Locations

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• Aachen Cathedral

  Charlemagne's palatine chapel at Aachen — an octagon modeled on Byzantine precedent, built to crown the Carolingian capital and, for centuries, the coronation church of the German kings.

• Aasivissuit-Nipisat

  The 235-kilometer Inuit hunting ground between ice and sea in west Greenland — from the Saqqaq middens of Nipisat island to the great caribou drive at Aasivissuit on the edge of the inland ice — a 4,200-year cultural landscape of the seasonal round, inscribed by UNESCO in 2018.

• Abomey

  The inland capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey, a walled city of earthen royal palaces on the Abomey plateau whose polychrome bas-reliefs record the dynasty in molded clay and whose precinct holds the cult of the deified Fon kings.

• Abu Simbel

  The pair of rock-cut temples Ramesses II carved into a Nubian cliff in the thirteenth century BCE — relocated stone by stone in the 1960s to escape a rising lake.

• Abydos

  The holiest necropolis of ancient Egypt and the cult center of Osiris, where the first kings were buried and the murdered god was held to lie.

• Adyar

  Riverside estate at Madras, world headquarters of the Theosophical Society from 1882 — the great banyan, the Adyar Library's palm-leaf manuscripts, and the finding of the World Teacher.

• Ajanta Caves

  A complex of rock-cut Buddhist cave-monasteries in Maharashtra, carved in two phases across some seven centuries and famous for the wall paintings preserved in its dark interiors.

• Al-Aqsa Mosque

  The congregational mosque at the southern end of the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem — one of Islam's holiest sites, tied in tradition to Muhammad's Night Journey.

• Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia

  The neo-Byzantine cathedral church of Sofia, raised as a national memorial to the dead of Bulgaria's liberation and now the principal seat of Bulgarian Orthodox worship.

• Alexandria

  Alexander's planned metropolis on the Egyptian shore — seat of the Museion and Library, throne of Serapis, cradle of the Septuagint, the Hermetica, and the last schools of ancient philosophy.

• Allada

  The town of southern Benin that was Great Ardra, cradle of the Aja-Fon world and of the kingdom of Allada, from whose three founding brothers sprang Dahomey and Porto-Novo, and whose name — carried out the slave ports — became the Rada nation of the spirits in Haiti.

• Ambohidrabiby

  The hill northeast of Antananarivo where the Merina king Ralambo held his capital, named the highland country Imerina and fixed the new-year fandroana to fall on his own birthday — and where he lies buried in the stone tomb of his vazimba grandfather Rabiby, the astrologer for whom the hill is named.

• Ambohimanga

  The blue hill of the Merina sovereigns north-east of Antananarivo — a fortified royal city of ditches, stone gates and ancestral tombs that the kings left for the capital yet never let stop being holy, still climbed by pilgrims and inscribed by UNESCO in 2001.

• Ambondrombe

  The forested 'mountain of the dead' of the Betsileo country near Ambohimahamasina, where tradition says the souls of the dead gather and are heard, its forest kept whole by fady.

• Amyclae

  An ancient Laconian settlement south of Sparta, site of the sanctuary of Apollo Amyclaeus — home of the colossal Throne of Apollo and the festival of the Hyacinthia.

• Anatori

  The plague-era crypt-houses at a river-mouth below Shatili in Upper Khevsureti, the akldama-vaults into which the dying of the epidemic years are remembered to have walked of their own will, to spare their households and lie down among the dead.

• Anboto

  The 1,331 m limestone peak of the Urkiola range on the Biscay–Álava border, chief mountain-cave seat of the Basque goddess Mari — the Lady of Anboto — whose priestesses the Inquisition recast as the witches of Logroño.

• Andranoro

  The living vazimba-cult shrine of the Antehiroka on the northwestern Antananarivo plain, where Ranoro went down into the water and pilgrims still come under the fady of salt.

• Angkor Wat

  The vast twelfth-century Khmer temple in Cambodia, raised for Vishnu and laid out as a scale model of the Hindu cosmos, with its central towers standing for Mount Meru.

• Antsahadinta

  The royal tomb-village of western Imerina southwest of Antananarivo — a sacred Merina hill where the founding king planted his emblem-trees over his own pirogue grave, its wooden noble houses among the best-preserved of the highlands and its line still living on the crest.

• Anuradhapura

  The ancient capital of Sri Lanka and one of Theravada Buddhism's oldest living holy places — home to the Sri Maha Bodhi tree and the great brick stupas of the early island kingdom.

• Apoala

  The Mixtec valley of origin in the Oaxacan highlands — Yuta Tnoho, the river the lords came from — where a great tree gave birth to the first Ñuu Savi nobles in the Codex Yuta Tnoho, and where the river, the cave, and the Serpent's Tail falls remain.

• Apuolė

  The great Curonian hillfort above the Luoba in northwestern Lithuania — the first place in all the Baltic lands named in a written source, besieged by a Swedish fleet in 853 and entered into the record of Europe through Rimbert's life of Saint Ansgar.

• Aralar

  A karstic limestone range straddling Gipuzkoa and Navarre, one of the densest megalithic landscapes of the Basque Country, where the goddess Mari lodges in the peaks and the dragon Herensuge in the caves, and the Romanesque sanctuary of San Miguel in Excelsis is laid deliberately on top.

• Archbasilica of St John Lateran

  The cathedral of Rome and seat of the pope as the city's bishop — the oldest of the four papal basilicas, ranked in tradition as the mother church of the Latin West.

• Arkona

  The chalk-headland temple-fortress of the Slavic Rani on Rügen, seat of the four-headed god Svetovit and his oracle, sacked by a Danish crusade in 1168 to end west-Slavic paganism.

• Armaztsikhe (Bagineti)

  Armaztsikhe-Bagineti, the fortress-acropolis of the god Armazi above the meeting of the Mtkvari and Aragvi rivers — the royal citadel of ancient Mtskheta, capital of Kartli, the eastern-Georgian kingdom the classical writers called Iberia (the Caucasian one, unrelated to Spain) — where excavation has laid bare a six-apse temple, a palace, and the bilingual Stele of Serapeitis beneath the stone the missionaries say the idol fell from.

• Assin Manso

  The Nnonkonsuo or "Slave River" at Assin Manso in Ghana's Central Region, where captives took a last bath before the coastal forts and where, since 1998, the African diaspora returns through a "Door of Return."

• Astuvansalmi

  The painted cliff on Lake Yovesi in the Saimaa system of southeastern Finland, one of the largest rock-art sites in the country, where Stone Age hunter-fishers covered a sheer red-brown rock with some seventy ochre figures of elk, boats, hands, and a woman holding a bow, and left amber and arrowheads in the water below.

• Babylon

  Marduk's city on the Euphrates — the Ishtar Gate, the akitu procession route, Esagila, and the ziggurat Etemenanki, remembered in Genesis as the Tower of Babel.

• Baekdu Mountain

  A volcanic peak on the China–North Korea border, crowned by a vast caldera lake, held in Korean tradition as the place where the nation's founding myth begins.

• Bagan

  Bagan (Pagan) — the great temple-city on the east bank of the Irrawaddy, capital of the first unified Burmese kingdom from 1044, where over two thousand Buddhist temples and stupas survive across the dry plain; the ground on which King Anawrahta made the cult of the Thirty-Seven Nats a religion of the whole realm, enshrining the spirits at the Shwezigon as devotees of the Buddha.

• Bagrati Cathedral

  The early-eleventh-century Georgian Orthodox cathedral of Kutaisi — a landmark of medieval Caucasian church architecture, ruined for three centuries and contentiously rebuilt in modern times.

• Bandiagara Escarpment

  The 150-kilometer sandstone cliff of central Mali, tiered from Toloy granaries to Tellem burial-caves to the living Dogon villages that keep them — a UNESCO-listed sacred landscape read as closely as any text.

• Barhan Uula

  A sacred peak of about 2,514 meters on the western wall of the Barguzin valley northeast of Lake Baikal — one mountain held holy by two liturgies at once, the shamanic throne of the master-spirit Barkhan Baabai and, in the Buddhist reading, the guardian of the Dharma from the north.

• Basilica and Expiatory Church of the Holy Family (Sagrada Família)

  Antoni Gaudí's unfinished Barcelona basilica, conceived as a Bible in stone — its structure and ornament built to carry an explicit Catholic theological program.

• Basilica of Saint-Denis

  The royal abbey church north of Paris, rebuilt under Abbot Suger in the 1140s — long regarded as the birthplace of Gothic architecture and a building shaped by a metaphysics of light.

• Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi

  The church raised over the tomb of Francis of Assisi — the Franciscan mother church, and one of the founding monuments of Western narrative sacred painting.

• Basilica of San Vitale

  The sixth-century octagonal church of Ravenna, famed for its mosaics of Justinian and Theodora and counted among the finest survivals of early Byzantine art in the West.

• Bear Butte

  Bear Butte (Lakota Matȟó Pahá, "Bear Mountain"; Cheyenne Noahvose) — a laccolith near Sturgis, South Dakota, at the edge of the Black Hills; a living vision-quest and pilgrimage mountain sacred to the Lakota, Cheyenne, and other nations, a National Historic Landmark, and the focus of modern access and protection contests.

• Berlin Cathedral

  The Hohenzollern court church on Berlin's Museum Island — the principal Evangelical church of the city and the dynastic burial place of Prussia's royal house.

• Birutė Hill

  A wooded sacred hill above the dunes at Palanga on the Baltic coast, bound to the legend of the priestess Birutė and to a late-pagan summit sanctuary read by archaeologists as a sun-watching observatory.

• Boabeng-Fiema

  Twin Akan villages near Nkoranza in central Ghana where the mona and black-and-white colobus monkeys are held sacred as children of the deity Daworo, given human burial, and protected by taboo into one of West Africa's last colobus strongholds.

