Every place in the Field Guide, on one map

A Neolithic village of stone houses with stone furniture, buried in sand for four and a half thousand years and exposed by the storm of 1850.

The largest unbroken tidal flat on Earth, where twice a day the North Sea withdraws far enough to walk across its floor to an island.

The longest ice in the Alps — and the valley wall it was buttressing, which began to move once the glacier thinned.

A river vanishes into a plateau and resurfaces near the Adriatic. The route in between has never been fully mapped.

Portugal's highest mountain in the mid-Atlantic, with UNESCO vineyards walled in black lava and whales off the old whaling coast.

The westernmost Faroe: vast puffin colonies, the islands' only gannets, and a lighthouse across a sea gorge.

A parliament founded in 930 met for eight centuries on a valley floor that was steadily sinking and splitting beneath the argument.

Four months without a sunrise, more than forty nationalities free to move in, and the world's spare seeds sealed inside a mountain.

Rock soft enough to carve and firm enough to hold a ceiling — so when armies came, whole communities went eight storeys down.

Harbours that refuse to freeze at 68° north, and a thousand-year export trade built on one fish keeping an appointment.

Sixteen lakes held back by dams that moss, algae and bacteria are still building, about 13 millimetres a year by the park’s own count.

A river delta turned to stone and stood on end, with fourteenth-century monasteries on the flat bits.

Stone towers built one per family, entered by a ladder you pulled up behind you — defences against invaders, and against the family next door.

About 40,000 basalt columns stepping into the sea. They helped settle whether basalt comes from water or from volcanoes, and a tray of drying cornflour grows the same pattern.

The lagoon that protects Venice was kept a lagoon on purpose: for nearly two centuries the Republic dug new beds to carry rivers and their silt around it. Now the barrier faces the other way.

Built as one shy king's retreat from public life, closed to outsiders while he lived, and opened to the public seven weeks after he died. The throne it was built around was never made.

A palace whose rooms speak in the first person: the Alhambra's court poets wrote verses for the walls, and the Fountain of the Lions describes its own water. Its famous tile-symmetry claim is less settled.

A temple whose doorway meets the equinox sunrise, a burial complex dug three levels into the rock, the Knights' fortress capital, and paired grooves in the limestone that still have no agreed date.

The smallest country in the world meets Italy along a white stone line across St Peter's Square. By the 1929 treaty the square is the Vatican's, and on an ordinary day Italian police keep order in it.

A pilgrimage made since the ninth century, waymarked since 1984 by a parish priest's yellow arrows and proved with a book of stamps, ending at a granite cathedral in Galicia.

One of the great ports of the Roman world, left inland by its own river. Ephesus moved more than once to follow a coastline that silt kept pushing west.

A town on both lips of a gorge, joined by a bridge 98 metres high that was built of stone cut from the bottom of the gorge itself. It is called the New Bridge, and it was finished in 1793.

In 1088 a Byzantine emperor granted a small Aegean island to a monk. He built a monastery with battlements above the harbour, and a white town grew up around its walls.

A raised causeway nearly turned this tidal island into land. A dam that stores the sea and then lets it go, and a bridge on piles, are making it an island again on the biggest tides.

Everyone looks at Stonehenge’s standing stones. The six-tonne slab lying in the middle was traced in 2024 to north-east Scotland, at least 750 km away.

Every hour a skeleton rings the bell on Prague’s astronomical clock. The legend of the clockmaker blinded for building it is told about a man who did not.

A glacial river that turns and drops twice into a canyon. A farmer's daughter fought the plan to dam it and stands above it in stone; the lease itself died when the rent stopped.

An islet in the Bay of Kotor made of dropped stones and sunken ships, around a reef where, by tradition, seamen found an icon in 1452. Every July the town goes out and adds more.

A car-free island in the Bailiwick of Guernsey, where tractors and horses are the traffic and the sky is kept dark on purpose. Its two halves are joined by La Coupée, a railed road along a ridge high above the sea.

A remote island group beyond the Outer Hebrides whose last 36 people left together in 1930. A street of stone houses, about 1,400 turf-capped cleits and Britain’s highest sea stacks remain, a long day-boat ride from Harris.

The westernmost of the Aeolian Islands, north of Sicily: the cone of an extinct volcano where about 90 people live all year. There are no roads and no cars; stone stairways are the streets, and mules carry the shopping.

A twin-peaked rock in the Atlantic off County Kerry, where early medieval monks built beehive huts of dry stone on a ledge near the top. Permitted boats land a small number of visitors a day in summer, weather allowing; 618 stone steps lead up.

The one inhabited island of Iceland’s Westman Islands. In 1973 a volcano opened at the edge of its town and buried hundreds of homes; the islanders pumped seawater onto the lava to save the harbour, and the island came out larger.

A small pink-granite island off Peniche, Portugal, where the nature reserve lets in at most 550 visitors at a time. A 17th-century fort built from a ruined monastery sits on its own islet, reached by an arched bridge.

Scotland’s second-largest island, all peninsulas and sea lochs around the black peaks of the Cuillin. On its northern arm a vast landslip has left the rock towers of the Quiraing and the Old Man of Storr, and dinosaurs left their footprints on the shore.

The south-westernmost Canary Island: a steep volcanic island of more than 500 cones, with junipers bent flat by the trade winds and a vast bay left by an ancient collapse. For centuries many European maps counted longitude from here.

One of the most remote inhabited islands of the Adriatic, closed to foreigners as a military zone until 1988. Its old town turns its back on the sea, its chimneys look like miniature minarets, and the archipelago is a nature park.

A small crofting island halfway between Shetland and Orkney, home to 44 people and one of Europe’s great bird observatories. It gave its name to a knitting pattern, and a ship of the Spanish Armada was wrecked on it in 1588.

France’s westernmost island and its small neighbour, off the tip of Brittany: treeless heath grazed by sheep in common, seals among the islets, and a sea so dangerous that lighthouses stand on its rocks in every direction.

A village of a few hundred people squeezed between an Austrian mountain lake and a cliff, above a salt mine worked since prehistory, whose Iron Age graves named an era and whose crowds of day visitors made it Austria’s best-known lesson in overtourism.

A low mound in the flat farmland of northern Lithuania so covered in crosses, crucifixes and rosaries that no one has counted them in years: bulldozed by Soviet authorities and replanted by night each time, and still growing.

A hill village in eastern Portugal whose granite houses squeeze between, beneath and into boulders the size of houses, one of them roofed by a single rock, below a ruined Templar castle and a clock tower crowned with a silver rooster.

A salt mine in Transylvania worked from the Middle Ages to 1932, whose vast chambers are now a show mine: a lake with rowing boats at the bottom of a bell-shaped pit, a Ferris wheel in the last chamber dug, and rooms for salt-air treatment.

A loop of about 48 kilometres from Dingle around the end of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, through Irish-speaking villages and past an Iron Age fort, stone beehive huts, the Blasket Islands and the Gallarus Oratory; visitors are asked to drive it clockwise, because part of the cliff road is a single lane.

