Sacred & ancient places

Places in this collection

• 
  Entry № 001

  Skara Brae

  A Neolithic village of eight stone houses, buried in sand for four thousand years and uncovered in a single night by the storm of 1850.

• 
  Entry № 005

  Chiloé

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

• 
  Entry № 013

  Cueva de las Manos

  Hundreds of hands stencilled on a canyon wall in blown pigment. More than nine in ten are left hands, and one has six fingers.

• 
  Entry № 041

  Paro Taktsang

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

• 
  Entry № 042

  Cappadocia & Derinkuyu

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

• 
  Entry № 045

  Meteora

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

• 
  Entry № 056

  SG̱ang Gwaay

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

• 
  Entry № 058

  The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks

  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.

• 
  Entry № 063

  Tongariro

  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.

• 
  Entry № 074

  Nan Madol

  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.

• 
  Entry № 077

  Machu Picchu

  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.

• 
  Entry № 079

  The Nazca Lines

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

• 
  Entry № 085

  Malta

  Paired grooves cut into the bare limestone, crossing like a rail yard at 'Clapham Junction' and running into the sea at Birżebbuġa. Nobody agrees who made them or when.

• 
  Entry № 096

  Angkor Wat

  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.

• 
  Entry № 097

  Mount Fuji

  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.

• 
  Entry № 101

  Vatican City

  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.

• 
  Entry № 102

  Santiago de Compostela

  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.

• 
  Entry № 103

  Ephesus

  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.

• 
  Entry № 105

  Patmos

  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.

• 
  Entry № 112

  Registan

  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.

• 
  Entry № 114

  Fushimi Inari Taisha

  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.

• 
  Entry № 117

  Borobudur

  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.

• 
  Entry № 119

  Sigiriya

  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.

• 
  Entry № 122

  Taputapuātea

  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.

• 
  Entry № 142

  Mont-Saint-Michel

  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.

• 
  Entry № 143

  Stonehenge

  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.

• 
  Entry № 149

  Our Lady of the Rocks

  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.

• 
  Entry № 150

  Easter Island

  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.

• 
  Entry № 153

  Hampi

  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.

• 
  Entry № 161

  Great Zimbabwe

  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.

• 
  Entry № 164

  Kharkhorin

  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.

• 
  Entry № 170

  The Missions of Trinidad and Jesús

  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.

• 
  Entry № 174

  Tsodilo

  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.

• 
  Entry № 183

  L’Anse aux Meadows

  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.

• 
  Entry № 190

  Hvalsey Church

  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.

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Notes on sources. This Collection groups existing Field Guide entries; each entry carries its own sources. Written and fact-checked by SockMonkey.com. Last reviewed 29 September 2026.