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

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,

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

Rising in a striking silhouette of black-walled keeps and steep gables above its moat, with the snow-capped peaks of the Japanese Alps as a backdrop, Matsumoto Castle is one of

Towering over the blue-washed houses of the old city of Jodhpur, rising sheer from a great cliff of rock in the desert of Rajasthan, Mehrangarh is one of the mightiest

Rising like a vision from the sands where Normandy meets Brittany, Mont Saint-Michel is one of the most extraordinary sights in the world. A steep rocky island crowned by a

On the edge of a coral reef off a tropical island in the western Pacific, half-drowned by the rising sea and shrouded in dense jungle, stands one of the most