Did you know: 496 facts about places and countries

The armoury in Graz holds around thirty-two thousand pieces of seventeenth-century weapons and armour on four floors, arranged as they were left. It is the largest surviving historic arsenal in the world.

Locals call the Kunsthaus, the blue building on the Mur, the friendly alien. Its facade is also a screen: nine hundred and thirty fluorescent rings behind acrylic show images visible from the far bank.

The salt mine at Hallstatt has worked for seven thousand years and is the oldest still in operation anywhere. An entire Iron Age culture, the Hallstatt culture, is named after the finds from it.

Over six hundred painted skulls with names and dates stand in the charnel house by the church. There was no land for a cemetery, so after ten years the bones were lifted, washed, dried in the sun and returned to the chapel.

The Golden Roof of 1500 is covered with 2,657 gilded copper tiles. Maximilian I had it built so he could watch tournaments in the square from the balcony beneath it.

From the main square a cable car reaches two thousand metres in about twenty minutes, with no bus in between. Innsbruck is the only city to have hosted both the Winter Olympics and the Winter Paralympics twice.

The Streif at Kitzbuhel is the hardest downhill in the World Cup. The Mausefalle starts on an 85 per cent gradient with a jump of some eighty metres, and the fastest racers reach 140 kilometres an hour.

Before skiing Kitzbuhel lived off copper and silver mines worked since the Bronze Age. The first pair of skis arrived in 1892 with Franz Reisch, copying a Norwegian design, and he came down from the Kitzbuheler Horn on them.

The dragon on the main square was carved around 1590, and its head follows a skull found in a nearby quarry. The skull was in fact that of an ice age woolly rhinoceros, one of the first reconstructions from a fossil in history.

Lake Worthersee is one of the warmest Alpine lakes, with summer water above 26 degrees. It warms because it is shallow at the southern end and sheltered from cold winds by the mountains.

Ars Electronica in Linz has run since 1979 and is one of the oldest festivals and museums of digital art in the world. It is why the city is a UNESCO City of Media Arts.

The Linzer torte is considered the oldest cake with a written recipe in the world; the earliest known recipe dates from 1653 and is kept in Vienna. It is recognised by the lattice of pastry over redcurrant jam.

Salzburg means salt fortress. The city grew rich on the salt mines around it, and the archbishops built the baroque centre with that money. By weight, salt was worth more than silver for centuries.

The Sound of Music is one of the most watched films ever in America and almost unknown in Austria. It was not shown on Austrian television until 2020, so the location tours are taken almost entirely by foreigners.

The Venus of Willendorf, a limestone figurine some thirty thousand years old, was found at Willendorf in the Wachau in 1908. It is now in the Natural History Museum in Vienna and is one of the best known prehistoric finds anywhere.

Wachau apricots have protected origin status and are picked over just three weeks in July. They go into brandy, dumplings and jam, and the blossom in April draws as many people as the harvest.

Vienna's water comes from mountains some eighty kilometres away through an aqueduct opened in 1873, and travels the whole way by gravity without a single pump. That is why tap water is served in Viennese restaurants as spring water.

In 2011 the Viennese coffee house entered Austria's national inventory of intangible heritage, kept by its UNESCO commission, described as a place where time and space are consumed but only the coffee is paid for. A glass of water still comes with every coffee, and is refilled unasked.

The Kitzsteinhorn above Zell am See has a glacier where people ski in summer too. From the viewing platform at three thousand metres you can see the Grossglockner, Austria's highest peak, on a clear day.

The Sigmund Thun gorge near Kaprun is up to a hundred metres deep and in places two metres wide. A wooden walkway bolted into the rock runs through it, above water you hear more than you see.

In 1377 the Republic of Ragusa ordered ships and travellers to be held outside the city because of plague, one of the first quarantines anywhere. It abolished slavery in 1416, more than four centuries before most of Europe.

Water reaches the city through a twelve-kilometre aqueduct built in 1438, and it still works. Onofrio's fountain at the entrance to the Stradun is its end point.

The Hvar theatre of 1612 is one of the oldest communal town theatres in Europe, open to all classes and not only to the nobility. It sits on the upper floor of the Arsenal, above the hall where galleys were repaired.

The Stari Grad Plain is land the Greeks divided into regular plots in the fourth century BC. Those same drystone boundaries are still visible from the air, and the fields are still worked along them.

The Moreska is a sword dance performed on Korcula since the sixteenth century, with real swords and two kings fighting over a girl. It came from Spain, but survived only here.

Korcula claims to be Marco Polo's birthplace and shows the house where he was supposedly born. There is no proof, but Polo was indeed captured at the naval battle off Korcula in 1298, and dictated his book in prison.

The barriers between the lakes are not rock but travertine, stone that moss and algae build by depositing lime from the water. They grow about a centimetre a year, so the lakes are still forming. In a hundred years the layout will differ.

The German Winnetou westerns were filmed here in the nineteen sixties, with Plitvice and Velebit standing in for the Wild West. The films were watched so widely that Germans and Austrians came for decades to see America.

The Pula arena is the only Roman amphitheatre with all four side towers preserved. In 1583 the Venetians seriously planned to dismantle it and move it to Venice, but one senator argued the proposal down.

James Joyce lived in Pula in 1904 and 1905, teaching English to Austro-Hungarian officers. He hated the town, called it a naval Siberia, and left for Trieste after half a year.

Rovinj is officially bilingual: Croatian and Italian are equal, signs are in both, and the Italian community has its own schools. The Istro-Venetian dialect is still heard in the street.

By tradition the sarcophagus of Saint Euphemia floated across the sea to Rovinj in the year 800, after disappearing from Constantinople. The story says two calves dragged the stone tomb up the hill after every other attempt failed.

Split is not a city with a palace but a palace that became a city. Refugees moved into Diocletian's palace after Salona fell, and it has been lived in without a break for seventeen centuries. Around three thousand people live inside the walls today.

The sphinxes in the palace are genuine Egyptian ones, brought from Egypt in the fourth century. Of the dozen or so that were here, three survive, and one still sits on the Peristyle.

The Sea Organ is a set of steps with thirty-five pipes of different lengths under the stone. Waves push air through them and they play; the sea and the wind write the music. It never repeats.

Zadar is the only Croatian city bombed by both the Allies and the Axis in the Second World War. Around eighty per cent of it was destroyed, so much of the old core was rebuilt after the war.

The Museum of Broken Relationships grew out of objects people sent in after breakups, each with a short story. It began as a travelling exhibition by two former partners and won the European award for the most innovative museum in 2011.

The funicular linking the lower and upper town is sixty-six metres long and the ride takes half a minute. It has run since 1890 and is one of the shortest passenger funiculars in the world.

The cathedral of St James is built entirely from stone slabs fitted without mortar, like a puzzle. Around seventy heads of ordinary fifteenth-century citizens run along the outer frieze, not saints but people the carver saw in the street.

In 1895 Sibenik got alternating-current street lighting from a hydroelectric plant on the Krka. It was among the first cities in the world with such a system, only days after Niagara.

The thermal water at Bath fell as rain thousands of years ago, sank two kilometres down and was heated by the earth before returning to the surface. Over a million litres a day come out of the spring at 46 degrees.

Jane Austen lived in Bath for five years and set two novels there, though she disliked the place. She wrote of the relief of leaving it, and Bath now gives her a museum and an annual festival.

The Royal Pavilion is an Indian palace outside and Chinese inside, built for the Prince Regent in the early nineteenth century. The kitchen has columns shaped like palm trees with cast copper leaves at the top.

A network of nineteenth-century sewer tunnels runs under Brighton and can be walked on guided tours in summer. The town was a fishing village until a doctor from nearby Lewes published in 1750 that sea bathing was healthy.

Watson and Crick announced in the Eagle pub in Cambridge in 1953 that they had found the structure of DNA. The plaque is still on the wall and the pub carries on as a pub.

The Mathematical Bridge over the Cam looks as if it stands without a single bolt, in a legend the students themselves repeat. It has always had fasteners; the story of Newton assembling it without nails is invented, since it was built twenty-two years after he died.

The Cavern is still a club on the same spot where the Beatles played almost three hundred times. The original cellar was filled in in 1973, and the club was rebuilt in 1984 from bricks of that same cellar, a few metres away.

Almost half the world's slave trade passed through Liverpool's port in the eighteenth century. The city council issued a formal apology in 1999, and the International Slavery Museum opened in 2007.

The world's first underground railway opened in London in 1863, pulled by steam locomotives. The tunnels filled with smoke, so the trains carried tanks to condense their own steam, and passengers were advised to smoke as a remedy for the fumes.

When the Thames stank so badly in 1858 that Parliament hung lime-soaked curtains in its windows, Bazalgette was told to build a sewer system. He worked out the pipe size he needed and then doubled the diameter, just in case. That is why the system still works.

In the middle of London sits the City, a 2.9 square kilometre authority with its own police force and a Lord Mayor unconnected to the Mayor of London. About eight thousand people live in it and over half a million work there.

Teaching has gone on at Oxford since 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world. Cambridge began in 1209 when a group of Oxford scholars fled the town after a clash with locals.

The Oxford English Dictionary took seventy years to make, and one of its most prolific contributors was William Chester Minor, who sent in quotations from the asylum where he was held for murder.

The smaller bluestones came from Wales, two hundred and fifty kilometres away, though each weighs up to four tonnes. How they were moved four and a half thousand years ago is still argued over.