An 8.3-kilometre stretch of County Road 64 on Norway's west coast, carried from islet to islet over causeways and bridges along the exposed sea of Hustadvika; opened in 1989, toll-free since 1999, protected as cultural heritage, and part of a 36-kilometre Norwegian Scenic Route that runs on to the fishing village of Bud.

County Road 5627 between Lærdal and Aurland in western Norway: 47 kilometres over a high, barren plateau where snow lies most of the year, from fjord to fjord, ending at the Stegastein platform 650 metres above the Aurlandsfjord; closed in winter, except the stretch up to Stegastein.

National road DN7C across the Făgăraș Mountains, Romania's highest, built by army engineers between 1970 and 1974: 151 kilometres from near Pitești to the Sibiu road, climbing to 2,042 metres by Bâlea Lake through the country's longest road tunnel; its high section is open only in summer, and in 2026 only from 7:00 to 21:00.

A toll road over the main ridge of the Alps between Bruck and Heiligenblut, opened in 1935: 48 kilometres and 36 bends to the Hochtor at 2,504 metres, with branches to a viewpoint over Austria's highest mountain and the Pasterze glacier; open from early May to early November, from €46.50 a car in 2026.

A road pass at 2,429 metres between Realp in Uri and Gletsch in Valais, on the watershed between the Mediterranean and the North Sea, past the shuttered Hotel Belvédère and the Rhone Glacier, parts of which are covered in white blankets every summer; closed in winter, when a car train runs through the mountain beneath it.

The drive along Route 1 below Iceland’s southern glaciers: Seljalandsfoss, which you can walk behind, Skógafoss and its legend of a hidden chest, and the black sand of Reynisfjara, where a warning light now tells visitors how far towards the waves to go.

Thirteen towns stacked up the cliffs above the Gulf of Salerno, south of Naples, joined by a 40-kilometre cliff road and a footpath called the Path of the Gods, with lemons on terraces cut into the mountain and a harbour town that once ran a sea republic.

A small alpine lake in the Julian Alps of Slovenia with a church on an island, reached by wooden pletna boats whose rowers have held a special right since 1740 and by a stair of 99 stone steps, under a castle on a cliff.

A village in the Swiss Alps closed to petrol and diesel cars, reached by train from Täsch, under the Matterhorn, with a rack railway climbing to 3,089 metres and a slow panoramic train that runs from here to St. Moritz over 291 bridges.

A walled sea city on the southern Adriatic that was the capital of its own republic for 450 years, chose a new rector every month, and carved a motto about liberty over a fortress gate; rebuilt after an earthquake in 1667 and a siege in 1991.

The largest island of the Azores, mid-Atlantic, where a crater lake comes in two colours, the ground at Furnas is hot enough that restaurants bury their stew in it at dawn, and Europe’s oldest surviving tea plantation is still at work.

A town in the misty hills west of Lisbon where a king consort built a red and yellow palace on a summit, a millionaire sank a well you walk down by a spiral stair, and a king had a ceiling painted with magpies to quiet the gossip.

The capital of Finnish Lapland, just south of the Arctic Circle, where a white line marks where the circle lay in 1865, the town was rebuilt after 1944 on a plan shaped like a reindeer’s head, and the sun stays up for thirty days in summer.

A circular route of 179 kilometres round the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, from Killarney’s lakes and Ireland’s first national park to an Iron Age stone fort and a Gold Tier dark-sky reserve; every tour coach drives it anticlockwise, and opinions differ on which way a car should go.

A range of pale rock towers in north-east Italy that turns pink and red at sunset, named after the rock a French mineralogist described in 1791, where the valleys round the Sella still speak Ladin and the ridges still hold the trenches of the First World War.

Five villages of coloured houses on a cliff coast in Liguria, joined by a footpath and a railway, below hillsides terraced for vines, a World Heritage Site since 1997, where floods killed nine people in 2011 and a lovers’ path closed by a rockslide took more than a decade to reopen.

A 15 km arm of the sea in western Norway between near-vertical mountains, where the Seven Sisters fall 410 metres opposite the Suitor, old goat farms sit on ledges far above the water, and a cracked mountainside on the fjord it branches from is watched for a slide that could send a wave to the village in about ten minutes.

A crescent of island round a flooded volcano in the Aegean, where white villages line the top of cliffs more than 300 metres high, a Bronze Age town lies preserved under the ash of an eruption of about 3,600 years ago, and parts of the caldera’s foot stay closed until March 2027.

A vast marsh at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, behind moving dunes and stone pines, where waterbirds from across Europe spend the winter, in numbers that rise and fall with the rain.

A spring-fed lake in the lava fields of north Iceland, ringed with small steep craters, where midges feed the ducks and, by its Ramsar record, virtually Europe’s whole breeding population of Barrow’s goldeneye nests.

White chalk cliffs on the Yorkshire coast where, from spring to late summer, around half a million seabirds crowd the ledges, puffins and gannets among them, along a level cliff-top path.

The southern tip of Öland, where birds following the island south stop before the open Baltic, and an observatory beside Sweden’s tallest lighthouse has been ringing them since 1946.

A tidal lagoon behind a chain of sandy barrier islands on Portugal’s Algarve coast, where waders winter on the mudflats, little terns nest in the dunes and salt pans, and Audouin’s gulls crowd one island.

A slab of the Earth's mantle pushed to the surface — orange, barren, and part of the evidence that proved plate tectonics.

The largest tree on Earth by volume, and a species whose cones can stay sealed for twenty years until fire, a squirrel or a beetle opens them.

The national park private citizens bought back acre by acre and gave away — with 45 miles of roads built to keep cars out.

A wilderness island in Lake Superior where wolves and moose have been studied since 1958 — the longest-running predator-prey study on Earth.

Sixteen million bricks, seventy miles out to sea: the largest masonry fort in the western hemisphere, never finished and never attacked.

Brown bears stand at the lip of a waterfall catching leaping salmon — a queue ordered by rank, with a platform for watching it.

The highest tides on Earth: walk the ocean floor at low water, paddle over your footprints six hours later.

Náįlįcho, a waterfall twice Niagara's height, and four great canyons in a roadless reserve — among the first UNESCO sites ever listed.

Sandstone stained by rust, a chapel grown from a cliff, and a town named for the postmaster's wife.

An asteroid cracked the bedrock in a ring 66 million years ago; the sinkholes tracing that ring today are far younger than the shortcut version says.

Cedar mortuary poles left to lean, weather and fall — because the Haida Nation decided they should, and UNESCO's listing accepts it.

The longest cave known, and still growing. The 1972 connection that made it so was already on an enslaved guide’s map, drawn from memory in 1842.

Earthworks aligned to a lunar cycle of 18.6 years — a pattern nobody could establish alone, since a person sees only about three of them in a lifetime.

Bigger than Switzerland, with the only wild nesting ground of the whooping crane and a beaver dam found from orbit — and 4,000 visitors a year.

