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.

← The whole Field Guide

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