Few names from the ancient world carry as much weight as Babylon. For thousands of years it was a byword for splendour, power and sometimes decadence, a great city on

On a bend of the Irrawaddy River in central Myanmar lies one of the most extraordinary religious landscapes on earth. Across the dusty plain of Bagan stand thousands of Buddhist

On the fertile plains of central Java, ringed by volcanoes, rises the largest Buddhist monument in the world. Borobudur is not a temple with rooms and halls but a vast

We come at last to the Danube, and to one of the most magnificent castle-scapes in all of Europe. High on Castle Hill, above the great river that divides Budapest

Deep in the rainforest of southern Mexico, close to the border with Guatemala, lie the ruins of Calakmul, one of the two great superpowers of the Classic Maya world. Its

In a dry valley a little inland from the Peruvian coast stand the eroded remains of what may be the oldest city in all the Americas. Caral, in the Supe

On a low headland overlooking the Gulf of Tunis lie the ruins of a city that once came close to ruling the western Mediterranean. This was Carthage, the great maritime

Some castles overwhelm you with size, and some seduce you with setting. Cesky Krumlov belongs firmly to the second kind. It does not sprawl across a mountain or crown a

On the desert coast of northern Peru sprawls Chan Chan, the largest city ever built of mud brick and the greatest metropolis of pre-Columbian South America outside the Inca realm.

On the flat limestone plain of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula rises the most famous of all Maya cities. At its centre stands a single perfect pyramid, El Castillo, a mountain of