World field guide
Every site from every regional travel guide on this site, combined into one global ranking by uniqueness, laymen interest, ease of access and low tourist crowds.
Western Europe · Baarle
A town where Belgian and Dutch borders run through streets and buildings
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $550.
South Asia · Maharashtra
The largest top-down monolithic rock excavation on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $550.
Southern Europe · Milan, Lombardy
A Renaissance church-and-convent complex that retains Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in its original refectory
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Asia · Siem Reap
The largest pre-industrial urban complex tied to a temple capital
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $750.
The world’s largest Buddhist temple monument
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $750.
Central America · Near Managua
One of the few volcanoes with a persistent lava lake that can be reached by road to the crater rim when access is open
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
USA · Los Angeles, California
The world's only actively excavated Ice Age fossil site in an urban location.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $900.
Western Europe · Fife and the Lothians
The world's earliest great multispan cantilever railway bridge, with three double-cantilever towers and an unadorned steel structure still carrying trains.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Basque Country
The world's first transporter bridge, still in operation; UNESCO says only eight of the more than twenty built worldwide still stand.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Mexico · State of Mexico
The largest city of the ancient Americas at its height, laid out on a rigid grid by builders whose identity remains unresolved
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
North Africa · Mahdia Governorate
One of the largest and best-preserved Roman amphitheatres outside Italy
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $750.
North Asia · Irkutsk Oblast / Buryatia
The deepest, oldest and largest freshwater lake by volume on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $800.
South Asia · Deshnoke, Rajasthan
A functioning Hindu temple where thousands of sacred rats move freely through the complex
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 3 days · $450.
Southern Europe · Portugal
A monumental European Sacri Monti complex with a Via Crucis, chapels, fountains and the Baroque Stairway of the Five Senses
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Oceania · Wellington and predator-free sanctuaries
The only living survivor of an ancient reptile order
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,200.
Central Europe · Bayreuth, Bavaria
The only entirely preserved example of its type, a freestanding Baroque court opera house whose tiered auditorium retains original wood and painted canvas
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
North Africa · Giza Plateau
The Great Pyramid, the only surviving wonder of the ancient world, shares the plateau with two other 4th-Dynasty royal pyramids, their temples and causeways, and the Sphinx.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $60.
South America · Potaro-Siparuni
226-metre single-drop waterfall with an unusual mix of height and volume
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
Southern Africa · Zambezi River
The world's largest curtain of falling water by combined width and height
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $950.
Central Europe · Karst Plateau
One of the world's largest known underground river canyons in the Classical Karst
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $850.
Southern Europe · Nazaré
A submarine canyon that helps produce some of the world’s largest surfable waves
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $650.
Southern Europe · Andalusia
Historic quarter around the Mosque-Cathedral where Roman, Visigoth, Islamic, Jewish and Christian layers remain in the street plan, monuments and courtyard houses.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Holy See / Italy
A stratified urban property combining Roman archaeological sites, Christian basilicas, papal buildings and Renaissance and Baroque streetscapes, with San Paolo Fuori le Mura as a separate component.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Caribbean · Saba
A tiny vertical Caribbean island with the Kingdom of the Netherlands’ highest point and a 400-metre commercial runway
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,900.
Mexico · Puebla
Guinness-listed largest pyramid by volume, hidden under a church-topped hill
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Southern Europe · Basilicata
A large rock-cut settlement with evidence of human occupation from the Palaeolithic to the present
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $850.
East Asia · Jeju Island
A UNESCO-inscribed culture of women breath-hold divers whose numbers have fallen sharply
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $700.
USA · Los Angeles, California
A hand-built group of 17 steel, wire-mesh and mortar sculptures inlaid with tile, glass, shells, pottery and rocks, made by one person over 33 years
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $900.
Central Europe · Speyer, Rhineland-Palatinate
The world's largest Romanesque church, with four towers, two domes and a gallery that encircles the building
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central America · Panama City, Panama
A freshwater lock-and-lake canal that climbs through Panama's Central Cordillera to Gatun Lake before dropping toward the other coast
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $80.
Oceania · Australia
The roof comprises three groups of interlocking vaulted shells, with their final geometry derived from the surface of a single imagined sphere.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $50.
South America · Atlantic Forest
A huge multi-fall basalt-rim waterfall system
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
Canada · Nova Scotia / New Brunswick
One of Earth's two extreme tidal-range sites; the Canadian Hydrographic Service has treated Burntcoat Head and Leaf Basin as statistically tied.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
A freshwater island formed by twin volcanoes
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
Central Asia · Karakalpakstan
One of the world's largest Russian avant-garde collections in remote Nukus, a base for trips to the Aral Sea
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,100.
Southeast Asia · Bohol
Tiny endemic tarsiers paired with more than a thousand seasonal brown cone hills
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · Alblasserwaard, South Holland
UNESCO describes it as the only drainage network of this kind or comparable antiquity, with 19 mills and three pumping stations in a hydraulic system that still functions.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Asia · Osh
A Silk Road sacred mountain with caves, shrines and petroglyphs above Osh
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,500.
Central Europe · Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia
A Carolingian palatine chapel with a preserved octagonal core, later enlarged by a Gothic choir and medieval chapels.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Germany
An 18th-century Baroque palace whose architecture and decoration combine French, Italian, Austrian and German work, including Balthasar Neumann’s design and Tiepolo’s staircase fresco.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Ticino
The only visible medieval fortification ensemble in the Alpine Arc with several castles linked by a wall that once closed the Ticino Valley.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Portugal
Rare, nearly complete Baroque estate combining a royal palace, formal garden and hunting park
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Saxony-Anhalt
A medieval west choir that integrates architecture, sculpture and stained glass around twelve life-size founder statues by the Naumburg Master
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Poland
A UNESCO-listed early-Modernist hall with the world's largest reinforced-concrete dome at the time of construction, within an Exhibition Grounds composition retaining its main historic features
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
East Asia · Shanghai
One of the world's few commercial high-speed maglev lines, with a 30-km airport route open to ordinary passengers.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $1,900.
Oceania · Queensland coast
The world's largest coral reef system
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,500.
Southern Europe · Portugal
A 946-hectare UNESCO cultural landscape where Romantic palaces and exotic gardens sit among older Moorish and monastic sites in the Serra de Sintra.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Lika-Senj and Karlovac counties
A cascade of 16 named lakes separated by actively growing tufa barriers, unusual for its scale and intactness.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $750.
Mexico · Isla Mujeres / Holbox / Yum Balam
A 2011 PLOS ONE study described the 2009 Afuera event as the largest whale-shark aggregation ever reported
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 2 days · $250.
Mexico · Yucatan
The largest known Mesoamerican ballcourt inside a Maya-Toltec ceremonial city
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
South America · Manaus
Two major rivers run side by side before mixing
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
West Africa · Lake Nokoué
One of Africa’s largest lake villages, founded by the Tofinu as a refuge from slave-raiders
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $650.
Western Europe · Yvelines, Île-de-France
A royal palace, Trianon châteaux and French formal gardens arranged along a five-kilometre royal perspective
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · City of Westminster, London, England
A World Heritage ensemble where a working Gothic abbey and parish church sit beside the neo-Gothic Palace of Westminster, the seat of the UK Parliament.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $50.
Central Europe · Malbork, Pomeranian Voivodeship
Gothic brick castle complex with three linked units: the High Castle, Middle Castle and Outer Bailey
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Bay of Naples
Roman urban life preserved by the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Southern Europe · Italy
UNESCO-listed serial site with Norman, Islamic and Byzantine architectural synthesis
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Spain
An unusually well-preserved Roman aqueduct remains part of Segovia's historic urban fabric, alongside the Alcázar, Romanesque churches, 16th-century Gothic cathedral and Royal Mint.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Spain
One UNESCO cultural property brings together a Gothic cathedral, a royal palace complex and the former merchants' exchange that became the Archivo de Indias.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Mexico · Mexico City
The last remaining wild habitat of the axolotl, a neotenic salamander that can regenerate limbs
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
USA · Northern Arizona
One of Earth’s best-preserved meteorite impact craters, with a visitor center on the rim
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
USA · Oracle, Arizona
The largest closed ecological system ever built, now used for Earth-systems research
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,200.
Western Europe · United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
A navigable canal crossing the Dee Valley on a 38.4-metre-high aqueduct with nineteen cast-iron spans.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Germany
A dense concentration of surviving Roman buildings north of the Alps, including the Porta Nigra and Constantine's Basilica, with Trier Cathedral and the Church of Our Lady in the same property
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Bamberg, Bavaria
Early-medieval town plan with three historic settlement areas and surviving medieval ecclesiastical and secular buildings
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Canton of Vaud, Switzerland
Terraced vineyards, stone walls and villages shaped by viticulture since the 11th century on Lake Geneva.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Caribbean · Southwest Trinidad
The largest natural asphalt lake on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,500.
South America · Uruguay
A UNESCO-listed modern church built around Eladio Dieste’s reinforced-brick Gaussian vaults and undulating walls.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Central Europe · Germany
A complete coal-mining and coking complex with 1930s Shaft XII buildings that apply Modern Movement design to an industrial site
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Northern Europe · Norrbotten County
Best-preserved church town in northern Scandinavia, with 404 wooden cottages around a late-15th-century stone church.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Caribbean · Vieques
Guinness-recognized brightest bioluminescent bay in the world
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 3 days · $450.
East Asia · Heilongjiang
The world’s largest temporary ice-and-snow theme park rebuilt every winter
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,100.
Mexico · Sonora
A UNESCO volcanic desert with North America's largest and most active dune system and ten enormous maar craters
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,400.
Oceania · Rock Islands
An isolated meromictic marine lake with endemic golden jellyfish
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,900.
Oceania · Koror State, Palau
The world's highest concentration of marine lakes in a lagoon with 445 uplifted limestone islands
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $3,900.
South America · Patagonia
Temperate ice fields, outlet glaciers, fjords and steppe
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · India
A symmetrical Mughal mausoleum complex built around a raised white-marble tomb, four free-standing minarets and a char-bagh garden.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Southern Africa · Kalahari Basin
The world's largest intact inland delta floods during Botswana's dry season
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,900.
Southern Africa · Namib-Naukluft
The world's only coastal desert with extensive dune fields influenced by fog
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
USA · New Mexico
The world’s largest gypsum dunefield, trapped in a closed desert basin
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
East Asia · Xi'an, Shaanxi
A life-size clay army built for Qin Shi Huang's funerary complex
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $1,900.
Matt Lakeman pick: a climbable Maya acropolis above jungle canopy
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
North Africa · Luxor west bank
A royal tomb valley with decorated New Kingdom burial chambers
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $450.
USA · Merritt Island, Florida
A public visitor complex that pairs flown spacecraft with bus access behind NASA's gates and views of active launch pads
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,100.
Western Europe · Scotland
Artemy top-tier rating: medieval ridge and planned Georgian city facing each other
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $550.
Central Europe · Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia
A 157-metre High Gothic five-aisled basilica with a large medieval stained-glass cycle and the Shrine of the Magi
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Germany
A planned ensemble of five museums built between 1824 and 1930, with each building designed in relation to its collections
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Budapest, Hungary
A city-scale urban ensemble combining the Danube panorama, Buda’s medieval and Baroque Castle Quarter and Andrássy Avenue’s 19th-century urban plan
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Portugal
A paired monastery and river fortress with surviving Manueline stonework, original layouts and a shared 16th-century setting on the Tagus.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Castile-La Mancha
An inhabited historic city where Roman, Visigothic, Andalusi, Jewish and Christian buildings survive within a medieval street plan.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central America · Coclé Province
Town on the floor of the 6 km-wide caldera of an inactive volcano, with trails along the crater rim.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Mexico · Oaxaca
An early Zapotec city whose flattened mountaintop plaza carries some of Mesoamerica’s early writing and calendar evidence
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Mexico · Oaxaca City and surrounding valleys
The Central Valleys put moles, chapulines, cacao drinks and nixtamalized maize alongside a major mezcal-producing corridor.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Oceania · North Island
Lebedev-rated favorite: compact windy capital between harbor and hills
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,400.
South America · Brazil
UNESCO-listed pilgrimage complex with Aleijadinho's twelve soapstone prophets and six polychrome Passion chapels.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
USA · Great Salt Lake Desert, Utah
A hard white salt pan used as one of the world’s classic land-speed surfaces
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
Western Europe · County Meath
A dense Boyne Valley ritual landscape with chambered tombs older than Stonehenge
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $700.
Western Europe · Amsterdam, Netherlands
A large, coherent seventeenth-century urban expansion whose concentric canals, radial streets and gabled houses remain part of a working city.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · County Durham
A Norman cathedral and castle complex on a peninsula above the River Wear, with the cathedral still used for worship and the castle as a university college.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany
A preserved medieval trading city with Roman, Romanesque and Gothic buildings, patrician towers, strong fortifications and the 12th-century Stone Bridge
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Poland
Europe's largest timber-framed Baroque church buildings, built under strict post-Westphalia rules and retaining their original structures and interiors
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Malta and Gozo
An island-only megalithic tradition older than Stonehenge and the pyramids
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $750.
Southern Europe · Italy
A planned Bourbon estate linking a palace, formal and English gardens, the Aqueduct Carolino and the San Leucio silk complex
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Madrid Region
One Herrerian royal monastery-palace complex combines a basilica, royal pantheon, palace, school, seminary and library.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · Seine-et-Marne, Île-de-France
A well-preserved medieval fair town whose urban layout, merchant houses, vaulted cellars, warehouses and defenses were built for international trade
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · France
Rare, unusually complete medieval episcopal ensemble unified by local fired brick
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Warsaw, Masovian Voivodeship, Poland
A near-total postwar reconstruction of a historic city centre, retaining its medieval street plan while recreating walls, churches, palaces and the Royal Castle
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
South America · Argentina
The former Officers' Quarters remain protected as judicial evidence, with preserved spatial features and marks from the building's use as a clandestine detention centre.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $20.
Central Europe · Lower Austria and Styria, Austria
A continuously operating 19th-century mountain railway with 14 tunnels, 16 major viaducts and nearby resort buildings
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Germany
A rare surviving Ottonian Romanesque complex with Bernward's bronze doors and column, St Michael's painted wooden ceiling and the medieval town layout around both churches.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Switzerland
A Carolingian monastic complex with the 9th-century Plan of St Gall, the only surviving manuscript plan of its time.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Italy
The oldest surviving academic botanical garden in its original location, with its 16th-century circular plan and ring of water still intact.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Africa · Free State
Earth's largest confirmed impact structure and one of its oldest
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 3 days · $450.
Mexico · Chihuahua / Sierra Tarahumara
A large system of barrancas across the Sierra Tarahumara, where the Chepe railway passes through a region inhabited by Rarámuri communities.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,500.