• Bodh Gaya

  The town in Bihar where Siddhartha Gautama is held to have awakened beneath a pipal tree — the navel of the Buddhist world and first of its four great pilgrimage places.

• Bogd Khan Mountain

  The forested holy mountain south of Ulaanbaatar, set aside under Qing administration in the later eighteenth century and counted among the oldest officially protected places on earth.

• Bonampak

  A small Classic Maya center in the Chiapas forest whose three painted rooms hold the most complete surviving picture of a Maya court at war.

• Borobudur

  The great ninth-century Mahayana Buddhist monument of central Java — a stepped pyramid of stone, read by its builders' tradition as a mandala and an ascent.

• Bourges Cathedral

  The Gothic cathedral of Saint-Étienne at Bourges, famed for its Last Judgment portal — and, in a later esoteric reading, treated as a sculpted book of hidden doctrine.

• Boyana Church

  A small medieval Orthodox church on the edge of Sofia, famous for its 1259 frescoes — sacred portraiture of unusual realism, and a high point of Byzantine-Bulgarian religious art.

• Brihadisvara Temple

  The great Chola temple of Shiva at Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu — a monument of Dravidian sacred architecture, crowned by one of South India's tallest temple towers and still in worship.

• Bujang Valley (Kedah)

  Malaysia's richest archaeological landscape, a Hindu-Buddhist entrepot with ancient candi shrines at the peninsula's gateway.

• Burgos Cathedral

  The Gothic cathedral of Santa María in Burgos, Castile — a thirteenth-century monument of Spanish church-building and one of the great pilgrimage stations on the road to Santiago.

• Burkhan Khaldun

  The forested holy mountain of the Khentii range, refuge and place of worship of the Mongols' founder and the likely country of his hidden grave, where the sky-cult of the steppe is still enacted on its ovoo-crowned heights.

• Burrungkuy

  An outlier of the Arnhem Land escarpment in Kakadu, whose shelters hold some of Australia's finest rock painting — among it the Lightning Man Namarrkon, repainted within living memory by a senior artist of the Country.

• Bwa Kayiman

  The wood near Cap-Haïtien where, by tradition, a Vodou ceremony on the night of 14 August 1791 sealed the blood-oath that opened the Haitian Revolution — a founding covenant that survives as sacred remembered speech, and whose site and history are contested to this day.

• Byblos

  The ancient Phoenician port north of Beirut whose harbor carried Egyptian papyrus to the Greeks, whose city-goddess and dying god were mourned each spring, and whose name became the Greek word for book and, through it, the Bible.

• Cajamarca

  Northern Inca highland city and thermal sanctuary where Atahualpa was captured, ending the empire.

• Calakmul

  Vast Classic Maya superpower of the Kaan (Snake) dynasty in Campeche, long-time rival of Tikal.

• Candi Sukuh

  Enigmatic 15th-century pyramidal Javanese temple with fertility and metalsmithing iconography on Mount Lawu.

• Canterbury Cathedral

  The cathedral church of the Archbishop of Canterbury and seat of English Christianity — for three centuries the great pilgrimage shrine of the martyred Thomas Becket.

• Canyon de Chelly

  Tséyiʼ, 'inside the rock' — the ancestral red-sandstone canyon of the Dine near Chinle in northeastern Arizona, crowned by Spider Rock where Spider Grandmother is held to have taught the loom, farmed for millennia and swept by Kit Carson's 1863–64 campaign before the Long Walk, and lived in and planted still.

• Cape Burkhan

  The twin-peaked marble headland with a through-cave on the western shore of Olkhon Island — the Shaman Rock, seat of the master-spirit of Lake Baikal, long forbidden to women and the impure, and the single holiest place of the Baikal shamanic world.

• Caracol

  Vast Classic Maya city on the Vaca Plateau of western Belize, the power that star-warred Tikal in 562 and whose true scale airborne laser survey first revealed.

• Caral

  Caral — the five-thousand-year-old Sacred City in Peru's Supe Valley, the oldest urban ceremonial center in the Americas, whose platform pyramids and sunken circular plazas were raised without pottery, without metal weapons, and without a single fortification, at the headwaters of the whole Andean sacred tradition.

• Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

  The Russian Orthodox cathedral in Moscow raised to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon, dynamited under Stalin, and rebuilt in the 1990s on its original ground.

• Cerro de la Estrella

  The low volcanic hill above Iztapalapa, called Huixachtlan in Nahuatl, where once in every fifty-two years the Mexica let every fire in the world die and then, at the turning of the calendar round, kindled a single new flame to keep the Fifth Sun alive.

• Cerro Sechin (Casma-Sechin Complex)

  Early coastal temple in the Casma valley famed for stone reliefs of warriors and dismembered bodies.

• Cerveteri

  The Etruscan Caere, whose Banditaccia necropolis is a city of the dead laid out like a city of the living — tumuli and tomb-streets, chambers cut as houses, and the home carried into the grave.

• Chaco Canyon

  Chaco Canyon (Chaco Culture National Historical Park), New Mexico — the Ancestral-Puebloan ceremonial and trade center of c. 850–1150 CE, with the great houses, the great kivas, the dead-straight road network, and the Fajada Butte Sun Dagger; UNESCO World Heritage since 1987, and an ancestral homeland of the living Pueblo nations.

• Chak Chak

  A fire-blackened cave shrine in the desert mountains of central Iran, holiest of the Zoroastrian mountain pilgrimages, where a dripping spring is held to be the rock weeping for a lost princess.

• Chamseongdan (Manisan)

  The dry-laid stone heaven-altar on the summit of Manisan on Ganghwa Island, held by tradition to be where Dangun made offering to Heaven, and where the nation still kindles its sacred fire.

• Chavín de Huántar

  Chavín de Huántar — the Formative-period oracle-temple in highland Áncash, Peru (c. 1200–500 BCE), whose underground galleries, fanged Lanzón monolith, tenon heads, and conch-shell acoustics engineered a pan-Andean pilgrimage encounter with the god two millennia before the Inca.

• Chichen Itza

  Postclassic Maya metropolis in Yucatan with the pyramid of Kukulkan, a great ballcourt, and a sacred cenote of sacrifice.

• Church of Our Lady (Dresden Frauenkirche)

  The Baroque Lutheran church of Dresden — destroyed in the 1945 firebombing, left as a ruin for half a century, and rebuilt by 2005 as a self-declared monument of reconciliation.

• Church of the Holy Sepulchre

  The Jerusalem church raised over the sites Christian tradition holds to be Christ's crucifixion and tomb — shared, contested, and home of the annual Holy Fire.

• Church of the Nativity

  The basilica at Bethlehem raised over a cave that Christian tradition holds to be the birthplace of Jesus — among the oldest churches still in continuous liturgical use.

• Coba

  A great Maya city of the northern Yucatan lowlands, built among shallow lagoons and ruling its world along the densest network of raised white roads the Maya ever laid, one of them running arrow-straight for a hundred kilometers to Yaxuna.

• Cologne Cathedral

  The great Gothic cathedral of Cologne on the Rhine, raised over the reputed relics of the Three Magi and ranked for centuries among the foremost pilgrimage sites of medieval Europe.

• Copan

  Classic Maya kingdom in western Honduras celebrated for its sculptural stelae and the Hieroglyphic Stairway.

• Coricancha

  The Qorikancha, 'the golden enclosure' at the heart of Cusco — the Inca sun-temple sheathed in hammered gold, seat of the royal mummies and origin of the ceque lines, its ashlar masonry outlasting the church raised upon it.

• Cuicuilco

  Early circular pyramid city in the Basin of Mexico, ruined by the Xitle volcano c. 1st century CE.

• Cusco

  The Inca capital Qosqo, 'the navel' of Tawantinsuyu — a puma-bodied city whose sacred heart, the Coricancha, threw out some forty-one ceque sight-lines strung with 328 shrines across the Andean landscape.

• Dankoli

  A great open-air vodun pilgrimage shrine near Savalou in the hills of central Benin, a peg-studded earthen mound where petitioners strike a bargain with the vodun in their own voice and return to pay the vow when the wish comes true.

• Delphi

  The sanctuary of Apollo on Parnassus where the Pythia spoke the god's answers — navel of the world, seat of the Pythian Games, and oracle of the Greek world for over a thousand years.

• Đền Sòng

  The battle-site temple of Liễu Hạnh in Bỉm Sơn, Thanh Hóa — reputed ground of her fierce Sòng Sơn manifestation and the great contest against the Nội Đạo Tràng, built under Lê Hiển Tông and famed as the most numinous shrine in the land of Thanh.

• Đền Trần

  The ancestral temple-complex of the Trần dynasty at Lộc Vượng in Nam Định — three halls on the site of the old second capital of Thiên Trường, the pre-eminent seat of the Father cult of Đức Thánh Trần, and home of the lunar-new-year Khai Ấn seal-opening.

• Dendera

  The great temple complex of Hathor on the Nile's west bank — one of the best-preserved sanctuaries of ancient Egypt, and home of the famous Dendera zodiac.

• Djenne-Djenno

  One of sub-Saharan Africa's oldest cities, a Niger floodplain urban center with ancestral terracotta figures.

• Doany Ndramisara

  The four-relics shrine of the Sakalava kings of Boina in the Tsararano quarter of Mahajanga — custodian of the royal dady and seat of the annual July fanompoa be, the bath of the relics.

• Dodona

  The sanctuary in the mountains of northwestern Greece that the Greeks held to be their oldest oracle — where Zeus answered through the rustling of a sacred oak.

• Eflatun Pınar

  A Hittite imperial spring-monument near Beyşehir in southwestern Anatolia, where a built stone pool is fed from below and its carved facade sets the storm-god, the sun, and the mountains above the living water.

• El Cobre

  The Cuban village in the copper hills west of Santiago whose hilltop basilica holds the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre — the island's holiest Marian shrine, national patroness, and, in Regla de Ocha, the syncretic seat of the river-orisha Ochún.

