In the mountains of northern Ethiopia stands a group of churches unlike any others in the world. Rather than being built up from the ground, they were carved downward into

On Belize’s New River Lagoon, Lamanai kept thriving through the Classic Maya collapse, Spanish colonization, and a colonial revolt, making it one of the longest continuously occupied Maya cities.

On a high ridge of the Otago Peninsula, overlooking a long harbour on the southern coast of New Zealand’s South Island, stands the only castle in the entire country. Larnach

There is a photograph that gets taken a few million times a year: a honey-coloured castle seeming to float on a still lake in the Kent countryside, its towers doubled

On the coast of Libya, half-buried for centuries beneath drifting sand, lie the ruins of Leptis Magna, one of the most magnificent Roman cities anywhere in the world. Its arches,

Thousands of years before the Great Wall, the Liangzhu culture built a walled water city, the world’s oldest known dams, and jade masterpieces in the Yangtze delta — a lost cradle of civilization only recognized by UNESCO in 2019.

Long before the pyramids rose beside the Nile, and thousands of years before a single stone was raised at Stonehenge, a small community gathered on the floor of what is

On the limestone cliffs above the Yi River in central China, tens of thousands of Buddhas gaze out from the rock. The Longmen Grottoes are one of the greatest treasuries

On a bluff in Almería, Los Millares was one of western Europe’s first towns — a Copper Age settlement ringed with stone walls, home to early metalworking and a vast necropolis of sun-facing tholos tombs.

“L’état, c’est moi” — “I am the state.” Whether or not Louis XIV ever actually uttered those words, they have clung to him for three centuries because they capture the