Itineraries

The Madara Rider, a 23-metre bas-relief carved into a northeastern Bulgarian limestone cliff around 705–710 CE by Khan Tervel of the First Bulgarian Empire, is UNESCO-listed since 1979 and unique in Europe as a large-scale medieval rock monument — flanked by Greek inscriptions from three successive Bulgarian khans spanning 705 to 822 CE.

The Citadel of Erbil — UNESCO-listed since 2014 — rises on a 6,000-to-8,000-year-old archaeological tell at the centre of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq’s capital city, surrounded by active bazaars and housing the Textile Museum, Hammam Museum, and the 12th-century Mudhafaria Minaret below its walls.

The Quebrada de Humahuaca is a 155-kilometre Andean canyon in Jujuy Province, Argentina, continuously inhabited for 10,000 years and UNESCO-listed since 2003 for its mixed cultural and natural values — from the pre-Columbian Pucará de Tilcara and the unique angel soldier paintings of Uquía to the minerally-striated Hill of Seven Colours near Purmamarca.

Old Québec, founded by France in 1608 and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985, is the only walled city remaining in North America north of Mexico — its two quarters straddling a cliff above the Saint Lawrence preserve 17th-century merchants’ stone houses, the oldest stone church on the continent, the site of the 1759 battle that transferred French Canada to British rule, and the iconic Château Frontenac. It lies 250 km northeast of Montréal, 3 hours 20 minutes by train.

Seven wooden farmhouses in Hälsingland, central Sweden, preserve the world’s finest collection of rural painted interiors from the 19th century — locked “best rooms” commissioned by prosperous linen-farming families and used only for weddings, funerals and Christmas, several of which were covered by wallpaper and only rediscovered in the 20th century. UNESCO inscribed the Decorated Farmhouses of Hälsingland in 2012.

Sulaiman-Too Sacred Mountain in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, holds 17,000 petroglyphs spanning the Bronze Age to the Timurid period, 101 identified shrines, and a documented connection to the Mughal founder Babur, who built a prayer house on its slopes in 1496. UNESCO inscribed it in 2009 as the most complete example of sacred mountain worship in Central Asia.

Twyfelfontein in Namibia’s Kunene Region holds at least 2,500 Stone Age rock engravings on 212 sandstone slabs — Africa’s most concentrated open-air archive of San hunter-gatherer art, including therianthropic shaman figures and a remarkable image of a seal carved 100 kilometres from the nearest coast. Namibia’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 2007, it lies approximately 450 km northwest of Windhoek and can only be visited with a licensed guide.

Kizhi Pogost on Kizhi Island, Lake Onega, preserves two extraordinary 18th-century wooden churches — the 22-domed Church of the Transfiguration (1714) and the 9-domed Church of the Intercession — built without iron nails using the interlocking log-joinery techniques of Karelia, now the centrepiece of an 89-building open-air museum of Russian northern wooden architecture.

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.