds’ warning. In the dining room of this modest red-brick cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, she revised “Pride and Prejudice,”...

Milford Sound (Piopiotahi): What to Know Before the Road Trip Milford Sound is not technically a sound. It is a fiord, carved by glaciers between 80,000 and 12,000 years ago. The distinction matters because it explains the place: sheer granite walls rising 1,200 metres from dark water, a permanent layer of freshwater tannin-stained by the surrounding rainforest floating above the saltwater below,...

The granite boulders on the beaches of La Digue are 750 million years old. That is not a metaphor for something timeless: those specific rocks, now stacked at the waterline of Anse Source d’Argent, were formed during the Precambrian era and have been sitting in roughly the same place, give or take a few hundred kilometres of continental movement, since before complex animal life existed on...

Angkor Wat Cambodia The 800 metres of bas-relief that run around Angkor Wat’s third enclosure galleries take most visitors about three minutes to walk past. They deserve three hours. The south gallery’s Battle of Kurukshetra alone contains 1,500 individual figures in a composition that unfolds like a scroll: armies in formation, individual warriors locked in combat, elephants crushing...

Kaikoura The name means “to eat crayfish” in te reo Maori, and that tells you something about the order of priorities here. Kaikoura is a small town on the northeast coast of the South Island, pressed between the Pacific and the Kaikoura Ranges, which rise almost immediately from the shoreline. The combination of a deep offshore trench (the Hikurangi Trough) and the nutrient flow from...

The Acropolis: How to Actually See It On the evening of 26 September 1687, a Venetian mortar round fired from Philopappos Hill arced over the city and dropped through the roof of the Parthenon. The Ottomans had been using the building as a powder magazine. The resulting explosion killed around 300 people inside, collapsed the cella walls, brought down most of the colonnade and scattered the carved...

Every year, 1.2 million wildebeest and 300,000 zebra move in a giant clockwise loop across 30,000 square kilometres of Tanzania and Kenya in search of rain-triggered grass. The circuit has no fixed timetable. The herds follow cues we don’t fully understand, and no one, including the most experienced guides, can tell you exactly when they will cross the Mara River on any given day. You show...

Hadrian’s Wall: The Edge of an Empire, and What Is Left of It When Hadrian’s Wall was completed in 128 AD, it had been whitewashed. The plaster and lime coating made it visible for miles across the Northumberland moorland, a deliberate statement rather than just an engineering decision. The Romans built things to be seen as well as to function, and the wall that Hadrian ordered in 122...

In October and November 2025, Hoi An’s Ancient Town was submerged by record flooding, with more than 1,000 millimetres of rainfall recorded in a 24-hour period. Streets like Tran Phu and Bach Dang, the Japanese Bridge, and the riverside night market were all temporarily closed. Since late November 2025 the floodwaters have receded and restoration work has returned the town to operating...

Haida Gwaii: The Islands at the Boundary of the World The Haida name for this archipelago is Xhaaidlagha Gwaayaai, which translates as “Islands at the Boundary of the World.” That phrase is more literal than poetic. Haida Gwaii sits roughly 130 kilometres west of the British Columbia mainland, separated from Prince Rupert by the stormy waters of Hecate Strait. The islands were...

The Villa Where James Bond Recovered, and Why You Should Visit on a Tuesday Villa del Balbianello sits on a narrow wooded promontory on the western shore of Lake Como, visible from the water long before you arrive. Most tourists see it from a ferry and take a photograph. Fewer actually visit, which is an oversight, because the interior contains something the lakefront photos do not hint at: the...

The Migration Is Not a Single Event You Book a Ticket For Around 1.5 million wildebeest move continuously through the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem across Tanzania and Kenya throughout the year, following rainfall and grass. This is not a scheduled performance. The famous Mara River crossings, where herds plunge into crocodile-filled water on the Kenyan border, happen unpredictably between July and...

The Spanish Riding School is not named after Spain. The name refers to the origin of the horses: in the 16th century, Ferdinand I, who had grown up in Spain, introduced Andalusian stallions to the Viennese court, and the breed that developed from crosses between Spanish, Arabian, and Berber horses became the Lipizzaner. The school itself was founded in Vienna in 1565, making it one of the oldest...

Lotte World, Seoul: The World Record Theme Park Next to a 555-Metre Skyscraper Lotte World Adventure opened on 12 July 1989 in Jamsil, Songpa District, and holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest indoor theme park. The outdoor section, Magic Island, added the following year, floats on an artificial lake connected to the main building. In 2017, Lotte World Tower rose adjacent...