• El Mirador

  Massive Preclassic Maya city in northern Peten, home to La Danta, one of the largest pyramids by volume on Earth.

• El Rincón

  The National Sanctuary of San Lázaro at El Rincón outside Havana — a leprosarium chapel become Cuba's second-greatest pilgrimage, where each 16-17 December penitents pay their promesas in the body to the beggar-saint who is at once the orisha Babalú-Ayé.

• Eleusis

  The sanctuary of Demeter and Kore west of Athens, seat of the Eleusinian Mysteries from Mycenaean times to the Gothic sack of 396 CE — the most famous initiation of the ancient world.

• Emain Macha

  The hilltop earthwork in County Armagh that the legends made the capital of Ulster and the seat of King Conchobar, where Iron-Age builders raised a forty-meter temple of oak and then burned and buried it in a single deliberate act.

• eMakhosini

  The sacred valley on the White Mfolozi south of Ulundi where the ancestor-kings of the Zulu royal house lie buried — the Place of the Kings, cradle of the amaZulu, and a living landscape of ancestral address.

• Entremont

  The fortified hilltop capital of the Salyes above Aix-en-Provence, whose seated stone heroes, head-pillars, and pierced human skulls make it the foremost witness to the Gaulish cult of the head.

• Erechtheion

  The Ionic temple on the Athenian Acropolis that gathered the city's oldest cults — Athena Polias, Poseidon-Erechtheus, and the tokens of their contest for Athens.

• Eridu

  The Sumerian first city of the world, holy place of the freshwater apsu and cult-seat of Enki, beneath whose ruined ziggurat archaeologists found eighteen temples built one atop another over two thousand years.

• Etchmiadzin Cathedral

  The mother church of the Armenian Apostolic Church at Vagharshapat — often called the oldest cathedral in the world, built where Gregory the Illuminator is said to have seen Christ descend.

• Etemenanki

  The great ziggurat of Marduk at Babylon — seven receding stages climbed by a triple stair, the cosmic bond of heaven and earth, and the likeliest original of the Tower of Babel.

• Florence Cathedral

  The cathedral of Florence — Santa Maria del Fiore, crowned by Brunelleschi's dome — standing at the centre of the city that hosted the Renaissance recovery of Plato and the Hermetic books.

• Fontes Sequanae

  The healing sanctuary at the source of the Seine in Burgundy, where the goddess Sequana received the sick, who left her carved bodies of oak and bronze in the waterlogged ground.

• Gamla Uppsala

  The royal and cultic heart of pagan Sweden — three great burial mounds, a long royal hall, and the gold temple Adam of Bremen reported with horror.

• Gangkhar Puensum

  The highest mountain in Bhutan and the highest summit on earth never reached — left unclimbed under a national ban tied to local belief that the peaks are the dwellings of deities.

• Gede Ruins

  Abandoned medieval Swahili town near Malindi with stone mosques, palace and pillar tombs, mysteriously deserted by the 17th century.

• Geghard Monastery

  The partly rock-cut Armenian Apostolic monastery in the Azat gorge, named for the Holy Lance once kept there, with a spring rising inside the living rock.

• Geoglyphs of Acre

  Hundreds of monumental geometric earthwork enclosures in western Brazilian Amazon, evidence of large pre-Columbian forest societies.

• Glastonbury

  The isle of Avalon in Somerset — oldest-church legend, Arthur's grave, the Tor, Chalice Well, the Christmas-flowering thorn, and abbey ruins at the heart of Britain's alternative spirituality.

• Gournay-sur-Aronde

  A Belgic Gaulish war-sanctuary in the valley of the Aronde, a ditched enclosure where iron weapons were ruined and offered and sacrificed oxen were left to rot, read today from its own buried deposits rather than from the words of strangers.

• Great Pyramid of Cholula (Tlachihualtepetl)

  The largest pyramid by volume on earth, a Quetzalcoatl sanctuary and pilgrimage center crowned by a Spanish church.

• Guanabacoa

  The old colonial town on the eastern side of Havana bay, one of the oldest and deepest seats of Afro-Cuban religion, where in the cabildos de nación the three reglas — Regla de Ocha, Palo Monte, and the Abakuá society — struck root and are served to this day.

• Gudanis Jvari

  The Cross of Gudani above its village on the Aragvi side of Khevsureti, paramount warrior-shrine of the province, seat of the fighting khati addressed as Baaduri, and a treasury of silver, banners, and bells that lay open on the mountain under no guard but the cross's own sanctity.

• Gunung Agung

  Bali's highest peak, an active andesitic stratovolcano read as the local Mount Meru — the axis mundi toward which the sacred direction kaja turns the whole island, seat of Mahadewa, source of the subak's waters, and the mountain whose 1963 eruption fell during the once-a-century Eka Dasa Rudra rite.

• Gyeryongsan

  The granite "Rooster-Dragon Mountain" at the center of the Korean peninsula, charged by geomancy and by the Jeonggamnok prophecy of a coming dynasty, and long the densest gathering of shamans, seekers, and new religions in the country.

• Haleakalā

  The House of the Sun — the vast dormant shield volcano of East Maui, where the demigod Māui snared the sun to lengthen the day, a wahi pana whose summit remains a living place of ceremony and burial.

• Harar Jugol

  Walled Islamic holy city of the Horn, called the fourth holiest of Islam, with 82 mosques, Sufi shrines and a living scholarly tradition.

• Harmandir Sahib

  The central gurdwara of Sikhism at Amritsar — the gold-clad "Golden Temple" set in a sacred pool, built with four doors as a sign that it stands open to all.

• Harran

  The ancient moon-city of Upper Mesopotamia, seat of the god Sin and last redoubt of organized Near Eastern paganism, where Crassus' legions died and star-worshipping scholars carried Greek learning into Arabic.

• Hattusa

  Hattusa — the walled capital of the Hittite Great Kings on the central Anatolian plateau, ringed by miles of fortification and monumental gates, whose buried cuneiform archive at Büyükkale recovered nearly the entire religion of Bronze-Age Hatti.

• Hedeby

  The greatest trading town of the Viking Age, on the neck of Jutland between the North Sea and the Baltic, where an Arab traveler and a Frankish missionary alike recorded the life and the gods of the heathen north.

• Hegra

  Hegra (al-Hijr, Mada'in Salih) — the carved-tomb necropolis of the Nabataeans in the Hijaz of northwestern Arabia, second city of the kingdom after Petra, its facades crowned with merlons and eagles and inscribed with dated dedications that call down Dushara and Manawat on the violator of the grave; the first World Heritage Site in Saudi Arabia.

• Heliopolis

  The ancient Egyptian city of the sun, center of the cult of Ra and Atum and seat of the Ennead — one of the oldest and most influential homes of Egyptian theology.

• Hermopolis Magna

  The ancient cult center of Thoth, the Egyptian god later identified with Hermes Trismegistus.

• Hōryū-ji

  The Buddhist temple at Ikaruga in Nara Prefecture whose central buildings are the oldest surviving wooden structures anywhere — an Asuka-period monastery still in use.

• Howick Falls

  The ~95 m plunge of the uMngeni River at Howick, KwaZulu-Natal — kwaNogqaza, 'the place of the tall one,' a waterfall whose dark pool is held to be the dwelling of the inkanyamba and which, by the tradition's own law, only the izangoma may approach.

• Hydesville

  The hamlet in Wayne County, New York, where raps in the Fox family cottage answered questions on March 31, 1848 — the founding site of Modern Spiritualism, marked by an obelisk since 1927.

• Idanre Hills

  A wilderness of bare granite domes in the Yoruba country where the people of Idanre kept their hill-town for centuries before descending to the plain in 1923, leaving the heights as shrine, monument, and place of return.

• Ifugao Rice Terraces

  The hand-carved wet-rice terraces of Ifugao on Luzon — a sacred agricultural landscape fed by ridgetop forest and guarded by the carved bulul rice-gods, chanted over in the hudhud, and now the center of a live quarrel over whether it is two thousand years old or four hundred.

• Igbo-Ukwu

  Igbo site with sophisticated 9th-century bronze ritual objects, evidence of an early West African metalworking elite.

• Ile-Ife

  The Yoruba creation-cradle in southwestern Nigeria, where the world was made on a chain over the deep, source of crowned kingship and of the naturalistic Ife heads.

• Inuksuk Point

  The treeless peninsula on the Foxe Peninsula of Baffin Island, Nunavut, that holds one of the greatest concentrations of inuksuit on earth — more than a hundred Inuit stone figures, standing "in the likeness of a person," that once told travelers where to find caribou, cache, and safe passage, and whose silhouette now sits on a territorial flag.

• Iréli

  The tiered Dogon cliff-village at the foot of the Bandiagara Escarpment near Sangha, where living granaries crowd the base of the wall and the mud-brick tombs of the ancient Tellem hang in the rock far overhead — one village that is really two settlements stacked in the stone.

• Ise Grand Shrine

  The supreme shrine of the kami world at Ise in Mie Prefecture, dwelling of the sun-goddess Amaterasu, where the imperial mirror is kept unseen and the whole sanctuary is rebuilt in fresh cypress every twenty years.

• Isla del Sol

  The Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, Bolivia — the Inca origin-place where the creator called the sun out of an age of darkness at the Titikala sacred rock, an Aymara pilgrimage island whose sanctity runs millennia deeper than the Inca.

• Itsukushima Shrine

  The Shinto shrine built over the tidal flats of Miyajima island in Hiroshima Bay, famous for the great vermilion torii that stands in the sea.

• Izumo Taisha

  The great shrine of the land-master kami Ōkuninushi on the Shimane coast, seat of the unseen realm, the oldest of the shrine-styles, and the place where all the gods of Japan are said to gather in the tenth lunar month.