In 1915 Stonehenge was bought at auction by one man for 6,600 pounds, by his own account because his wife liked it. Three years later he gave it to the nation.

Cotswold houses are yellow because they are built from soft limestone out of the same band that runs through the whole area. The stone cuts easily when quarried and hardens in the air. That is why every village is the same colour.

The wealth of the Cotswolds came from wool in the Middle Ages, when English wool was the most sought after in Europe. The oversized churches in small villages are called wool churches, built by merchants with that money.

Beatrix Potter used the money from her Peter Rabbit books to buy fifteen farms in the Lake District to keep them from being built on. She left them to the National Trust, some four thousand acres, and so shaped how the area looks today.

Wastwater is the deepest lake in England, seventy-nine metres, with its bed below sea level. Scafell Pike above it is England's highest peak, at only 978 metres.

York was founded by the Romans in 71 as Eboracum, the emperor Septimius Severus died here, and Constantine the Great was proclaimed emperor in the city in 306. The Vikings passed through the same town and called it Jorvik.

York Minster holds the largest expanse of medieval stained glass in Britain. The east window is the size of a tennis court, and in both world wars it was taken apart into thousands of pieces and stored safely.

Phylloxera, an aphid brought from America, destroyed the vineyards around Bordeaux in the late nineteenth century. They were saved by grafting French vines onto American rootstock resistant to it. Almost all European wine now grows on American roots.

The water mirror in front of the stock exchange is the largest of its kind in the world: two centimetres of water on granite that turns to mist every twenty minutes or so. It was built in 2006 on what had been a car park.

Cinema was invented in Lyon, not Paris. In 1895 the Lumiere brothers filmed Workers Leaving the Factory at their father's works, the first film ever shot; the building still stands and holds a museum.

Old Lyon is threaded with traboules, covered passages through the courtyards of buildings, used by silk workers to carry cloth out of the rain. There are over four hundred, and around forty are open to walk through.

The difference between high and low tide here reaches fourteen metres, among the greatest in Europe. The sea withdraws for kilometres and returns at a speed Victor Hugo compared to a galloping horse.

During the French Revolution the abbey was turned into a prison and stayed one for almost a century. Prisoners turned a huge wooden wheel that hauled supplies up the slope. The wheel is still there.

Nice only became French in 1860, when the Kingdom of Sardinia handed it over along with Savoy in payment for French help in the war against Austria. Until then it was Italian, which still shows in the food and the street names.

The Promenade des Anglais is named after the English who paid for it. Wealthy British winter visitors raised money in 1820 to build a path along the sea, because they found walking on the shingle uncomfortable.

Seventy-two names of French scientists and engineers are carved around the Eiffel Tower, just below the first platform. Eiffel had them cut in 1889; not one is a woman, though Sophie Germain worked on exactly the metal elasticity that holds the tower up.

The first paying public screening was held on 28 December 1895 in the basement of a cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines, where the Lumiere brothers charged for admission. Thirty-three people came.

A bronze plaque with an eight-pointed star is set into the pavement in front of Notre-Dame. It is the kilometre zero of France: every distance to Paris on every road sign in the country is measured from that spot.

The purple fields of Provence are mostly not lavender but lavandin, a hybrid that sets no seed. It is propagated only from cuttings. Every plant in a field is genetically identical: the whole field is one plant multiplied a thousand times.

The Pont du Gard is a Roman aqueduct forty-nine metres high, built without mortar. Over fifty kilometres the channel drops just twelve metres, a gradient of one centimetre every forty metres, surveyed in the first century.

Between 1870 and 1945 Strasbourg changed country four times, from France to Germany and back. That is why it reads as two cities: the French core and the German imperial quarter built after 1871.

The astronomical clock in the cathedral, from 1843, shows the positions of the planets, the phases of the moon and the movable church feasts, and corrects itself for leap years. At noon the apostles process across it.

Monet painted the chalk arches at Etretat more than fifty times, in every weather and at every hour. He worked on several canvases at once and swapped them as the light changed.

The cliffs are chalk formed from the skeletons of sea organisms eighty million years ago. The sea takes about twenty centimetres a year, so the coastline visibly changes within a single lifetime.

The Berlin Wall was 155 kilometres long, but only 43 of those split the two halves of the city. The rest ringed West Berlin on every side. The city was an island inside East Germany, not cut in half as the map suggests.

While the city was divided, two West Berlin underground lines ran beneath East Berlin without stopping. Those stations were sealed and guarded, dimly lit, and passengers watched them slide past the window. They were called ghost stations.

The Victory Column has not always stood in the middle of the Tiergarten. The Nazis moved it a kilometre and a half from its place in front of the Reichstag in 1938 and added another drum along the way, so it is taller today than when it was built.

Cologne cathedral took 632 years to build, with a three-century pause: begun in 1248, halted in 1473 and finished in 1880. When it was done it was the tallest building in the world.

Kolsch is served only in two-decilitre glasses, and the waiter brings a new one as soon as the old is empty until you put your beer mat on top. Beer may be called Kolsch only if it is brewed in Cologne.

After the bombing of 1945 the Frauenkirche lay as a heap of stone for forty-five years, kept as a memorial. It was rebuilt only in 2005, with every block numbered and returned to its place. The dark stones on the facade are the original ones.

The Fürstenzug, the procession of princes, is a 102-metre wall covered with around twenty-three thousand Meissen tiles. It survived the bombing almost intact, because the porcelain withstood the heat.

German emperors were elected in Frankfurt from 1356 and crowned there from 1562, in St Bartholomew's cathedral. The city was a free imperial city and never had a ruler. It had a council of merchants.

The Frankfurt Book Fair has been held since the fifteenth century, only a few decades after Gutenberg's invention of printing. It is still the largest book fair in the world, with over seven thousand exhibitors.

Hamburg has more bridges than Venice, Amsterdam and London put together, over two thousand. The city sits on the Elbe and a network of canals, and its port is still the third largest in Europe.

The Beatles played over two hundred and fifty shows in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962, often eight hours a day. John Lennon later said they were born in Liverpool but grew up in Hamburg.

Heidelberg University has run since 1386 and is the oldest in Germany. It had a student prison where undergraduates were locked up for brawling and noise; they covered the walls with drawings and signatures. It can still be visited.

In the castle cellar stands a barrel of two hundred and twenty thousand litres, the largest wine barrel in the world. It was made in 1751 from 130 oak trees, and has a dance floor on top.

The peaceful demonstrations in Leipzig in autumn 1989 grew out of prayers in the Nikolaikirche to three hundred thousand people. Not a shot was fired, and it was a month before the Berlin Wall fell.

Bach was cantor of St Thomas's church in Leipzig for twenty-seven years and is buried there. He wrote a cantata a week for the Sunday service. That is how over two hundred of them came about.

The beer purity law of 1516 lays down that beer may contain only barley, hops and water. It was passed in Bavaria and is the oldest food regulation still in force in some form.

People surf a river in the Englischer Garten. The wave on the Eisbach forms where the water passes over a concrete step; it is permanent and is surfed all year, winter included.

The Nuremberg trials of 1945 and 1946 were held in courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice, which went on hearing cases until 2020. It was there that a court first tried anyone for crimes against humanity.

The first German railway ran six kilometres between Nuremberg and Furth in 1835. Stephenson supplied the locomotive from England along with a driver, because nobody in Germany knew how to operate it.

There is almost no straight line in the Parthenon. The columns swell slightly towards the middle and the floor is higher at the centre than at the edges, all deliberate, so that an eye which would otherwise see sagging sees a straight building.

The National Archaeological Museum holds the Antikythera mechanism, a device of some thirty bronze gears from the first century BC. It computed the motion of the sun and moon and predicted eclipses; nothing of comparable complexity appears for another thousand years.

Digging the Athens metro turned into the largest archaeological excavation in the city's history. That is why Syntagma station has a glass wall showing layers of earth with graves and water pipes, left where they were found.

The palace at Knossos has over a thousand rooms linked by corridors in no obvious order, and it is most likely the source of the Greek myth of the labyrinth. The Cretan script Linear A has still not been deciphered.

The Samaria gorge is sixteen kilometres long and three metres wide at its narrowest, with three-hundred-metre walls on either side. You walk it on foot, one way, in five to seven hours.

The monasteries stand on conglomerate pillars up to four hundred metres high, the remains of the floor of a former sea. Until the twentieth century the only way up was a net that the monks hauled with a winch.

The finale of the 1981 Bond film For Your Eyes Only was shot at Meteora, at the Agia Triada monastery. The monks opposed the filming and hung sheets from the roof to spoil the shots.

Monemvasia is a town on a rock cut off from the mainland and joined to it by a single causeway. The name means single entrance, and the town is invisible from the road because it is built on the seaward side.

Malvasia wine takes its name from Monemvasia, from where it was shipped across medieval Europe. The name warped into malvasia and malmsey in Italian and English, and the wine itself only returned to the town a few decades ago.

The Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders, stood for about fifty years before an earthquake toppled it in 226 BC. The pieces lay on the ground for eight centuries, because an oracle forbade raising it again.

The old town of Rhodes is the largest inhabited medieval town in Europe. The Knights of St John raised the walls in the fifteenth century, and several thousand people still live inside them.

The island is what is left of a volcano that exploded around 1600 BC and took the middle of the island with it. The bay that remains is a caldera up to four hundred metres deep, and the eruption is linked to the fall of Minoan Crete.