In November 1941, with German forces less than 20 kilometres from Moscow, Stalin gave a speech to Red Army soldiers on the platform of Mayakovskaya metro station. The speech invoked Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Suvorov, Kutuzov: the great military commanders of Russian history. That speech became the conceptual brief for Komsomolskaya station a decade later. When the station opened in 1952,...

When engineers designed the Oresund crossing in the 1990s, they ran into a problem: the bridge could not be tall enough to clear shipping lanes without violating flight paths for Copenhagen Airport on the Danish side. Their solution was to make the crossing become two things: a bridge on the Swedish end that submerges into a four-kilometre underwater tunnel on the Danish end, with an artificial...

In 1958, Harry Winston shipped the most famous diamond in the world to the Smithsonian Institution in a plain brown package sent by registered mail. The Hope Diamond, 45.52 carats and the largest known blue diamond on earth, arrived at a museum that charged no admission and was open to anyone who walked in off the National Mall. That combination, extraordinary objects made freely available, is the...

The name Devils Tower is almost certainly a translation error. In 1875, Colonel Richard Dodge escorted a scientific survey through northeastern Wyoming and wrote the name down from a phrase he believed the local tribes used. The best current interpretation of the Lakota name is Mato Tipila, which means “Bear Lodge,” not anything devilish. The “Bad God’s Tower”...

In 1972, Gulf Oil Corporation owned much of the Marin Headlands and had detailed plans to build a city called Marincello there, complete with high-density housing for 30,000 residents. An atomic bomb had even been proposed to blast a bowl out of the hillside for foundations. The Nature Conservancy outmaneuvered the developers, the land was transferred to the federal government, and the Golden Gate...

The Guggenheim Bilbao repaid its construction costs in public tax revenue within three years Before the Guggenheim opened on 18 October 1997, Bilbao was an industrial city in decline, its shipbuilding and steel economy gutted. The Basque government approached the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1991 with an unusual offer: fund the building entirely in exchange for the Guggenheim name and...

Cradle Mountain, Tasmania: The Park That Rewards Patience The boat shed at the edge of Dove Lake is made from King Billy Pine, built by the park’s first ranger, Lionell Connell, sometime in the early twentieth century. It is no longer used for anything functional. It sits at the water’s edge with the jagged dolerite spires of Cradle Mountain reflected in the glacial lake in front of...

Chichen Itza: What the Pyramid Isn’t Telling You Yet Beneath the main plaza at Chichen Itza, ground-penetrating radar has detected an underground cenote containing dozens of ritual ceramic vessels with painted texts unlike anything found elsewhere at the site. Separately, a team led by Mexico’s INAH and UNAM is deploying muography (cosmic-ray imaging technology) inside El Castillo to...

Getting Tickets for the Colosseum Without Losing Your Mind The Colosseum was built with plunder from Titus’s sack of Jerusalem in 70 CE and constructed largely by enslaved Jewish prisoners from Judaea. The marble facing has gone, quarried for other buildings through the medieval period, but the scale of the engineering still stops most visitors in their tracks. What does not stop them: the...

Conwy Castle, North Wales On Good Friday in 1401, two cousins of Owain Glyn Dwr captured Conwy Castle by disguising themselves as carpenters. They walked in while the garrison was at prayer, killed the guards, and held the fortress for three months before eventually negotiating a surrender. It is exactly the kind of episode that gets left off the information boards, but it tells you a great deal...

Milan Without the Rush Book Leonardo’s Last Supper before you book your flight. That is not an exaggeration. The Cenacolo Vinciano, the refectory wall where the painting has survived for over five hundred years, releases tickets in quarterly batches roughly three months out, and slots for spring and summer routinely sell out within hours, sometimes minutes, of going live. A second, smaller...

Architect Alejandro Bustillo chose the Puerto Pañuelo peninsula specifically because it had a port. That practical decision, a dock for guests arriving by boat, is why one of South America’s most photographed hotels sits exactly where it does, on a narrow strip of land between two glacial lakes with the Andes rising behind it. The hotel opened January 9th, 1938, burned down completely in...

Alcatraz: What the Rock Actually Tells You The morning ferry from Pier 33 crosses a mile and a quarter of bay water at roughly 12 degrees Celsius, and on the crossing you can see exactly how close San Francisco is. The city sits right there, gleaming and loud and full of restaurants and taxis and ordinary life. That proximity is not incidental to Alcatraz. It is the whole point. The men housed in...

Graceland: The Elvis Presley Estate in Memphis, Tennessee The Jungle Room at Graceland has green shag carpet on both the floor and the ceiling, an artificial waterfall, carved wood furniture with built-in cushions, and rainbow lighting. Elvis had it designed to look like a Hawaiian resort and reportedly spent $10,000 furnishing it in a single afternoon. It also doubled as a recording studio:...

