Travel places

The only wonder of the ancient world still standing, and the tallest human structure on Earth for nearly four thousand years.

A Nabataean trading capital carved directly into rose-red sandstone cliffs and reached through a 1.2 km slot canyon.

An Inca royal estate on a knife-edge ridge, built without mortar and abandoned barely a century after it was finished.

The largest amphitheatre ever built, once flooded for mock naval battles in front of fifty thousand spectators.

At each equinox the afternoon sun throws a serpent of shadow down the staircase of El Castillo.

Not one wall but many, layered over two millennia and running more than 21,000 km across ridgelines and desert.

A mausoleum of white marble that shifts from pink to pearl to gold as the light moves across the day.

A 30 m art-deco figure on Corcovado, struck by lightning several times a year and repaired with its own quarry stone.

The largest religious monument on Earth, a Hindu temple later turned Buddhist, ringed by a moat 190 m wide.

A Nasrid palace-fortress where water, light and geometry were engineered into one continuous piece of architecture.

Its dome held the record as the world's largest interior space for close to a thousand years.

Bluestones hauled 250 km from Wales and set to frame the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset.

Over 8,000 clay soldiers, each with a different face, buried to guard one emperor and found by farmers in 1974.

Nearly a thousand stone ancestors on the most remote inhabited island on the planet, 3,500 km from the mainland.

Twin towers joined by a skybridge that is deliberately not bolted to either tower, so it can slide as they sway.

A 446 km gash cut by the Colorado River, exposing nearly two billion years of rock in its walls.

Sits under the auroral oval, so the sky performs on any clear dark night through the polar winter.

The largest living structure on Earth — 2,300 km of coral, visible from orbit and built by animals a few millimetres across.

275 separate falls in a horseshoe nearly 3 km wide, with the Devil's Throat swallowing half the river.

Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders — spray from the drop rises 400 m and is visible 50 km away.

The world's largest salt flat, so level that a thin rain film turns 10,000 km² into a perfect mirror of the sky.

Roughly 1,600 limestone karst towers rising from jade water, hollowed through with caves and hidden lagoons.

Sixteen terraced lakes whose travertine dams are still being built, millimetre by millimetre, by moss and algae.

Thousands of quartz-sandstone spires that float above the cloud layer on humid mornings.

Granite towers, blue glaciers and wind that regularly exceeds 100 km/h on the classic W trek.

Rock flour ground by glaciers stays suspended in the meltwater, turning the lakes an unreal turquoise.

One of the wettest inhabited places on Earth — and the rain is the point, since it wakes hundreds of cliff waterfalls.

Meltwater tunnels under Europe's largest ice cap, refrozen each winter into blue glass that never repeats.

Wind-piled dunes up to 150 m tall, with some of the darkest night skies anywhere in North Africa.

The Valley of the Moon — sandstone islands in red sand, and the stand-in for Mars in a dozen films.

The oldest desert on Earth, where 300 m dunes meet a clay pan of 900-year-old blackened camelthorn trees.

A slot canyon scoured by flash floods, where midday light drops through the crack in solid shafts.

Volcanic tuff eroded into fairy chimneys, hollowed into churches and underground cities eighteen storeys deep.

Around 1.5 million wildebeest run a clockwise circuit through the Serengeti and Masai Mara every year.

The finches, tortoises and marine iguanas that gave Darwin the shape of natural selection.

A river that never reaches the sea, flooding the Kalahari instead and pulling in wildlife from across the desert.

One in ten known species on Earth lives here, and the forest generates a large share of its own rainfall.

Roughly half the world's remaining mountain gorillas live in this single stretch of impenetrable forest.

The only continent with no permanent human population, reached across the Drake Passage in about two days.

Polar bears outnumber people, the sun does not set from April to August, and a seed vault sits inside a mountain.

Sixteen hundred temples and a thousand years as the imperial capital, spared from wartime bombing.

A city on 118 islands, built on millions of alder piles driven into the lagoon mud.

Jemaa el-Fnaa turns over completely at dusk, from snake charmers and storytellers to a hundred food stalls.

The only city standing on two continents, and capital of three successive empires.

Its astronomical clock has been tracking the sun, moon and zodiac since 1410 and still runs.

A city wedged between a flat-topped mountain and two oceans, with penguins on a suburban beach.

Granite peaks drop straight into the Atlantic, and the world's largest urban forest sits inside the city limits.

Around 800 languages are spoken here, making it the most linguistically dense city ever recorded.

A city-state that grew its land area by a quarter through reclamation, and calls itself a city in a garden.

Home to the tallest building on Earth, on a coastline that was mostly fishing villages within living memory.

The Eiffel Tower was meant to be dismantled after twenty years; it survived because it made a useful radio mast.

For a few weeks each summer the sun barely sets and the whole city stays out through the white nights.

The flattest country on Earth — its highest natural point is under 2.4 m above the sea.

A sunken volcano ringed by a barrier reef, leaving a lagoon in half a dozen distinct shades of blue.

The rim of a volcanic caldera that blew apart around 1600 BCE in one of the largest eruptions in human history.

Limestone cliffs, hidden lagoons reached only at low tide, and an 8 km navigable underground river.

The old Spice Islands, where a coral-stone trading town meets tides that walk the sea out a kilometre.

Volcanic ridges terraced into rice paddies watered by subak, a cooperative irrigation system a thousand years old.

Eighteen basalt islands in the North Atlantic where sheep outnumber people and the weather changes by the hour.

A third of its plants grow nowhere else, including dragon's blood trees shaped like upturned umbrellas.

Twelve days on foot from Lukla to 5,364 m, through Sherpa villages and across the Khumbu icefall's doorstep.

Forty-three kilometres of original Inca paving over a 4,215 m pass, ending at the Sun Gate above Machu Picchu.

The longest railway line in the world — 9,289 km, eight time zones and about a week from Moscow to the Pacific.

Chicago to Santa Monica, 3,940 km of the Mother Road, decommissioned in 1985 but never really closed.

One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities anywhere, where eighty-eight ghats step down into the Ganges.

Around ten thousand vermilion torii gates, each one donated, climbing four kilometres up a sacred hill.

Monasteries on sandstone pillars, once reachable only by rope ladders that the monks pulled up behind them.

More than 2,200 surviving temples on a bend of the Irrawaddy, out of over ten thousand once built.