Akrotiri is a Bronze Age town buried by the ash of that eruption, with three-storey houses, drains and coloured frescoes. Unlike Pompeii, not a single body has been found. The inhabitants left before the volcano blew.

The White Tower was a prison and place of execution for centuries, and was called the Bloody Tower. It was whitewashed in 1890 by a convict who was given his freedom for the job. The name changed with it.

Until the twentieth century Thessaloniki was a city where Jews were the largest community, descendants of those expelled from Spain in 1492. They spoke Ladino, and the port did not work on Saturdays because the dockers were Jewish.

By the ratio of depth to width the Vikos gorge is among the deepest in the world: some nine hundred metres deep and only a few hundred wide at its narrowest. It entered the Guinness book on exactly that ratio.

Zagori has some sixty stone villages linked by mule paths and arched stone bridges. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the bridges were paid for by village merchants who made money across Europe and sent it home.

The University of Bologna has run without a break since 1088 and is the oldest in the world. Students originally paid the professors themselves and could dismiss them, so the university began as a guild of students, not of teachers.

Bologna has almost forty kilometres of covered pavement. The porticoes appeared in the Middle Ages when houses pushed their upper floors out over the street to make room for students, and they have been UNESCO listed since 2021.

Stendhal syndrome is named after the writer who described, in Florence in 1817, the dizziness and racing pulse brought on by too much art at once. The Santa Maria Nuova hospital still records several cases a year, mostly at the Uffizi.

The cathedral dome was built without scaffolding, because nobody knew how to make any. Brunelleschi won the 1418 competition with a plan for two shells and bricks laid in a herringbone pattern, and never wrote the method down.

In 1952 Matera was emptied by law: the cave dwellings were declared a national disgrace and seventeen thousand people were moved to new estates. Those same houses are now UNESCO heritage and hotels.

Its stone and caves have made Matera stand in for Jerusalem for half a century. Pasolini's Gospel According to St Matthew and Gibson's Passion of the Christ were shot here, and in 2019 so was the opening of the last James Bond film.

The Last Supper was painted in tempera on a dry wall instead of as a fresco, so it began flaking while Leonardo was still alive. It survived the bombing of 1943, when that wall was all that remained of the refectory, propped up with sandbags.

You can walk on the roof of Milan Cathedral among a hundred or so spires and three thousand statues. Construction began in 1386 and was only officially finished in 1965, so it took almost six centuries.

The veil on the Veiled Christ in the Sansevero Chapel is carved from the same block of marble as the body beneath it. For two centuries people believed Prince Raimondo di Sangro had somehow turned a real veil to stone, because there was no other explanation.

Forty metres below the city runs a system of tunnels: the Greeks quarried stone here, the Romans turned it into an aqueduct, and in the Second World War tens of thousands of people sheltered in it from the bombing.

West of the city lie the Phlegraean Fields, a caldera thirteen kilometres across where the ground rises and falls by metres. In Pozzuoli it rose almost two metres in two years in the early eighties and the town had to be evacuated. The volcano underfoot is larger than Vesuvius.

There is no flat part of Positano. The one road through it is one-way and drops in switchbacks, and there is some hundred and seventy metres of height between the top and the bottom. Everything else is stairs.

In 1953 John Steinbeck wrote for Harper's Bazaar that Positano is a dream place that is not quite real while you are there and becomes real after you have gone. The piece brought the town its first American visitors.

The Pantheon's dome is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world after almost two millennia, 43.3 metres across. The Romans changed the concrete mix towards the top, from heavy stone to light pumice, so that it holds itself up.

The 35-metre hill of Monte Testaccio is not a hill but a dump: it is made of the shards of some 53 million amphorae that brought olive oil into Rome. The jars were greasy and could not be reused, so they were broken and stacked in rows.

About a million and a half euros in coins is fished out of the Trevi Fountain every year. The money goes to the Catholic charity Caritas, and the collecting is done at night with rubber-bladed poles.

The Palio is run twice a year on earth spread over the stone of the main square, and lasts about ninety seconds. A horse wins even without its rider if it crosses the line first, and the city districts prepare for it all year.

The floor of Siena cathedral is a puzzle of fifty-six marble panels that craftsmen worked on for over two hundred years. It is covered for most of the year and uncovered for a few weeks, usually in late summer and autumn.

Venice does not stand on rock but on millions of oak and alder piles driven into the mud. Wood underwater does not rot because oxygen cannot reach it, so over time the piles mineralised and effectively turned to stone.

The words quarantine, ghetto and arsenal all come from Venice. Quarantine was the forty days ships waited outside the city during plague, and ghetto was the foundry on the island where Jews were forced to move in 1516.

The 1979 earthquake brought down almost the whole old town. It was rebuilt stone by stone from photographs and surveys made before the quake, so what you walk through today is an exact copy, finished only in 1987.

A Hellenistic necropolis with gold jewellery, Greek vases and silver vessels was dug up below the old town in 1938. The finds are kept in the town museum and are the strongest evidence that a Greek town stood here.

A printing press started work at Cetinje in 1493, the first in the Balkans and one of the earliest in Europe, barely forty years after Gutenberg. It produced the Oktoih, the first Cyrillic book printed among the South Slavs.

Cetinje was the capital of Montenegro and by the late nineteenth century had a dozen foreign embassies. Those legation buildings still stand in a town of under fifteen thousand people.

The Tara canyon is up to 1,300 metres deep, the deepest in Europe. It comes right after the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and in places the river water is clean enough to drink untreated.

Durmitor has eighteen glacial lakes that locals call mountain eyes. They are left from the ice age, when glaciers gouged hollows that later filled with water.

Herceg Novi changed hands seven times in six centuries: a Bosnian king, Ottomans, Spaniards, Venetians, Russians, the French, Austrians. Each left a fortress behind, so a small town has several.

The town climbs a slope, so you move through it by stairs. There are thousands of them and it is called the town of steps. Its mild climate supports over a hundred plant species brought from around the world, mostly on sailors' ships.

Around 1,350 steps lead to the fortress of St John above the town, climbing 260 metres. The walls that scale the cliff are four and a half kilometres long and in places fifteen metres thick.

The cats of Kotor have their own museum and count as a symbol of the town. Tradition ties them to sailors, who kept them on ships against rats and left them behind in port.

The island of Our Lady of the Rocks is man-made. For centuries sailors sank old ships and dropped stones on the spot until an island formed. The custom survives: every 22 July at dusk locals row out with rocks and tip them around the island.

In the eighteenth century Perast had a maritime school to which Peter the Great sent Russian officers to learn navigation. The town then had a hundred houses and a dozen palaces, and more ships than households.

Sveti Stefan was a fishing village until the state moved its inhabitants out in 1955 and turned the whole island into a hotel. The houses kept their outsides and became rooms inside.

In the sixties and seventies Sophia Loren, Kirk Douglas, Elizabeth Taylor and Sylvester Stallone stayed here. The island was the Yugoslav answer to the French Riviera, with Hollywood guests and prices to match.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ulcinj was a pirate port with several hundred corsairs from Algiers and Malta. One tradition holds that Cervantes was held captive here and named Dulcinea after a girl from the town.

For centuries Ulcinj was home to a community descended from African slaves brought in on pirate ships. The last of them emigrated in the twentieth century, and the quarter where they lived is still known by its name.

Amsterdam houses are narrow because tax was charged on the width of the facade. So they are deep and tall, with a hook at the top for hoisting furniture. The stairs are too narrow to carry anything up.

The whole city stands on wooden piles driven through mud to sand; there are 13,659 of them under the Royal Palace. The canals are dredged, and around fifteen thousand bicycles are pulled out of them every year.

Vermeer spent his whole life in Delft and painted only some thirty pictures now accepted as his. He died in debt, and was rediscovered only two centuries later.

Delft blue pottery began as a cheap substitute for Chinese porcelain, which stopped arriving in the seventeenth century because of war in China. The Dutch coated ordinary clay with white glaze and painted it blue, and the substitute became sought after in its own right.

Harlem in New York is named after this town: Dutch settlers called their new settlement on Manhattan Nieuw Haarlem in 1658. The original is five centuries older than the copy.

In the Middle Ages Haarlem had over a hundred breweries, because people drank beer instead of water that was not safe. Fifteenth-century recipes are brewed again today in a church converted into a brewery.

The Dominicanen bookshop occupies a Dominican church from 1294, with shelving on three levels between the Gothic pillars. Before that the church served as a bicycle store and a carnival hall.

Under the Sint-Pietersberg hill run over twenty thousand passages cut by quarrying soft limestone across twenty centuries. In the Second World War Dutch paintings were hidden in them, Rembrandt's Night Watch among them.

On 14 May 1940 Rotterdam lost its entire centre to half an hour of bombing. That is why it is the only large Dutch city without an old core. It is also why the city became a testing ground for modern architecture after the war.

The cube houses by the architect Piet Blom are tilted at 45 degrees and stand on pillars. They were conceived as trees forming a wood above the street; one of them is a museum, so you can see how living in a tilted room actually works.

The Hague is the seat of government and of the king, but it is not the capital of the Netherlands; by the constitution that is Amsterdam. The split has existed since 1814 and is unique in Europe.

The Panorama Mesdag of 1881 is a painting in the round, a hundred and twenty metres long and fourteen high, viewed from a platform in the middle. Real sand is spread in front of it, so you cannot see where the painting begins.