North Asia · Zabaykalsky Krai
A true dune desert abruptly set among taiga, bog, permafrost and glaciated mountains
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,300.
Oceania · Indian Ocean
An island-wide migration of millions of red crabs from forest to sea
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $4,200.
Caribbean · Southern Montserrat
A modern capital buried by an active volcano, still inside a controlled exclusion zone
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,500.
A huge high-altitude saline lake ringed by mountains and nomadic routes
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,400.
East Asia · Nagano
The only known wild monkey troop that regularly bathes in hot springs
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
East Asia · Wakayama
A 1,200-year Shingon Buddhist mountain town where temple lodging and Okunoin's necropolis still function
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,700.
Mexico · Papantla / El Tajín, Veracruz
A UNESCO-listed pre-Hispanic fertility rite performed from a tall pole
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Middle East · Jordan Rift Valley
The Dead Sea shore is the lowest land-based elevation on Earth and its water is so saline that bathers float easily.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $700.
Oceania · Marquesas archipelago
A continent-remote Polynesian archipelago with high endemism and major ceremonial sites
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 13 days · $4,900.
A megalithic city of basalt-log islets built on a coral reef
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 12 days · $3,900.
Southeast Asia · Sarawak
The world's largest known cave chamber in a park with at least 295 km of explored caves
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
USA · San Luis Valley, Colorado
North America’s tallest dunes backed by alpine peaks and seasonal surge-flow creek water
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
USA · Uintah County, Utah
A building wrapped around an exposed wall of roughly 1,500 dinosaur bones
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
Western Europe · County Antrim
A distinctive basalt-column coast with related formations at Staffa, Mull and Ulva in Scotland
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $650.
Central Europe · Kraków, Lesser Poland, Poland
A 149.65-hectare urban ensemble joining the medieval chartered city, Wawel Hill and Kazimierz, with architecture from the early Romanesque to Modernist periods
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Italy
A Renaissance city centre that retains medieval streets, fortified palaces and traditional shops alongside major churches and museums.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Italy / Switzerland
Two historic mountain railway lines remain in service as a UNESCO technical, architectural and environmental ensemble; the Bernina line is the highest transalpine railway route and one of the steepest adhesion railways.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Caribbean · Sosúa
A five-story castle filled with alien-themed art, Haitian and Dominican sculpture and outsider art
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,700.
Lebedev-rated favorite: harbor city of Dutch, Chinese, Christian and atomic-age layers
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,600.
East Asia · Hiroshima
Preserved Atomic Bomb Dome near the hypocenter, paired with a museum of victims' belongings and photographs
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Mexico · Puebla / Oaxaca
Cactus forests and some of the earliest evidence for plant domestication in the Americas
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
Mexico · Mexico City / Xochimilco
A World Heritage property joining Mexico City's Aztec-colonial core to Xochimilco's surviving canals and chinampas
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
North Africa · Western Desert, Faiyum Governorate
The world's most important fossil site for documenting whales' transition from land mammals to ocean-going mammals
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 3 days · $350.
South Asia · India
A 13th-century Kalingan temple built as Surya's stone chariot, with 24 carved wheels and seven horses.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Southeast Asia · Southwest Papua
The Coral Triangle's coral-diversity bullseye
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,800.
USA · Painted Desert, Arizona
An accessible Late Triassic fossil record with one of the world’s largest concentrations of mineralized fossil wood
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
USA · Laurel Highlands, Pennsylvania
A Frank Lloyd Wright house built directly over a waterfall, visitable as a preserved house museum
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $700.
Northern Europe · Finland
A 210-hectare sea fortress spread across six islands, with 6 km of defensive walls and 200 buildings from the Swedish and Russian periods
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Northern Europe · Riga, Latvia
A UNESCO urban ensemble combining a medieval core, a 19th-century boulevard ring and former suburbs with wooden architecture; the property also contains about 50 high-value Art Nouveau buildings in the medieval part and more than 300 elsewhere.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · France
One of the most complete 13th-century Gothic churches, with a coherent plan and extensive medieval sculpture
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · France
A medieval urban ensemble that brings together the Papal Palace, the episcopal buildings, city ramparts and four surviving arches of the Saint-Bénézet Bridge.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · France
A well-preserved Roman aqueduct bridge with three levels of arches and a height of nearly 49 m
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · Somerset, South West England
A city-wide World Heritage site where Roman baths and hot springs sit within an unusually intact Georgian plan of crescents, squares and terraces.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Lower Austria
A UNESCO-listed Danube valley where medieval settlements and vineyard terraces remain part of a working landscape
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Czechia
UNESCO-listed Baroque princely residence with an almost-intact 17th-century Pleasure Garden
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Portugal
UNESCO-listed historic place with preserved cultural fabric
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Portugal
The world's largest bulwarked dry-ditch system and the best surviving example of the Dutch school of fortification
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Galicia
Cathedral-centred old town with Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical buildings lining its squares and narrow streets.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Castile and León
A largely intact medieval walled town with a Gothic cathedral and Romanesque churches inside and outside the walls, all part of one UNESCO serial property.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Castilla y León
Historic university town with one of Europe's oldest universities, a Roman bridge, the 18th-century Plaza Mayor and a centre spanning Romanesque, Gothic, Moorish, Renaissance and Baroque monuments.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Croatia
A Roman imperial palace whose walls and substructures are part of a living, inhabited historic centre
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Eastern Europe · Gobustan and Absheron
One of Earth's highest concentrations of mud volcanoes, with more than 300 on land and offshore
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,050.
North Africa · Souss-Massa and Tamri roads
Tree-climbing goats are strongly associated with southwestern Morocco, where argan trees provide fruit and leaves for browsing.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $750.
North Asia · Russia
First stone tent-roofed church in Russia, with a design that influenced later Russian ecclesiastical architecture.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
Oceania · Burrup Peninsula / Dampier Archipelago
One of the world's densest rock-art concentrations, with engravings spanning more than 50,000 years
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,900.
USA · Grand Coulee, Washington
A dry waterfall and canyon system carved by some of the largest known floods on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,400.
Northern Europe · Lithuania
A 352-ha historic centre retaining its medieval radial street plan alongside Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Classical buildings
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Oświęcim
The largely intact grounds of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the principal Nazi German concentration and extermination camp complex
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
Central Europe · Austria
UNESCO-listed urban ensemble joining Graz's historic centre with Schloss Eggenberg, a 17th-century palace and its gardens
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Germany
UNESCO-listed Old Town island with a largely intact medieval street plan, patrician houses, churches and salt storehouses
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Italy
A compact Romanesque complex where the cathedral, Ghirlandina tower and Piazza Grande retain their historic relationship
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Community of Madrid, Spain
UNESCO-listed royal landscape combining a palace, formal gardens, planned town and historic waterways
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Croatia
An all-stone Gothic-Renaissance cathedral with unusual vaulting, a dome and a frieze of 71 sculpted faces.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Eastern Europe · Imereti
A manganese-mining town with cable cars linking its steep valley and outlying districts
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
Central America · La Libertad
The ash-preserved Maya farming village often called the Pompeii of the Americas
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Western Europe · Solent
The only scheduled passenger hovercraft service in Europe.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $120.
Central Europe · Czechia
A five-pointed church with a circular cloister and a layout built around repeated groups of five
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Tarnowskie Góry, Bytom and Zbrosławice, Upper Silesia
A 300-year underground water-management system integrated with historic metal mining and regional water supply
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · Belgium
The four hydraulic boat-lifts are the only ones among the eight built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that remain in their original working condition.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Alfeld, Lower Saxony
A complete 10-building factory complex with vast glass-panel walls, original layout and continuing industrial use
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Mexico · Huasteca Potosina, San Luis Potosí
One of the world's largest cave shafts, with a 333–376-meter free-fall drop and white-collared swifts circling the opening at dawn and dusk
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
North Africa · Nubia
Rock-cut temples dismantled into more than 1,000 blocks and reassembled 64 metres above their original site
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $650.
Oceania · Southeastern Polynesia
Moai fields plus rongorongo, a possible independent invention of writing
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $4,100.
USA · Arizona
A readable cross-section through nearly two billion years of rock
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,500.
Canada · Haida Gwaii
The largest original-location stand of Haida memorial and mortuary poles
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $3,000.
Canada · Ontario
Lebedev-rated favorite: a group of three waterfalls on an international border beside a dense tourist district.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 2 days · $250.
Caribbean · Long Island
One of the world's deepest blue holes and the site of the Vertical Blue freediving competition
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,100.
Central America · Guatemalan Highlands
Central America’s deepest lake, a volcanic caldera ringed by living Maya towns
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
Central America · Peten
A rare mixed UNESCO property where a major Maya urban centre sits inside Guatemala's protected Maya Forest
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
A tiny inhabited volcano-within-a-volcano village in the Philippine Sea
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,000.
East Asia · Cheung Chau Island
A Taoist island festival with children carried aloft on steel frames and a midnight bun-scrambling final on a bun-covered tower
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Oceania · Waikato
A guided cave display of New Zealand’s endemic glowworm
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,200.
South America · Chubut
Marine megafauna concentrated on an arid Patagonian coast
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
Southeast Asia · Khammouane
One of the largest active river-cave passages on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $650.
USA · Northern California coast
Coast redwood groves containing some of the world's tallest known trees in a cool, fog-fed coastal climate
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,800.
Central Europe · Southern Poland near Kraków
A serial royal saltworks with two mines, a medieval Saltworks Castle and chapels and statues carved into rock salt
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Cyclades
Artemy top-tier rating: inhabited caldera rim above a Bronze Age volcanic system
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $950.
A classic example of mountains in dolomitic limestone, with Triassic carbonate platforms and tectonic and glacial landforms
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
Orthodox monasteries perched on a localized landscape of vertical rock pillars
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
Southern Europe · Castilla-La Mancha
A medieval fortress-town whose intact townscape includes religious and secular buildings from the 12th to 18th centuries, with the casas colgadas above the Huécar gorge.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Canada · Quebec City
The only North American city to retain historic ramparts, bastions and gates around its old city; UNESCO calls it the most complete fortified colonial town north of Mexico.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,800.
Central America · Near León
One of the best-known commercial volcano boarding sites, on an active cinder cone that first erupted in 1850
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
East Africa · Southwest Mauritius
A mountain fortress with cave shelters, summit settlements and oral traditions tied to Mauritian maroonage
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
Middle East · Şanlıurfa Province
An early monumental complex of T-shaped limestone pillars built by hunter-gatherers during the transition to farming
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Middle East · Sivas Province, eastern Turkey
A 13th-century mosque-hospital complex whose carved portals are all distinct; UNESCO notes no other examples of its three-dimensional geometric and flowing-plant forms.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
North Africa · Tozeur and Kebili
A vast Saharan salt pan with salt-and-gypsum crusts, mirages and surface colors that can appear white, green or purple
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
South America · Mendoza Andes
The highest mountain in the Americas and the highest point outside Asia
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Bolívar Department, Colombia
A linked system of city walls, harbour forts and a colonial walled city, among the most extensive and complete military-fortification ensembles in South America.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Northern Europe · Denmark
Preserved Renaissance castle and fortress with a chapel that survived the 1629 fire and the largest Renaissance great hall of its kind in Northern Europe.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Northern Europe · Tallinn, Estonia
An exceptionally complete medieval northern European trading city where the 13th-century street plan, building plots and long sections of the town defences remain legible
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · Oxfordshire, England
A UNESCO-listed 18th-century princely residence pairing Vanbrugh's palace with Capability Brown's two lakes inside a walled landscape park
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $100.
Central Europe · Austria
A UNESCO-listed city centre with a medieval core, Baroque palace ensembles and the late-19th-century Ringstrasse
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Czechia
A preserved medieval silver-mining town with a late-Gothic Church of St Barbara and a Cistercian church at Sedlec restored in the early-18th-century Baroque Gothic style.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Czechia
One of Europe's largest designed landscapes, linking Liechtenstein castles, parks and smaller structures with avenues, ponds and long views
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Germany
A cross-city ensemble of Prussian palaces, parks and designed spaces along the Havel, extending across Potsdam and Berlin
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Eisenach, Thuringia
UNESCO-listed hilltop fortress with a late-Romanesque palace, surviving medieval ramparts and a 19th-century reconstruction that shapes much of its present appearance
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Germany
It is a 38-element 19th-century ducal capital ensemble where the palace, civic and religious buildings, parks and water features remain connected by preserved sightlines.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Madeira, Canary Islands and Azores
A living remnant of the laurel forests that once covered southern Europe and North Africa
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,100.
Southern Europe · Tuscany
Rare, largely intact medieval city centre with a 15th-century street plan, Gothic buildings and the Piazza del Campo at its centre.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Italy
Historic urban fabric where the ancient Greek grid remains legible beneath Roman, medieval, Spanish and Bourbon layers
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Italy
A 2,000-year urban fabric with Roman remains, medieval walls and Renaissance buildings inside a preserved fortified city
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Portugal
A cross-river urban ensemble that keeps Porto's medieval fabric alongside the Luiz I Bridge and Serra do Pilar's circular church and cloister.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Portugal
A university city that combines a hilltop royal palace, colleges along Rua da Sofia and later academic buildings within Coimbra's old town.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Community of Madrid
A single urban property links a 16th-century tree-lined avenue, 120-hectare Retiro gardens and the terraced Royal Botanic Garden with museums and scientific institutions.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Caribbean · Bonaire
One of the principal Caribbean flamingo breeding sites, intertwined with Bonaire’s salt pans
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,000.
East Asia · Suwon, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea
A 5.74-km Joseon fortress combining military, administrative and commercial functions across hills and flatland
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $60.
Mexico · Mexico City
A rare 20th-century modernist campus where a single master plan combines architecture, landscape design and fine arts with references to Mexico's pre-Hispanic past.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
North Asia · Buryatia
Center of the Buddhist Traditional Sangha of Russia, with the body of 12th Pandito Khambo Lama Dashi-Dorzho Itigelov kept in a dedicated palace.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
A raised coral-limestone island with two main terraces, caves and no rivers
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $3,300.
USA · Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico
A reconfigurable radio telescope array spread across a high desert plain
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
Western Europe · Zeeland
A nine-kilometre movable storm-surge barrier with 65 concrete piers, 62 gates and a public road, cycle path and footpath
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $600.
