How a royal vow, a fortune in Brazilian gold, and tens of thousands of labourers raised Portugal’s colossal Mafra National Palace.

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.

Stand on the north bank of the Pasig River as it winds through Manila, and you will find a rambling white building screened by acacia and mahogany trees, its wide

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

In the center of the Burmese city of Mandalay, ringed by a vast square moat and miles of towering brick walls, lies the last royal palace of the kings of

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