The tallest dunes in North America exist because two creeks carry the escaping sand back. In late spring one of them runs in waves, every twenty seconds.

A hundred and thirteen miles of highway across open water, built on the piers of a railroad a hurricane destroyed in 1935. The old bridges still run alongside.

Nearly two billion years of rock, and a hole cut through it that geologists still date three ways: 70 million years for part of it, 5 to 6 million for the whole, or a lake that spilled.

The colours around Yellowstone's hot springs are living microbes. From one small pool off the boardwalks came the bacterium whose enzyme made copying DNA practical.

A treaty sets how much water goes over Niagara Falls: twice as much by day in the tourist season as at night. The rest goes through tunnels to power stations, and in 1969 the American Falls was turned off.

Canada's national parks began with a quarrel over a hot spring in 1885. The spring is now closed to bathers, because it is the main home of a snail found nowhere else.

Polar bears gather at Churchill each autumn to wait for Hudson Bay to freeze. The ones that come into town can be held by the province until the ice forms, then let go onto it.

For most of a century a waterfall of burning embers was pushed off a Yosemite cliff every summer night. The Park Service stopped it in 1968. Each February the sun now sets a real waterfall alight.

More than 2,000 sandstone arches stand over a buried salt bed in Utah. One fell in the night in 2008, and the Park Service says new ones form about as fast as old ones fall.

A lake in the collapsed top of a volcano, with no river in or out: rain and snow keep it full. It is the deepest in the United States, and until the end of 2028 nobody can walk down to it.

The only walled city north of Mexico nearly pulled its walls down in the 1870s. A governor general stopped it, and the gates you walk through were rebuilt afterwards, wider and for show.

A copper-mill town of red timber buildings above a rubble-covered glacier in Alaska, almost empty since 1938. The road stops at a footbridge, and the last five miles are on foot, by bike or by shuttle.

Three narrow volcanic islets an hour off the California coast, reached by a ladder and 154 stairs, with a forty-foot stone arch at one end and the world’s largest breeding colony of western gulls on top.

A trail-less badland in north-west New Mexico of grey and rust clay mounds, stone caps on thin necks and petrified logs, with no water and no marked paths. Its rocks record the end of the age of dinosaurs.

Grassed-over outlines of Norse turf halls at the northern tip of Newfoundland, the only confirmed Norse site in the Americas. Wood cut there has been dated, by its tree rings and a solar storm, to the year 1021.

A wooded island off Percé at the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula, Quebec, where tens of thousands of pairs of northern gannets nest on the cliff tops. Summer boats cross from Percé; a forest trail leads to the colony.

The largest of Newfoundland’s offshore islands, a ferry ride from Farewell: old fishing outports of painted wooden houses, icebergs drifting past in spring, and Brimstone Head, one of the four corners of the flat earth, by a joke society’s reckoning.

A field of dunes made of gypsum, not quartz, in a desert basin of southern New Mexico: bright, cool underfoot and the largest of its kind on Earth, wholly surrounded by a missile range whose tests can shut the road for hours.

A cave in the Guadalupe Mountains of New Mexico, dissolved by acid from below, whose Big Room is among the largest cave chambers in North America; on summer evenings a colony of free-tailed bats pours out of its natural entrance.

A small lake in the dry hills of southern British Columbia that evaporates each summer into pools of green, blue and yellow minerals: a sacred medicine lake of the Syilx Okanagan Nation, who bought back its land in 2001, and seen, as they ask, from the roadside fence.

A vast, shallow peat swamp on the Georgia–Florida line, with tea-dark water, cypress hung with moss and some of North America’s densest alligator country, which a company once tried to drain, loggers stripped, miners nearly reached, and the world listed as heritage in 2026.

A dead-flat dry lakebed in the remote north of Death Valley where rocks of up to hundreds of pounds leave long trails across the mud, a puzzle for decades until scientists filmed thin, windblown ice pushing them in December 2013.

A fog-bound headland at the south-eastern tip of Newfoundland where tilted slabs of ancient deep-sea floor are crowded with the imprints of creatures about 565 million years old, among the first large, complex life on Earth, seen only on a guided walk.

Fifty miles across Glacier National Park and over the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, built from 1919 to 1932 with a single switchback west of the Divide where one engineer had wanted fifteen, and opened in full each summer only when the snowplows get through, by early July in most recent years.

Forty-eight miles of US 34 across Rocky Mountain National Park, eleven of them above the trees and up to 12,183 feet, on what the Park Service calls the highest continuous paved road in the United States; open to through travel only from late May to mid-October, and in summer with a timed-entry reservation from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Two lanes cut into mountains that fall straight into the Pacific, on a coast the US Geological Survey counts among the most landslide-prone in the American West; Highway 1 through Big Sur reopened end to end in January 2026 for the first time in almost three years.

A 469-mile two-lane road along the crests of the Appalachians from Virginia to the Great Smokies, begun as a Depression public-works project in 1935 and finished only in 1987; Hurricane Helene closed every mile of it in 2024, and 458 miles had reopened by October 2026.

A 444-mile two-lane parkway from the Mississippi River at Natchez to the hills south of Nashville, with a 50 mph limit and no commercial traffic, laid along a travel corridor the Park Service says people have used for 10,000 years; two sections were closed for work in autumn 2026.

Highway 93 North between Lake Louise and Jasper: 232 kilometres along the Continental Divide past glaciers, milky lakes and the Columbia Icefield, with a national park pass required, no cell service along the way, and in winter no fuel or food for the whole distance.

A 298-kilometre loop around the northern tip of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, about a third of it through Cape Breton Highlands National Park, where the road climbs onto a plateau of spruce and bog and drops back to the sea again and again; open all year, with a park pass needed for the national park section.

Old, rounded mountains on the Tennessee–North Carolina line, the most visited national park in the United States, with no entrance fee, more kinds of salamander than almost anywhere, and a few nights each spring when its fireflies flash in step.

A canyon in south-western Utah with sandstone walls up to 2,640 feet high, a river you can wade up between them, and Angels Landing, a ridge whose chained final half-mile has needed a lottery permit since 2022.

A small limestone island in Lake Huron, off the tip of Michigan, where motor vehicles have been banned since 1898; the town moves by horse, carriage and bicycle, and its shore road is the only state highway in the United States closed to cars.

A South Carolina port of pastel houses and church steeples on a peninsula between two rivers, where the Civil War began at a fort in the harbour and Gullah basket makers still coil sweetgrass by the road.

Not a canyon but a row of natural amphitheatres on the edge of a Utah plateau, 8,000 to 9,000 feet up, crowded with orange and white spires of rock that ice prises loose on more nights of the year than not, under one of the darkest skies in the national parks.

The capital of New Mexico and the oldest state capital in the US, founded in 1610 nearly 7,000 feet up, a city of low brown adobe buildings that an ordinance of 1957 still requires, with Native artisans under the Palace portal and galleries up Canyon Road.