Western Europe · France
UNESCO-listed royal palace and park where Italian Renaissance artists influenced French Renaissance art
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · France
A linked pair of saltworks: Salins-les-Bains preserves underground brine extraction and a working 19th-century pump, while Arc-et-Senans preserves Ledoux's semicircular 18th-century factory.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · Luxembourg
A fortified European city where medieval streets, bastions and casemates survive on a steep rocky outcrop above the Alzette and Pétrusse rivers.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Poland
A UNESCO-listed late-16th-century planned Renaissance town with its original rectilinear street plan, parts of its fortifications and a blend of Italian and Central European architecture
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Bern
Medieval urban structure remains legible in the market streets, narrow plots, sandstone houses, six kilometres of arcades and 16th-century fountains.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Portugal
UNESCO-listed historic centre with a medieval urban layout, traditional granite-and-timber buildings and former Couros tanneries
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Eastern Europe · Armenia
A single World Heritage property joining Echmiatsin's cathedral and three churches with the ruins of Zvartnots, a seventh-century circular cathedral.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
South America · Suriname
Largely intact historic street grid and mainly wooden buildings that combine Dutch and other European architecture with local South American techniques and materials.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Western Europe · Belgium
A rare Romanesque-Gothic cathedral with a five-tower transept and a 13th-century Gothic choir.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Germany
A Gothic and Weser Renaissance town hall beside the 1404 Roland, with its historic relationship to the market square still intact
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Pannonhalma, Győr-Moson-Sopron County
A living Benedictine monastery founded in 996, with a thousand-year sequence of monastic buildings, a school and surrounding forest and gardens
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · Belgium
The world's only surviving Renaissance- and Baroque-era printing workshop and publishing house, with workshop equipment and furnishings kept in situ, an extensive library, business archives and works of art.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Italy
A modernist industrial city where Olivetti's factories, offices, housing and social services form one planned architectural ensemble
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Caribbean · Interior Dominica
Dominica’s volcanic interior, including the world’s second-largest boiling lake
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,900.
Mexico · Baja California Sur
One of the rare places where wild gray whales routinely initiate friendly contact with small boats
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,300.
Oceania · Northern Territory
A sandstone monolith and conglomerate domes central to Anangu law and desert ecology
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,500.
South America · Guiana Highlands
Isolated sandstone table mountains with endemic summit species
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · Kannur and Kasaragod
A living ritual system in which performers enter trance and embody deities
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $650.
Caribbean · Soufriere
Twin volcanic spires rising from the sea beside Sulphur Springs, a geothermal field with fumaroles and hot springs
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,900.
Central America · Nicoya Peninsula
One of the world’s major olive-ridley arribada beaches, where nesting happens in synchronized waves
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
Central Asia · Karakalpakstan
A vanished sea, a stranded fishing fleet and a new desert formed within a few decades
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $1,700.
East Asia · Jeju Island
A shield volcano island with lava tubes, tuff cone and Hallasan at its center
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $1,600.
East Asia · Hiroshima Bay
Lebedev-rated favorite: shrine-island composition of mountain, forest, sea and floating torii
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,600.
A remote Snake Kingdom capital inside a UNESCO mixed site and one of the Americas’ largest tropical forest reserves
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,300.
North Africa · Zouérat to Nouadhibou
One of the world’s longest and heaviest trains crossing 700 km of open Sahara
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,100.
North Africa · Farafra Depression
Wind-carved chalk forms in a stark Sahara basin
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $500.
North Asia · Kronotsky Reserve, Kamchatka
The only geyser field on the Eurasian landmass
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,600.
Oceania · Tasman Sea
The world's most southerly true coral reef and the rediscovered Lord Howe Island phasmid
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $3,900.
Oceania · Southern Pentecost
Naghol land diving, the vine-jumping rite that inspired bungee
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $3,700.
Oceania · South Island
A 2.6-million-hectare South Island World Heritage area with mountains, temperate rainforest, glacial fiords and Gondwanan biota
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 12 days · $2,900.
The world's largest sand island with rainforest growing on dunes
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,300.
USA · Kentucky
The longest known cave system on Earth by a wide margin
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,100.
USA · New York Harbor
A colossal statue of thin copper sheets over a flexible iron framework, combining sculpture with 19th-century engineering.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $60.
Northern Europe · Norwegian High Arctic
A high-Arctic settlement and wilderness edge with the Global Seed Vault nearby
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,700.
Southern Europe · Canary Islands
A young lava landscape from one of the longest recorded basaltic fissure eruptions
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Eastern Europe · Upper Svaneti
A dense, still-inhabited medieval tower-house landscape in the high Caucasus
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,300.
Caribbean · Soufriere
A drive-in geothermal field inside the Qualibou Depression and Saint Lucia’s UNESCO-listed Pitons Management Area
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,900.
Central America · Guatemalan Highlands
Former colonial capital with a preserved Renaissance grid, Barroco antigueño buildings and three surrounding volcanoes
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
Central America · Lake Nicaragua
Lebedev-rated favorite: colonial grid beside lake, volcanoes and islets
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
East Asia · Japan
Eight component sites combine five Buddhist temples, a Shinto shrine, the excavated Nara Palace site and the Kasugayama Primeval Forest.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
East Asia · South Korea
A Joseon secondary palace whose buildings and rear garden were laid out to follow the site's natural terrain
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $45.
North Africa · Tataouine Governorate
Berber hilltop villages and fortified granary landscapes at the Sahara edge
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $850.
North Africa · Ksar Ouled Soltane and Tataouine region
Honeycombed Berber grain-storage architecture at the edge of the Sahara
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $850.
Southern Africa · South Atlantic Ocean
A remote volcanic island tied to Napoleon’s exile and long pre-airport isolation
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $2,600.
Southern Africa · Southern and southwestern Madagascar
Madagascar's dry ecoregion with the highest percentage of endemic plants
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,900.
USA · Channel Islands National Park, California
Six of California's Channel Islands each have a distinct island fox subspecies, found nowhere else.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
USA · Southeast Georgia and northeast Florida
The world's largest lowland freshwater peatland in the subtropical zone, with canoe trails, alligators and floating peat mats
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,100.
Northern Europe · Southwest Iceland
An exposed section of Iceland’s Mid-Atlantic rift, with the clear, diveable Silfra fissure inside the rift zone
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $1,200.
Northern Europe · Vestland
Artemy top-tier rating: UNESCO-listed Hanseatic wharf in Bergen, a harbor city between the sea and steep mountains
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $750.
Northern Europe · Sweden
UNESCO-listed medieval walled trading town with a notably complete historic townscape and more than 200 surviving warehouses and merchants' dwellings.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · Belgium
A UNESCO-listed medieval city centre where the street plan, canals and brick-Gothic architecture remain legible
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · France
A monumental open-sea lighthouse with a Renaissance royal chapel and apartments that remains an active maritime signal
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Salzburg, Austria
The most completely preserved surviving example of an ecclesiastical city-state from the Holy Roman Empire, with a Baroque skyline dominated by Hohensalzburg Fortress
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Vienna
The palace and gardens form a Baroque Gesamtkunstwerk; the 18th-century park layout is virtually untouched and the complex retains its original architecture, furnishings and spatial relationship.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Germany
UNESCO-listed medieval town with more than 2,000 half-timbered houses, a preserved medieval town plan and the Romanesque Collegiate Church of St Servatius
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Greece
One of the most complete ancient Greek sanctuaries, with temples, hospital buildings, a stadium and a theatre.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Malta
Fortified late-Renaissance city on a hilly peninsula, with a uniform grid plan and 320 monuments in 55 hectares
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Batalha, Leiria District, Portugal
A Portuguese Gothic monastery where the Royal Cloister, royal pantheons and unfinished chapels show the transition into Manueline work
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Extremadura
An unusually intact 9-hectare walled urban ensemble with Almohad defenses, Gothic and Renaissance palace-houses and religious buildings.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Mallorca
A Mediterranean mountain landscape where Arabic water-management systems, dry-stone terraces and Christian-era farm estates remain legible together.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Caribbean · Grand Cayman
A Grand Cayman endemic rescued from functional extinction
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $2,100.
North Africa · Tunisian Sahel, Sousse Governorate
A walled early-Islamic medina where the ribat, Great Mosque, kasbah and ramparts form a coastal defense complex
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $700.
Western Europe · Milton Keynes
The codebreaking campus tied to Enigma, Colossus and early computing
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $80.
Western Europe · County Clare
A glaciated limestone pavement landscape with rare flora, caves and megaliths
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $850.
Western Europe · France
An extensive ensemble of 11th- and 12th-century Romanesque murals preserved across the church
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · France
A three-part coronation complex: a Gothic cathedral, the former royal Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Rémi and the archbishop's Palace of Tau
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · France
A five-nave Gothic cathedral with no transept, five sculpted west portals and stained glass dating from the 13th to 17th centuries
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · Lyon, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France
A two-thousand-year urban fabric where Roman remains, medieval streets, Renaissance Vieux Lyon, classical Presqu'île architecture and 19th-century canut housing remain legible in one city
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
A 132-hectare historic garden with 18th- to 20th-century design, 44 listed buildings and extensive botanical collections.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $45.
Central Europe · Dinaric karst
Europe’s only cave-adapted vertebrate and one of the world’s richest regions for subterranean biodiversity
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Central Europe · South Bohemia
A living South Bohemian village of 23 farmsteads around a rectangular green, with façades in the South Bohemian folk Baroque style and a medieval plan.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Czechia
Preserved arcaded Renaissance country residence with a second square courtyard unique to Litomyšl and intact ancillary buildings
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Vimbodí, Conca de Barberà, Catalonia
An inhabited Cistercian abbey arranged in three fortified enclosures, with a royal residence and the pantheon of Catalan and Aragonese rulers.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Croatia
The most complete surviving early Christian episcopal complex of its type, combining a basilica, atrium, baptistery and episcopal palace in Poreč's historic centre.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
North Africa · Morocco
One of Morocco's smallest medinas, with a largely intact urban fabric and clear Andalusian influence.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $700.
North Africa · Morocco
An urban ensemble that pairs a planned 20th-century capital with a 12th-century medina, Almohad ramparts and 17th-century Andalusian remains.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $700.
South America · Paraguay
Trinidad preserves an eight-hectare mission layout, while Jesús has trefoil arches with no other Jesuit-era example in the region.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Southeast Asia · Xieng Khouang
Thousands of Iron Age stone jars across a high plateau
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $600.
West Africa · Abomey
A 47-hectare earthen palace complex whose bas-reliefs served as Dahomey’s official history
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
Southeast Europe · Bulgaria
Three-period church complex with 1259 frescoes and later painted layers
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Northern Europe · Kaunas, Lithuania
A city-scale interwar ensemble in Naujamiestis and Žaliakalnis, with about 1,500 of Kaunas's surviving 1919–1939 buildings inside the World Heritage area.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Basel border region
Urban tram lines crossing from one city into two neighboring countries
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $450.
Central Europe · Augsburg and surrounding district, Bavaria
A 22-element urban water system documenting more than 700 years of successive hydraulic engineering, from medieval canals and Renaissance water towers to operating hydropower plants
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Germany
A rare surviving Carolingian gatehouse with archaeological remains from more than 800 years of monastic life
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Caribbean · Virgin Gorda
House-sized granite boulders forming sea caves and pools
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,000.
East Asia · Hunan
A quartz-sandstone pillar forest with comparable formations elsewhere, rather than a strict global one-off
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,100.
East Asia · Honshu
An almost perfect stratovolcano tied to Japanese mountain worship and art that influenced the West
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,400.
Oceania · North Island
Active and extinct volcanoes with Māori cultural and spiritual associations
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,600.
South America · Patagonia
Granite towers beside active ice and steppe
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Eastern Pacific
Evolutionary isolation made visible
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Santa Cruz Province, Patagonia
A cluster of granite spires, glacial lakes and ice-carved valleys reached on foot from El Chaltén
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
Southeast Asia · Quảng Trị
The world's largest documented cave passage by diameter and continuity, inside the Phong Nha–Ke Bang karst landscape
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $3,600.
Canada · Offshore Nova Scotia
A shifting offshore sand island with wild horses, the world's largest grey-seal breeding colony and endemic insects
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $6,000.
Central America · Alajuela Province
Lebedev-rated favorite: volcano town, hot springs and rainforest tourism hub
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
The highest density of white marble-clad buildings on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $2,700.
Central Asia · Zarafshan Valley
A Timurid urban ensemble where monumental madrasas, mausoleums and an astronomical observatory sit inside a living city
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $1,400.
Mexico · Quintana Roo / Yucatan
A surface ring aligned with the buried Chicxulub impact structure, alongside two of the world's longest underwater cave systems
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $800.
Musandam's limestone rias, with desert mountains rising above narrow sea inlets
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 3 days · $450.
Middle East · Adıyaman Province
A 2,150-metre royal tomb flanked by toppled colossal Greek-Persian deity heads
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Middle East · Nevşehir and Kayseri provinces
Fairy-chimney tuff valleys layered over multi-level subterranean refuge cities
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
Oceania · Tanna Island
One of the most accessible persistently active volcanoes on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $3,500.
Oceania · South Island
Lebedev-rated favorite: alpine lake town at the edge of dramatic South Island terrain
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,700.
Oceania · Northern Territory
Rock art, wetlands, escarpments and living Aboriginal culture in one huge tropical park
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,200.
Oceania · Kimberley, Western Australia
One of the world’s most dramatic sandstone tower-karst formations
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $3,700.
One of the world's largest tropical wetlands
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Arequipa
Deep inhabited canyon and reliable condor thermals
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · Punakha District
A Bhutanese protective tradition linking phallic house paintings with a fertility shrine
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,200.
Southeast Asia · Lesser Sunda Islands
The natural home of the world’s largest living lizard
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Southern Africa · Menabe
A concentrated stand of endemic Grandidier's baobabs
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,400.
USA · Wyoming
The world’s largest example of columnar jointing and the first US national monument
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,400.
USA · Hawaii Island and the Hawaiian archipelago
The Hawaiian archipelago records hotspot-driven island-building and adaptive radiations in birds and plants, while Kīlauea remains one of Earth's most active volcanoes.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,600.
USA · Cascade Range, Oregon
The deepest lake in the United States, filling a collapsed Cascade volcano
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,700.
Western Europe · Outer Hebrides
Artemy top-tier rating: evacuated Atlantic island culture and seabird cliffs
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
Southeast Europe · Croatia
UNESCO-listed walled city with preserved Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque buildings inside its historic fortifications.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Caribbean · Matanzas
One of the Caribbean's largest wetland systems and the main wild stronghold of one of the world's most range-restricted crocodiles
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
Caribbean · West coast Dominica
The world’s first marine reserve created specifically for sperm whales
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,000.
Central America · Cerro Verde National Park
Izalco is a steep-sided 650-metre stratovolcano built on Santa Ana’s flank during two centuries of frequent Strombolian eruptions. Its incandescent activity made it a night-time beacon for ships.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
A large Maya city with an extensive causeway network, reservoirs and monumental plazas in the Chiquibul Forest Reserve
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
Central Asia · Korgalzhyn / Naurzum
A major Central Asian flyway wetland inside protected steppe
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,000.
East Asia · Guangxi
Guilin's karst-and-river scenery is strongly associated with Chinese landscape imagery, but the geology has close analogues in Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $600.