The Dom Tower is the tallest church tower in the Netherlands at 112 metres. The nave behind it collapsed in a storm in 1674 and was never rebuilt, so the tower still stands apart from the rest of the church, with an empty square between.

Utrecht has canals with wharves below street level, at the water's edge, where warehouses used to be. Today they hold cafe terraces; it is the only canal of that two-level kind in the country.

The Second World War began in Gdansk, at Westerplatte, at 4.45 in the morning on 1 September 1939. The same city was where Solidarity was founded in the shipyard in 1980, which set off the end of communism in Europe.

Gdansk lived for centuries off amber, fossil resin washed up on the Baltic shore. The Amber Road ran from here all the way to Rome, and pieces sometimes hold insects forty million years old.

Every hour a trumpeter plays a tune from the tower of St Mary's church that breaks off abruptly mid-phrase. The break recalls a trumpeter who, by tradition, was shot in the throat by a Tatar arrow while warning the city.

The Wieliczka salt mine near Krakow has over three hundred kilometres of galleries on nine levels. Inside is a chapel carved out of salt, with chandeliers of salt crystal and a floor that looks tiled and is also salt.

Poznan is Poland's oldest city and its first capital. The first Polish rulers, Mieszko I and Boleslaw the Brave, are buried in the cathedral on Ostrow Tumski.

Two mechanical goats come out of the town hall at noon every day and butt heads twelve times. The mechanism has worked since 1551 and comes from a story about two goats that escaped a cook before a banquet.

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Torun in 1473. The house where he is said to have been born is now a museum, and his book on the movement of the heavenly bodies appeared only in the year he died.

Torun gingerbread has been made since the thirteenth century and the recipe was kept as a civic secret. The dough was left to mature for months, sometimes years, before baking. It is still made the same way.

Warsaw's old town was rebuilt from rubble after the war, partly from the vedute Bernardo Bellotto painted in the eighteenth century. UNESCO listed it in 1980 precisely as an example of reconstruction, not as an original.

Marie Sklodowska Curie was born in Warsaw and is the only person with Nobel prizes in two different sciences, physics and chemistry. She named the first element she discovered polonium, after a country that did not then exist on the map.

Over a thousand small bronze dwarfs, about twenty centimetres tall, are scattered around Wroclaw. They come from the Orange Alternative, a movement that mocked the authorities in the eighties by painting dwarfs over censored graffiti.

Wroclaw lies on twelve islands joined by over a hundred and thirty bridges. Over the centuries the city belonged to Bohemia, Austria, Prussia, Germany and Poland, and today it is Polish.

The Zakopane style was devised by Stanislaw Witkiewicz at the end of the nineteenth century, joining local timber building with art nouveau. It was meant as a Polish national style at a time when Poland did not exist as a state.

The Tatras are the only genuinely alpine range between the Alps and the Caucasus, with peaks over two and a half thousand metres. They cover just seven hundred square kilometres, so they can be crossed in a few days on foot.

Cape Sagres in the southwest of the Algarve was the end of the known world before the discovery of America. The Romans called it Promontorium Sacrum and believed the sun hissed as it went out in the sea there.

The caves at Benagil and Lagos formed as the sea ate away at soft sandstone over millions of years. In places the roof has collapsed and left an opening through which the sun falls onto the sand. These caves are reachable only by boat.

The eighteenth-century Joanina Library keeps pests down with a colony of bats that hunt insects at night. The furniture is covered with leather in the evening and cleaned in the morning. The routine has worked for three centuries.

The University of Coimbra has run since 1290 and is one of the oldest in Europe. The fado sung in Coimbra is sung only by men, in black capes, and by convention you do not clap but cough.

The 1755 earthquake was the first anyone studied scientifically: the Marquis of Pombal sent every parish in the country a questionnaire asking how long it lasted and how the animals behaved. The answers survive, and seismology grew out of them.

The houses Pombal put up downtown after the quake have a wooden cage inside the walls, the gaiola. Models were tested by having troops march around them to shake the ground, the first earthquake-resistant construction in Europe.

Lisbon sits further west than Dublin and Edinburgh, despite being in southern Europe. That is why Portugal keeps London time rather than the time in Madrid, to which there has been no direct train since 2020.

Madeira has two and a half thousand kilometres of levadas, narrow channels that carry water from the rainy north to the dry south. They have been cut since the fifteenth century, partly by enslaved labour, and are now also a network of walking paths.

The laurisilva, Madeira's laurel forest, is a remnant of woodland that covered southern Europe millions of years ago. It survived only here and on neighbouring islands, and has been UNESCO listed since 1999.

An undersea canyon five kilometres deep runs up to Nazare and funnels wave energy upward. That is why the biggest officially measured waves ever surfed have been ridden here, 26.2 metres, the height of an eight-storey building.

The fisherwomen of Nazare traditionally wear seven skirts one over another. Explanations range from shelter from the wind while waiting on the shore to the seven days of the week and seven waves; the dress is still seen on the beach.

Port wine is not made in Porto but in the Douro valley, a hundred kilometres upstream. It is only aged across the river in Vila Nova de Gaia, where the climate is steadier, and by law until 1986 it could be exported only from there.

The Lello bookshop of 1906 has a staircase that splits and rejoins, and charges admission that is deducted if you buy a book. The line about it inspiring Hogwarts is marketing: Rowling taught English in Porto, but has publicly denied the link.

Quinta da Regaleira has a well you go down rather than water: nine spiral levels underground, with masonic symbolism at each. It was built in the early twentieth century as a place for initiation rites.

Sintra has a climate of its own: the ridge traps Atlantic mist, so it is several degrees cooler and damper than Lisbon half an hour away. That is why Portuguese kings built their summer palaces here.

The Chapel of Bones in Evora is lined with the bones of around five thousand people, dug up from the city's cemeteries in the sixteenth century. The inscription at the door says the bones inside are waiting for yours.

Around Evora is the largest concentration of megaliths on the Iberian peninsula. The Almendres Cromlech has almost a hundred standing stones and is older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids.

Tesla's ashes stand in a gilded sphere, in his museum on Krunska Street. With them, over a hundred and sixty thousand documents from his estate, in the UNESCO Memory of the World register.

Fourteen kilometres downstream from the centre lies Vinca, the site that gave its name to a whole Neolithic culture. Pottery from there carries incised signs some seven thousand years old, among the earliest attempts at writing in Europe.

Ada Ciganlija was a river island until embankments joined it to the bank in 1967. The side channel left behind the dams became a four-kilometre lake. The city beach came about as a by-product of construction.

The Deliblato Sands are the largest inland sand area in Europe, some three hundred square kilometres of sand blown out of the Danube bed by the kosava wind over centuries. Planting has stopped the dunes, but their shape still shows under the acacia woods.

The dry sand and steppe vegetation have earned it the name of the European Sahara, though it sits in the middle of Banat. Species live here that are found nowhere else in Serbia, the Banat peony among them.

Two hundred and two earth towers up to fifteen metres tall formed because a stone on top sheltered the soil beneath it while everything around was washed away. They are still growing and falling. A few collapse every year and new ones appear.

The water from the spring below the towers is more acidic than vinegar and so heavy with minerals that nothing lives in it. That water is exactly why the slope has no plants to hold the soil together.

Golija is the only UNESCO biosphere reserve in Serbia, listed in 2001. Plants left over from the ice age still grow here, because the mountain never warmed enough to push them out.

On its slope stands Studenica monastery, founded by Stefan Nemanja in 1190, with a church of white marble. It has been UNESCO listed since 1986, fifteen years before the mountain itself was.

Kragujevac was the first capital of modern Serbia, from 1818 to 1841. The country's first grammar school, first lyceum and first theatre opened here, and the Sretenje constitution was adopted in the town in 1835.

In Sumarice, on the site of the shootings of October 1941, a monument is dedicated to the pupils and teachers taken out of class. The park covers the ground where the executions took place and carries a monument for each group.

The Sargan Eight is a narrow-gauge railway that climbs three hundred metres by looping in the shape of a figure eight. The end stations are three and a half kilometres apart in a straight line, and fifteen by rail.

The village of Drvengrad on the hill above the railway was built as a film set for Kusturica's Life Is a Miracle and then simply stayed. Its streets are named after directors and writers, and it has hosted a film festival since 2008.

The Skull Tower was built in 1809 from the skulls of Serbian insurgents killed at Cegar, on orders that it serve as a warning. Instead it became the reason travellers all over Europe wrote about the uprising.

Mediana, the imperial residence on the edge of town, has mosaic floors and underfloor heating. This was the suburb where Roman emperors stayed when they came back to the region they were born in.

The clock on Petrovaradin fortress has its hands swapped: the large one shows the hour and the small one the minutes. That way the time could be read from the Danube and the far bank, where two thin hands look alike.

Under the fortress run sixteen kilometres of galleries on four levels, with loopholes for muskets and chambers for mines. They were built in the eighteenth century, and only a small part is visited today, with a guide and a torch.

Ten monasteries stand in the gorge between the two mountains, which is why it is called the Serbian Holy Mountain. Most were founded in the sixteenth century, when monks withdrew into places hard to reach.

The West Morava twists through the gorge so sharply that it turns a series of tight bends in twenty kilometres. From the Kablar viewpoint you can see the river make almost a full circle around a hill.