• Jelling

  The royal monument complex in Jutland where the tenth-century Danish kings Gorm the Old and Harald Bluetooth set their conversion in granite — two great mounds, a vast stone ship, and the runestone that names Denmark and shows the oldest image of Christ in the North.

• Jirisan

  The great southern massif of the Korean mainland, highest ground south of the northern border, seat of a mountain-mother goddess and a dense shamanic and Buddhist sacred landscape, set aside in 1967 as Korea's first national park.

• Jordan River

  The river running from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea — site of the Israelite crossing into Canaan and of the baptism of Jesus, long read as a threshold of passage and renewal.

• Ka'ba-ye Zartosht

  A windowless Achaemenid stone tower at Naqsh-e Rostam whose original use nobody has proven — fire-house, strongroom, or tomb — and whose blank walls the Sasanians used to cut two of ancient Iran's greatest inscriptions.

• Kaaba

  The cube-shaped shrine at the center of the Great Mosque in Mecca — the direction Muslims face in prayer and the focus of the hajj pilgrimage.

• Kanchenjunga

  The world's third-highest mountain, on the Nepal–Sikkim border, held by the peoples of Sikkim to be the seat of a guardian deity — its summit left untrodden by some climbers out of respect.

• Karnak

  The vast sanctuary of Amun-Ra at Thebes in Upper Egypt — built and rebuilt over some two thousand years, and the largest religious precinct of the ancient world.

• Kerkouane

  The only fully preserved Punic town, on Cap Bon in Tunisia, abandoned about 250 BCE in the First Punic War and never built over, where the houses, the baths, and the sign of Tanit in the floors give the daily world of Carthage that the literary sources never record.

• Kernavė

  The five-hillfort complex above the Pajauta valley of the Neris, a pagan-era and early-state center of medieval Lithuania whose buried town and cemeteries hold some ten thousand years of Baltic settlement and the pagan-to-Christian passage.

• Khakhmati

  The great Khevsur highland sanctuary at the last village under the Bear-Cross pass — Khakhmatis Jvari, seat of Giorgi the demon-slaying child-of-god and of Samdzimari the kaji king's daughter, one of the chief houses of the surviving jvari-khati shrine religion of the eastern Georgian mountains.

• Khyunglung

  The ruined cliff-city of cave-dwellings on the upper Sutlej in far-western Tibet, remembered in the Bon tradition as the Silver Castle of the Garuda Valley and a capital of the ancient Zhangzhung kingdom near Mount Kailash.

• Kīlauea

  Kīlauea — the active shield volcano on the southeast of Hawaiʻi Island whose summit pit Halemaʻumaʻu is, in the living Hawaiian tradition, the house and body of the fire-goddess Pelehonuamea; a wahi kapu served with chant and offering at the crater rim, within Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park.

• Kilwa Kisiwani Sultanate

  Wealthiest medieval Swahili sultanate; its coral-stone Great Mosque and Husuni Kubwa palace controlled the Sofala gold trade.

• Kinkaku-ji Temple

  The gold-leafed pavilion of a Rinzai Zen temple in Kyoto, its upper storeys mirrored in the pond before it — first a shōgun's villa, later a monastery.

• Kiyomizu-dera

  The Buddhist temple in the eastern hills of Kyoto, famous for the great wooden stage built out over the slope and for the Otowa waterfall below it.

• Konark Sun Temple

  The thirteenth-century Odishan temple built as a colossal stone chariot for the sun-god Surya, its sanctum aligned so that the first light of dawn reached the deity.

• Kul-Oba

  The first great Scythian royal kurgan opened in modern times — a stone-vaulted tomb near Kerch in eastern Crimea, dug in 1830, whose gold founded the recovery of the steppe kings.

• Kumano Sanzan

  The three grand shrines of the Kumano mountains on the Kii Peninsula — Hongū by the river, Hayatama by the sea, Nachi beneath Japan's tallest waterfall — joined into one syncretic pilgrimage paradise where kami and buddha were worshipped as a single power.

• Kumasi

  The Asante capital in the Ghanaian forest zone, seat of the Asantehene at Manhyia and home of the Golden Stool, made a sacred city by the recurring Adae rites.

• Kurukshetra

  The level plain in Haryana that the tradition calls the field of dharma — the ground of the great epic war and of the song the lord sang before the first arrow.

• Lake Akan

  The caldera lake of eastern Hokkaido, cradled between the male and female Akan mountains, whose bed grows the marimo — the rare velvet-green algae balls the Ainu prize — and on whose southern shore stands the largest Ainu kotan in Hokkaido, a living center of carving, dance, and the October rite that sends the marimo home to the water with thanks.

• Lake Baikal

  The great rift lake of southern Siberia — the oldest and deepest lake on earth and a fifth of its living fresh water, and to the Buryat not a lake at all but Baigal dalai, the sacred sea, ruled by the water-spirits and ringed with the holy capes of the Baikal shamanic world.

• Lake Bosomtwe

  Ghana's only natural lake, a 1.07-million-year-old meteorite-impact crater southeast of Kumasi that is itself the Asante obosom Twe — a closed water where the dead take their leave and no iron may touch the surface.

• Lake Mungo

  A dry Pleistocene lakebed in far western New South Wales whose eroding dune gave up the oldest known cremation on earth and an ochre-strewn ceremonial burial, evidence of Aboriginal ritual life more than forty thousand years deep.

• Lake Titicaca

  Lake Titicaca — the vast high-altitude lake on the Peru-Bolivia border, at c. 3,812 m the highest large navigable lake in the world; in Andean tradition the origin-water where the creator Wiraqocha raised the sun from the dark before there was any light, the emergence-place of the first Inca, and the sacred sea of the Aymara.

• Lake Tritriva

  The deep crater lake of the Vakinankaratra highlands near Antsirabe — walled in gneiss cliffs, set under fady, and told as the grave of two drowned lovers whose intertwined trees bleed and whose water is said to redden before a death and to keep its own contrary calendar.

• Lakou Soukri

  The great Kongo lakou near Gonaïves whose mid-August pilgrimage carries the drums, waters, and spirits of Central Africa in Haiti — a living family compound where the Kongo rite of Vodou is served across generations.

• Lalibela Rock-Hewn Churches

  Eleven monolithic churches carved from living rock under the Zagwe dynasty, conceived as a New Jerusalem and still a pilgrimage center.

• Lily Dale

  The gated Spiritualist camp on Cassadaga Lake in western New York — incorporated 1879, seat of the NSAC, last address of the Fox cottage, and a town where mediumship is still the resident trade.

• Lincoln Cathedral

  The English Gothic cathedral at Lincoln — a medieval shrine of pilgrimage, once the tallest building in the world, and home of the carved grotesque known as the Lincoln Imp.

• Lotus Temple

  The lotus-shaped Bahá'í House of Worship in Delhi, completed in 1986 — a nine-sided sanctuary open to prayer from every religion and to no sermon.

• Luxor Temple

  The great Theban temple bound to Egyptian kingship and the annual Opet festival — and, in one modern esoteric reading, a deliberate diagram of the ideal human form.

• Machu Picchu

  Inca royal estate and ceremonial complex above the Urubamba, aligned to solstices and sacred mountain horizons.

• Mahabodhi Temple

  The temple at Bodh Gaya in northern India marking the spot where, in Buddhist tradition, Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment beneath the Bodhi tree.

• Malinalco

  The Aztec sanctuary cut whole from the living rock above the town of Malinalco, its round Cuauhcalli entered through a serpent's carved mouth — the initiation-house of the eagle and jaguar warrior orders, left unfinished at the conquest.

• Marib

  Ma'rib — the capital of the kingdom of Saba on the desert edge of the Yemeni highlands, seat of the great dam across the Wadi Adhanah and of the oval temple of Almaqah at Awwam, the heart of the incense kingdom that scripture and legend remembered as Sheba.

• Mauna Kea

  The white mountain of Hawaiʻi Island, reckoned in the great genealogical chant as the firstborn child of the sky-father and earth-mother, the piko binding island to sky, and the contested summit where a city of observatories rose against a temple.

• Memphis

  The first capital of unified Egypt and city of the creator-god Ptah, where the priests taught that the world was spoken into being — now a ruin sunk among the palm groves at Mit Rahina.

• Menri Monastery

  The mother monastery of Yungdrung Bon and seat of its supreme head, the Menri Trizin — founded 1405 in Tsang, destroyed after 1959, and rebuilt from an empty succession at Dolanji in the Indian Himalaya.

• Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral

  The cathedral on Mexico City's central square, raised by the Spanish over the ruined sacred precinct of the Aztec capital — the largest such church in the Americas.

• Milan Cathedral

  The great Gothic cathedral of Milan, begun in 1386 and built over nearly six centuries — seat of the city's archbishops and one of the largest churches in Christendom.

• Mitla

  Mitla — the Zapotec Lyobaa, "place of rest" and threshold of the dead in the upper Tlacolula valley of Oaxaca, its palaces sheathed in mortarless greca fretwork and its cruciform tombs the necropolis of the Cloud People's kings and high priests, over whose sealed underworld the colonial church of San Pablo still stands.

• Monte Albán

  Monte Albán — the great Zapotec mountain-capital leveled from a ridge some 400 m above the Valley of Oaxaca around 500 BCE, a sacred topography of plaza, danzantes and tombs that governed the first Zapotec state for a thousand years and now, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, keeps the Cloud People's ancestors above the city of Oaxaca.

• Montségur

  The ruined Pyrenean fortress where, in March 1244, the last refuge of the Cathar church ended in a single great fire below the rock.

• Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba

  The great hypostyle mosque raised by the Umayyads of al-Andalus, later consecrated as a cathedral — a single building that has served two religions in turn.

• Motya

  The Phoenician-Punic island-city in the Marsala lagoon of western Sicily — walls, causeway, kothon, and tophet preserved beneath a small island, broken by Dionysius I of Syracuse in 397 BCE and never fully reoccupied.