More than 150 limestone islands alone in the North Atlantic, where a red single-celled sea creature tints the beaches pink, the law has every household collect the rain from its own roof, and a harbour town settled in 1612 keeps its old square.

A short, steep range in north-western Wyoming whose highest peak rises more than 7,000 feet straight out of the sagebrush valley of Jackson Hole, with lakes at its foot, homestead barns on Mormon Row, and the only commercial airport inside a US national park.

Rounded granite boulders and natural arches west of Lone Pine, California, below Mount Whitney, where the Bureau of Land Management counts more than 400 films shot since 1920 and a stone window called Mobius Arch frames the highest peak in the lower 48 states.

A fishing town on the north-west coast of the Yucatán, beside a mangrove estuary of 81,482 hectares, a biosphere reserve since 2000, where more than 18,000 American flamingos can gather at some times of year and fresh water from the peninsula’s aquifer rises to meet the sea.

A long, thin fishing island of sand streets and few cars off the north coast of the Yucatán, inside the Yum Balam protected area, where the government’s whale-shark plan opens the swimming season each year from 15 May to 17 September.

The southern end of Florida’s slow river of grass: sawgrass marsh, a mangrove coast and alligators beside the boardwalks, set aside in 1947 as the first US national park created for its biodiversity rather than its scenery.

A Spanish colonial town on Florida’s Atlantic coast, founded in 1565, and its fort of shell stone, the Castillo de San Marcos, whose walls swallowed English cannonballs instead of shattering.

Clear springs across north and central Florida where manatees gather out of the cold each winter, among them Three Sisters at Crystal River, in what the US Fish and Wildlife Service calls the only refuge created for them. Four stops, and four separate trips.

A wide, shallow river in the farm country of central Nebraska where, each March, sandhill cranes come down at sunset in their hundreds of thousands to sleep on the sandbars.

The farmed delta at the southern tip of Texas, where a federal refuge and a chain of small parks keep the last thickets of a vanished woodland, and subtropical birds reach the northern edge of their range.

A wooded ridge in Pennsylvania where hawks, eagles and falcons ride the wind south each autumn, counted from the boulders of the world’s first refuge for birds of prey, founded in 1934.

Oak woods on a salt dome above the marshes of the upper Texas coast, where spring songbirds land after crossing the Gulf of Mexico and spoonbills and egrets nest on a rookery island in a pond.

A wildlife refuge on the Rio Grande in the New Mexico desert, where staff flood fields and marshes each winter for tens of thousands of sandhill cranes, snow geese and ducks.

A small national park of rhyolite pinnacles and balanced rocks on a sky-island range in south-eastern Arizona, renamed from a national monument in October 2026, with a guest-ranch fireplace built from stones carved by Buffalo Soldiers.

Six million acres of Alaskan wilderness crossed by a single road, most of it open only to buses in summer, around North America’s highest peak, and patrolled in winter by the Park Service’s only sled dogs.

Nearly 5,000 Ancestral Pueblo sites on a tilted green tableland in south-western Colorado, including about 600 villages built into cliff alcoves, entered by ladder on ranger-led tours.

A national park in Alaska’s Brooks Range, wholly north of the Arctic Circle, with no roads, trails, signs or visitor facilities inside it: visitors fly in by small plane or walk in, and must bring everything they need.

Fjords and tidewater glaciers west of Juneau, where the ice that filled the inlet in 1794 has pulled back far up the bay, and most visitors arrive on a cruise ship that does not dock in the park.

One park with three landscapes on a Washington peninsula: glacier-capped mountains, a rain forest where trees grow on fallen logs, and 73 miles of wilderness coast, where the largest dam removal in US history let a river run free again.

A Texas desert park on the great bend of the Rio Grande, with a whole mountain range inside it, more than 450 bird species, a homesteader’s hot spring bubbling up through an old bathhouse floor, and the darkest skies of any park unit in the lower 48, the Park Service says.

Five islands off the southern California coast, reached only by boat, where a fox the size of a housecat, found nowhere else on Earth, was brought back from fifteen animals on two islands, and where one of the largest sea caves in the world is coloured by its own rock, lichen and algae.

A southern California park where the Mojave and Colorado deserts meet, named for a spiky yucca that DNA put in the agave family, with granite boulders, a cactus garden that may be one single plant, dark skies, and a national monument a determined gardener campaigned into being in 1936.

An Arizona park of striped badlands strewn with tree trunks turned to quartz more than 200 million years ago and cracked into lengths that look sawn, with an eight-room pueblo built of the stone wood, a 1932 car on the old Route 66, and the Painted Desert along its north end.

Sixteen wooden churches raised without iron nails by island shipwrights, and a ghost ship people still half-believe in.

Hundreds of hands stencilled on a canyon wall in blown pigment. More than nine in ten are left hands.

A glacier that has dammed an arm of the lake, held the water back for years, and then lost, and that is now retreating.

A granite laccolith built in ninety thousand years and sliced open by ice — a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 1978, though not a World Heritage Site.

Orcas that throw themselves onto the beach on purpose to hunt, using a technique the young learn by practising.

The youngest Galápagos island: never reached by an introduced mammal, an active volcano, sneezing marine iguanas — and a tortoise that hid for 113 years.

The most biologically intense place on Earth, by National Geographic's famous description — tapirs at the ranger station, macaws over the beach.

Shining waters where jaguars walk free again after seventy years — rewilding's great showcase, patrolled by unbothered capybaras.

Too steep for sugar, so the forest stayed — and offshore, sperm whale families live year-round instead of migrating.

Sixty per cent of the island is national park, and the forest everyone calls pristine is second growth over terraced sugar plantations.

The best-known ruin in the Americas, and possibly not called Machu Picchu at all: two scholars argue that name came from an American's 1911 publications.

The largest salt flat on Earth, level enough that space agencies test satellites against it, and a mirror when it rains.

Hundreds of huge lines and animal figures scratched into a Peruvian desert, still being found: in 2024 AI helped confirm 303 new ones.

A perfectly round hole in a Caribbean reef, and a flooded cave: the stalactites in its walls prove it was dry when the ice ages had drawn the sea down.

Argentina's park counts 275 falls; other accounts give 150 to 300, because the number depends on the river. The same river wrecked the walkway to the Devil's Throat in 2023, and it was taken apart again in 2026 before an expected flood.

The driest non-polar desert on Earth, whose soil near Yungay passed Viking-style tests for Mars in 2003, until another team grew microbes from it. In a wet year its southern end flowers.

White dunes on Brazil's north coast fill with freshwater lagoons every rainy season. The dunes move up to 25 metres a year, so the lagoons come back each year somewhere else.

Below Manaus, the black Rio Negro and the pale, muddy Solimões run side by side in one channel for kilometres without mixing, and the river that leaves is the one Brazil calls the Amazon.

A waterfall of 771 metres in two drops in northern Peru, in full view of the villages below it, which the wider world heard of only in 2006, together with a world ranking disputed ever since.