The water tower, the Grand Terrace and the women's beach at Palic were designed in 1912 by Komor and Jakab, the same architects behind Subotica's city hall. They were built to turn the lake into a spa on the model of Austro-Hungarian resorts.

By 1971 the lake was so polluted that it was drained to the bed and left to recover for years. The water in it today has passed through a treatment plant, so Palic is a lake people have made twice.

Rtanj looks like a regular pyramid from every side, though it is an ordinary limestone peak of 1,565 metres. The shape comes from the mountain rising alone out of the plain, with no neighbouring peaks to break its outline.

Rtanj tea grows on its slopes, a species of savory that in Serbia grows almost only here. It is picked in summer and dried in the shade, and the mountain is better known for it than for its peak.

Sweaters from Sirogojno were sold in New York, Paris and Tokyo from the nineteen sixties on. The ethnologist Dobrila Smiljanic gathered the village knitters into a cooperative, and their work ended up on fashion runways.

The Old Village museum is not a reconstruction: the houses are real, from the nineteenth century, taken apart in villages around Zlatibor and put back together here. Some of them can still be rented for the night.

The Romans bathed here, and the first modern bathhouse was raised by Prince Milos in 1837. That makes Sokobanja the oldest spa in Serbia in continuous operation.

Ivo Andric stayed in Sokobanja several times and wrote here. Stevan Sremac described the spa, and the rhyme about Soko Banja and Soko Grad entered the language before it became a tourist slogan.

The Treaty of Karlowitz was signed in 1699 in a pavilion with four doors, so that every delegation could enter at once and none would be second. The talks were held at a round table, one of the first used for exactly that reason.

The Karlovci grammar school opened in 1791 and is the oldest Serbian gymnasium. It was founded with money from the merchant Dimitrije Anastasijevic Sabov, in a town that was then the seat of the Serbian church in the Habsburg monarchy.

At 2,169 metres Midzor is the highest peak in Serbia outside Kosovo, and it sits right on the Bulgarian border. The summit is flat and bare, so on a clear day the view reaches a hundred kilometres.

The mountain has dozens of waterfalls, Tupavica and the Piljski falls among them. They form where streams cross layers of hard volcanic rock that the water cannot cut through.

The Subotica synagogue of 1902 is one of the few art nouveau synagogues in Europe and the only one preserved in Serbia. Its restoration was completed at the end of 2017, after four decades; the dome rests on an octagonal steel frame above eight steel columns, which also carry the galleries.

Subotica is officially trilingual: Serbian, Hungarian and Croatian are equal in the municipality. Signs, documents and council sessions are in all three.

The Serbian spruce grows only in the Drina basin and nowhere else in the world. Josif Pancic found it in 1875 and only managed to describe it years later. It had been considered an ice age species long extinct.

From the Banjska stena viewpoint the Drina lies five hundred metres below, a green arc between two banks. The river is the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina here.

Lepenski Vir is around nine thousand years old and has trapezoidal houses and boulder sculptures with human faces. The whole settlement was lifted and moved thirty metres higher in 1971, because the lake behind the dam would have drowned it.

Trajan's plaque from the year 100, cut into the rock above the Roman road through the gorge, was sliced out of the cliff and raised some twenty metres before the water came. The Roman road below it stayed under the lake.

The Uvac holds one of the last colonies of griffon vultures in Europe. The bird has a wingspan of nearly three metres, and from a few remaining pairs in the nineteen seventies the colony has grown to several hundred birds.

The Uvac meanders formed when the river wound across a plain before the lakes existed, then cut down into rock as the land rose, keeping its shape. The Usacka cave in the canyon is the longest cave system in Serbia.

Guduricki vrh in the Vrsac Mountains is the highest point in Vojvodina at 641 metres — a hundred metres above Crveni Cot on Fruska Gora, at 539. The Vrsac Tower stands on a lower hill, at 399 metres.

The Vrsac vineyards are among the oldest in Vojvodina and in the nineteenth century were among the largest in Europe. Phylloxera destroyed them at the end of that century, and they were replanted on American rootstock.

The Gold Gondola on Zlatibor is nine kilometres long and one of the longest panoramic cable cars in the world. The ride from Ribnicko lake to Tornik takes about twenty-five minutes.

Stopica cave holds the Great Basin, a travertine pool with a ten-metre waterfall dropping into it. Travertine is stone the water builds instead of carrying away, so the rims between the basins rise a fraction every year.

In the eleventh century Albarracin was an independent Muslim principality, a small state of its own in the mountains of Aragon. It takes its name from the Berber family Banu Razin who ruled it.

In the pine woods around the town are sheltered rocks with prehistoric paintings some seven thousand years old, part of the UNESCO listing of Levantine rock art. You reach them on foot, on a trail marked from the village.

The Sagrada Familia only got a building permit in 2019, one hundred and thirty-seven years after the first stone. It turned out the 1885 application had never been decided, so the church paid the city 4.6 million euros and finally got its permit.

Park Guell was designed as an estate of sixty luxury houses for wealthy buyers. Two were sold, the project failed, and Gaudi moved into one of them and lived there for twenty years.

Every corner in the Eixample is cut at 45 degrees. Cerda designed them that way in 1859 so carts could turn, and the by-product is that every junction has a small square. Today they hold cafe terraces and parking.

The hanging houses of Cuenca stand on the lip of a cliff above the Huecar gorge, with wooden balconies out over the drop. They date from the fifteenth century, and the San Pablo bridge across the gorge is iron and wood and sways as you cross.

One of the hanging houses holds the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art, opened in 1966. The painter Fernando Zobel brought his collection here because he wanted a gallery far from Madrid, and it is now one of the reasons people come to Cuenca.

The Alhambra survived because when Napoleon's army withdrew in 1812 it mined the towers, and a disabled soldier pulled out the fuses at the last moment. Eight towers went up, the rest stayed.

Granada is one of the few Spanish cities where a drink still comes with a free tapa, and you do not choose it. You get whatever the kitchen is serving that day, and each round brings a more serious plate.

Sobrino de Botin has been open since 1725 and the Guinness book lists it as the oldest restaurant in the world in continuous operation. The wood oven in which it roasts suckling pig has not been let go out since it opened.

Madrid is the highest capital in the European Union, at around 650 metres above sea level. That is where its dry, sharp weather comes from, which locals sum up as nine months of winter and three of hell.

Antonio Banderas was born in Malaga and in 2019 opened a theatre in the building where he watched films as a child. He runs it himself, acts in its productions and keeps it open all year.

The Phoenicians founded Malaga around 770 BC, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Europe. The Roman theatre below the fortress was found by chance in 1951 while digging foundations for a cultural centre.

San Sebastian has one of the highest concentrations of Michelin stars in the world, in a city of under two hundred thousand people. It also has closed gastronomic societies, txokos, where members cook for themselves and charge themselves.

Basque is not related to any known language in the world. It has no proven link to Indo-European or to any other family, and it has been spoken in the same place longer than any language around it.

The Giralda bell tower was the minaret of a twelfth-century mosque. Instead of stairs it has a ramp, wide enough for the muezzin to ride a horse to the top. You still climb that same ramp.

Seville has around forty-eight thousand bitter orange trees. The fruit is too sour to eat, so the city collects it and ships it to Britain for marmalade, and since 2021 some of it goes to a plant that turns it into electricity.

After the flood of 1957 the river Turia was diverted around the city, leaving its bed empty through the centre. Instead of the motorway that was planned, a nine-kilometre park was laid out in the riverbed.

Paella comes from the area around Valencia and was not originally a seafood dish. The true Valencian version has chicken and rabbit, beans and snails; the seafood version came later and is a different dish.

Hadrian's Gate in Antalya was raised in the year 130 for the emperor's visit. The ruts in the stone beneath it were worn by cart wheels over the centuries and are visible to the naked eye.

The Duden waterfall drops straight into the sea from a forty-metre cliff a few kilometres from the centre. The river disappears underground before that and runs through limestone, surfacing only just before the drop.

The pillars called fairy chimneys formed because a hard basalt cap sheltered the soft volcanic ash beneath it from erosion. Once the cap falls, the pillar crumbles within a few decades.

Derinkuyu is an underground city of eighteen levels, some eighty metres deep, where up to twenty thousand people could hide with their livestock. It was found by accident in 1963, when a man knocking down a wall in his house discovered a passage behind it.

Ephesus was a port city, but the sea is now five kilometres away. The river Cayster silted up the harbour over centuries, so the city lost its reason to exist and slowly emptied.

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the seven wonders and was destroyed and rebuilt three times. One column stands today, assembled from pieces found in the marsh.

Hagia Sophia was the largest church in the world for almost a thousand years. Its dome collapsed twenty years after it opened and was rebuilt steeper. It has stood that way for fifteen centuries.

The Basilica Cistern lay forgotten under the city for centuries. It was rediscovered in the sixteenth century when a French traveller noticed locals drawing water through holes in their cellar floors, and now and then a fish.

The Bosphorus carries two currents running opposite ways: fresher water from the Black Sea moves south on the surface, while saltier, heavier water travels back underneath it. Fishermen knew this for centuries before it was measured.

Off Kekova you can see walls, steps and foundations of a Lycian town that sank in an earthquake in the second century. Diving is banned, so it is all viewed from a glass-bottomed boat.

The Lycian tombs along the shore are carved in the shape of upturned boats. The Lycians believed a soul would sail off more easily by ship, so even their stone tombs have roofs like a keel.

