Bilbao: A Steel City Reinvented by a Single Museum
Bilbao was, for most of the 20th century, an industrial city built on steel and shipbuilding, and by the 1980s, as those…
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Berlin’s Victory Column: A Monument That Outlived the War It Celebrated
Berlin’s Victory Column was built to commemorate Prussia’s military victories in the 1860s, and by the time it was finally unveiled in…
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Cologne Cathedral: A Construction Project That Took 632 Years
Construction on Cologne Cathedral began in 1248 and stopped almost entirely in 1473, left unfinished for over 300 years with a medieval…
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Rotterdam: A City Rebuilt From Nothing After a Single Devastating Day
Rotterdam’s historic centre was almost entirely destroyed on a single day, May 14, 1940, when German bombing during the invasion of the…
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Ghent’s Gravensteen Castle: A Fortress Built to Intimidate Its Own City
Gravensteen, “Castle of the Counts,” was built in 1180 by Count Philip of Alsace, and its imposing, deliberately fortress-like design wasn’t primarily…
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Luxembourg: A Country Small Enough to Cross by Lunch, Built on a Gorge
Luxembourg City is built directly around and above deep sandstone gorges carved by the Alzette and Petrusse rivers, giving the capital of…
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Melbourne: A City That Grew Rich on a Gold Rush and Never Slowed Down
Melbourne’s grand Victorian-era architecture, still visible throughout its city centre, was largely funded by the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s, a…
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Queenstown: A Gold Rush Town That Became an Adventure Capital
Queenstown began as a gold rush settlement in the 1860s, prospectors drawn to the Shotover River, once considered so gold-rich it was…
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Fiji: An Archipelago of 330 Islands Held Together by the Sea Between Them
Fiji is made up of more than 330 islands, though only about a third of them are permanently inhabited, spread across the…
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New Delhi: A Capital Built by the British, Inherited by Everyone Else
New Delhi was purpose-built by British colonial administrators beginning in 1911, designed by architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker as an entirely…
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Mount Everest: A Mountain That Grows Roughly Four Millimetres a Year
Mount Everest, at 8,849 metres, is still growing, the ongoing collision between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates that first formed the…
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St Peter’s Basilica: A Church Built Over an Emperor’s Circus
St Peter’s Basilica stands on the site of a Roman circus built by the Emperor Nero, the same arena, tradition holds, where…
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