• Mount Arafat

  The granite hill on the plain east of Mecca where pilgrims keep the noon-to-sunset standing that is the climactic rite of the Hajj.

• Mount Athos

  The self-governing monastic republic of Eastern Orthodoxy — twenty monasteries on a Greek peninsula, chartered in 972, closed to women for a millennium, and given over wholly to unceasing prayer.

• Mount Banahaw

  Mount Banahaw — a dormant andesitic volcano on the Quezon-Laguna border of Luzon, held by folk-Catholic, Rizalista, and mystical devotees to be a holy mountain and New Jerusalem, its more than a hundred caves and springs walked as the sacred puestos of a living pilgrimage.

• Mount Bonri

  Mount Bonri (Kongpo Bönri, 'the Bon mountain') — the holiest pilgrimage mountain of Bon, rising on the north bank of the Yarlung Tsangpo in the Kongpo region of southeastern Tibet; the one mountain personally consecrated by the founder Tonpa Shenrab and circled counter-clockwise, the reverse of the Buddhist kora.

• Mount Fuji

  The volcano of central Honshū long held sacred in Japan — a Shinto and Buddhist pilgrimage mountain, and the focus of the Edo-period Fuji-kō devotional associations.

• Mount Hiei

  The holy mountain northeast of Kyoto whose monastery, Enryaku-ji, was for centuries the cradle and the conscience of Japanese Buddhism.

• Mount Kailash

  A peak in western Tibet held sacred by four religions, identified with the cosmic mountain at the center of the world — circumambulated by pilgrims and, by tradition, never climbed.

• Mount Makiling

  An inactive stratovolcano on the Laguna–Batangas border of Luzon, read from the lakeshore as a reclining woman — at once the body of the diwata Maria Makiling, a geothermal engine that gives Los Baños its baths, and a 4,244-hectare university forest reserve.

• Mount Miwa

  The wooded conical mountain in the old Yamato heartland worshipped not as the seat of a kami but as the kami's own body — the shrine at its foot, Ōmiwa, having no inner sanctuary because there is nothing to house, the oldest and most primordial form of the cult the land preserves.

• Mount Popa

  Mount Popa — a long-dormant stratovolcano rising from the dry central Myanmar plain southeast of Bagan whose pilgrimage focus is Taung Kalat, a sheer volcanic plug crowned by a gilded monastery reached by 777 steps and ringed with nat shrines; in the living Burmese tradition the household capital of the Thirty-Seven Nats and the seat of Min Mahagiri and Popa Medaw.

• Mount Taylor

  Tsoodził, 'turquoise mountain' — a dormant stratovolcano northeast of Grants, New Mexico, the Diné sacred mountain of the south and one of the four that bound Dinétah, fastened to the earth with a stone knife of flint and dressed in turquoise; sacred also to Acoma, Laguna, Zuni, and the Hopi, mined for uranium, and protected in 2009 as a Traditional Cultural Property upheld by the New Mexico Supreme Court.

• Mount Tlaloc

  The stone-walled summit shrine on the eastern rim of the Valley of Mexico where the rulers of the Aztec world climbed each spring to petition the rain-god at the source.

• Murujuga

  The peninsula and islands of the Pilbara coast that the Europeans called the Burrup, holding the densest concentration of rock engravings on earth — perhaps a million images pecked into ancient stone across tens of thousands of years on the Country of the Ngarda-ngarli.

• Mutso

  The fortress-village on the near-vertical rock above the Andaki gorge in Khevsureti — its tower-terraces, its dry-stone crypts, and the Broliskalo Jvari at the summit, an abandoned Khevsur stronghold rebuilt stone by stone in the 2010s.

• Mỹ Sơn

  The ruined Shaivite sanctuary of the Cham kingdom in central Vietnam — a cluster of brick temple-towers built and rebuilt across roughly a millennium of Hindu worship.

• Nangzhig Monastery

  Nangzhig Monastery (Snang zhig dgon; locally Narshi) — a monastic town of many hundreds of Bon monks on the grasslands above Ngawa in Amdo, northern Sichuan; the largest Yungdrung Bon monastery in the world and the principal center of Bon inside the People's Republic, with dialectic and meditation colleges that train Geshe scholars and A-tri retreatants.

• Naqsh-e Rostam

  A cliff necropolis near Persepolis where four Achaemenid kings lie in cross-cut tombs and the Sasanians carved their triumphs in the same rock.

• Nazca Lines

  The vast field of geoglyphs scored into the desert of Peru's south coast (c. 100 BCE–800 CE) — figures, lines, and trapezoids scraped a hand's-breadth deep into the ground, legible chiefly from the air, and best read as a made landscape of ritual movement in a country that almost never rains.

• Newgrange

  A Neolithic passage tomb raised above the river Boyne around 3200 BCE, its inner chamber lit by the winter-solstice sunrise and remembered in Irish myth as the dwelling of the gods.

• Nibutani

  A district of Biratori in the Saru River valley of Hokkaido, heartland of the modern Ainu, home to two Ainu museums and the legacy of Kayano Shigeru, and site of the 1997 Nibutani Dam ruling — the first Japanese judgment to recognize the Ainu as an indigenous people.

• Nineveh

  Assyria's last and greatest capital opposite Mosul, where the burnt library of Ashurbanipal preserved the lost literature of Mesopotamia until the spade and the decipherers returned it to the world.

• Nippur

  Enlil's holy city in southern Iraq — the Ekur ziggurat, the "bond of heaven and earth," where kings sought legitimacy, scribes kept Sumerian literature, and demon-bowls guarded the last houses.

• Nkandla Forest

  The mist-belt indigenous forest of the Zululand interior that keeps the grave of King Cetshwayo — a sacred-natural site of ancestral presence, kept under royal grave-protocol by the Shezi custodians and managed today as a protected reserve.

• Notre-Dame d'Amiens

  The largest Gothic cathedral in France, raised at Amiens from 1220 — known for its pavement labyrinth and its vast sculptural program, both of which later esoteric writers read as a hidden curriculum.

• Notre-Dame de Chartres

  The Gothic cathedral of Chartres in northern France — renowned for its stained glass and pavement labyrinth, and the focus of later esoteric readings about sacred geometry.

• Notre-Dame de Paris

  The Gothic cathedral on the Île de la Cité, begun in 1163 — and, since Fulcanelli, the most cited site of the claim that medieval church sculpture encodes an alchemical teaching.

• Nunalleq

  The frozen Yup'ik village on the Bering Sea coast of southwest Alaska — a pre-contact winter settlement (c. AD 1350–1670) burned in the Bow and Arrow War Days, whose thawing permafrost has released the world's largest trove of Yup'ik organic artifacts, recovered in a community-led dig owned by the village of Quinhagak and racing the sea that is destroying it.

• Occult Paris

  Paris of the occult revival, c. 1854–1936 — the bookshops, journals, schools, orders, salons, and temples through which the modern magical renaissance moved.

• Olkhon

  The largest island of Lake Baikal and the sacred heart of the Baikal shamanic world — a seventy-two-kilometer spine of steppe, larch, and stone cape held to be the seat of the island's chief lords and the gathering-place of its shamans, its western shore crowned by the pierced Shaman Rock at Cape Burkhan.

• Olkhon Island

  The largest island of Lake Baikal and the spiritual heart of Buryat shamanism, whose white-marble Shaman Rock at Cape Burkhan is held the dwelling of the lord-spirit of the lake.

• Ollantaytambo

  Inca royal estate and temple-fortress in the Sacred Valley with megalithic Sun Temple and living grid town.

• Olympia

  The sanctuary of Zeus in the western Peloponnese — seat of the ancient Olympic Games, of a renowned oracle, and of one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.

• Orongo

  The clifftop ceremonial village on the Rano Kau crater rim of Rapa Nui, center of the tangata manu birdman cult that succeeded the moai-carving age.

• Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove

  The forested river sanctuary of the orisha Osun at Osogbo in Yorubaland, last and fullest of the sacred groves that once ringed every Yoruba town, rebuilt in monumental sculpture and inscribed on the world's heritage list.

• Otgontenger

  The glaciered high peak of the Khangai range, held the abode of the wrathful thunderbolt-deity Ochirvani and worshipped by decree of the Mongolian state, its summit forbidden to climbers.

• Ouidah

  The coastal town of southern Benin that is the spiritual capital of vodun — home to the Temple of the Pythons and the Sacred Forest of Kpasse, and one of the great embarkation ports of the Atlantic slave trade, from whose Door of No Return the vodun crossed the ocean.

• Oyo-Ile

  Ruined imperial capital of the Oyo Empire on the northern Yoruba savanna, its earthwork walls and palace recovered by the spade within Old Oyo National Park.

• Pachacamac

  The great coastal oracle in Peru's Lurín valley, sacred across the Lima, Wari, and Ichma cultures for a thousand years before the Inca crowned it with a Temple of the Sun, and named for Pacha Kamaq, the earth-maker whose two-faced Wari-era effigy survived the conquest.

• Pachacamac

  Great coastal pilgrimage and oracle center near Lima, sacred for over a millennium and revered by the Inca.

• Palenque

  Classic Maya city in Chiapas famed for refined art, inscriptions, and the tomb of king Pakal beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions.

• Pantheon

  The domed Roman temple "to all the gods," rebuilt under Hadrian and in continuous use since — consecrated as a Christian church in the early seventh century.

• Parthenon

  The fifth-century BCE temple of Athena Parthenos crowning the Athenian Acropolis — the most famous building of classical Greece, and a sanctuary that later served three religions.

• Pasargadae

  The first capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, raised by Cyrus the Great on a high plain in Fars — a scatter of palaces in a watered garden, and the plain gabled tomb where the empire's founder still lies alone in the grass.