The white terraces are neither snow nor chalk but travertine, stone formed when warm calcium-rich water meets the air and leaves a deposit. The layer grows about a millimetre a year, so the terraces are still forming.

Above the terraces stands Hierapolis, an ancient city built around the springs for their cures. Cleopatra's pool is full of fallen Roman columns lying on the bottom. They came down in an earthquake and stayed.

Safranbolu is named after the saffron grown here for centuries. A single kilogram of the spice takes around a hundred and fifty thousand flowers, picked by hand over a few days in October.

Over two thousand Ottoman houses stand in the town, which is why it has been UNESCO listed since 1994. They have timber frames filled with mud brick, with the upper floor jutting over the street so the room is larger than the plot.

In the sixties the temples at Abu Simbel were cut into over a thousand blocks and moved sixty metres higher so Lake Nasser would not drown them. The work took four years and fifty countries paid for it through UNESCO.

Twice a year, in February and October, the morning sun reaches into the temple and lights three of the four statues at the back. The statue of the god of the underworld stays in shadow. It still works after the move, one day off.

The Library of Alexandria did not burn down in one night. It decayed over centuries through several fires, cuts in funding and the expulsion of scholars. A new library opened on the waterfront in 2002.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria was one of the seven wonders and over a hundred metres tall. Earthquakes brought it down, and its blocks were built into the Qaitbay fort that stands on the same spot today.

Around 240 BC Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth starting from the fact that at Aswan the midsummer noon sun cast no shadow in a well. He was off by about two per cent.

The Aswan dam stopped the annual Nile flood that had spread silt over the fields for thousands of years. The land has been fertilised artificially ever since, and the silt settles at the bottom of Lake Nasser.

The Great Pyramid was the tallest structure in the world for almost four thousand years, until Lincoln cathedral overtook it. Its sides are aligned to the compass points with an error of less than a twentieth of a degree.

Cleopatra lived closer in time to the opening of the first pizza shop than to the building of the Great Pyramid. The pyramid went up around 2560 BC, and Cleopatra lived in the first century BC.

The Blue Hole at Dahab is a vertical shaft a hundred metres deep, with an arch to the open sea at around sixty metres. It is one of the most dangerous dive sites in the world. The plaques on the shore are for divers who tried to swim through that arch.

Until the eighties Dahab was a Bedouin fishing village, and its name means gold in Arabic. Bedouin of the Muzeina tribe still live in the northern part of the town.

Hurghada was founded in the early twentieth century as a settlement beside oil fields. Tourism only began in the eighties, and in forty years the town grew from a few thousand to over two hundred thousand people.

The Red Sea is opening as two tectonic plates pull apart, widening about a centimetre a year. In a few million years it will be an ocean, with Africa and Arabia much further apart.

Luxor stands on the site of Thebes, capital of Egypt during the New Kingdom. There are so many monuments in and around it that it is sometimes said a third of the world's ancient heritage lies along this stretch.

Howard Carter found Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 almost untouched, because rubble from a later tomb built above it had buried the entrance. Over five thousand objects came out of it and cataloguing took ten years.

The Red Sea stays warm and salty all year because not a single river flows into it from the deserts around. That is why the water is so clear, and the coral reef holds over a thousand species of fish.

The Sinai peninsula was under Israeli administration from 1967 to 1982. Sharm el-Sheikh was a small settlement then; it was built up as a resort only after it returned to Egypt.

Amboseli is the best place in the world to photograph an elephant below Kilimanjaro, though the mountain is in neighbouring Tanzania. The park's water comes from it. Meltwater travels underground and surfaces in the swamps.

Elephants have been tracked individually in Amboseli since 1972, in one of the longest studies of wild animals ever run. Over fifteen hundred elephants are known by name, with family trees across several generations.

Colobus monkeys with white tails live in the Kaya Kinondo forest above Diani beach, and only a few hundred remain. The forest is a sacred site of the Mijikenda people and is UNESCO listed; you enter with an elder as escort.

A coral reef runs the length of Diani and breaks the waves, so the water inside it is calm and shallow. At low tide you can walk out to the reef on sand, and the tide covers it again within a few hours.

Lamu is the oldest continuously inhabited Swahili settlement, over seven centuries old, and it is UNESCO listed. There are almost no cars in the town; transport is by donkey. There are thousands of them.

Carved wooden doors are a mark of wealth on the Swahili coast and have been made to the same patterns for centuries. The spikes on them come from India, where they deterred elephants. There are no elephants on Lamu, but the spikes stayed.

The great migration is the movement of some one and a half million wildebeest and several hundred thousand zebra and gazelle in a circle between the Serengeti and the Mara. It has no leader and no fixed route; the herd follows the rain. The river crossing falls on a different date each year.

The Maasai have driven cattle through the same pastures for centuries and do not hunt game, so lions and herds live alongside their villages. That is why the reserve still borders inhabited land without a fence.

Fort Jesus in Mombasa was built by the Portuguese in 1593 and changed hands nine times in a century. One siege lasted thirty-three months and ended with thirteen people left alive inside.

Swahili grew on this coast from Bantu languages mixed with Arabic, through centuries of trade across the ocean. Over a hundred million people speak it today and it is one of the official languages of the African Union.

Nairobi is the only capital in the world with a national park inside the city limits. Lions and rhinos live seven kilometres from the business district, and photographs show skyscrapers behind the giraffes.

The city began in 1899 as a depot on the railway being built from Mombasa to Uganda. The name comes from a Maasai phrase for cool water, after the stream that ran there.

The seven coloured earths at Chamarel are sand dunes in seven shades, from red to purple. The colours come from volcanic rock that broke down into minerals of different density, so after rain they separate again instead of mixing.

Chamarel makes rum from fresh sugar cane juice rather than molasses like most rum in the world. That method, rhum agricole, is used almost only on Indian Ocean islands and the French Caribbean.

The name Flic en Flac has nothing to do with French or Creole; it comes from the Dutch Fried Landt Flaak, meaning free flat land. The Dutch held the island in the seventeenth century and left a few names behind.

The west coast of Mauritius lies in the lee of the trade winds, making it the driest and calmest part of the island. That is why sunsets are watched from here while the rain falls on the other side.

Mauritius is ringed by a coral reef that breaks the ocean swell, so the water in the lagoons at Grand Baie is as calm as a pool. The reef is one of the longest unbroken ones in the world.

Grand Baie was a fishing village until the sixties. The name means great bay in French, and the resort grew only after the island became independent in 1968.

Le Morne is UNESCO listed as a memorial to escaped slaves. By tradition they hid on the summit, and when police arrived in 1835 to announce that slavery had been abolished, they thought they had come for them and jumped from the cliff.

From the air an underwater waterfall appears below Le Morne: sand and silt dragged by currents over the edge of an undersea shelf. The waterfall is an optical illusion, but the movement of the sand is real.

Port Louis was founded in 1735 by a French governor as a port on the route to India. Mauritius was held in turn by the Dutch, the French and the British, and each left a language. That is why Creole, French and English turn up in one sentence.

The 1847 Mauritius Blue Penny is one of the most valuable stamps in the world. It was printed by mistake with Post Office instead of Post Paid, and a few surviving copies are kept in the Blue Penny Museum in Port Louis.

Ile aux Cerfs is an island inside the lagoon, sheltered by reef on every side. The water around it is shallow and warm all year, and visibility underwater goes past thirty metres.

The name means island of deer, after deer the Dutch brought in the seventeenth century. The deer are long gone, but the name stayed.

Ait Benhaddou has stood in for locations in Lawrence of Arabia, Gladiator, The Mummy and Game of Thrones. Several structures that now look like part of the village are in fact leftover film sets.

The whole ksar is rammed earth mixed with straw, without a single fired brick. The walls crumble after heavy rain. The village is repaired exactly as it was built, again every year.

The film Casablanca was shot in Hollywood and not a single frame was filmed in the city. Rick's Cafe, which does business in Casablanca today, opened in 2004 modelled on the film set.

The Hassan II mosque stands partly over the sea, and its minaret is 210 metres tall, among the highest anywhere. Part of the prayer hall has a glass floor with the water visible below it.

Chefchaouen has only been blue since the twentieth century. Explanations range from Jewish refugees who brought the colour in the thirties, to a belief that blue keeps mosquitoes off, to it cooling the walls; none is the single answer.

The town was founded in 1471 as a stronghold against the Portuguese. Christians were barred from entering until 1920, making Chefchaouen one of the last closed places in Morocco.

Jimi Hendrix spent a few days in Essaouira in 1969, and Orson Welles filmed Othello here in 1951. The Castelo Real in the port was the set for the opening of the film that won the Palme d'Or.

Essaouira was for centuries the main port for purple dye taken from sea snails on the islands offshore. The Romans called it Mogador, and senators' togas were dyed with what came from here.

The University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fes was founded in 859 by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri. The Guinness book lists it as the oldest continuously operating university in the world.

The medina of Fes has around nine thousand lanes and is the largest car-free urban area in the world. Goods still move by donkey, because nothing wider fits through most of the passages.

The walls of Marrakesh and most of the old town are built of rammed red earth, not brick. That is where the colour that earns it the name of the red city comes from, and the earth for repairs is still dug nearby.

Jemaa el-Fnaa square is on the UNESCO list of intangible heritage, not for its buildings but for the storytellers, musicians and healers who have worked on it for centuries. It was one of the first entries of that kind, in 2001.