In the 10th century, Córdoba was the largest city on earth. While Paris shuffled along with a few tens of thousands of residents and London barely registered on the map, half a million people lived here under the Umayyad Caliphate, reading in libraries that held hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, visiting hammams fitted with star-shaped skylights, and debating philosophy in a city that had not...

The Royal Mile has over 70 named closes running off it, most of which tourists never enter Edinburgh’s Old Town is a city within a city. The Royal Mile, running almost exactly one mile from Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, is its spine. Off either side, narrow passages called closes cut through the tenement blocks to the streets and levels below. A close is a covered or...

During the Hundred Years’ War, the English besieged Mont Saint-Michel repeatedly for over a century. The island never fell. The combination of the tidal bay, the fortified walls, and the abbey’s strategic position on a granite outcrop made it effectively impregnable. That military record is part of what turned a religious site into a national symbol, the one place in Normandy that...

Someone carved a tunnel through a living 2,400-year-old tree so that motorists could say they drove through a redwood. The tree has been standing since roughly the era of ancient Rome. The hole is 6 feet wide and 6 feet 9 inches tall. It has survived. The Chandelier Tree in Leggett, California remains alive despite the intervention, and the drive-through is one of those roadside attractions that...

Houses of Parliament, London The building you see from Westminster Bridge is not medieval. It is Victorian. The original palace burned down on the night of October 16, 1834, after two cartloads of medieval tax-receipt tallysticks, made from wooden notched sticks, were incinerated in the basement furnaces. The fire got into the floor of the House of Lords and spread from there, destroying most of...

Gallipoli Peninsula: What the Anzac Narrative Leaves Out On May 19, 1915, roughly 42,000 Ottoman troops attacked 17,000 ANZAC soldiers defending the beachhead. The Ottomans suffered around 13,000 casualties in a single day, including 3,000 killed. A formal truce was arranged afterwards so they could collect their dead. That scale of loss, on a single day of fighting on a narrow strip of Turkish...

The Living Irrigation System That Has Run for 1,300 Years The rice terraces of Yuanyang County in southern Yunnan are not relics. They are a working agricultural system that the Hani people have maintained continuously since roughly the Tang Dynasty. Four trunk canals and 392 branch channels totalling nearly 446 kilometres of waterways bring water from forested mountaintops down through a vertical...

Captain Cook named this place “Doubtful Harbour” in 1770 because he was not convinced he could sail out of it again under wind power alone. He never entered. That reluctance left one of the most spectacular fjords on earth largely undisturbed for decades longer than it might otherwise have been, and in a sense that caution still defines Doubtful Sound today: fewer tourists, fewer...

Cinque Terre, Italy: What the Crowds Miss In August 2024, the Via dell’Amore reopened after nearly a decade of closure following a landslide that killed two hikers in 2012. The restoration cost over 23 million euros and introduced a system most visitors still do not fully understand: 200 people per 30-minute timed slot, one-way only from Riomaggiore to Manarola, and as of March 2026 the...

Copenhagen: What to Know Before You Go in 2026 The driverless Metro from Copenhagen Airport drops you into the city centre in under fifteen minutes for around 25 DKK. That speed sets the tone for Copenhagen: a capital that mostly works, mostly on time, and expects you to keep up. What it cannot prepare you for is how much the city has shifted since 2024, when Noma shuttered its dining room,...

On 19 February 1942, the same Japanese commander who led the attack on Pearl Harbor directed 188 aircraft over Darwin in two waves. It was the largest foreign assault ever launched on Australian soil, and the Australian government suppressed casualty figures for months to avoid panic. That story alone makes Darwin worth the detour, but the city has quietly accumulated other reasons to visit too,...

For most of the early 19th century, before the first immigrant ever set foot there, Ellis Island was known locally as Gibbet Island, a place where convicted pirates and mutinous sailors were hanged and their bodies displayed on wooden posts as a warning to ships entering New York Harbor. The fact that it became the gateway of hope for 12 million people over the following century is one of the more...

Milan’s Duomo: Six Centuries, 3,400 Statues, and One Lightning Rod Hidden in the Madonna’s Spear Construction on Milan’s cathedral began in 1386 and the final bronze door was not inaugurated until 1965. That 579-year build makes the Duomo di Milano one of the longest-running architectural projects ever completed, and it shows in the details: over 3,400 statues and 135 gargoyles...

Hiroshima The flame in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park has been burning since 1964. What most visitors do not know is that the fire was lit from a torch carried from Mount Misen on the island of Miyajima, where a flame has burned continuously for over 1,200 years. The eternal fire in the Peace Memorial Park will be extinguished only when the last nuclear weapon on Earth is destroyed. The...