• Pazyryk

  The frozen Iron-Age kurgan cemetery in the Altai highlands whose permafrost kept the felts, carpets, wagons, and tattooed bodies of the eastern Scythian world that the earth elsewhere dissolves.

• Perperikon

  The rock-cut Thracian acropolis and sanctuary near Kardzhali in the Eastern Rhodope of Bulgaria, worked from the living stone across millennia and proposed — contestedly — as the seat of the wine-fire oracle of Dionysus among the Bessi.

• Persepolis

  The ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire — a terrace of audience halls where the king received the tribute of the nations under the winged sign of the great god, burned by Alexander in 330 BCE.

• Peryn

  A low spit where the Volkhov leaves Lake Ilmen near Novgorod, sanctuary of the thunder-god Perun, whose idol was raised in 980 and thrown into the river at the conversion.

• Petra

  The rock-cut capital of the Nabataeans in southern Jordan, where a caravan kingdom carved its gods, its dead, and its waterworks into the living sandstone.

• Phủ Dầy

  The holiest temple-landscape of the Liễu Hạnh cult and the home ground of Đạo Mẫu, in Vụ Bản, Nam Định — some twenty shrines around the two rival palaces of Tiên Hương and Vân Cát and the goddess's green-stone tomb, with a great third-month pilgrimage festival.

• Phủ Tây Hồ

  The great urban temple of Liễu Hạnh on a peninsula of West Lake in Hà Nội, one of the capital's most-visited pilgrimage sites, founded in tradition on a lakeside meeting between the Mother of the Sky and the scholar-poet Phùng Khắc Khoan.

• Pir-e Naraki

  A Zoroastrian mountain pilgrimage shrine at the foot of Kuh-e Naraki near Mehriz, south of Yazd — one of the six great pirs of the Iranian highlands, held in tradition to mark where the mountain opened to hide a fleeing lady of the last Sasanian house and broke a spring from dry rock, and the site of a living pilgrimage each Mordad.

• Plain of Jars

  Iron Age megalithic field of thousands of stone funerary jars on the Xiangkhouang Plateau, Laos.

• Potala Palace

  The fortress-palace and monastery rising over Lhasa, winter residence and seat of the Dalai Lamas, and a principal sacred center of Tibetan Buddhism.

• Poverty Point

  The Monumental Earthworks of Poverty Point in northeastern Louisiana — six concentric C-shaped ridges and the bird-shaped Mound A, raised between roughly 1700 and 1100 BCE by hunter-fisher-gatherers without agriculture, the largest earthworks of their age in North America and a continental trade hub, inscribed by UNESCO in 2014.

• Prambanan

  The ninth-century Hindu temple compound of central Java, dedicated to the Trimurti and dominated by its towering shrine to Shiva — the largest Hindu monument in Indonesia.

• Prayag

  The triple confluence at Prayagraj where the Ganga and Yamuna join in sight and the lost Sarasvati is held to join unseen — the tirtha-raja, king of pilgrimage-places, and ground of the planet-timed Kumbh bathing.

• Preah Vihear

  The Khmer mountaintop sanctuary of Shiva on the Dângrêk escarpment, built along a single processional axis climbing nearly a kilometre to the cliff's edge.

• Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau

  Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau — the great place of refuge on the Kona coast of Hawaiʻi Island, where a kapu-breaker or a defeated warrior who reached the ground beyond the great lava wall was absolved and made noa; its sanctity rested in the mana of the aliʻi whose bones lay in the Hale o Keawe, and it endures as a National Historical Park kept sacred by the living Kanaka Maoli.

• Puʻukoholā Heiau

  Puʻukoholā Heiau — the massive luakini war-temple raised by Kamehameha I in 1790–91 on the hill above Kawaihae on Hawaiʻi Island, dedicated to his war-god Kū-kā-ʻili-moku upon a prophecy that it would deliver him every island, its stones the stake of the wager and the rival chief Keōua the price the god named; today a National Historic Site and a living place of the Kanaka Maoli.

• Pura Besakih

  Bali's 'mother temple' — a stepped landscape of some twenty-three pura and eighty-six shrines climbing the flank of Gunung Agung, seat of the once-a-century Eka Dasa Rudra, spared by mere meters when the volcano erupted mid-rite in 1963.

• Pura Besakih

  Bali's "mother temple," the largest and holiest complex of Agama Hindu Dharma, a terraced landscape of more than twenty pura on the southwest slope of Gunung Agung, and the seat from which the Balinese keep their island in balance.

• Pura Luhur Uluwatu

  A Balinese sea-temple set on a limestone headland some seventy meters above the Indian Ocean at the southern tip of the Bukit peninsula, counted among the sad-kahyangan pivots, holding the south-west quarter for Rudra and guarding the seaward edge where the island's land gives out.

• Pura Tanah Lot

  A Balinese sea temple on a tidal rock off the Beraban coast in Tabanan, consecrated within tradition by the wandering priest Dang Hyang Nirartha, guarded by banded sea-snakes said to be his sash, severed from the land by the tide twice a day, and shored up in the 1990s until a third of its 'rock' is cast concrete.

• Pura Tirta Empul

  The holy-spring purification temple at Manukaya near Tampaksiring in Gianyar, central Bali, where a spring said to be Indra's water of life feeds a row of stone spouts and pilgrims move in order through the melukat pools; founded around 962 CE under the Warmadewa dynasty and recorded on the Prasasti Manukaya.

• Pura Tirta Empul

  The holy-spring water temple at Manukaya near Tampaksiring in Gianyar, Bali, where a spring said to be Indra's amerta feeds a row of stone spouts and pilgrims move westward through the melukat pools, passing by the poison spouts because the healing water and the venom rise from the same rock.

• Pushkar

  A sacred lake in the Rajasthan desert, ringed by bathing-steps and held to have welled up where the creator let a lotus fall, beside which stands one of the rare temples on earth dedicated to the creator-god himself.

• Pyrgi

  The port-sanctuary of Etruscan Caere on the Tyrrhenian shore, where three gold tablets record a ruler's dedication to a goddess named Uni in Etruscan and Astarte in Phoenician.

• Qajartalik

  A wind-scoured soapstone shelf on an island in Hudson Strait, off Nunavik in northern Quebec, where the ancient Dorset people incised at least 180 human and spirit faces into the working rock of a quarry — the northernmost rock-art site in North America, the only major one in the Arctic, and, since 2018, a Canadian nominee for the UNESCO World Heritage list.

• Qaryat al-Faw

  The painted caravan capital of the kingdom of Kindah at the pass into the Empty Quarter, a town of temples, markets, and frescoed houses under the protection of the god Kahl.

• Qorikancha (Coricancha, Temple of the Sun)

  Inca empire's holiest sanctuary in Cusco, gold-clad temple of Inti from which sacred ceque sightlines radiated.

• Quirigua

  Classic Maya site in Guatemala renowned for the tallest carved stone stelae in the ancient Americas.

• Rambynas

  A sacred hill above the Nemunas in Lithuania Minor — the holy height of an altar-stone, a midsummer-fire festival, and a Baltic people who worshiped the hill, the grove, and the stone rather than building temples.

• Regla

  The historic Afro-Cuban harbor town across the bay from Old Havana, home of the black Virgin of Regla — patroness of the Bay of Havana and, in Regla de Ocha, the syncretic seat of the sea-orisha Yemayá — reached by the little ferry and kept every seventh of September.

• Reims Cathedral

  The High Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame at Reims — coronation church of the kings of France for six centuries, and the site of the royal anointing with holy chrism.

• Rila Monastery

  The largest Orthodox monastery in Bulgaria, founded in the orbit of the tenth-century hermit John of Rila and long held to be a center of Hesychast prayer.

• Roquepertuse

  A Celto-Ligurian hilltop sanctuary near Velaux in Provence whose carved stone portico held human skulls in its niches — the clearest surviving witness to the Gaulish veneration of the head.

• Rosslyn Chapel

  The carved collegiate chapel of the Sinclairs at Roslin, founded 1446 — a hundred Green Men, the Apprentice Pillar, the St Clair charters, and the modern Templar-Grail legend built upon it.

• Rouen Cathedral

  The Gothic cathedral of Rouen in Normandy — a layered medieval church whose carved porches were later read, in esoteric literature, as a book of alchemical signs.

• Rova of Antananarivo

  The royal palace and tomb complex on Analamanga, the highest hill of the Merina capital — seat of the highland sovereigns, whose holiest rooms were the wooden tomb-houses of the royal dead; burned on 6 November 1995 and rebuilt as a museum by 2020.

• Rudolfine Prague

  The imperial capital of Rudolf II, 1583–1612 — the castle Kunstkammer, the court of astronomers, alchemists, and angel-readers, and the golden age whose legends Prague still tells.

• Sacré-Cœur

  The white basilica crowning Montmartre in Paris, dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and built as a national act of penance after the defeat of 1871.

• Sacsayhuamán

  Megalithic Inca ceremonial fortress above Cusco with colossal precision-fitted ramparts and a sun-festival plaza.

• Saint Basil's Cathedral

  The Orthodox cathedral on Moscow's Red Square, raised under Ivan IV to mark the conquest of Kazan — nine chapels gathered around a central tower, long read as an image of the heavenly city.

• Saint Isaac's Cathedral

  The great neoclassical domed cathedral of Saint Petersburg, raised over four decades in the nineteenth century as the chief Orthodox church of the imperial Russian capital.

• Saint Paul Outside the Walls

  One of Rome's four major papal basilicas, raised over the traditional tomb of the apostle Paul on the road to Ostia and held to mark his burial place.

• Saint Sophia Cathedral, Kyiv

  The eleventh-century cathedral of Kyivan Rus' dedicated to Holy Wisdom — its Byzantine mosaics among the oldest surviving in the East Slavic world.