A shortcut between two oceans that lifts every ship 26 metres on fresh water from a lake, then lets the water run to the sea. When the rain fails, fewer ships cross. Bound for the Pacific, a ship sails south-east.

Argentina's southernmost city calls itself the world's. Across the Beagle Channel, Chile's Puerto Williams lies about 15 km farther south and has counted as a city since 2019.

On a Patagonian lake big enough to raise its own waves, the water has hollowed a marble shore into chapels and tunnels, and glacial silt in the water turns the walls blue.

A remote stretch of Brazilian savanna with orange dunes, clear rivers and springs that push swimmers back to the surface, and a golden grass that the quilombola village of Mumbuca turned into a craft.

A gorge in the southern Peruvian Andes where condors rise past the rim in the morning and the valley is stepped with terraces older than the Inca. In 1586 its two peoples told the Spanish they shaped their children's heads after mountains.

A green volcano in the Caribbean with cliffs on every side, a runway of about 400 metres that only small planes use, and a road islanders built by hand after engineers said it could not be done. Its women made a trade of drawn-thread lace.

A village of scattered houses on a rocky Atlantic cape in Uruguay, reached only across the dunes. Its houses have no mains power, by its residents' own preference; its lighthouse is from 1881, and sea lions crowd the islands offshore.

The sandstone ruins of two Jesuit reductions in southern Paraguay, built with the Guaraní and listed by UNESCO in 1993. One church has a frieze of carved angel musicians; the other was still being built when the Jesuits were expelled, and stands unfinished.

A volcanic island far off the coast of Chile where the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk lived alone for four years and four months. Chile renamed it in 1966 after the novel his story helped inspire.

A valley of pale, wind-cut badlands under red cliffs in San Juan, Argentina, whose rocks of about 230 million years ago gave up some of the first dinosaurs. A guided circuit of about 40 km leads past a stone mushroom and a stone submarine.

A volcanic archipelago 354 km off Brazil, mostly a marine national park, where visitors pay a tax for each day they stay, spinner dolphins rest in a bay, and twin peaks stand in the surf.

A shallow lake turned brick-red by algae and sediment, with white islands of borax, at 4,278 metres on Bolivia’s altiplano. James’s flamingo, once thought extinct, was found nesting here in the 1950s.

A flat, uninhabited island off Curaçao, reached only by day boat across open sea. An old lighthouse stands in the middle, a tanker wreck breaks up on the windward shore, and sea turtles nest on the lee beach.

A small island in the Río de la Plata that lies in Uruguayan waters but belongs to Argentina. It was a fortress, a penal colony and a prison for three presidents; a 1973 treaty keeps it a nature reserve.

A rocky island off Puerto Deseado, in Argentine Patagonia, where yellow-crested rockhopper penguins nest from spring to autumn: the only colony of them on the continent that visitors can reach, by authorised boat, beside an old navy lighthouse.

A flat, quiet coral island north of Antigua, with a single village, long empty beaches of pink sand, and a great shallow lagoon whose mangroves hold what is called the world’s largest colony of magnificent frigatebirds.

Five small uninhabited islands in the Southern Grenadines, set in a shallow lagoon behind the long Horseshoe Reef. The marine park around them is reached only by boat, and green turtles graze its seagrass.

The flat one among the mountainous British Virgin Islands: a low coral island ringed by a long reef that has wrecked hundreds of ships, with miles of white beach, flamingos in its salt ponds and a rare iguana found nowhere else.

The smallest of the three Cayman Islands, home to 161 people and thousands of nesting red-footed boobies. Off its north coast, the reef of Bloody Bay Wall drops from snorkelling depth into the deep.

More than 300 carved stone balls, from fist-sized to taller than a person, set in lines near the houses of chiefs on a river delta in southern Costa Rica, found by banana workers in the 1930s, dynamited by gold hunters and still not fully explained.

A chain of rapids on the Coppename River in the rainforest of central Suriname, reached by charter plane or by road and dugout, and a few hours’ walk away the Voltzberg, a bare granite dome that rises over forest unbroken to every horizon.

A high, dry Andean valley in Argentina’s far north where hills banded rose, cream, plum and green stand over adobe villages like Purmamarca, along a route of traders, the Inca and armies that people have travelled for at least 10,000 years.

The walled colonial heart of Puerto Rico’s capital, with blue cobblestone streets, a governor’s mansion built between 1533 and 1540, and El Morro, a Spanish fort begun in 1539 that steps down six levels to the Atlantic and was taken in battle only once.

Argentina’s capital on the Rio de la Plata, where tango began in the 1880s, the acoustician Leo Beranek ranked the Teatro Colón the best room in the world for opera, the houses of Caminito are painted every colour, and fileteado sign-painting is on UNESCO’s list.

A road park across the northern Pantanal of Brazil, the largest seasonally flooded plain in the Americas, where caimans, storks and jaguars share the roadside and hyacinth macaws nest in old trees.

Around 170 people living inside an active double caldera, cooking with volcanic steam, on an island the ferry often cannot reach.

The world's largest cave keeps its own clouds and grows its own jungle — found by a farmer sheltering from a storm, then lost for eighteen years.

In one of the wettest inhabited places on Earth, the Khasi grow bridges from living fig roots — architecture that heals itself and strengthens with age.

A lake two miles up with no town and no trees — only a season: yurts and herds arrive each June, and by October it all belongs to the wind again.

Three thousand stone towers wearing trees for hats — when the mist rises past their feet, whole mountains cast off and float.

A monastery glued to a rock wall nine hundred metres above the valley, in a country that writes its forests into its constitution.

The highest reef biodiversity ever recorded, on islands that also happen to be made of battery metal.

In 1923 a team here found the first dinosaur eggs anyone recognised as such, and science blamed the wrong animal for stealing them for seventy years.

A river cuts through solid marble while the island keeps rising to meet it — and since 2024, the gorge has been carefully putting itself back together.

Women who dive to twenty metres on one breath, by rule and without tanks. Over 4,500 of them in 2013; about 2,600 by the end of 2024.

No road in, some of the largest caves on Earth, and millions of bats pouring out of one at dusk. Several of its famous records are out of date.

The famous building is one temple. Lidar flown in 2012 showed the forest around it hides a planned city of embankments, ponds and roads, and the temple was built into the grid.

The summit of Japan's national symbol is shrine land: the state took it after the Meiji Restoration, the Supreme Court ruled for the shrine in 1974, and it was handed back in 2004. The prefectural border across the top was never drawn.

A limestone tower landscape that the sea has flooded: UNESCO calls it the most extensive marine-invaded tower karst on Earth. Every island carries a notch the tide has dissolved at its foot.

Not one wall but thousands of sections, trenches and towers built over two thousand years, of whatever the ground offered. China's own survey of its Ming line counts hills and rivers as part of it.

Three tiled madrasas facing each other across Samarkand's central square. When a minaret of the oldest began to lean in 1918, the engineer of Moscow's radio tower set it straight in 1932.