East Asia · Yunnan
A dramatic stone-forest expression of one of the world's great karst regions
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,200.
Mexico · Bajío
A silver-mining city with subterranean streets, ravine topography and naturally mummified bodies
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
Middle East · Istanbul (Fatih district)
The UNESCO property has four zones where Byzantine and Ottoman monuments sit among surviving historic neighborhoods.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
A substantially preserved Roman-period city on a North African hill site
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $780.
North Africa · Gabès Governorate
A concentration of traditional pit-courtyard cave homes in the pre-Saharan hills, some still inhabited
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
North Africa · Cairo, Egypt
A surviving medieval Islamic urban fabric of neighbourhoods, mosques, madrasas and markets integrated into modern Cairo.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $70.
South America · Avenue of the Volcanoes
Farthest point on Earth's surface from Earth's center
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
Southeast Asia · Ninh Binh Province
A mixed UNESCO World Heritage property where tower-karst landforms shaped over five million years surround caves with archaeological traces of human occupation spanning more than 30,000 years
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
Southern Africa · KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape coast
A huge but increasingly unpredictable marine feeding event
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,500.
Southern Africa · Lake Malawi National Park
The most extensive recent vertebrate adaptive radiation
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
USA · Fly Ranch, Hualapai Geothermal Flats, Nevada
A continuously growing, human-made geothermal geyser with travertine terraces colored by thermophilic microbes
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
USA · South Florida
South Florida is the only place in the world where American alligators and American crocodiles occur together in the wild
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,500.
USA · Arizona-Sonora borderlands
A protected Sonoran Desert site with the only large natural stands of organ pipe cactus in the United States
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,400.
West Africa · Dakar region
A hypersaline lake famous for dry-season pink water and hand-harvested salt
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 3 days · $650.
Northern Europe · Ornes, Luster, Vestland, Norway
Norway's only stave church on UNESCO's World Heritage List, with a reused carved portal and the distinctive Urnes style
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · France
Inhabited medieval town with two concentric walls, 52 towers and 3 km of ramparts
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Near Krakow
A historic salt mine with underground chapels, chambers and visitor routes
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $650.
Central Europe · Czechia
A preserved urban ensemble spanning Prague’s medieval town plan, Gothic monuments, Baroque buildings and modernist architecture
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Spain
A complete Gothic cathedral with chapels, cloister and annexes, plus a unique collection of paintings, choir stalls, reredos, tombs and stained-glass windows.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Bosnia and Herzegovina
Reconstructed 16th-century Ottoman bridge in a historic town with pre-Ottoman, Ottoman, Mediterranean and western European architectural layers
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Eastern Europe · Kotayk Province, Armenia
Rock-cut churches and tombs within a still-used medieval monastery at the entrance to the Azat Valley
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Canada · Osoyoos, British Columbia
A sacred alkali lake with 365 mineral circles revealed as summer water evaporates
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,500.
Central Asia · South shore of Issyk-Kul
A surviving golden-eagle hunting tradition shared across the Turkic-Mongol steppe
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,400.
East Africa · Swahili coast
A Swahili town continuously inhabited for more than 700 years and shaped by Indian Ocean trade
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Mexico · Mexico
A 4-km² colonial centre where a Spanish rectilinear grid meets winding Indigenous streets, with 1,400 listed buildings and multilobate Baroque arches inside houses and palaces.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Mexico · Mexico
A preserved Baroque colonial port with an irregular hexagonal wall and surviving Caribbean fortifications
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Middle East · Saudi Arabia
The only surviving urban ensemble of the Red Sea cultural world, with coral-stone houses, Roshan tower houses and souks shaped by trade and the Hajj.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
North Africa · Morocco
A planned late-18th-century fortified seaport where European military design was adapted to a North African medina and port.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $700.
Oceania · Grande Terre
An isolated Pacific biota with five endemic plant families, Amborella and the kagu
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,700.
Largest earthen-architecture city in pre-Columbian America
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
USA · Eastern Sierra, California
An ancient soda lake with tufa towers and an endemic brine-shrimp ecosystem
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
USA · Pocahontas County, West Virginia
The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope inside the 13,000-square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Western Europe · North Sea coast
The largest unbroken intertidal sand-and-mud-flat system on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Western Europe · Centre-Val de Loire
An unusually complete early-13th-century Gothic cathedral with much of its 12th- and 13th-century stained glass intact.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · France
A 522-hectare UNESCO urban property whose hotels, villas, promenades and street plan record the rise of international winter tourism
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
A three-part World Heritage site linking a 6th-century church, an abbey ruin and a cathedral.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Stralsund and Wismar, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany
A paired UNESCO site where Wismar retains its medieval harbour basin and Stralsund retains its 13th-century island setting, with Brick Gothic churches and merchant houses in both
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Banská Bystrica Region, central Slovakia
A medieval mining town paired with an industrial landscape of shafts, tunnels and historic water reservoirs
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
North Africa · Morocco
A 17th-century North African capital with a medina, imperial city and ramparts up to 15 metres high.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $700.
North Africa · El Jadida, Casablanca-Settat
One of Morocco's best-preserved Portuguese fortifications, with an underground cistern and Manueline church
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $700.
The coldest major city on Earth and the largest city on continuous permafrost
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Northern Europe · Blekinge
A planned 17th-century naval city where the civilian grid, dockyard, harbour and island fortifications remain legible as one connected system
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · France
A 17th-century canal network still in operation, with Pierre-Paul Riquet's original route, water-supply system and many structures intact
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · France
An inhabited UNESCO historic city whose early-18th-century plans and classical and neoclassical buildings form a coherent urban ensemble
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Germany
An unusually broad Enlightenment cultural landscape linking English-style parks, palaces and agricultural land across the Dessau-Wörlitz region; Wörlitz was the focus of the first landscape garden in continental Europe.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Germany
UNESCO-listed historic place with preserved cultural fabric
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Germany
A serial property of seven component parts across three cities, including Haus Am Horn in Weimar, the Bauhaus Building and Masters' Houses in Dessau and the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Hungary
A 27-settlement UNESCO landscape where active vineyards, historic settlements and hand-cut volcanic-rock cellars remain linked.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Community of Madrid
A planned university city beside a medieval town, with a humanist university layout and 465 protected buildings among the precinct's 785.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Oceania · Australia
The only Great Hall from a major industrial exhibition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that survives substantially intact, set within formal exhibition gardens.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Southern Africa · Western Cape
The smallest floral kingdom and the only one inside a single country
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $750.
Central Europe · Germany
A nearly complete Cistercian monastic complex with a preserved medieval layout and water-management system
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Asia · Kolsai Lakes National Park
A small earthquake-dammed lake with a drowned spruce forest
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,000.
Mexico · Oaxaca
Rare travertine formations that look like waterfalls frozen over a cliff
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Polar Regions · Weddell Sea
A realistic visitor target for the only bird that breeds through the Antarctic winter
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 16 days · $30,000.
South America · Altiplano / Sud Lípez
World's largest salt flat; Sud Lípez adds mineral lakes and geysers
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · Mustang District
A former Tibetan Buddhist kingdom with Lo Manthang, one of the last surviving medieval walled settlements in the Tibetan region
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 12 days · $2,400.
USA · Wyoming / Montana / Idaho
The world's largest concentration of active geysers, with more than 10,000 hydrothermal features and about half of the world's geysers
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,100.
Canada · Gaspé Peninsula, Quebec
The largest and most accessible northern gannet colony in North America
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,700.
Central Africa · Atlantic coast
A coastal park where rainforest, lagoon, savanna and beach meet, with wildlife crossing between them
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,900.
Central America · Pacific Panama
A former prison island protecting eastern Pacific marine biodiversity
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
Central Asia · Naryn Region
A high-altitude Kyrgyz jailoo around a large alpine lake, with seasonal herding and yurt camps; similar pastoral landscapes exist across Eurasia
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,300.
East Asia · Shanxi / Henan
Two major Chinese Buddhist cave complexes with peers across the Silk Road and East Asia
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,100.
Ancient cedar forest on a wet subtropical mountain island
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,700.
East Asia · Remote Pacific islands
Oceanic islands with more than 100 recorded native land-snail species, over 90% endemic and woody-plant endemism as high as 70%.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 13 days · $3,000.
East Asia · Dunhuang, Gansu
A millennium of Silk Road Buddhist art preserved in desert caves
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,300.
North Asia · Kamchatka Peninsula
One of the world's densest active-volcano regions, with 34 volcanoes and 19 active in the World Heritage site
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,900.
Oceania · Western Australia Coral Coast
Thousands of limestone pillars rising from yellow coastal sand
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
Oceania · South Australia
A working opal town where underground dwellings are normal climate adaptation
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,800.
South America · Honoria, Huánuco
A non-volcanic thermal river in the Amazon
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
A 5th-century palace-fortress, water-garden system and fresco site on a roughly 180 m granite peak
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $850.
USA · California / Nevada
North America's lowest point plus salt flats, dunes, badlands and extreme summer heat
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
USA · Sequoia National Park, California
The largest known living single-stem tree by volume, in a species naturally limited to the Sierra Nevada
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,900.
Western Europe · County Kerry
A stone beehive monastery set on a steep Atlantic sea stack
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Caribbean · Curacao
Four historic districts around a natural working harbor, with Dutch forms adapted to the Caribbean climate and trade
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,900.
Caribbean · Eastern Jamaica
A mountain refuge tied to Maroon resistance and high endemism
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
Caribbean · Trinidad / Tobago
Oilbirds are the only nocturnal flying fruit-eating birds; the circuit adds scarlet ibis roosts and Tobago's 1776 Main Ridge Forest Reserve.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,800.
Central America · Tenorio Volcano National Park
A river whose blue color appears where two clear streams mix and scatter sunlight
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Central America · Cayo District
A Maya ritual cave where artifacts and human remains stay in situ
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
Central Asia · Bukhara Region
A long-lived oasis city of madrasas, bazaars, mosques and urban continuity
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $1,300.
East Asia · Andong
A still-inhabited Pungsan Ryu clan village with a living mask-dance tradition
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $650.
East Asia · Seto Inland Sea
A water-droplet-shaped museum with a permanent installation by Rei Naito, plus Naoshima's cluster of Tadao Ando museums
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,700.
East Asia · Macao Peninsula
A 22-building UNESCO ensemble of historic streets, Portuguese and Chinese buildings and public squares in Macao's old city.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Middle East · Southern Arabian Peninsula, mainly southeastern Saudi Arabia
The largest continuous sand desert on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 3 days · $700.
Middle East · AlUla
The largest conserved Nabataean site south of Petra, with monumental tombs carved directly into sandstone outcrops
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,200.
North Africa · Moroccan-controlled Atlantic coast
A calm Atlantic lagoon where Sahara dunes, wind sports and ocean flats meet
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
North Africa · Kef Governorate
A mesa-like fortress plateau rising from the Tunisian-Algerian borderlands
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
South America · Jujuy
A high desert valley where geology, villages and long-distance Andean routes overlap
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Misiones / Uruguay River
A waterfall system running lengthwise along the river channel instead of across it
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Peru
An Inca urban plan and stonework overlaid by Spanish colonial churches and palaces, with both layers still visible in the historic centre.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
South Asia · Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta
The world's largest contiguous mangrove forest and the only mangrove habitat in the world for Bengal tigers; honey collectors face recurring tiger attacks.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $800.
Three adjacent volcanic lakes that change color independently
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $750.
Southern Africa · Masvingo
The largest of more than 500 stone-walled sites in southern Africa
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $850.
Southern Africa · Malawi
UNESCO-listed cultural landscape with preserved cultural fabric
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
USA · Hawaii Island
One of the world’s largest ground-based astronomy sites on a summit with deep spiritual significance to Native Hawaiians
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,600.
West Africa · Osogbo, Osun State
The largest surviving Yoruba sacred grove, with 40 shrines and sculptures along the Osun River in remnant high forest
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $450.
West Africa · Dakar and village arenas
West Africa’s striking-permitted wrestling tradition and Senegal’s national obsession
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Central Europe · Czechia
A medieval town on a Vltava meander where the castle, planned street layout and many historic buildings remain intact
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Laconia
Artemy top-tier rating: a walled medieval town on a massive sea rock reached by a narrow causeway
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $950.
Southern Europe · Tuscany
Compact medieval centre with 14 surviving tower houses, an original urban layout and 14th- and 15th-century Italian art in its historic settings.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Portugal
A large Cistercian complex combining an early Gothic church, medieval monastic rooms, an 18th-century kitchen and royal tombs
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Suceava County, northern Moldavia, Romania
A serial group of eight Romanian Orthodox churches whose exterior frescoes cover the facades in complete biblical cycles, a form UNESCO calls unique in Europe.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Eastern Europe · Greater Caucasus and central Azerbaijan
A living UNESCO cultural landscape organized around a 200-kilometre vertical transhumance route
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Canada · Alberta / Northwest Territories
Canada's largest national park, the largest dark-sky preserve and core wood-bison/whooping-crane habitat
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,300.
Central America · Southern Nicaragua
Central America's largest lake, where bull sharks move between the Caribbean and freshwater through the San Juan River
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
Central Asia · Jalal-Abad Region
One of Central Asia’s largest and highest rock-art concentrations
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $2,000.
Central Asia · Kashkadarya Region
A Timurid monument ensemble in Amir Temur's birthplace, centred on the surviving Ak-Saray portal and related memorial and religious complexes
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
East Africa · Tanzania
UNESCO-listed historic place with preserved cultural fabric
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
Mexico · Puebla
A Renaissance street grid with Baroque churches, former palaces and houses clad in azulejos.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
North Africa · Fès el-Bali
A vast living medieval city fabric anchored by still-working leather tanneries
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
North Africa · Tunisia
A preserved Arabo-Muslim urban ensemble with an eighth-century central medina, 13th-century northern and southern suburbs and roughly 700 historic monuments.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $700.
North Asia · Russia
Russia's only surviving Tatar fortress, with 10th- to 16th-century remains and Tatar-Russian architectural influences.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
South America · Peru
Historic urban centre built largely from volcanic sillar, with European and native construction traditions still visible in its streets and buildings.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
South America · Colonia Department
Only regional example of a preserved urban plan adapted to the peninsula rather than Spain's rigid grid, with Portuguese, Spanish and post-colonial architectural styles
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $140.