• Sainte-Chapelle

  The royal chapel on the Île de la Cité in Paris, built in the 1240s to house the Crown of Thorns and other relics of Christ's Passion — a reliquary raised in stone and glass.

• Salisbury Cathedral

  The English Gothic cathedral church of the diocese of Salisbury, built almost in one campaign from 1220 and crowned by the tallest church spire in Britain.

• Samothrace

  Island sanctuary of the Great Gods in the north Aegean, where pilgrims of every station took the mysteries on demand — in Greek and an older tongue — from the 7th century BCE into late antiquity.

• San Agustin Culture

  Highland Colombian culture famed for hundreds of monumental stone statues and funerary mounds; largest pre-Columbian megalithic necropolis in South America.

• Sanga

  The plateau-top cluster of Dogon villages at the crest of the Bandiagara escarpment where Marcel Griaule based his fieldwork and where, in 1946, the blind elder Ogotemmêli dictated the cosmology the world came to know as Dogon.

• Santa Maria delle Grazie

  The Dominican church and convent in Milan whose refectory holds Leonardo's Last Supper — a building drawn into esoteric speculation it never sought.

• Santa Maria Maggiore

  The great papal basilica of Rome dedicated to the Virgin Mary — raised in the fifth century in the wake of the council that named her Mother of God, and the oldest Marian church of the West.

• Santiago de Compostela Cathedral

  The great Romanesque pilgrimage church of Galicia, raised over the reputed tomb of the apostle James and marking the end of the Camino de Santiago.

• Saqqara

  The necropolis of ancient Memphis on the desert escarpment, where Imhotep raised the Step Pyramid of Djoser, the first monumental building in cut stone, and where the oldest religious writing and the catacombs of the sacred Apis bulls lie beneath the sand.

• Sarmizegetusa Regia

  The mountain sanctuary-capital of the Dacian kingdom in the Orăştie Mountains of Romania, ringed by the murus dacicus and holding the precinct of circular and rectangular sanctuaries, stormed and thrown down by Trajan in 106 CE.

• Sarnath

  The Deer Park at Isipatana north of Varanasi, where the Buddha preached his first sermon and the monastic order was born, marked today by the Dhamek Stupa and Ashoka's lion capital.

• Saut-d'Eau

  The hundred-foot waterfall near Ville-Bonheur where, every July, tens of thousands of Haitians bathe to honor Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the lwa Ezili in the same water on the same day.

• Seville Cathedral

  The largest Gothic cathedral in the world, raised on the foundations of Seville's Almohad mosque and keeping its minaret as the bell-tower known as the Giralda.

• Shatili

  The fortified tower-village of the Argun gorge in Upper Khevsureti, its some sixty koshki built wall-to-wall into a single body of stone — a village engineered as one house with sixty doors, resettled under the Soviets and held today by a dozen families through the warm months, a candidate on Georgia's UNESCO tentative list.

• Shiprock

  Tsé Bitʼaʼí, 'the winged rock' — a 1,583-foot volcanic neck breaking the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico, tied in Diné sacred history to the Hero Twins and the monster birds and honored by an absolute Navajo Nation ban on climbing the surveyors' 'clipper ship.'

• Shiretoko

  The volcanic peninsula at the far northeast of Hokkaido whose Ainu name, sir-etok, 'the end of the earth,' still stands on Japan's maps — a homeland of the sea and mountain kamuy where the drift ice, the salmon, and the bear form a single circle of giving, inscribed as a UNESCO natural World Heritage site in 2005.

• Shwedagon Pagoda

  The gilded Buddhist stupa rising above Yangon — the holiest pagoda of Myanmar, held to enshrine relics of the Buddha and of three who came before him.

• Shwezigon Pagoda

  The great gilded bell-shaped stupa at Nyaung-U near Bagan, begun by King Anawrahta and completed by his successor Kyansittha around the turn of the twelfth century — the prototype of the classic Burmese pagoda, and the place where Anawrahta set images of the Thirty-Seven Nats at the base of the Buddha's reliquary, folding the spirit religion into the Buddhist frame.

• Sidon

  The ancient Phoenician harbor of Eshmun and Astarte on the Lebanese coast, whose curse-bound royal sarcophagi and surviving healing sanctuary returned its priest-kings to the world.

• Sistine Chapel

  The principal chapel of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican — site of the papal conclave, and of Michelangelo's ceiling, where Hebrew prophets sit beside pagan sibyls.

• Solokha

  Solokha — the great Scythian royal kurgan on the lower Dnieper near Velyka Znamianka in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, excavated by Nikolai Veselovsky in 1912–13, whose untouched side-grave yielded the golden comb crowned by three warriors in combat.

• Songo

  The Dogon village northwest of Bandiagara whose great painted rock-shelter is a circumcision ground and a ritual ledger — its red-and-white masks and signs added to at each initiation and repainted for the Sigui.

• Souvenance

  The Rada lakou near Gonaïves whose Easter pilgrimage keeps the drums, songs, and spirits of Dahomey alive in Haiti — a family-compound temple that is itself an act of remembrance.

• Speyer Cathedral

  The great Romanesque imperial cathedral on the Upper Rhine — founded by the Salian dynasty around 1030 as a basilica and burial church for the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire.

• St Mark's Basilica

  The domed Italo-Byzantine basilica of Venice, raised over relics held to be those of St Mark the Evangelist and sheathed inside in gold mosaic.

• St Paul's Cathedral

  Wren's domed cathedral on Ludgate Hill, rebuilt after the Great Fire — a monument of geometric design whose Masonic associations have been read, contestably, into its stones.

• St Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna

  The Gothic cathedral at the centre of Vienna — seat of the city's archbishop, famous for its tiled roof and its catacombs of the dead.

• St Vitus Cathedral

  The Gothic metropolitan cathedral inside Prague Castle — coronation church and royal burial place of Bohemia, standing at the heart of the city that became a byword for the imperial pursuit of alchemy.

• St. Peter's Basilica

  The great Renaissance basilica of Vatican City, raised over a site held since antiquity to be the tomb of the apostle Peter and crowned by a relocated Egyptian obelisk.

• Starosel

  The temple-in-the-mound on the southern slopes of the Sredna Gora — the largest Thracian cult complex yet found, a round domed chamber ringed by a great curving wall, read as the burial and the cult-place of a heroized Thracian ruler.

• Strasbourg Cathedral

  The Gothic cathedral of Strasbourg, built in red Vosges sandstone, whose single spire was the tallest structure in the world for over two centuries and whose astronomical clock gathered its own legends.

• Taatsi

  The Taatsin seita, a ten-meter Sami sacred stone-pillar on the north shore of Lake Taatsinjarvi near Pokka in Kittila, Finnish Lapland — one of Lapland's most renowned sieidi, with offering-hearths spanning roughly 600 to 1600 AD and a living heritage today.

• Tabon Caves

  The limestone burial and habitation caves at Lipuun Point on Palawan — source of the ~16,500-year-old Tabon Man and of the Manunggul Jar, whose boat-of-the-dead lid is the oldest surviving image of the Filipino belief that the soul must be paddled across water to the next world.

• Taebaeksan

  The Great White Mountain of Korea's eastern range, crowned by the Cheonjedan heaven-altar where the rite to Heaven and to Dangun is still kept, and one of the mightiest of the shaman's mountains.

• Takht-e Soleyman

  The ruined Sasanian royal sanctuary in northwestern Iran where the warriors' fire Adur Gushnasp burned beside a deep artesian lake, binding the throne of Persia to the altar.

• Taputapuatea

  The great open-air marae of Ra'iatea, dedicated to the god 'Oro and the ancestral node of the eastern Pacific voyaging world.

• Tarquinia

  The Etruscan city of Tarchna above the Tyrrhenian coast, home of the prophet Tages and of the painted Monterozzi tombs that hold the fullest surviving record of the Etruscan vision of feast, dance, and the life beyond.

• Tatul

  The megalithic Thracian rock-cut sanctuary near Tatul in the eastern Rhodope — a truncated stone pyramid carved from the living rock, its summit cut with two rock-tombs, and the focus of a modern legend that would make it the grave of Orpheus.

• Taungbyon

  Taungbyon — a village about ten to twenty kilometers north of Mandalay on the east bank of the Shweta stream, the shrine of the executed Shwepyin brothers and the ground of the greatest nat pwe in Myanmar, a week-long August gathering when tens of thousands come and the spirit-mediums dance in possession.

• Tayma

  The great walled oasis of northwest Arabia, station of the incense road, where the god Salm received his cult and the last king of Babylon withdrew for a decade.

• Temple Mount

  The walled platform in the Old City of Jerusalem held sacred by Jews as the site of the Temples and by Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, home of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa.

• Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

  The great sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesus — counted among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and the cult home of the many-breasted Ephesian goddess.

• Temple of Heaven

  The walled ritual complex in southern Beijing where the emperors of Ming and Qing China performed the annual state sacrifices to Heaven, its plan laid out as a model of the cosmos.

• Templo Mayor

  The twin-shrine great pyramid of Tenochtitlan, sacred axis of the Mexica world, excavated in central Mexico City since 1978.

• Tenochtitlan

  The Mexica island capital on Lake Texcoco, one of the largest cities on earth in 1500, now buried beneath Mexico City.

• Tharros

  The Phoenician-Punic port-city on the Sinis peninsula of western Sardinia, whose tophet, sanctuaries, and dispersed funerary golds open a window onto the island Carthage held as granary and forward base.

• The Ganges

  The great river of northern India, revered in Hindu tradition as the goddess Ganga — a flowing site of purification, pilgrimage, and the washing away of sin.

• The Golden Dawn's London

  The rented London of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — hired Masonic halls, the migrating Vault of the Adepti, museum desks and bookshops, and the April 1900 fight for 36 Blythe Road.

• The Great Serpent Mound

  The largest serpent effigy mound in the world, a quarter-mile of earthen coils on a ridge above Ohio Brush Creek in Adams County, Ohio, its head turned to the summer-solstice sunset and its builders and age still contested.