The tunnels of vermilion gates on the Inari shrine's mountain are offerings, given since the Edo period for prayers made or answered. The giver's name is on the back of each.

Borobudur's first chapter, 160 carved panels on cause and effect, lies behind a later stone base. It was photographed once, in 1890–91, and covered again; one corner is open.

Visitors to Sri Lanka's Lion Rock scratched verses into its polished Mirror Wall between the 8th and 10th centuries. Hundreds survive, including one from a man who declined to write a poem.

Rounded limestone mounds rise out of the rice fields of Bohol by the hundred and turn brown in the dry season. Three official counts give three different totals.

A Jaipur landmark that is mostly a screen: five storeys of latticed windows over a bazaar street, built in 1799 so royal women could watch the city unseen.

An active volcano standing in a plain of grey volcanic sand inside an older crater in East Java. The sand sea has been a nature reserve since 1919, and the Tenggerese carry offerings to the crater every year.

A waterfall outside Luang Prabang that spills through a staircase of milky blue pools over pale stone the water laid down itself, with rescued moon bears and sun bears dozing beside the path.

A trading port that lost its trade when its river silted, and so kept its timber houses, its assembly halls and a little covered bridge with a temple on it. The river still floods the old town most autumns.

A cove on a limestone island in the Andaman Sea, reshaped for a film and then overrun, closed for three and a half years to recover and reopened with swimming banned. Its shallows are now a nursery for blacktip reef sharks.

A river winding between limestone towers that rise one by one from flat green fields, from Guilin down to Yangshuo. One bend near Xingping is on the back of China's 20-yuan note, and people stand there holding the note up to the view.

A mountain lake that an earthquake made in a single night in 1911, drowning a spruce forest where it stood. The trunks still rise from the water, pale above and green below.

A fishing port on the Aral Sea until the rivers that fed the sea were diverted for cotton. The water has gone out of sight; the town's fishing boats lie rusting on the sand, and the town is still lived in.

The ruined capital of the Vijayanagara Empire, among granite boulders on the Tungabhadra. Its stone chariot is on India's fifty-rupee note, and its oldest temple never stopped holding worship.

The capital of the Mongol Empire stood here, with a silver tree that poured drinks for the khan's guests. The city was razed, its stones built into a monastery, and a granite turtle still sits in the grass at its edge.

A volcanic island off south-east Taiwan, home of the Tao, who build their fishing boats by hand from planks and arrange their year around the flying fish. Visitors are asked to leave the boats, and the drying fish, alone.

Subtropical islands about 1,000 km south of Tokyo with no airport, reached by a ferry of about 24 hours that sails roughly once a week. UNESCO listed them for snails and plants found nowhere else.

A wide, tiered waterfall on the Quay Son River in Vietnam’s far north, falling into a green pool below karst hills. China shares it and calls it Detian; visitors from Vietnam see it from the southern bank.

The northernmost province of the Philippines: small, steep islands in the Luzon Strait where the Ivatan build in stone and lime under thick grass roofs, against the wind, rather than in wood and bamboo.

A bay of sheer limestone islands at the northern tip of Palawan, with lagoons reached by kayak, and a town renamed in 1954 after the edible swiftlet nests in its cliffs: el nido is Spanish for ‘the nest’.

Mountainsides in northern Luzon cut into stepped rice fields by the Ifugao: in 1995 the first site on UNESCO’s World Heritage List as a cultural landscape, and, by the archaeologists’ dating, built in the seventeenth century rather than two thousand years ago.

A group of forested islands off southern Vietnam, mostly national park, where green turtles nest in greater numbers than anywhere else in the country. Its French colonial prison, used from 1861 to 1975, is now a national memorial.

A steaming gorge in the mountains of Nagano where a troop of wild macaques, fed by the park since 1964 to keep them off the apple orchards, sits up to its necks in a hot-spring pool through the snowy winter.

A village of steep thatched farmhouses in a snowy valley of central Japan, built three and four storeys high under the roof for raising silkworms, where neighbours still gather to re-thatch them and the whole village rehearses each autumn for fire.

A wide, marshy valley high in central Bhutan where most of the country’s black-necked cranes spend the winter, below a monastery they are said to circle on arrival, and where electricity reaches the houses underground so that no wires cross the birds’ flight.

A valley of white chalk towers and two great pale fangs on the edge of a desert plateau in western Kazakhstan, carved from the floor of a vanished sea and still scattered with its shells, a long 4x4 drive from the Caspian coast.

A cape of sandstone on Taiwan’s north coast where waves and wind have carved hundreds of mushroom rocks, among them the Queen’s Head, a profile in stone whose neck has been measured, guarded and worried over as it wears thinner every year.

A town on stilts over the Brunei River, of wooden houses, schools, mosques and fire stations joined by plank walkways and water taxis, lived in for centuries and facing Brunei’s capital across the water.

Japan’s first permanent capital, where a bronze Buddha 16 metres high sits in a hall that was the world’s largest wooden building until 1998, three thousand stone lanterns line the way to a forest shrine, and deer bow for crackers.

The snowy dairy country on the edge of Japan’s largest marsh where red-crowned cranes, once thought extinct in Japan, gather each winter to be fed and to dance, and roost at dawn in a steaming river.

Unlogged lowland rainforest in eastern Sabah, set aside by the timber concession around it, where pittas and hornbills live, scientists have worked since the 1980s, and the tallest tropical tree yet measured stands.

A UNESCO Biosphere Reserve atoll whose southern pass holds hundreds of grey reef sharks stacked in the current — visible even to snorkellers.

Vertical volcanic islands with no reef to soften the Pacific, monumental stone tiki, and two famous graves above Atuona.

A deep-sea canyon starts almost at the beach, so sperm whales feed year-round within sight of a town whose name means 'eat crayfish'.

An island capped at 400 guests at a time, with the world's southernmost coral reef and Ball's Pyramid, a 560-metre sea stack, next door.

The opal capital of the world solved the desert sun by moving underground — homes, churches, hotels, and a golf course with no grass at all.

Microbes have built rock here since before anything could eat them. They survive because the water is twice as salty as the sea.

Beehive domes striped orange and black, standing only because a living skin of bacteria binds sandstone that would otherwise fall apart.

Three sacred volcanoes given to the Crown in 1887 to stop them being sold — and the first cultural landscape ever inscribed on the World Heritage List.

No stoats, so the kiwi feed in daylight — which is how kiwi used to be everywhere. Also the southernmost Dark Sky Sanctuary on Earth.

A salt pan most of the time. When floodwater finally arrives from Queensland, pelicans appear in their tens of thousands, and nobody knows how they know.

Around a hundred artificial islets walled with basalt columns stacked like logs, on a reef off Pohnpei. The coral inside its first tomb dates it to about 1180.

The world's largest reef system has died five times in 30,000 years, stranded as the sea fell and drowned as it rose, and survived each time by moving. The reef you swim over is less than 10,000 years old.