South Asia · India
A Kakatiyan temple with a sandbox foundation, a lightweight porous-brick vimana and dolerite bracket figures that depict regional dance.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Southern Africa · Drakensberg and Maloti mountains
The largest and most concentrated San rock-art group in sub-Saharan Africa
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
USA · Snake River Plain, Idaho
The largest young lava field in the lower 48 states, spread across Idaho's Great Rift
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
Southern Europe · Greece
Fortified Mediterranean port with Venetian fortifications and a largely intact neoclassical urban network.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Italy
A compact Renaissance urban ensemble inside largely intact walls, with the Ducal Palace, cathedral and oratories still part of the historic centre
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Portugal
A working UNESCO vineyard landscape of thousands of small basalt-walled plots (currais) beside the Atlantic, with traditional cultivation continuing around Criação Velha.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · San Marino
San Marino is one of the world's oldest republics and the only surviving Italian city-state; its still-inhabited historic capital occupies Mount Titano.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Bulgaria
A medieval monastic complex carved into natural karst cavities, with 13th- and 14th-century churches and frescoes preserved in the rock.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Croatia
Hellenistic street grid and Romanesque, Renaissance and Baroque buildings survive in a compact island town.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Mexico · Mexico
The property combines blue-agave fields, working distilleries, haciendas, towns and Teuchitlan-era archaeological sites in one World Heritage listing.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
High-altitude pre-Inca ceremonial and political center
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · India
A seven-monument Old Goa ensemble where Manueline, Mannerist and Baroque forms were adapted to local materials.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
USA · San Antonio, Texas
A five-mission Spanish colonial World Heritage property with surviving churches, farmland, residences and historic acequias, including the Alamo.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Northern Europe · Roskilde, Zealand
A Gothic brick cathedral that became a Danish royal mausoleum, with chapels and porches added in successive architectural styles.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · Côte-d'Or, Burgundy
An unusually complete Cistercian complex whose intact site retains its Romanesque church, cloister, monastic buildings and a late-12th-century forge
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Ferrara and the Po Delta, Emilia-Romagna
A virtually intact Renaissance urban plan tied to the Este family's engineered Po Delta landscape and network of ducal residences
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Eastern Europe · Georgia
An Orthodox monastery whose main church has a well-preserved 12th-century apse mosaic and Georgia's largest ensemble of medieval and post-medieval wall paintings, with much of its landscape setting intact
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
East Asia · Hapcheon County, South Gyeongsang Province, South Korea
Four 15th-century depository buildings use natural ventilation and humidity control to preserve the Tripitaka Koreana, the most complete collection of Buddhist texts on woodblocks.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
East Asia · Seoul
Confucian royal shrine with a unique spatial layout preserved in its entirety.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $40.
Oceania · Victoria
An ancient Gunditjmara eel aquaculture system built into lava flows
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,100.
Southeast Asia · Indonesia
UNESCO-listed cultural landscape with preserved cultural fabric
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
Western Europe · United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
A 24-kilometre industrial landscape with mills, workers' housing, canals and railways still visible around the River Derwent.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Poland
UNESCO-listed cultural landscape with preserved cultural fabric
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Middle East · Kerman, Sistan and Baluchestan and South Khorasan
A UNESCO desert with a recorded land-surface temperature of 70.7°C, giant dunes and vast wind-carved kalut fields
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
South America · Maranhão
Rain-filled lagoons inside migrating dunes
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
Caribbean · Pinar del Río
Dome-shaped limestone mogotes rise from a tobacco-growing cultural landscape where traditional farming methods survive.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
East Asia · Nagasaki
An abandoned, densely built coal-mining company town on a tiny artificial island
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,100.
East Asia · Tainan
A plague-era ritual where wooden frames fire bottle rockets into crowds in protective gear
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $600.
Mexico · Chihuahua
The largest known natural gypsum crystals, in a reflooded mine cave
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,500.
North Africa · Sahara
A vast Saharan sandstone plateau with more than 15,000 prehistoric drawings and engravings
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,900.
Southern Africa · Malanje Province
One of Africa's largest waterfalls by volume
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,600.
Central Europe · Austria
A preserved Alpine cultural landscape shaped by more than 2,500 years of salt mining, timber production and transhumance.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Canada · Alberta badlands
The world's most abundant and diverse dinosaur locality, per IUGS
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,700.
Caribbean · Barbuda
The Caribbean’s largest magnificent frigatebird colony, with nesting birds concentrated on mangrove islets.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,100.
Caribbean · Saint Kitts
An extensive British fortress built into a steep volcanic hill, with the citadel spread across the upper slopes
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,700.
Central Africa · Ogooué-Ivindo
A rainforest-savanna interface with mandrills and deep human history
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,600.
Central America · Northern Peten
A Preclassic Maya city with La Danta, listed by Guinness as the largest Maya pyramid by volume
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,200.
The Maya site with the longest known Maya inscription, carved into the Hieroglyphic Stairway
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,100.
East Asia · Dewa Sanzan / Mount Yudono
Japan’s concentrated cluster of self-mummified “living Buddhas”
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,500.
East Asia · China
An exceptionally large, well-preserved Taoist building complex with surviving Yuan, Ming and Qing structures
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
East Asia · Beijing
A Qing imperial garden arranged around Kunming Lake and Longevity Hill, with halls, temples, islands, bridges and roofed corridors.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
East Asia · Japan
Seventeen component sites, including 198 buildings and 12 gardens, form one UNESCO property across Kyoto, Uji and Otsu.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
North Africa · Ounila Valley near Ouarzazate
Compact pre-Saharan ksar with earthen dwellings, defensive walls, corner towers and communal spaces on a former trade route between the Sahara and Marrakesh.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
North Africa · Western Desert near the Great Sand Sea
A living Berber-speaking oasis culture around Shali and the Oracle of Amun
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $450.
North Asia · Kamchatka Peninsula
Lebedev-loved stop: a working Pacific port on Avacha Bay, with volcanoes visible from town.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,500.
Chachapoya walled settlement in Andean cloud forest
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Antofagasta
Hyperarid desert, salt basins and geysers
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Corrientes
A large wetland of open water, floating vegetation and grassland islands, with capybaras, caimans, marsh deer and reintroduced jaguars.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
Southeast Asia · Sabah
Ancient Bornean primary rainforest with wild orangutans
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,600.
USA · Death Valley, California
A dry lakebed where thin ice panels push rocks across wet mud in rare winter conditions
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,700.
Central Europe · Germany
UNESCO-listed Rococo pilgrimage church with an intact rural Alpine setting
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Poland
A rare medieval settlement agglomeration combining the ruins of the Teutonic Castle with the Old Town and New Town inside an intact ring of defensive walls, with its original street pattern and many Gothic brick townhouses still preserved.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Black Sea coast
Europe’s largest continuous marshland and one of the world’s great reed-bed systems
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
Southeast Europe · Bulgaria
A UNESCO-listed monastery with a 19th-century Bulgarian Renaissance complex and a functioning monastic community
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Caribbean · Saint Thomas
Lebedev-rated favorite: hilly Danish-Caribbean port town and harbor amphitheater
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,000.
Caribbean · Dominican Republic
The only 15th-century colonial city in the Americas, with a largely intact walled grid of 32 streets and 116 blocks.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
Central Asia · Aralsk / North Aral Sea
The partially recovered North Aral Sea
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,500.
North Africa · Atlantic Sahara coast
The Sahara meeting the Atlantic in one of the planet’s great shorebird wintering systems
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,300.
North Asia · Tatarstan, Russia
A 16th-century monastery complex with rare Eastern Orthodox frescoes, including a substantial mural cycle in the Assumption Cathedral.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
South America · Pernambuco
Portuguese colonial centre spread over hills, with about 20 Baroque churches, convents, gardens and tiled houses in an irregular street plan.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
South America · Ecuador
Historic Centre of Quito retains its original street plan, blocks and squares, with colonial churches, monasteries and houses.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Southern Africa · Northern Cape
The only area where the Nama still construct portable rush-mat haru om houses
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
USA · Puerto Rico
A 16th- to 20th-century defensive system that adapted European military architecture to a Caribbean harbor, including La Fortaleza, El Morro, San Cristóbal, El Cañuelo and much of the old city wall.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Southern Europe · Greece
A four-kilometre-walled medieval city where the Knights' Gothic upper town sits alongside Ottoman mosques, baths and houses in a living urban settlement
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Portugal
Terraced vineyards on schist slopes, wine estates, villages, chapels and roads form a living cultural landscape shaped by nearly 2,000 years of viticulture.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Eastern Europe · Azerbaijan
A rare medieval walled urban ensemble where 12th-century defenses, the Maiden Tower and the Shirvanshahs' Palace remain part of a living city.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Canada · Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia
The best and most complete known fossil record of terrestrial life from the Pennsylvanian (Carboniferous) 'Coal Age'
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
Caribbean · East coast Dominica
The Caribbean’s last community claiming direct descent from the Indigenous Kalinago who populated the region, with its own Chief and Council
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,800.
North Asia · Vologda Oblast
A complete 15th–17th-century Orthodox monastic ensemble whose Nativity Cathedral retains Dionisy's only fully preserved original wall paintings.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
Oceania · South Island
Lebedev-rated city where earthquake recovery remains visible alongside gardens and a South Island gateway role
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,400.
South America · Atacama / Tarapacá
Nitrate company towns mummified by the Atacama
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
Southeast Asia · Yogyakarta City and Bantul Regency, Indonesia
Six-kilometre north-south axis linking Mount Merapi, the Kraton and the Indian Ocean through monuments connected by Javanese rituals.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
Central Europe · Austria / Hungary
A cross-border cultural landscape around Eurasia's westernmost steppe lake, with saline soils, reed beds, villages and centuries of viticulture and stock raising.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Canada · Eastern Ontario
North America's best-preserved slackwater canal, still operating along its original route with most original structures intact
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,100.
Canada · Minas Basin, Nova Scotia
A rare North American polder landscape where Acadian dykes, aboiteaux, drainage channels and archaeological village remains are still part of a farming system.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,100.
North Asia · Tatarstan, Russia
Two preserved university observatories retain historic buildings and instruments, including the world's only still-functioning heliometer telescope.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
USA · Upper Mississippi River, Iowa
A concentration of Indigenous mounds shaped like bears, birds and other animals above the Mississippi
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
USA · Thurston County, Washington
A preserved field of repeating low prairie mounds whose origin remains debated
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,100.
Central Europe · Czechia
The world’s only hop-growing landscape on the UNESCO World Heritage List: Žatec’s medieval centre and industrial Prague Suburb sit alongside rural hop fields and villages.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Mexico · Huasteca Potosina, San Luis Potosí
Edward James's surrealist concrete jungle, with stairs, arches and rooms that behave like dreams
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
South America · Canaima National Park
World's tallest uninterrupted waterfall dropping from a tepui
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Cusco
Inca urbanism fused to cloud-forest topography
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · Meghalaya
Load-bearing bridges grown from living rubber fig (Ficus elastica) roots
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $850.
Central Africa · Congo Basin rainforest
A mineral-rich forest clearing where large numbers of forest elephants gather
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,500.
Central Asia · Pamir Mountains
A mostly Soviet-built highway through the Pamirs that reaches 4,655 metres at Ak-Baital Pass
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 14 days · $3,100.
Central Asia · Almaty Region
A striking red canyon in the Kazakh steppe, impressive but not globally singular
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $900.
East Africa · Outer Islands
A remote raised coral atoll with the world's largest giant tortoise population and minimal human impact
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $4,200.
East Asia · Gansu
A large, accessible example of multicoloured Danxia landform, with banded hills and eroded formations spread through a 322-square-kilometre geopark.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,100.
Mexico · Michoacan / State of Mexico
A major protected overwintering region for eastern North America's monarchs, covering 8 of 14 known colonies; UNESCO calls the concentration a superlative natural phenomenon
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
Middle East · Ma'an and Aqaba Governorates
Jordan's pairing of a Nabataean rock-cut city with a UNESCO-listed sandstone desert
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Oceania · Subantarctic
The only place on Earth where mantle rocks are actively exposed above sea level
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 18 days · $10,700.
USA · New Mexico
Huge sulfuric-acid cave chambers and desert bat ecology
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
Canada · Northwest Territories
A canyon river with Niagara-scale falls and Canada's largest tufa mounds
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,700.
Canada · Central and north coast, British Columbia
The only known wild range of the white Kermode spirit bear in a 6.4-million-hectare coastal temperate rainforest
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $6,400.
Caribbean · Havana
A historic centre that retains its original urban layout, five major plazas and a network of some of the oldest and largest stone fortifications in the Americas.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
Caribbean · Cuba
A multi-level fortress on a rocky promontory, recognized by UNESCO as the most complete and best-preserved example of Spanish-American military architecture
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
Central Asia · Khorezm
A preserved inner Silk Road city enclosed by mud-brick walls
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $1,400.
East Africa · Rift Valley
A caustic soda lake whose seasonal islands host East Africa's only regular lesser flamingo breeding site.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Middle East · Edirne
A 16th-century Ottoman külliye with Sinan's single great dome, four minarets, peak-period Iznik tiles and associated schools, market, courtyard and library.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Middle East · Denizli Province
A major travertine terrace system, but not globally singular
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
North Asia · Sakha / Yakutia
The largest known retrogressive thaw slump on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,300.
North Asia · Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast, Russia
A 3,934-hectare serial cultural property covering Saint Petersburg's planned core, imperial palaces and parks and Gulf of Finland fortifications.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
Oceania · New Georgia Islands
The world’s largest and best-defined double-barrier enclosed lagoon system
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $4,500.
South America · Andes to Amazon
A protected gradient from Andean grasslands through cloud forest to Amazon lowland rainforest
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Santa Cruz
Ancient hand stencils in a Patagonian canyon
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Catamarca Puna
A white, pumice-rich ignimbrite field with Earth's largest known wind-formed ripple marks and yardangs
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · Bihar
India's oldest surviving rock-cut caves with mirror-like Mauryan polish
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 3 days · $400.
USA · Waters around the Hawaiian Islands, including Maui Nui
Principal winter breeding and calving waters for roughly half of the North Pacific humpback population
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,600.
USA · Eastern Sierra, California
A former California gold-mining town whose surviving buildings and interiors are left in place under a state of "arrested decay"
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
West Africa · Ouidah, Cotonou, Lomé and southern shrines
Active Vodun traditions in southern Benin and Togo, with related forms in the Atlantic diaspora
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $850.
Canada · Côte-Nord, Quebec
One of Earth's largest confirmed impact structures, with a 70-kilometre annular lake inside a roughly 100-kilometre crater
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,700.
Central America · Nicaragua
UNESCO-listed cathedral with a rectangular basilica plan, low earthquake-adapted towers and rooftop domes and terraces open to visitors.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
East Asia · Gyeongju
Silla capital archaeology and Buddhist monuments across five heritage belts
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $600.
East Asia · Xiamen, Fujian
UNESCO-listed island with 931 historic buildings and the Amoy Deco architectural style
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
North Africa · Ghardaïa
A compact Ibadi oasis urban system in the Sahara
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
North Africa · Marrakesh-Safi
A living historic town inside its ramparts, with a medieval lane network, souks, fondouks and monuments from the Almoravid, Almohad, Saadian and Alaouite periods.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $700.
