Built as Emperor Pachacuti’s mountain retreat, Machu Picchu survived Spanish conquest untouched, was never truly forgotten by local farmers, and only later became world famous through Hiram Bingham.

High on a narrow ridge between two Andean peaks, wrapped in cloud and ringed by plunging green gorges, stands the most famous ruin in the Americas. Machu Picchu, built by

There is a field in Surrey, flat and a little soggy, where the Thames loops lazily past on its way to London. On most days nothing happens there at all.

Mahmud of Ghazni, the first Turkish ruler to use the title of Sultan, is also the commander who honored India with Islam. It is no wonder that the sultan, who

Near Lake Baikal, an Ice Age settlement left exquisite ivory figurines and a child whose DNA revealed the deep ancestry of Native Americans.

Prepare to have your sense of scale recalibrated. Malbork, on the flat plain of northern Poland, is the largest castle in the world measured by land area, and the largest

Some palaces are monuments to a dynasty’s rise, but Mandalay Palace is a monument to a monarchy’s fall. Built at the foot of the sacred Mandalay Hill in central Myanmar,

Where the Limpopo and Shashe rivers meet, at the point where South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe now converge, a flat-topped sandstone hill rises above the surrounding bush. Eight centuries ago

On a high hill of black volcanic rock overlooking the blue waters of the Mediterranean, in the coastal mountains of northern Syria, there rises one of the greatest of all

The Rhine gorge between Bingen and Koblenz is famous for its castles. There are dozens of them, perched on crags and vineyards above the river, one after another, a stone