So much rain falls here that fresh water floats on the sea like a lid, and deep-sea black coral grows within a diver's reach. The boats pass right over it.

Named for tourists, never twelve, and now seven: the stacks were carved in the last few thousand years, and the only extra Apostles anyone has found stand drowned offshore.

Measured at 3,764 metres for a century, New Zealand's highest mountain lost ten metres in a night in 1991 and thirty more since. To Ngai Tahu it is an ancestor, not a summit.

Not mountains but a sandstone plateau cut into gorges, blue because of its eucalypts and World Heritage-listed for them. One canyon hid a tree known only from fossils until 1994.

Visitors still land on an airstrip US forces built on a reef islet in 1943 for a wartime fuel base, then cross the lagoon by boat. For years it was French Polynesia's only international airport.

After its summit collapsed in 2018, Kīlauea's crater filled with groundwater. The lake grew for seventeen months, until lava broke in one December night in 2020 and boiled it off in about ninety minutes.

On Raiatea, a marae at the centre of an old alliance of islands. UNESCO records that stones were carried from it to found marae of the same name elsewhere.

The jagged island facing Tahiti, whose native tree snails were lost in the wild, bred in zoos and carried home, each with a dot of paint. The ones found without a dot were born there.

Thousands of limestone pillars in yellow sand north of Perth, called a desert where it rains most winters. In 2024 iron nodules on the pillars were used to date them.

Hundreds of stone ancestors that Rapa Nui stories say walked to their places. Two archaeologists roped a replica and walked it, and the argument over how is not quite over. You visit with a local guide.

Two narrow gaps in a range of hills on the Kimberley coast, where tides of up to about ten metres heap the sea up on one side and pour it through. To the Dambimangari it is Garaan-ngaddim, a powerful, sacred place.

Hundreds of green limestone islands in a turquoise lagoon, many worn away at the waterline into mushrooms, with a lake of golden jellyfish among them. Every visitor signs a promise to Palau's children before they are let in.

The capital of Tuvalu, on a ring of coral islets so narrow that the airport runway is also the town's playing field. A few flights a week come in from Fiji, by daylight only; in between, the runway belongs to football, volleyball and bicycles.

A chasm in the raised coral on Niue's east coast, reached through rainforest, a field of jagged coral and a long ladder, with a floor of sand and coconut palms. Niue was the first whole country certified as a dark sky place.

A mountainous island off the east coast of Tasmania, all of it national park, where wombats graze between the brick buildings of a World Heritage convict station and sandstone cliffs are stained in swirls of orange.

A windswept archipelago about 800 km east of New Zealand’s South Island that keeps its own clock, 45 minutes ahead. It is home to the Moriori, its first people, and to the black robin, once down to five birds.

A two-mile beach and a clear coral reef under steep green ridges in American Samoa’s Manu’a Islands: the smallest unit of the only US national park south of the equator, on land the Park Service leases from villages.

An Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, nearer Java than Perth, two-thirds of it national park. At the start of each wet season, red land crabs leave the forest in their millions to spawn in the sea, and roads close to let them cross.

Samoa’s largest island, a shield volcano reached by ferry from Upolu. From 1905 to 1911 lava from Mount Matavanu ran through villages on the north coast; at Sale’aula a church still stands with the lava inside it.

Tonga’s high island, just across from Tongatapu: pushed up from the sea floor rather than built by a volcano, with a rainforest national park on its eastern cliffs and humpback whales offshore in the winter months.

Fiji’s third-largest island, a long rainforested volcano crossed by the 180th meridian. Its mountains hold a crater lake and the tagimoucia, the national flower, which grows wild nowhere else; its reefs and waterfalls draw divers and walkers.

A big, hilly island at the edge of the Hauraki Gulf, 100 km from Auckland, with no mains power: its people live on sun and wind. Most of it is conservation land, and its night sky earned it the world’s first island dark-sky sanctuary.

A huge raised coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific, its lagoon fading into salt flats, with seabird colonies once counted in the millions and bonefish on the flats. It keeps the world’s farthest-forward clock.

A small Australian island in the South Pacific where convicts built a stone town beside a reef lagoon, and where descendants of the Bounty mutineers, resettled from Pitcairn in 1856, still speak a creole of their own under the island’s tall pines.

A limestone cave in New Zealand’s North Island where a guide pulls a boat in silence along an underground stream beneath a ceiling of glowworms, on land returned in 1989 to the descendants of the man who first led visitors through it.

A dry lake in the outback of New South Wales whose crescent of wind-carved dunes, the Walls of China, held burials made more than 40,000 years ago, among the oldest ritual burials known, on the country of the Paakantyi, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa peoples.

The summit of Maui’s great volcano, 10,023 feet up, where a dollar reservation buys a place at sunrise above the clouds, a summit valley of cinder cones turns out not to be a crater, and a silver plant grows that is found nowhere else.

The brown crater at the eastern end of Waikīkī, made in a single eruption about 300,000 years ago, with a 1908 Army trail of switchbacks, stairs and a lit tunnel to a four-storey lookout hidden in its summit.

A resort town on New Zealand’s longest lake, whose water quietly rises and falls every 27 minutes, near the old gold-rush bridge where commercial bungy jumping began, and served by a coal-fired lake steamer launched in 1912.

A peninsula of pink granite peaks on Tasmania’s east coast, in a national park founded in 1916, where a path climbs over a saddle to a lookout above Wineglass Bay, a curve of white sand once worked by shore whalers and first named Thouin Bay by a French expedition.

An ‘almost atoll’ in the Cook Islands: a hilly main island and 15 small islets round a pale lagoon of 50 to 74 square kilometres, where TEAL’s flying boats on the Coral Route set down in the 1950s and passengers went ashore for breakfast and a swim.

Tropical rainforest in Far North Queensland that runs from the mountain tops to the sea, home of the southern cassowary, bowerbirds and riflebirds, and jointly managed with its Traditional Owners, the Eastern Kuku Yalanji.

A forest that died six centuries ago and never fell — black trees on white clay beneath the rusted-red dunes of the Namib.

A flood sourced a thousand kilometres away arrives exactly when Botswana's dry season leaves nothing else wet.

Around eight hundred people live inside a collapsed volcano with no road — everything they own arrived on a back or under a helicopter.

A salt flat on the floor of a lake that outlived its rivers, and the zebra still cross it twice a year.

A pan so barren that water becomes the scarce thing, so the animals queue for it rather than scatter across the park.

A village farming inside an active crater, rebuilt on the lava that buried it in 2014 though the state said not to.

The green island of a dry archipelago: steep volcanic mountains off West Africa, cut by deep valleys terraced for sugar cane and grogue. It has had no airport since the 1990s, so everyone arrives by ferry from Mindelo.

A palm forest holding the largest seed on Earth, which had a mythology for centuries before anyone found the tree.

Mangrove islands that are partly made of shells: 218 mounds of discarded cockles and oysters, piled up over two thousand years. Some of them are cemeteries.