South America · Sacred Valley
Inca microclimate terraces beside hand-worked salt pans
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Altiplano
South America's largest freshwater lake at 3,810 metres, with Uros reed islands and long-lived island communities
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · San Juan
A protected Andean park with two observatories and more than 300 clear nights a year
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · Anuradhapura District, North Central Province
Ancient Buddhist capital with monumental stupas, monastic complexes and the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi, a living sacred Bodhi tree.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
South Asia · Central Province, Matale District
A living Buddhist cave monastery with five shrines, 2,100 m² of murals and 157 statues
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Southeast Asia · South Sulawesi
A rare living funerary culture with cliff tombs, tau-tau statues and ceremonial grounds
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $950.
Southern Africa · Vilanculos coast
The last viable dugong population in the Western Indian Ocean
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,700.
USA · New Mexico
Ancestral Pueblo great houses and roads organized around celestial alignments across a regional ceremonial network
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,100.
USA · White Mountains, California
Home of Methuselah, the oldest known non-clonal living tree
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,900.
USA · New Mexico
Living Pueblo community with continuously inhabited multi-storey adobe homes, including five-storey North and South Houses.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Western Europe · Corsica
Artemy top-tier rating: Corsican harbor city between Napoleonic memory and granite island coast
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $850.
Western Europe · Cheshire, northwest England
A working radio-astronomy site whose 76-metre Lovell Telescope and surviving research buildings document the shift from optical astronomy to radio astronomy.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Czechia
A triangular market square lined by Renaissance and Baroque burgher houses with continuous arcades, alongside a Renaissance castle and defensive fishponds.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Epirus, northwestern Greece
A rare surviving group of stone-built villages, arched bridges, cobbled paths and stone staircases shaped by Byzantine and Ottoman vernacular traditions
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Alta Ribagorça, Catalonia
Nine 11th- and 12th-century churches form Europe's largest concentration of Romanesque art, with a consistent Lombard style in a rural mountain setting.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Oceania · Hawke's Bay
Lebedev-rated favorite: earthquake-rebuilt Art Deco townscape
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,400.
South America · State of Goiás
An intact 18th- and 19th-century mining-town plan follows the Rio Vermelho between two hill ranges, with public and private buildings using local materials and vernacular techniques.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
West Africa · Côte d'Ivoire
A colonial town plan with separate quarters for commerce, administration, European housing and African housing alongside the N’zima fishing village.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
Northern Europe · Latvia
UNESCO-listed historic town with a largely retained ducal-period street plan, traditional log buildings and Baltic-influenced brick and timber-framed houses
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Aragon
A serial group of ten monuments using Islamic-influenced brick, glazed tile and decorative forms with contemporary European, especially Gothic, architecture.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Asia · Singapore
UNESCO-listed British tropical colonial botanic garden with a well-preserved landscape design, historic plantings and buildings that show its development since 1859.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $25.
Southeast Europe · Romania
The world's pre-eminent underground Roman gold-mining complex, with later mining works and an agro-pastoral settlement landscape around it
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
West Africa · Benin City, Edo State
One of the largest pre-mechanical earthwork complexes ever built
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $500.
Northern Europe · Denmark
Preserved Baroque hunting landscape with star-and-grid forest roads, numbered stone posts and a hunting lodge
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Africa · Sahara / Sahel
A sandstone massif of natural arches, gueltas and one of the Sahara's largest rock-art ensembles
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $2,800.
Central Africa · Chad
A mixed UNESCO World Heritage property with one of the Sahara's largest rock-art ensembles, including more than 900 sites spanning about 7,000 years
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
East Africa · Serengeti ecosystem
One of the world's largest remaining intact animal migrations
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,700.
East Africa · Arusha Region
The world's largest intact, unfilled volcanic caldera with dense resident wildlife
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,500.
Mexico · Michoacán
A Purépecha Day of the Dead tradition across Lake Pátzcuaro’s communities and islands
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
Middle East · Arabian Sea
An isolated Gondwanan island fragment with dragon's blood trees and extreme endemism
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $3,200.
North Africa · Fezzan deep desert
A black-tephra volcanic caldera with small, multicoloured lakes isolated in the pale Sahara
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,800.
South America · Lake Maracaibo
Highest lightning concentration on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
USA · Great Smoky Mountains, Tennessee
A large population of Photinus carolinus, one of only a few firefly species known to synchronize its flashes.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
West Africa · Inner Niger Delta
The world’s largest mud-brick building, replastered each year by Djenné residents
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,700.
West Africa · In-Gall and the Cure Salée region
A gender-inverted courtship festival where women judge male beauty and performance
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $2,600.
A self-governing Indigenous comarca shaped by the 1925 Guna Revolution
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
Central America · Cordillera de Tilarán
A tropical cloud forest on the Continental Divide where mist condenses on leaves, mosses and roots
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Central Asia · Abai Region / Kurchatov
One of the few former nuclear test sites that tourists can visit with guides
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,000.
East Asia · Hunan
Lebedev-rated favorite: stilt houses, river bends and preserved minority-region townscape
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,000.
East Asia · Fujian
Fortified rammed-earth clan buildings designed as equal communal housing
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $900.
East Asia · Ulaanbaatar / Khui Doloon Khudag
Mongolia's national three-games festival of wrestling, archery and horse racing
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,300.
Mexico · Quintana Roo
A Maya-named coastal biosphere of reefs, lagoons, mangroves and tropical forest
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
North Asia · Yamal and Gydan peninsulas
A rare explosive gas-emission phenomenon known from a small number of sites in the Yamal-Gydan region
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $3,500.
North Asia · Krasnoyarsk Krai
A roadless Arctic basalt plateau linked to the Siberian Traps
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $2,800.
South America · Santa Cruz / Guaporé basin
Amazon, Cerrado and Precambrian shield plateau in one park
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Serranía de la Macarena
A river colored by an endemic aquatic plant
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Southern Patagonia
Subantarctic forest, peatlands and sea channels at the continent's edge
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
Southeast Asia · Papua
A protected transect from tropical sea level to equatorial glaciers
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,200.
Southern Africa · South Atlantic Ocean
The world's most remote inhabited island in a mostly uninhabited volcanic archipelago
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 18 days · $5,200.
USA · Colorado
The largest US archaeological preserve, with hundreds of Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
Canada · Whistler, British Columbia
A rare 3S tri-cable gondola with a 3.024-kilometre unsupported span between its two furthest-apart towers
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,400.
Caribbean · Eastern Cuba
One of the Caribbean's most important centers of endemism
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $1,900.
Central Africa · Ogooué valley, central Gabon
A mixed World Heritage site where relict savanna, rainforest and about 1,800 petroglyphs occupy the same Ogooué valley corridor
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Central Asia · Kyzylorda Region
The historic doorway to human spaceflight and a Russian-leased space city inside Kazakhstan
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $1,600.
East Asia · China
The world's largest existing building complex for offering sacrifice to heaven, with 92 ancient buildings and 600 rooms.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Mexico · Zacatecas
A silver-mining city whose largely preserved sixteenth-century street pattern follows a narrow valley, with 15 religious complexes and Baroque architecture combining European and Indigenous elements.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Mexico · Mexico
Preserved 153-block grid where Spanish and Caribbean traditions meet, with single-storey colonnaded houses and mature trees in public spaces.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
South America · Chiloé Archipelago
A foggy island culture of timber churches, palafitos and maritime mythology
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Brazil
UNESCO-listed colonial town with a preserved irregular urban plan and Baroque works by Aleijadinho
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
South America · Valparaíso Region
Historic port quarter spread across a narrow coastal plain and steep hills, with five connected neighborhoods and surviving early-industrial funiculars.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Southern Africa · Okavango Panhandle
One of Earth's densest rock-art landscapes
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,600.
Southern Europe · Italy
UNESCO-listed Renaissance ideal city with a largely intact medieval street plan and Piazza Pio II at its centre
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Central and southern Albania
Two well-preserved fortified historic centres where Ottoman-era houses sit alongside Byzantine churches and mosques.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Romania
A preserved Saxon citadel and lower town, with medieval walls, towers and street network still forming a coherent urban plan
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Romania
Eight UNESCO-listed wooden churches with tall western belfries, steep shingled roofs and painted folk-art interiors
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Asia · Xinjiang / Turpan Depression
A network of more than 5,000 km of underground channels that carries mountain water into the Turpan oasis
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,200.
East Asia · Hiraizumi, Iwate Prefecture
A five-part group of Pure Land temples, gardens and archaeological sites aligned with sacred Mount Kinkeisan, including Chūson-ji's surviving 12th-century Konjikidō.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
North Asia · Altai Krai
The type locality of the Denisovans and the only known site occupied by Denisovans, Neanderthals and modern humans
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $650.
North Asia · Russia
Historic centre with numerous 16th- and 17th-century churches, a neoclassical radial plan and civic architecture.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
South America · Bolivia
UNESCO-listed historic centre with intact 16th- to 19th-century buildings blending local and European architectural traditions
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
South America · Maranhão
A preserved Portuguese colonial street grid, with azulejo tilework and buildings adapted to São Luís's equatorial climate.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
South Asia · Bagerhat District
A 15th-century brick-built Islamic city with surviving mosques, roads, water tanks and tombs from medieval Khalifatabad.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
South Asia · Bihar
One of India's earliest surviving Buddhist temples built entirely in brick, with the Vajrasana, sacred Bodhi Tree and ancient votive stupas around the 50 m main shrine.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Southeast Asia · Melaka and Penang
Two complementary historic city centres with multicultural architecture, religious buildings and living traditions shaped by Malay, Chinese, Indian and European influences.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
Southeast Asia · Luang Prabang Province
A preserved peninsula town with Lao traditional buildings and Buddhist temples alongside 19th- and 20th-century European colonial architecture
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $700.
Southern Africa · Gauteng
The world's richest known hominin fossil region
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $90.
Southern Africa · Northern Cape, South Africa
A 959,100-hectare Kalahari cultural landscape where Stone Age-to-present archaeological evidence is tied to ǂKhomani San ethnobotanical knowledge, cultural practices and !Ui-Taa linguistic memory.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
Western Europe · France
A 12th-century Romanesque abbey church on a protected hill, with the historic village below included in the UNESCO property
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
UNESCO-listed industrial landscape where mines, ironworks, transport routes and workers' housing survive together in an unusually complete setting.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Vicenza and Veneto, Italy
A serial UNESCO site with 23 Palladian buildings in Vicenza and 24 villas scattered across the Veneto
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Portugal
A preserved 15th- and 16th-century road network and vernacular architecture in a port city shaped by Atlantic navigation, with two 400-year-old fortifications
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Serbia
Late Roman imperial palace and memorial complex with fortifications, mausoleums and a tetrapylon linking ceremonial and memorial spaces.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Canada · Gaspé Peninsula, Quebec
The world's outstanding fossil window into the Devonian Age of Fishes
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,800.
Middle East · Cyprus
Ten painted Byzantine and post-Byzantine churches with an architectural style UNESCO describes as unique to the Troodos range.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Oceania · Taveuni
A marked, visitable road crossing of the 180th meridian on Taveuni
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $3,600.
South America · Norte Chico
One of the Americas' earliest urban centers
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · India
UNESCO-listed walled city with distinctive timber houses, gated pols and Sultanate architecture
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Southern Africa · NamibRand and Giribes Plain
A globally famous and still-contested natural patterning phenomenon
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,100.
Southern Africa · Namib near Swakopmund
A marked drive to wild Welwitschia, the only living genus in its family, in the Namib Desert
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $700.
USA · Chillicothe, Newark and Oregonia, Ohio
A UNESCO-listed set of precise geometric earthworks built about 2,000 years ago
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
USA · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
An early-18th-century brick Pennsylvania State House with a wooden steeple and the Assembly Room where the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were debated and signed.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Northern Europe · Öland, Kalmar County
Living agrarian landscape with medieval land-use patterns, villages, coastal pastures and Stora Alvaret, a very rare survival in northern Europe.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Western Europe · County Mayo
A Stone Age farming landscape preserved beneath Atlantic blanket bog
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $850.
Canada · Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland
The oldest abundant, diverse assemblage of large complex fossils known
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,600.
USA · Illinois
The largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico and the apex of Mississippian mound urbanism
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Caribbean · Milot and the Nord Department in northern Haiti
The largest fortress in the Americas, built after the only successful nation-founding slave revolt
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,400.
Caribbean · Lighthouse Reef
One of the world’s largest marine sinkholes, a drowned Ice Age cave inside Lighthouse Reef
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,700.
Central America · Alta Verapaz
A natural limestone bridge where the Cahabón River disappears beneath turquoise pools
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,100.
Central Asia · Balkan Region
Coloured cliffs formed from sediment deposited on an ancient seabed; similar formations occur across the Ustyurt Plateau and into Kazakhstan's Mangystau region.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,600.
East Asia · Altai Mountains / Bayan-Ölgii
A horseback golden-eagle falconry tradition maintained by Kazakh berkutchi
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,100.
East Asia · Anhui
Granite peaks, cloud seas and ancient pines that inspired Chinese shanshui painting and poetry
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,200.
The Maya temple-pyramid with K'inich Janaab' Pakal's royal tomb inside
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,100.
The desert's mudbrick skyscraper city, with dense vertical tower houses inside a fortified wall
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $3,500.
North Africa · Fezzan
Saharan rock art in a sandstone massif of dunes and arches
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $2,600.
South America · Caribbean Colombia
The world's highest coastal mountain range, with the ancestral territories of the Kogui, Arhuaco, Kankuamo and Wiwa peoples.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Equatorial Atlantic
A volcanic Atlantic archipelago with the only known resident spinner dolphin population of this size
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · Ghor Province
A 65 m 12th-century brick minaret standing almost alone in a remote river gorge
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $4,200.
Southeast Asia · East Java
A visitor-accessible volcano where sulfur gases ignite into blue flames at night
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
Southern Africa · Melaky
A rare karst landscape of sharp limestone pinnacles reaching up to 100 metres, cut by caves, dolines and canyons
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,900.
West Africa · Kassena country near Ghana border
A royal court of earthen houses covered in black, white and red Kassena murals
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,000.
East Africa · Kilimanjaro Region
Africa’s highest mountain and a free-standing volcanic massif
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,500.
East Asia · Gifu
A still-inhabited gassho-zukuri thatched village whose winter light-up is tightly rationed
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,800.
East Asia · Aomori / Shimokita Peninsula
A volcanic “gateway to the afterlife” where itako mediums still appear at festivals
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
East Asia · China
A serial UNESCO property linking Beijing's Forbidden City with the early Qing palace in Shenyang; UNESCO describes Shenyang's Eight-Banner layout as unique among palace buildings.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
North Asia · Altai Republic
Permafrost-preserved Pazyryk burials, including the tattooed Siberian Ice Maiden and organic grave goods
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,200.