• The Hill of Tara

  A low green ridge in County Meath, the sacred seat of the high kings of Ireland, where a stone was said to cry out beneath the rightful king.

• The Hill of Uisneach

  A low hill near the center of Ireland, held to be the island's navel, where the Stone of Divisions marked the meeting of the five provinces and the first Bealtaine fire was kindled.

• The Holy Land

  The region between the Mediterranean and the Jordan held sacred by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — and the place where the idea of sacred geography itself took lasting shape.

• The İvriz Relief

  An eighth-century BCE Luwian rock relief near Ereğli in southern Anatolia, where King Warpalawas of Tuwana stands in worship before the storm-god Tarhunza, who holds out grain and grapes.

• The Kiev Pantheon

  The hilltop row of six idols Prince Volodymyr raised at Kiev in 980 as an official pantheon of the Rus, torn down eight years later at the baptism of 988.

• The Lashari Shrine

  The Cross of Lashari on the dry mountain above the upper Pshavis Aragvi, principal sanctuary of the war-deity Lashari, whose one summer festival gathers all twelve communities of Pshavi into the household of a single warrior-khati addressed as their monarch.

• The San Francisco Peaks

  Dookʼoʼoosłííd, 'the summit that never melts' — the volcanic massif north of Flagstaff, Arizona, the shining sacred mountain of the west and one of the four that bound Dinétah, and, to the Hopi as Nuvatukyaʼovi, the winter home of the katsinam; a holy ground shared by thirteen tribes and fought over for decades as the Arizona Snowbowl sprayed reclaimed sewage across its slopes.

• The Sarasvati River

  The lost river of the Veda — praised in the oldest hymns as the best of mothers, rivers, and goddesses, failing into the desert before history, and surviving as a goddess, a hidden confluence, and a contested dry bed.

• The Temple of Eshmun

  The terraced Phoenician sanctuary of the healing-god Eshmun above Sidon, raised on a vast stone podium among the springs, where the votive children and the throne of Astarte preserve the cult of the god of health.

• The Tophet of Carthage

  The open-air precinct of Tanit and Baal Hammon in the Salammbô quarter of Carthage, where thousands of urns of cremated infants and young animals lay beneath dedicatory stelae — and the unresolved test case for whether the western Phoenicians sacrificed their children.

• Thebes

  The New Kingdom religious capital of Egypt at modern Luxor — city of the god Amun, with Karnak and Luxor on the living east bank and the royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings across the river.

• Thingvellir

  The rift-valley assembly plains of southwestern Iceland, where a kingless people made its law aloud for nine centuries and, in the year 1000, chose Christianity to keep one law.

• Tierradentro

  Colombian site of vast underground hypogea (rock-cut burial chambers) painted with geometric designs; a unique mortuary tradition.

• Tikal

  Towering Classic Maya city-state in the Peten rainforest, a dominant political and ritual power with steep temple-pyramids.

• Tilantongo

  Tilantongo (Nuu Tnoo, 'Black Town,' full name Nuu Tnoo-Huahi Andehui, 'Black Town of the Temple of Heaven') — the pre-eminent Mixtec city-state and dynastic axis of the Mixteca Alta, the throne of Lord 8 Deer Jaguar Claw around which the Mixtec codices turn, its soil holding the Late Formative city of Monte Negro and the living town of Santiago Tilantongo.

• Tlatelolco

  Sister-city of Tenochtitlan and Mesoamerica's greatest market, site of the final 1521 Mexica stand.

• Tlatilco

  Formative-period village near Mexico City famed for its expressive figurines and Olmec-influenced burials.

• Tolstaya Mogila

  The Scythian royal kurgan near Pokrov in the lower-Dnieper steppe, excavated by Borys Mozolevsky in 1971, from whose intact side-chamber came the golden pectoral whose three tiers hold the whole world of the steppe in gold.

• Tongariro

  The tapu ancestral peaks at the heart of the North Island — kindled by fire called from Hawaiki, gifted to the Crown in 1887, and the first place admitted to the world's heritage roll as a living people's cultural landscape.

• Tournai Cathedral

  The cathedral of Notre-Dame in Tournai, Belgium — a Romanesque nave under five towers joined to a soaring Gothic choir, and the seat of a long Marian devotion.

• Tula

  The ruined Toltec capital in the dry hills of Hidalgo, revered by the Aztecs as Tollan, the archetypal city and the fountainhead of toltecayotl, civilization itself, where the warrior-columns called the Atlantes still stand atop the pyramid of the Morning Star.

• Txindoki

  The pyramidal limestone horn at the western edge of the Sierra de Aralar — the "Basque Matterhorn," whose upper cave, Larrunarriko Marizulo, is named as one of the mountain-seats of the goddess Mari.

• Tyre

  The island city of the Phoenicians that gave the ancient world its royal purple, founded Carthage and the colonies of the far west, and held against Alexander until he built a causeway through the sea.

• Udvada Atash Behram

  The Iranshah, 'King of Iran' — the holiest fire of the Parsis, carried across the sea from Iran into a millennium of exile and enthroned at last in 1742 in the Gujarati fishing town of Udvada, where it has burned without a break ever since.

• Ukonsaari

  The holy offering-island of Lake Inari in Finnish Lapland, sieidi of the Inari Sami and altar of the thunder-power Aijih, where reindeer antlers were laid in the rock cleft and where Arthur Evans found a silver ornament in 1873.

• Ulm Minster

  The Lutheran parish church of Ulm in southern Germany, a vast Gothic building whose west tower — the tallest church steeple in the world — was begun in the Middle Ages and finished only in 1890.

• Uluru

  The great arkose monolith at the center of Australia, sacred to the Anangu as the body and the record of the Tjukurpa ancestral beings, handed back to its traditional owners in 1985 and closed to climbers in 2019.

• uMgungundlovu

  King Dingane's great royal capital of 1829-1838 in the eMakhosini uplands of KwaZulu-Natal — a vast oval ikhanda built to be read from the surrounding hills, and one of the most fully excavated of all Zulu royal sites.

• Upopoy

  Japan's national center for the revival of Ainu culture, opened at Shiraoi on the shore of Lake Poroto in July 2020 — a museum, a rebuilt kotan of the kamuy religion, and, on a hill across the water, a memorial holding more than a thousand ancestors taken from their graves for research and awaiting return.

• Upper Xingu Earthworks (Kuhikugu)

  Network of fortified garden-cities at the Xingu headwaters with plazas, roads and ditches, ancestral to the living Kuikuro people.

• Ur

  The city of the moon god Nanna in southern Iraq — Ur-Nammu's ziggurat, Enheduanna's priestesshood, the grave rites of the Royal Cemetery, and the Ur of the Chaldees of Abraham's tradition.

• Urnes Stave Church

  The oldest surviving Norwegian stave church, on the Lustrafjord — famous for carved portal panels in the intertwined animal ornament now called the Urnes style.

• Uruk

  The world's first city — Inanna's Eanna precinct, the White Temple of Anu, Gilgamesh's wall, the birthplace of cuneiform writing, and temple astronomers who wrote the last dated tablet in 79/80 CE.

• Uxmal

  Puuc-style Maya city in Yucatan distinguished by intricate stone latticework and the rounded Pyramid of the Magician.

• Vani

  the Colchian temple-city on Akhvlediani Gora in the Rioni basin of western Georgia, a hill where the elite of Colchis were buried in gold of a workmanship no other land made and which grew into a walled sanctuary-city — the archaeological body of the Greek dream of a country 'rich in gold.'

• Varanasi

  Kashi, the "city of light" on the Ganges — Shiva's own abode, one of the seven cities that grant liberation, where to die is to be released from rebirth.

• Värikallio

  A Stone-Age red-ochre rock-painting cliff above Lake Somerjärvi in the Hossa wilderness of northeastern Finland — sixty-one figures, among them an antlered human and a possible bear, set on a sacred face of stone and recorded only in 1977.

• Veii

  The southernmost of the great Etruscan cities and Rome's nearest rival, whose Portonaccio sanctuary of Menrva carried the striding terracotta gods of the sculptor Vulca, among them the Apollo of Veii.

• Wat Phu

  Khmer Hindu temple complex in southern Laos, a Shaivite mountain sanctuary on the sacred Phou Kao hill.

• Western Wall

  The surviving western retaining wall of the Herodian Temple Mount in Jerusalem — the holiest place at which Jewish prayer is customarily offered.

• Westminster Abbey

  The royal collegiate church of London, coronation and burial place of English and British monarchs since 1066 — a continuously consecrated ground where the crowning rite survives as a public sacrament.

• Wolin

  An early-medieval Slavic-Viking trading town at the mouth of the Oder, seat of the three-headed god Triglav and a leading candidate for the saga-fortress Jómsborg and the drowned city of Vineta.

• Xochicalco

  Fortified hilltop city with a Feathered Serpent pyramid and observatory, flourishing after Teotihuacan's fall.

• Yaxchilan

  A Classic Maya city on a horseshoe bend of the Usumacinta whose carved lintels hold the most vivid surviving images of royal bloodletting.

• Yazd Atash Behram

  The one Zoroastrian fire of the highest grade still burning in Iran, kept without a break since about 470 CE and housed since 1934 in a Parsi-funded brick temple at Yazd.

• Yazılıkaya

  Yazılıkaya — the open-air rock sanctuary northeast of Hattusa where two roofless chambers of living stone were carved with the assembled gods of the Hittite empire in procession, the fullest surviving image of the Hurrianized state pantheon.

• Zugarramurdi

  The Basque village whose limestone cave and its he-goat meadow, the Akelarre, an Inquisition read as the Devil's sabbath — the geography behind the Logroño auto-da-fé of 1610 and the trials that ended witch-burning in Spain.