A tiny equatorial island where a 1919 eclipse photographed through cloud helped make Einstein famous — on a cocoa estate with a much harder history.

Classed as the largest sheet of falling water on Earth, and a waterfall that keeps walking upriver: the zigzag canyon below it is where it used to be.

The giant baobabs along the road north of Morondava did not grow as an avenue. They are what remains of a forest cleared for farming, and the land around them is poor ground for young trees.

South Africa's first national park turned 100 in 2026. It is named for President Paul Kruger, and historians have argued since 1994 about how much he had to do with it.

The only mountain with a constellation named after it, drawn in the 1750s by a French astronomer working below it. Its flat top was once the floor of a valley.

In Zambia's Luangwa Valley, visitors were first taken out on foot in the 1950s. The river loops into lagoons that have held some of the densest hippo numbers recorded.

The great square of Marrakesh is protected for what happens on it, not what stands round it. A writer's campaign to save it helped create UNESCO's list of oral heritage.

A fortified hillside village of rammed earth and mud brick in southern Morocco. Its families have mostly moved across the river, and what keeps its walls standing is restoration, helped along by the film crews that keep returning.

In the dry season elephants of Africa's largest population come down to the Chobe River by the family. In the river is a grassy island Botswana and Namibia took to the World Court.

Senegal's pink lake gets its colour from an alga that blushes under salt and sun. After the 2022 floods it went green; by 2025 it was pink again.

A diamond town in the Namib, built after a railwayman picked up a stone in 1908. It had a ballroom, an X-ray station and free ice delivered daily; since 1956 the sand has been moving in.

A grassland in western Zambia that a Lozi king protected in the 1880s. More than 47,000 wildebeest gather on it with the first rains, and about 12,000 people still live inside the park.

A stretch of Gabon's Atlantic coast where elephants, buffalo and hippos walk out of the forest and the lagoons onto the beach. A National Geographic photographer made its hippos in the surf famous.

The largest precolonial stone city in southern Africa, built without mortar by ancestors of the Shona. A white government once pressed archaeologists to deny who built it; in 1980 an independent country took its name.

A whole village standing on stilts in a lake in western Ghana, reached by an hour's dugout ride through swamp forest. School, church and daily life all happen over the water, and on Thursdays the lake rests.

A needle of grey volcanic rock standing about 370 m straight up out of the rainforest of São Tomé: the hardened core of a volcano that has worn away. Nobody stood on top of it until 1991.

Four hills of pale quartzite in the flat Kalahari bush of north-west Botswana, holding over 4,500 rock paintings and revered by the Hambukushu and San as a home of ancestral spirits.

Five islands of sand off the coast of Mozambique, a national park since 1971, with giant white dunes, seagrass meadows and the last viable population of dugongs in the western Indian Ocean.

A limestone plateau in western Madagascar worn into forests of grey blades and needles, so sharp that its Malagasy name warns against walking on it barefoot. It is visited on guided circuits from the village of Bekopaka.

A mountain desert on South Africa’s Orange River border with Namibia, watered mostly by sea fog, owned by the Nama and run with them. Its slopes hold the halfmens, a spiny single-stemmed succulent, and its tracks need a four-wheel drive.

The northernmost granite island of the Seychelles, a nature reserve where more than a million seabirds breed. Visitors land on its one beach from a small boat, in season, and walk with a ranger; only the reserve staff live there.

A handful of steep volcanic islets 4 km off Dakar, uninhabited and protected since 1976 as a national park of about 45 hectares. Red-billed tropicbirds breed on the cliffs of the largest, Sarpan, and for Dakar’s Lebu fishing families the islands are the home of the city’s protective spirit.

A village on an island of piled-up shells at the southern end of Senegal’s Petite Côte, reached on foot over a long wooden bridge, where nine in ten people are Christian in a mostly Muslim country and the two faiths bury their dead side by side.

A granite island of about ten square kilometres in the Seychelles, with no airport and few cars, where people get about by bicycle and ox-cart, giant boulders frame a beach Wikipedia says is often considered the world’s most photographed, and a forest reserve keeps one of the rarest flycatchers on Earth.

Two days of open water where the largest current on Earth meets no land at all — and the gap whose opening let Antarctica freeze.

King penguin colonies that fill whole beaches, a rusting whaling station, and the grave where every passing ship still stops to raise a glass.

The world's most southerly post office, on an island the size of a football pitch, run by a core team of four among a gentoo colony of 445 breeding pairs.

The largest fjord system on Earth, with one town of about 330 people at its mouth — placed there in 1925 to strengthen a claim.

The best harbour in the South Shetlands is the flooded crater of an active volcano. Ships sail in through a gap in the cliffs, and the beach steams.

The pole stays put; the ice on top of it moves about ten metres a year. So every New Year's Day the station's people mark the pole again, with a marker made by hand over the winter.

The glacier behind Ilulissat's icebergs slowed and thickened from 2016 as the sea cooled, then sped up again from 2018 before the warm water came back. Its biggest icebergs still queue on a ridge at the fjord's mouth.

The largest ice shelf on Earth, a floating slab about the size of France, ends in a cliff more than 600 km long. Ships sail south until they meet it, and the record for the farthest south keeps moving.

Antarctica's largest ice-free region, where a glacier leaks brine sealed underneath it for perhaps two million years. It comes out clear and turns red in the air.

An Inuvialuit hamlet on the Arctic Ocean at the end of a gravel highway across the tundra, opened in 2017. Nearby stand pingos, smooth green hills with a core of solid ice, among them Canada's tallest.

A treeless island off north Iceland, the only part of the country the Arctic Circle crosses. A grey concrete sphere marks the line, and it is moved to follow the circle as it drifts north.

A Greenlandic town of coloured houses on a rocky island, under a sheer mountain of about 1,170 m, named for its heart shape. No plane can land on the island, so the last leg is by helicopter.

A spit of stones under a glacier on Elephant Island, where twenty-two of Shackleton's men lived under two upturned boats for four and a half months until a Chilean Navy tug came for them in August 1916.

An Inuit hamlet of about 1,500 people on a gravel shore in Nunavut, facing the glaciers of Bylot Island across Eclipse Sound. Narwhals spend the summer in the sound, and the way in is by air through Iqaluit.

The best-preserved Norse ruin in Greenland, by UNESCO’s account: a roofless granite church on a fjord near Qaqortoq, where a wedding in September 1408 is the last written record of the Greenland Norse.

Bare golden dunes up to a hundred feet high, north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, with spruce and tundra at their edge and caribou crossing them. No road goes in: a small plane lands on the sand.

A strait 600 metres wide at its narrowest between ice-hung cliffs on the Antarctic Peninsula, usually as calm as a lake, sometimes blocked by icebergs, and threaded slowly by expedition ships heading south.

An Arctic island off the Yukon coast where American whalers wintered in the 1890s. Its wooden buildings still stand at Pauline Cove, but the island has no bedrock, and its ice-rich ground is slumping into the Beaufort Sea.