Erg Chebbi near Merzouga has dunes up to a hundred and fifty metres high, formed from sand the wind carries hundreds of kilometres. The dune field is the exception: nearly all the Sahara is stone, not sand.

The Sahara has not always been desert. Between six and ten thousand years ago it was savannah with lakes and herds, and satellite images still show riverbeds under the sand.

The Hassan Tower was meant to be the minaret of the largest mosque in the world. Work stopped in 1199 when the sultan died, leaving a 44-metre tower and a field of over two hundred columns with no roof.

Rabat has been Morocco's capital since 1912, when the French chose it over Fes. Until then the country had four imperial cities that took turns as capital, depending on which dynasty ruled.

The Etosha pan is a dried lake of around five thousand square kilometres, so white that it is visible from space. It holds water only a few weeks a year; the rest of the time it is a salt crust.

In the dry season the animals gather at a handful of waterholes, so a safari here comes down to sitting by one and waiting. Some of the holes are lit at night, when the rhinos come.

The Fish River Canyon is the second largest in the world after the Grand Canyon: a hundred and sixty kilometres long and up to five hundred and fifty metres deep. The river at the bottom does not flow for most of the year but stands in pools.

The canyon is open only from May to September, because summer is too hot for hiking. The trail through it is eighty-five kilometres and takes four or five days, with no point at which you can turn back.

The Skeleton Coast takes its name from the shipwrecks and whale bones along the sand. Fog and currents ran ships aground for centuries, and survivors who reached the shore found a waterless desert.

A seal colony of tens of thousands lives on this coast, feeding in the cold Benguela current. That current brings food up from the ocean floor and is why the sea here teems with life while the land is empty.

The dunes at Sossusvlei are among the tallest in the world, up to three hundred metres. The sand is red because the iron in it has oxidised over millions of years. The older the dune, the redder it is.

The dead trees at Deadvlei have stood for some nine hundred years without rotting. The air is so dry that the wood cannot decay, so they remain where they died when the river changed course.

Swakopmund looks like a German seaside town because it was one: founded in 1892 as the main port of German South West Africa. German is still heard in the street and the bakeries sell strudel.

The town sits where the desert meets the cold Atlantic, so dense fog rolls in almost every morning. That fog is the only water for plants and insects in this desert. Some beetles catch it on their backs.

Namibia is the only African country where German was once official, and today the official language is English, though under one per cent speak it as a mother tongue. It was chosen in 1990 precisely because it belonged to nobody.

Beer in Windhoek is still brewed to the German purity law of 1516, though no such rule exists in Namibia. The brewery follows it voluntarily, as a legacy of the colonial period.

Table Mountain is around six hundred million years old, older than the Himalayas, the Alps and the Rockies put together. Over thirteen hundred plant species grow on it, more than in the whole of Britain.

In 2018 Cape Town was months away from the day its water would run out. Use was capped at fifty litres per person a day, the city halved its consumption, and that day never came.

Johannesburg began in 1886 after gold was found and grew to a hundred thousand people in ten years. It is the largest city in the world that sits on no river, lake or coast. It exists only because of the ore beneath it.

Fifty kilometres from the city lies the Cradle of Humankind, where around forty per cent of all known human ancestor fossils have been found. Little Foot is among them, an almost complete skeleton over three million years old.

Kruger is about the size of Israel, two million hectares with over seven hundred kilometres of tarred roads. You can drive through it in your own car without a guide, which is rare in Africa.

Around twenty thousand elephants live in the park, and one adult eats up to a hundred and fifty kilograms of plants and drinks two hundred litres of water a day. Their numbers are watched and capped. Too many elephants turn woodland into savannah.

Arusha lies almost exactly halfway between Cairo and Cape Town. The town is the starting point for the Serengeti, Ngorongoro and Kilimanjaro, so nearly every safari in northern Tanzania passes through it.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda sat in Arusha from 1994 to 2015. That made the town the seat of several regional institutions, and it is called the diplomatic capital of East Africa.

Dar es Salaam means house of peace in Arabic. The sultan of Zanzibar founded it in 1865 as a summer residence, giving the name to what had been the fishing village of Mzizima.

Dar es Salaam is one of the fastest growing cities in the world; United Nations projections put it above ten million people by 2030. Tanzania's official capital has been Dodoma since 1996, but most of the government is still here.

Climbing Kilimanjaro takes you through five climate zones in a few days, from rainforest to arctic desert at the top. That is the same as travelling from the equator to the polar circle, compressed into fifty kilometres.

Kilimanjaro is the highest free-standing mountain in the world; it belongs to no range but rises alone from the plain to 5,895 metres. The ice at the summit has shrunk by over eighty per cent since 1912.

Ngorongoro is the largest unbroken volcanic caldera in the world, twenty kilometres across and six hundred metres deep. It formed when a volcano as tall as Kilimanjaro collapsed into itself.

In the Olduvai gorge, on the edge of the conservation area, Mary and Louis Leakey found tools and fossils almost two million years old in the fifties. Those finds were the first to show that humanity began in Africa.

The tidal range is small at the north of Zanzibar, so you can swim all day at Nungwi, unlike the east coast where the sea withdraws for hundreds of metres. That is also why the dhow boatyards are here.

Dhows are still built by hand in Nungwi, without drawings, from memory. The same hull sailed the Indian Ocean for over a thousand years, carrying goods between Africa, Arabia and India on the monsoon winds.

Serengeti means endless plain in Maasai. The park covers almost fifteen thousand square kilometres and holds the greatest concentration of large mammals on earth.

The grass of the Serengeti grows on volcanic ash from Ngorongoro, rich in minerals but shallow, so trees cannot root. That is why the plain is treeless. It is also why the herds can cross it with no cover.

Zanzibar fought the shortest war in history in 1896, lasting between thirty-eight and forty-five minutes. British ships shelled the palace, the sultan fled, and it was over before noon.

Freddie Mercury was born in Stone Town in 1946 as Farrokh Bulsara. His family left the island in 1964 during the revolution and moved to England.

The El Ghriba synagogue on Djerba is the oldest in Africa and by tradition was founded in the sixth century BC, after the destruction of the First Temple. A Jewish community has lived on the island without a break since.

Homer described Djerba as the island of the lotus-eaters, where Odysseus's men ate a fruit that made them forget where they came from. Locals still point out a tree they say is the one.

The amphitheatre at El Djem held around thirty-five thousand spectators, in a town that today has some twenty thousand people. It is the third largest in the Roman world and better preserved than the Colosseum.

Scenes for Gladiator and for Monty Python's Life of Brian were shot in the amphitheatre. Today it hosts a festival of symphonic music each summer.

In the thirties the Villa Sebastian in Hammamet was a gathering place for European artists, among them the painter Paul Klee. It is now a cultural centre with an amphitheatre in the garden.

The medina in Hammamet is small, with walls that run straight down to the sea. That is why Hammamet became Tunisia's first seaside resort, back in the thirties, before tourism existed as an industry.

The blue and white of Sidi Bou Said was prescribed in 1915 by the French baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger, who lived there. Painting a house any other way has been forbidden since, and the rule still holds.

Paul Klee, August Macke and Simone de Beauvoir all stayed in Sidi Bou Said. Klee's journey to Tunisia in 1914 is considered the turning point in his relationship with colour.

The eighth-century ribat in Sousse is a fortified monastery, a military tower and a place of prayer at once. Its watchtower was used to scan the sea for Byzantine ships.

Over five kilometres of early Christian catacombs with around fifteen thousand graves run under Sousse. Only a short stretch is open; the rest is closed because of collapse.

The desert scenes of Star Wars were filmed near Tozeur. Part of the set for Luke's home still stands in the sand near Nefta, and local guides drive out to it.

Chott el Djerid beside Tozeur is a salt lake of some seven thousand square kilometres, which dries out completely into a white crust in summer. Part of it is below sea level, and a causeway runs straight across the middle.

Carthage, at the end of the suburban railway from central Tunis, was Rome's equal through three wars. The Romans levelled it in 146 BC and then rebuilt it a century later as a Roman city.

The Bardo Museum in Tunis holds the largest collection of Roman mosaics in the world. It occupies a former bey's palace, so the mosaics sit under ceilings decorated in Ottoman style.

The Forbidden City has 980 buildings and almost nine thousand rooms, and for five centuries nobody could enter without the emperor's leave. It opened to the public only in 1925.

The story that the Great Wall is visible from space with the naked eye is not true. The wall is a few metres wide and the same colour as the ground around it; the Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei confirmed in 2003 that he could not see it.

Chengdu has the largest giant panda breeding centre in the world. A panda is born pink, hairless and weighing about a hundred grams, roughly a thousandth of its mother's weight; no other placental mammal bears young so small relative to itself.

Sichuan pepper does not burn, it numbs. It contains a compound that irritates touch nerves, so it feels like a light current on the lips. The heat itself comes from chilli, which only reached China in the seventeenth century.

The hills around Guilin are what is left of a limestone massif that rain ate away for three hundred million years. Only the hardest parts remain, standing like pillars in the middle of the plain.

The view from the Li river is printed on the Chinese twenty yuan note. The exact spot is near the village of Xingping, and people go there to hold the note up against the view.

From 2004 to 2021 the maglev from Shanghai to the airport was the fastest passenger train in scheduled service, at 431 kilometres an hour. Since May 2021 it has been capped at 300 and covers the thirty kilometres in eight minutes ten seconds.

