Mosi-oa-Tunya / Victoria Falls, shared between Zambia and Zimbabwe on the Zambezi River, is the world’s largest waterfall by combined height and width — 108 metres high and 1,708 metres wide — with the Zambian side offering the Devil’s Pool at the lip of the drop and the Zimbabwean side the full panoramic view across the 1,708-metre curtain of water.

Delos, an uninhabited 5 km² island in the Greek Cyclades, preserves both the ancient sanctuary of Apollo — mythological birthplace of the god — and the most complete Hellenistic commercial city surviving in the Mediterranean, abandoned after twin massacres in 88 and 69 BCE left its mosaic-floored residential quarter intact beneath two thousand years of silence.

Hiraizumi’s 12th-century Buddhist temples and Pure Land gardens represent the brief, brilliant civilisation built by the Northern Fujiwara clan in the remote Tōhoku region — preserved today at Chūson-ji’s golden Konjikidō hall and the Heian garden of Mōtsu-ji, and made famous in Japanese literature by Matsuo Bashō’s haiku at Takadachi hill.

The Nanda Devi and Valley of Flowers National Parks, a UNESCO site in the Indian Himalaya, combine the permanently closed wilderness sanctuary around Nanda Devi (7,816 m) with the seasonally accessible Valley of Flowers — a high-altitude meadow holding over 500 alpine plant species and open to trekkers only between June and October.

The Ennedi Massif in northeastern Chad, a UNESCO mixed site inscribed in 2016, preserves Carboniferous sandstone eroded into vast gorge systems and natural arches, over 400 rock art sites documenting the transition from the Green Sahara to desert across 7,000 years, and the Guelta d’Archei — where the last relict Saharan crocodiles coexist with daily camel gatherings in an isolated spring deep in the desert.