Paquime in Chihuahua, Mexico was a multi-story adobe trading city that bred macaws and engineered running water, linking the Southwest and Mesoamerica from 1200 to 1450 CE.

Before the great terraced splendor of the later Persian capital, there was a quieter, more intimate royal center out on a high plain in what is now southern Iran. Pasargadae

On a high plain in southern Iran stands a simple, dignified stone tomb, its stepped base rising to a small gabled chamber. This is the tomb of Cyrus the Great,

High in the Altai Mountains, ice preserved the tattooed bodies, oldest knotted carpet, and whole horses of Iron Age steppe nomads in astonishing detail.

High in the wooded Carpathian mountains of Romania, in a valley surrounded by dark forests and dramatic peaks, rises one of the most beautiful and romantic royal residences in all

Most of the castles in this series were born of war, raised to guard a pass or overawe a region, their beauty almost accidental. Peleş is different. It was built

Built by King Carol I in the Carpathian Mountains, Romania’s Peles Castle fuses romantic Neo-Renaissance splendour with pioneering modern technology.

Every so often a castle does more than witness history; it makes it. Pembroke, standing on a great rock almost surrounded by a tidal river in the far south-west of

The colourful, dreamlike Pena Palace is Portugal’s masterpiece of Romanticism, built by an artist-king on a misty peak above Sintra.

Crowning a steep hill above the town of Bergama in western Turkey, the ancient city of Pergamon was one of the most brilliant capitals of the Greek world. From this