Between 1937 and 1941 Shanghai took in around twenty thousand Jewish refugees from Europe, because it was one of the few places in the world that required no visa. The quarter where they lived can still be visited.

The Great Wild Goose Pagoda was built in 652 to hold the scriptures the monk Xuanzang brought back from India. His seventeen-year journey became the basis for Journey to the West, one of the four great Chinese novels.

Xi'an was the eastern end of the Silk Road and the capital of thirteen Chinese dynasties. Its fourteenth-century walls run almost fourteen kilometres and you can cycle around the top.

The Atomic Bomb Dome is the one building left exactly as it was on 6 August 1945. It stood almost directly below the blast. The pressure went straight down and the walls held while everything around was flattened.

A monument in the peace park is covered with thousands of paper cranes sent from all over the world. It is tied to Sadako Sasaki, a girl who fell ill with leukaemia after the bomb and folded cranes believing a thousand would bring recovery.

Kyoto was on the target list for the atomic bomb in 1945, but the American secretary of war Henry Stimson had it removed. He had been there on his honeymoon and insisted the city be spared.

The Golden Pavilion you see today was built in 1955. A young monk burned down the fourteenth-century original in 1950, and Yukio Mishima turned the case into a novel that is still read.

The deer in Nara are protected as a natural monument and roam the city freely. They have learned to bow to people to be given a biscuit. They picked the gesture up from visitors, not from any trainer.

Todaiji was for centuries the largest wooden building in the world, and the present version from 1709 is a third smaller than the original. Inside sits a bronze Buddha fifteen metres tall, cast in the eighth century from nearly all the bronze in the country.

Osaka is called the nation's kitchen, and the local word kuidaore means to ruin yourself by eating. Takoyaki and okonomiyaki come from here, and both are made on a griddle in front of the customer.

In Osaka people stand on the right of an escalator, in Tokyo on the left. The difference is usually put down to the 1970 World Expo, when Osaka adopted the international habit while Tokyo kept its own.

Most streets in Tokyo have no names. An address gives the district, the block and the building's number in the order it was built, so two neighbouring houses can have numbers with no relation to each other.

Tokyo was Edo until 1868, and in the eighteenth century, with a million inhabitants, it was the largest city in the world. When the emperor moved the capital from Kyoto the city was renamed Eastern Capital, which is what Tokyo means.

In the seventeenth century Ayutthaya had around a million inhabitants and was among the largest cities in the world. A Burmese army burned it in 1767, and the capital moved to where Bangkok stands today.

At Wat Mahathat a stone Buddha head is held in the roots of a fig tree. The head fell from a statue after the sacking, and the tree grew around it over two centuries.

Bangkok's full ceremonial name in Thai has 168 letters and is the longest place name in the world. Locals call the city Krung Thep, the first word of that name, meaning city of angels.

Bangkok is sinking about a centimetre a year because it stands on soft silt from which groundwater was pumped for decades. Parts of the city are now below sea level.

Chiang Mai was founded in 1296 as the capital of the kingdom of Lanna, independent of Siam for centuries. The old town is still a square ringed by a wall and moat, exactly as it was laid out.

Doi Inthanon above the city is Thailand's highest peak at 2,565 metres. Temperatures there drop below freezing in winter, the only place in the country where that happens regularly.

The limestone towers rising straight out of the sea are the remains of a coral reef some 300 million years old. The sea undercuts them at the base, so many are narrower at the bottom than at the top.

Maya Bay on nearby Phi Phi Leh was made famous by the film The Beach in 2000. Tourism damaged it so badly that it was closed for four years from 2018 to let the coral recover.

Phuket grew rich on tin mines, not tourism. The Sino-Portuguese houses in the old town were built by mining merchants in the nineteenth century, and they are what people come to see today.

The vegetarian festival in October runs for nine days and includes cheek piercing and walking on hot coals. Chinese miners brought it in the nineteenth century and it has been kept up since.

The bay holds around 1,600 limestone islands, remains of a massif the sea worked on for twenty million years. Almost none are inhabited, because the rock is too steep to build on.

Floating fishing villages lived in the bay for centuries, with houses on rafts and a school on the water. Most were resettled after 2014 to protect the bay, and a few remain as workshops and farms.

Hanoi marked a thousand years since its founding in 2010. Hoan Kiem lake in the centre carries the legend of a king given a sword by a turtle in the lake for the war against China, which took it back after the victory.

A train passes through one street in central Hanoi several times a day, a few dozen centimetres from the house walls. People pull in their chairs, the train goes by, and the cafes move back onto the street.

The tunnels at Cu Chi near Ho Chi Minh City run for some two hundred and fifty kilometres on three levels. People lived in them for years; they held hospitals, kitchens and workshops. Kitchen smoke was vented kilometres away.

The banh mi sandwich came from joining the French baguette with Vietnamese fillings after the colonial period. The Vietnamese version uses rice flour in the dough, so the crust is thinner and lighter than the French one.

Hoi An was one of the most important ports in Southeast Asia until the river silted up in the nineteenth century. The town stopped changing and stayed as it was, which is why it is UNESCO listed today.

The sixteenth-century Japanese bridge has a temple built into the middle and is guarded by statues of monkeys at one end and dogs at the other. It is printed on the Vietnamese twenty thousand dong note.

The rice terraces around Sapa were cut by hand over centuries and climb the slopes to over a thousand metres. Each terrace has to be perfectly level for the water to stand, and they were levelled without a single instrument.

Several highland peoples live around Sapa, the Hmong and the Dao among them. The French built Sapa in 1922 as a hill station for colonial officials escaping the heat of the delta.

Bariloche is known for chocolate because Swiss, German and Austrian settlers arrived at the end of the nineteenth century. The main street now has dozens of chocolate shops, and the town holds a chocolate festival at Easter.

The Nazi officer Erich Priebke lived in Bariloche for almost fifty years under his own name, as head of the German school. He was uncovered in a television interview in 1994 and extradited to Italy.

The El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookshop occupies a theatre from 1919, with boxes to read in and a cafe on the stage. It is regularly named the most beautiful bookshop in the world.

The Recoleta cemetery is a town in miniature, with over four thousand mausoleums along paved streets. Eva Peron is buried there; after her death her body spent fourteen years in Milan, buried under another name.

The vineyards around Mendoza lie between eight hundred and fifteen hundred metres, among the highest in the world. There is almost no rain, so the vines are watered by channels dug by peoples who were there before the Spanish.

Aconcagua near Mendoza is the highest peak outside Asia at 6,961 metres. It can be climbed without technical gear, but half of those who try do not make it. The altitude stops them, not the terrain.

Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world and most ships to Antarctica leave from it. It was a penal colony until 1947, and the prison building is now a museum.

In December it gets dark here around eleven at night and light again at four in the morning. In winter it is the other way round: the day lasts seven hours, and snow falls in July.

The Iguazu falls have between 150 and 300 separate cascades, depending on the water level. On seeing them, Eleanor Roosevelt is said to have remarked only: poor Niagara.

An hour away is the triple border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, marked by obelisks in three colours on three banks. The falls are split between the first two countries, so there are two sides to see and they are two different views.

The opera house in Manaus was built in 1896 in the middle of the rainforest, from Italian marble and French glass, with rubber money. Everything came by ship fifteen hundred kilometres up the Amazon.

Brazil's rubber monopoly was broken in 1876 by the Englishman Henry Wickham, who took seventy thousand seeds out of the Amazon. Plantations in Asia grew from them, the price collapsed, and within a decade Manaus had lost its reason to exist.

Rio de Janeiro means river of January, and there is no river. The Portuguese sailed into Guanabara Bay in January 1502 and took it for a river mouth. The name stuck even though the mistake was corrected within months.

The Selaron Steps were tiled by the Chilean painter Jorge Selaron over twenty-three years, until his death in 2013. The 215 steps carry tiles from over sixty countries, mostly sent to him by people who had passed by.

The church of St Francis in Salvador is lined inside with woodcarving covered in gold leaf, several hundred kilograms of it. It is one of the most lavish baroque interiors in the Americas.

Capoeira grew among slaves in Bahia as a martial art disguised as a dance, so it could be practised in front of the masters. It was banned until 1940 and is now protected as Brazilian heritage.

Sao Paulo banned advertising billboards across the whole city in 2007. Over fifteen thousand hoardings came down within months, revealing buildings nobody had seen for decades.

The state of Sao Paulo has the largest Japanese community outside Japan, around a million and a half people. The first immigrants arrived by ship in 1908 to work on the coffee plantations.

The Atacama is the driest desert in the world; some weather stations have never recorded rain. That is also why the largest telescopes are here: the air is so dry that it barely distorts the light of the stars.

NASA tests Mars rovers in the Atacama, because the soil is closer in composition to Martian ground than anything else on Earth. In parts of the desert no bacteria have been found at all.

Since 2018 the Santiago metro has run largely on solar and wind power. It was the first metro system in the world to be powered mainly from renewable sources.

The Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago is dedicated to the victims of the Pinochet dictatorship. It opened in 2010, and La Moneda palace, where the 1973 coup took place, is still the president's seat.

Valparaiso was the most important port on the Pacific until the Panama Canal opened in 1914. It lost its reason to exist overnight, which is why the centre stayed as it was.

The city climbs forty hills, so you move through it on funiculars from the nineteenth century. Fewer than half of the thirty or so that once ran are still working, and some have been declared monuments.