Oceania · Pitcairn Island
Pitcairn's only settlement, above Bounty Bay in one of the world's most remote inhabited island groups
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 18 days · $8,200.
Polar Regions · Antarctic Plateau
The southern endpoint of Earth's rotation axis, sitting on a moving ice sheet
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 12 days · $68,000.
South America · Navarino Island
One of the world's southernmost named trekking circuits
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
Southeast Asia · Mountain Province, Luzon
Igorot coffins suspended on limestone cliffs and cave mouths
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $650.
East Asia · Shanxi
A remarkably intact Ming-Qing walled city, important but not globally unique
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $1,900.
East Asia · Hangzhou, Zhejiang
A lake-and-hills garden landscape shaped by more than 1,000 years of dredging, with two causeways, three islands and ten poetically named views.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
East Asia · Gyeongju
An Silla Buddhist complex linking an artificial granite grotto and white-granite sculptures to temple halls on raised stone terraces.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Mexico · Mexico
A UNESCO-listed 390-hectare centre with its original street layout and more than 200 historic buildings in the region's pink stone.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
North Asia · Primorsky and Khabarovsk Krais
A roughly 900-kilometre range where taiga, temperate and subtropical species overlap, including Amur tiger habitat
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,700.
South America · Puno
Highest larger permanent settlement on Earth, at roughly 5,100 meters
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Bolivian Andes
The world's largest silver deposit, still mined above a city at 4,000 metres
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Ica
A huge, unusually varied group of desert geoglyphs spread between Nazca and Palpa
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Mendoza / Malargüe
A black-lava volcanic reserve with hundreds of cones in southern Mendoza
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · Arunachal Pradesh
A distinctive engineered wet-rice and fish farming landscape in the eastern Himalayan foothills
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,000.
Southern Europe · Pátmos, Dodecanese, South Aegean, Greece
The only example in Greece of an organized settlement built around a fortified Orthodox monastery, with the Cave of the Apocalypse and Chóra forming the same pilgrimage property
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Europe · Extremadura
A monastery complex combining 14th- to 15th-century Mudéjar work with Gothic, Plateresque and Baroque additions, including a Mudéjar cloister, a Gothic cloister and paintings by Zurbarán.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Canada · Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories
The world's highest concentration of pingos, including Canada's tallest and the world's second-tallest
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $4,100.
Caribbean · Saint Croix
Lebedev-rated favorite: Danish colonial Caribbean townscape and harbor fort
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,000.
Caribbean · Zapata Peninsula and western Cuba
The smallest bird on Earth, endemic to Cuba and Isla de la Juventud
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
Central Asia · Chu-Ili Mountains
A dense sacred rock-art landscape with some 5,000 carvings, settlements and burial grounds
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,000.
Oceania · South-western New South Wales
Ancient lake beds with a cremation site at least 42,000 years old and the world's largest group of fossil human footprints.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,200.
Oceania · Otago
Lebedev-rated favorite: limestone Victorian harbor town with preserved streetscape
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,500.
South America · Brazil
Portuguese-influenced 18th-century urban fabric with distinctive wood-based Baroque architecture
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
South America · Lima Province
Spanish colonial checkerboard city core with churches, convents and civic buildings adapted to repeated earthquakes.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Southern Africa · Namaqualand and southern Namibia
The only fully arid global biodiversity hotspot
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
Western Europe · Cornwall and West Devon, England
A 19,709-hectare cultural landscape with more than 200 Cornish engine-house sites, mine workings, ports, railways and mining settlements spread across ten areas.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Vâlcea County, Wallachia, Romania
A large Brâncovenesc monastic complex with balanced architecture, carved stonework, votive portraits and painted decoration
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
East Asia · Kowloon City
The memory of the densest self-built urban enclave in modern history
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
East Asia · Beijing to Zhejiang, China
The world's longest and oldest canal, with a network of more than 2,000 kilometres of artificial waterways, hydraulic works and associated urban sites linking five major river basins.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
East Asia · Beijing
A 7.8-kilometre urban ensemble of 15 component sites that preserves Beijing's imperial north-south plan from the Bell and Drum Towers to Yongdingmen Gate.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
North Asia · Pskov, Pskov Oblast
A serial group of ten churches and cathedrals showing Pskov's local architectural school from the 12th to early 17th centuries
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
South America · Sergipe
A preserved colonial square where Portuguese and Spanish town-planning models meet in a Franciscan monumental ensemble.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
South America · Western Andes of Colombia
A six-part cultural landscape where small coffee farms, steep mountain terrain and Antioquian-influenced town architecture remain part of a living production system.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
South America · Río Negro Department
Industrial district linking meat-processing buildings and equipment with a port, workers' housing and social institutions.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
USA · Louisiana
A 3,400-year-old complex of mounds and six concentric ridges built by a hunter-fisher-gatherer society
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Artemy top-tier rating: a Russian colonial outpost on the California coast
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $950.
West Africa · Cabo Verde
UNESCO-listed former capital with an original street layout, two churches, a royal fortress and Pillory Square
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
Northern Europe · Finland
Preserved pine-log Lutheran church combining Renaissance central planning, Gothic vaulting and Finnish vernacular construction
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Slovakia
A serial UNESCO site of eight wooden churches plus Hronsek's belfry, spread across eight Slovak locations
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Asia · Bamiyan Province
Six intensely blue lakes formed by natural travertine dams in the Afghan highlands
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 14 days · $4,100.
East Asia · Sichuan
Mineral-blue lakes, travertine terraces and waterfalls in a Tibetan-edge valley
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,500.
East Asia · Toyama / Nagano
A trans-alpine route where snowplows carve walkable walls that can tower over visitors
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,900.
East Asia · Hualien
One of only a few river-carved gorges cut through pure marble; the Liwu River cut it into Taiwan's rising Central Mountain Range.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
North Africa · Nile valley near Shendi, about 200 km north-east of Khartoum
A dense field of more than 200 narrow, steep-sided Kushite pyramids built as royal tombs, markedly different from Egypt’s broad-based pyramids.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $3,000.
Polar Regions · South Shetland Islands
A ship-reachable harbor inside the flooded caldera of an active volcano
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 14 days · $14,000.
South America · Bahia
Table mountains, cave lakes and a seasonal blue shaft of light
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Aysén
Lake-carved marble forms
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
Central Europe · Germany
A serial group of four well-preserved 19th-century palace complexes with historic settings and gardens, combining historicist and eclectic design.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Canada · Northern Saskatchewan
The most northerly major active dune field, with plants found nowhere else
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $4,100.
East Africa · Afar Triangle
A below-sea-level rift basin with active volcanoes, salt plains and acidic hydrothermal features
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $850.
East Asia · Yunnan
A Hani terrace system integrated with forests, villages, water channels and rice fields; similar terrace landscapes exist elsewhere in Asia
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $1,900.
A pre-Saharan oasis town of covered passages and vertically organized mud-brick houses
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,400.
North Africa · Adrar near Ouadane
A roughly 45 km dome with concentric rock rings, photographed by astronauts from orbit
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,800.
North Africa · Mediterranean coast west and east of Tripoli
Leptis Magna has some of North Africa’s most complete Roman ruins; Sabratha retains a major coastal theatre, and both see little ordinary tourist traffic.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $2,200.
North Asia · Chukotka
The last known refuge of woolly mammoths and a polar-bear denning stronghold
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 18 days · $12,000.
Polar Regions · George V Land
The windiest place on Earth at sea level by annual average daily maximum wind speed
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 28 days · $33,000.
South America · Cusco / Vilcanota Range
Glaciated sacred mountain circuit with passes above 5,000 metres
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · Gilgit-Baltistan
One of Earth's highest broad plateaus, turning into a wildflower steppe around 4,000 m
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,500.
Southern Africa · Lüderitz and Tsau //Khaeb
A sand-filled diamond-boom ghost town inside a restricted desert park
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
West Africa · Bandiagara region, central Mali
A Dogon cultural landscape with Tellem cave remains, cliff architecture and living ritual traditions
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,900.
North Asia · Sakha / Yakutia
An early Cambrian fossil metazoan reef among a cryogenically shaped pillar belt along the Lena River
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,400.
South America · Huila
Monumental megalithic statues and elite funerary monuments from a pre-Hispanic northern Andean culture
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · Lahore, Punjab
A paired Mughal World Heritage property: a 21-monument fort and a 16-hectare terraced water garden.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Southern Africa · Kalahari Basin
A giant salt-pan basin with a restored long-distance zebra migration
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,400.
USA · Olympic National Park, Washington
A temperate rainforest with One Square Inch of Silence, a marker for natural quiet
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $650.
Alaska port town on Kodiak Island, with a 1.9-million-acre refuge and dense brown-bear habitat nearby
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,400.
Canada · Newfoundland
One of the clearest places on Earth to walk on uplifted mantle rock
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,100.
Canada · South Shore, Nova Scotia
An intact 18th-century British colonial grid of small lots, mostly wood-built houses and public buildings, a working waterfront and the local 'Lunenburg bump' dormer.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,100.
Central America · La Mosquitia
One of Central America’s largest remaining rainforest blocks, with documented pre-Columbian settlements in the wider Mosquitia
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $2,500.
Central America · Panama
A chain of Spanish colonial forts from Portobelo Bay to the mouth of the Chagres River, adapted over three centuries to tropical terrain and changing defensive technology.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 2 days · $180.
East Africa · Harari Region
A walled Islamic town with distinctive Harari townhouses, 82 mosques and 102 shrines
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
East Asia · Jiangsu
Nine historic gardens that use rocks, water, plants and buildings to make miniature natural worlds within urban compounds.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
East Asia · Sado Island, Niigata Prefecture
A three-part property preserving placer mining at Nishimikawa and manual surface and underground mining around Aikawa and Tsurushi, with processing sites and mining settlements.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
North Asia · Veliky Novgorod and surrounding sites, Novgorod Oblast
A serial UNESCO property with a medieval Kremlin, churches and 14th-century frescoes by Theophanes the Greek.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
South America · Ecuador
A four-century-old orthogonal Spanish colonial plan with parks, churches, two cathedrals facing one another and the Pumapungo archaeological site.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
South Asia · Central Province
Last Sinhala royal capital with the Temple of the Tooth Relic at the centre of its surviving royal precinct.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Malaysia's only oceanic island, rising from a 600-metre drop-off in the Celebes Sea
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,100.
Southern Europe · Chalkidiki
An Orthodox monastic republic with medieval continuity and strict access rules
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,050.
Southern Europe · Italy
A serial cultural landscape of five wine-growing areas and Grinzane Cavour Castle, with villages, castles, churches and wine-making structures across six components.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Serbia
Preserved medieval Serbian monastery complex with white-marble churches and 13th- and 14th-century Byzantine paintings.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Eastern Europe · Lori Province
These two complexes combine Byzantine ecclesiastical forms with traditional vernacular building styles from the Caucasus.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
USA · United States
This serial UNESCO property pairs Jefferson's Monticello with the University of Virginia's Academical Village, eight km apart.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Northern Europe · Telemark
A UNESCO property that brings together power plants, fertilizer works, company towns and transport systems from one early-20th-century industrial complex
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Central Europe · Poland
A six-part UNESCO group of Gothic timber churches retaining historic forms, horizontal-log construction and period interior decoration
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Canada · Alberta foothills
One of the oldest, largest and best-preserved buffalo jumps in the world
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,100.
Oceania · Shark Bay, Western Australia
One of Earth’s most abundant living marine stromatolite fields
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $2,600.
East Africa · Amhara
Eleven medieval monolithic churches carved top-down from volcanic rock
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $650.
A sacred landscape with 3,595 recorded Buddhist monuments across Myanmar's dry central plain
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,100.
Canada · North Baffin Island, Nunavut
A spring floe-edge wildlife corridor in a region where IUCN identifies critical habitat for 75% of the world's narwhals.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $8,700.
Canada · Nunavik, Quebec
A near-perfect meteorite crater lake in Arctic tundra
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $5,100.
Central Asia · Northern Khovsgol taiga
Mongolia’s only reindeer herders and one of the world’s last taiga reindeer cultures
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 12 days · $4,000.
Middle East · Sana'a
A dense highland city of decorated rammed-earth and fired-brick tower houses
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $3,500.
Middle East · Jerusalem
A compact walled historic core containing sites sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam and divided into four quarters.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
North Africa · Adrar caravan towns
Living Saharan library culture beside desert-swallowed caravan architecture
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
Oceania · Central Pacific
A remote protected equatorial Pacific atoll with no permanent population
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 12 days · $12,000.
South America · Colombian Amazon, across Caquetá and Guaviare
Guiana Shield tepuis with more than 75,000 rock pictographs
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · Manipur
The world's only floating national park, set on Loktak's phumdis
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $750.
South Asia · Raa Atoll
A named bioluminescent shoreline on an inhabited island; the same phenomenon can occur around other Maldivian islands and elsewhere in the world.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,800.
Southeast Asia · Northern Cambodia
Remote Khmer imperial sites outside the Angkor core
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $750.
Canada · Northern Newfoundland
The only confirmed Norse/Viking site in the Americas outside Greenland
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,200.
East Asia · Yunnan
A preserved Naxi townscape with a still-functioning historic water-supply system and architecture blending Han, Tibetan and Bai influences.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Oceania · Ambrym Island
A giant caldera famous for paired lava lakes until their 2018 drainage
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $4,100.
Southeast Asia · Sulu Sea
A remote atoll-reef system in the center of the Coral Triangle
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,200.
Southern Africa · Northern Namib Desert, southwestern Angola
Angola's oldest and largest park in the northern Namib system
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
Canada · Strait of Belle Isle, Newfoundland and Labrador
The earliest, most complete and best-preserved archaeological testimony of a pre-industrial whaling station
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,500.
Caribbean · Barbados
UNESCO-listed colonial port and military garrison with a surviving serpentine street plan and 17th- to 19th-century buildings
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
Caribbean · Cuba
A 54-hectare historic centre with an irregular plan of squares, alleys and serpentine streets, unusual among Latin American colonial towns on flat terrain
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
Mexico · Guanajuato
Lebedev-rated favorite: preserved Bajio townscape and hill-town light
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
South America · Bolívar Department
Spanish colonial river port with a sinuous riverside street, three riverfront plazas with churches and largely preserved 17th- to early 19th-century buildings still used for their original purposes.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Southeast Asia · Sarawak
A Kelabit highland settlement of longhouses reached by small aircraft or a rough logging road
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Western Europe · Gwynedd, Wales
A six-part industrial landscape joining relict quarries and mines to worker settlements, railways and coastal export harbours across the Snowdon massif.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Europe · Bosnia and Herzegovina
UNESCO-listed Ottoman bridge by Mimar Koca Sinan, with 11 masonry arches and a total length of 179.5 m
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Caribbean · Aruba / Bonaire / Curaçao
A Dutch-Caribbean Creole spoken as a first language across the ABC islands and with official status on all three
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,000.
Middle East · Al-Ahsa Governorate, Eastern Province
The world's largest oasis, with more than 2.5 million date palms, open canals, springs and historic settlements
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
South Asia · Paharpur, Badalgachhi Upazila, Naogaon District, Rajshahi Division
A vast cruciform Buddhist monastery whose plan influenced architecture across Southeast Asia
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
Southern Europe · La Rioja
UNESCO-listed monastic pair in which Suso preserves hermit caves and Visigothic and Mozarabic remains, while Yuso is a later Renaissance monastery with Baroque additions.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Canada · Yoho and Kootenay national parks / Canadian Rockies
Exceptional soft-bodied fossils from the Cambrian explosion
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,900.
East Asia · Gunma Prefecture
A four-part UNESCO property that preserves an integrated silk-production system: Japan's first mechanized silk-reeling mill, a sericulture farm, a school for teaching sericulture methods and a natural cold-storage site for silkworm eggs.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
West Africa · Central Nigeria, especially southern Kaduna and the Jos Plateau, with museum collections in Kaduna and Jos
The oldest known figurative terracotta sculpture tradition south of the Sahara
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
Northern Europe · Kymenlaakso
A preserved late-19th-century forest-industry village with original machinery, workers' housing, power plants and the surrounding rapids.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Probably the most accessible place to see wild polar bears gather, with summer belugas in the Churchill River estuary.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $5,000.
Middle East · Strait of Hormuz
A salt-diapir island with iron-rich red soils, multicolored valleys and salt caves
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,200.
Canada · Northern Labrador
Inuit homeland, polar-bear country and fjord mountains at the edge of the Arctic
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $5,400.
Central Asia · Karakum Desert
A human-made gas crater in the Karakum Desert that has burned since the 1970s, with its flames now weakening.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $2,700.
Central Asia · Bamiyan Province
A UNESCO-listed cultural landscape with two giant Buddha niches cut into the cliffs, Buddhist caves and Islamic fortifications on a former Silk Road route
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 14 days · $3,900.
East Asia · Panmunjom / border north of Seoul
A heavily fortified armistice border where North and South Korean forces face each other across the Military Demarcation Line
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 1 days · $120.
North Asia · Altai Republic
Three protected areas with central Siberia's most complete sequence of steppe, forest-steppe, mixed forest, subalpine and alpine vegetation
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,100.
Polar Regions · Ross Island
Three heroic-era expedition huts on one island, with interiors and artifacts still in place
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 34 days · $39,000.
Eastern Europe · Ukraine
A 19th-century historicist ensemble combining Byzantine, Gothic and Baroque forms across a former metropolitan residence, seminary and monastery.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Middle East · Western Galilee
A walled port-city where Crusader remains survive above and below street level beneath a later Ottoman town
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Polar Regions · Taylor Glacier
A globally unique surface discharge from an ancient, iron-rich subglacial brine ecosystem
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 34 days · $48,000.
Southern Africa · South Atlantic Ocean
An isolated volcanic island with military infrastructure, turtle nesting and a human-greened mountain
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,600.
USA · Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico
A pristine sulfuric-acid cave with rare formations and deep-cave microbiology
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,600.
Caribbean · Northern Range, Trinidad
Matt Lakeman recommendation: empty jungle mountains falling into the Caribbean Sea
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,800.
Central Asia · Murgab River oasis, near Mary
The oldest and best-preserved of Central Asia's Silk Road oasis cities
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,400.
Oceania · Ovalau Island, Lomaiviti Province
Rare late-19th-century Pacific port town where local settlement patterns meet European urban planning
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
South Asia · Galle, Southern Province
A living fortified town with Dutch street planning, coral-and-granite ramparts and a 17th-century tidal drainage system
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Southeast Asia · Ilocos Sur
A 17.25-hectare historic core with a Renaissance grid, two plazas and 233 historic buildings shaped by Chinese, Ilocano, Filipino and European influences.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
Southern Europe · Italy
A serial UNESCO cultural landscape of 12 villas and two gardens, each tied to its surrounding rural setting.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
East Asia · Tibet / Qinghai high plateau
Highest point of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway and the highest point on any railway, at Tanggula Pass (5,072 meters above sea level)
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 12 days · $2,700.
Mexico · Nayarit / Jalisco / Zacatecas / Durango / San Luis Potosí
A 2025 UNESCO World Heritage serial route of 20 sacred Wixárika sites spanning more than 500 km
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,200.
Mexico · Sierra Gorda, Querétaro
Five mission churches with Indigenous-influenced New Spanish Baroque façades, plus rural settlements that retain their vernacular character.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Southern Europe · Greece
A Greek temple that combines Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders and has the earliest surviving Corinthian capital
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southern Africa · Zambezi / Chobe border region
Two close tripoints that nearly create a four-country meeting point
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $800.
Central America · Osa Peninsula
National Geographic called the Osa Peninsula the most biologically intense place on Earth, citing its 2.5% share of global biodiversity.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,700.
Central Asia · Near Baherden
A warm sulfurous lake inside a cave, memorable but not globally unique
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,000.
Central Asia · Western Afghanistan
Matt Lakeman's favorite Afghan city, with Persianate urbanism and a citadel he calls Afghanistan's best-maintained tourist site
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 15 days · $4,400.
East Asia · Kashgar / Xinjiang
A Chinese Silk Road city with Uyghur architectural and cultural traditions, a largely rebuilt Old City and tightly controlled routes into the Pamirs
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 12 days · $2,800.
East Asia · Toyama Bay
A seasonal deep-sea firefly-squid event close enough for visitors to watch
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,300.
A UNESCO adobe city of badgir windcatchers, qanats and Zoroastrian heritage
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,500.
Central America · Darién Gap
A UNESCO World Heritage park on the roadless break in the Pan-American Highway
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,900.
East Asia · Tokushima / Kochi, Shikoku
Toyota Coaster-based road–rail vehicle that switches between bus and train modes in about 15 seconds.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $2,600.
North Asia · Russia
A boulder-built monastery-fortress with medieval roads and irrigation systems, archaeological sites and Gulag memorials across the archipelago.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
Oceania · Central Pacific
A vast mid-Pacific coral archipelago and seamount wilderness
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 18 days · $16,200.
Polar Regions · Victoria Land
Antarctica's largest relatively ice-free area and a terrestrial analogue for Mars
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 34 days · $48,000.
Polar Regions · Ross Island
Earth's southernmost active volcano, with one of the few persistent lava lakes
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 34 days · $39,000.
South America · Guiana Shield
Large intact, largely uninhabited tropical forest
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · Chitral, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
One of the few surviving indigenous polytheistic traditions in the Hindu Kush
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,800.
Southern Africa · Serra da Leba, Humpata Plateau
A roughly kilometer-scale escarpment break above the Angolan highlands
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,700.
East Asia · Khentii Mountains, northeastern Mongolia
One of four sacred mountains Chinggis Khan designated, with three major ovoos, a defined pilgrimage route and revived shamanic and Buddhist rites.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Middle East · Turkey
5.8-kilometre city walls with 63 inscriptions, linked to the Hevsel Gardens and the Tigris River
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
South Asia · Sindh
A 5,000-year-old Indus city with a strict street plan, public baths, wells and an elaborate drainage system
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,100.
Southeast Europe · Romania
A serial UNESCO cultural landscape of seven villages with fortified churches and preserved late-medieval settlement patterns
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
North Asia · Sakha / Yakutia
The coldest permanently inhabited places on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,600.
North Asia · Arkhangelsk Oblast
Preserved northern Russian village landscape with wooden churches, chapels and painted 'heavens'
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
South America · Ancash
An underground ceremonial complex of an early Andean cult
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South Asia · Trashigang District
High-altitude Brokpa yak-herders with the rain-shedding tsipee cham hat tradition
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,900.
USA · Southeast Alaska / British Columbia
A road-reachable Alaska town entered from Canada without normal US inspection
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,500.
Western Europe · France
UNESCO-listed agro-pastoral landscape with drailles, stone farmhouses and traditional summer transhumance on Mont Lozère
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
A proto-urban settlement linking Central Asia, Iran and the Indus sphere
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 9 days · $1,700.
Mexico · Mexico
A 48.22-kilometre hydraulic system that combines Roman water engineering with Mesoamerican adobe construction.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Middle East · Five provinces of Türkiye: Afyonkarahisar, Ankara, Eskişehir, Kastamonu and Konya
A rare surviving type of medieval Islamic religious architecture, with wooden columns supporting flat timber ceilings and roofs
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Ural industrial town built around an ironworks and pond, with surviving pre-revolutionary buildings and the Sonkina Laguna complex
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
Central Africa · Albertine Rift
Africa’s oldest national park with gorillas, volcanoes and Rift Valley lakes
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,500.
Middle East · Fars Province
A unique archaeological site with a monumental terrace, palace remains and reliefs of rulers and tribute bearers.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,500.
West Africa · Dakar and Ghana’s Central Region
A cross-border set of preserved sites tied to the Atlantic slave trade, from Gorée’s Maison des Esclaves to Ghana’s coastal castles
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,400.
Central Africa · Ituri Forest
A Congo Basin forest reserve created for okapi habitat
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,200.
North Asia · Near Chersky, Sakha / Yakutia
A long-running attempt to restore a mammoth-steppe-like grazing ecosystem
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,500.
North Asia · Komi Republic
Seven 30 to 42 m sericite-quartzite schist pillars on a remote plateau once considered sacred by the Mansi
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,900.
North Asia · Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug
One of the world's longest annual nomadic reindeer migrations, with some Yamal routes reaching 1,000 km to the Kara Sea.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,500.
Polar Regions · Ross Sea
Earth's largest ice shelf
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 34 days · $35,000.
South America · Cuyo
Triassic fossil basin exposed in desert canyons
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
Central Asia · Former Aral Sea
A former Soviet open-air biological-weapons test site on an Aral Sea island that became part of the Aralkum Desert
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $4,400.
North Asia · Krasnoyarsk Krai
The largest impact event in recorded history
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,000.
Oceania · Southern third of Rennell Island
The southern third of Rennell, a raised coral atoll with Lake Tegano, the largest lake in the insular Pacific
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 11 days · $4,900.
Oceania · Western New Guinea / Papua
A remote rainforest where expeditions have documented dozens of species new to science.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 14 days · $12,700.
South America · Venezuela
UNESCO-listed urban heritage with earthen buildings and a largely preserved colonial layout shaped by local traditions, Spanish Mudéjar techniques and Dutch architectural patterns.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Southeast Asia · Highland Papua
A remote highland valley first documented by outsiders in 1938, with Dani, Lani and Yali communities and limited tourism
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,200.
Southern Africa · South Atlantic Ocean
A remote South Atlantic wildlife reserve with two endemic land birds and major seabird colonies
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 22 days · $7,200.
Caribbean · Saint Kitts
Lebedev-rated favorite: small colonial capital tied to sugar, forts and volcanic island geography
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,700.
Caribbean · Cuba
A 70-hectare planned centre with an original 25-block grid, neoclassical civic buildings and a later eclectic layer around Parque José Martí.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
East Asia · Oda City, Shimane Prefecture
A largely intact silver-mining system with mine shafts, smelting and refining sites, settlements, transport routes and three former shipping ports.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Central Africa · North Kivu
A steep stratovolcano whose 1.2-km summit crater has repeatedly held a large lava lake
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,200.
East Asia · Lhasa / Tibet Autonomous Region
A high-altitude Tibetan cultural route where foreign visitors must follow an approved itinerary and permit system
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 12 days · $3,100.
USA · White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico
The first atomic-bomb test site, normally closed inside an active missile range
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,300.
Central Africa · Congo Basin
A UNESCO-listed complex of three contiguous national parks in the Congo Basin
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,300.
Central America · Eastern Tropical Pacific
Remote volcanic island and marine reserve where currents concentrate hammerheads and other large pelagic species
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 12 days · $4,800.
East Asia · Gobi Desert
The fossil beds where Roy Chapman Andrews's 1920s expedition found the first solid evidence that dinosaurs laid eggs
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 12 days · $3,100.
North Asia · Tuva
A living overtone-singing tradition where one singer produces multiple pitches
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $900.
Intha leg-rowing fishermen and floating gardens on a highland lake
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,000.
Polar Regions · Eastern Antarctic Peninsula
An Antarctic ice-shelf complex with the rapid disintegrations of Larsen A and B and the 2017 calving of A-68 from Larsen C
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 16 days · $22,000.
Polar Regions · East-West Antarctica divide
A roughly 3,500-kilometer mountain range and the world's longest rift shoulder
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 34 days · $35,000.
South America · Piauí
Rock art and debates over early peopling
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
USA · Northwestern Hawaiian Islands
A 1,931-kilometre chain of low islands, atolls and surrounding ocean with coral reefs, endemic species, archaeological sites and living Native Hawaiian traditions
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $3,500.
East Asia · South Korea
A serial UNESCO property of seven living mountain monasteries, with madang courtyards, historic halls and monastic spaces still used for Buddhist practice.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Middle East · Karabük Province, Black Sea region
UNESCO-listed Ottoman town with three historic districts, narrow stone-paved streets and largely intact traditional buildings.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
North Asia · Irkutsk Oblast
A limestone cone with a ring-shaped crown and central hill; its formation remains disputed.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $3,200.
South America · Gran Chaco
Plautdietsch-speaking agricultural colonies in dry Chaco scrub
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 0 days · $0.
South America · Santa Cruz Department, Bolivia
Six surviving mission towns whose churches adapt European Christian architecture to local traditions; San José is the stone-built exception.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 6 days · $1,200.
Southeast Asia · Philippines
Four Philippine Baroque churches combine European design with local materials, decorative motifs and earthquake-adapted forms.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $700.
West Africa · Northern Côte d’Ivoire’s savanna zone, mainly the Bagoué, Kabadougou, Tchologo, Poro and Gontougo regions
Eight mainly 17th–19th-century earthen mosques, the best-preserved group among the 20 Sudanese-style mosques that survive in Côte d’Ivoire
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
West Africa · Madagali, Adamawa State
A hilltop settlement where terraced farming, sacred terrace features, dry-stone architecture, paved walkways, the Hidi Palace complex and iron-smelting furnaces remain together.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
West Africa · Ijebu rainforest, Ogun and Lagos states
Africa’s largest single ancient monument, a roughly 170 km rainforest rampart
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 2 days · $180.
Middle East · Kerman Province, Iran
A UNESCO-listed village with roughly 400 rock-cut winter dwellings and a three-phase agro-pastoral migration system
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Canada · Northern Quebec
A road corridor whose Trans-Taiga terminus is 745 km from the nearest town
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $1,600.
Compact Caribbean capital with the botanic gardens, Roseau River and coast in the centre and a UNESCO-listed volcanic park about 8 km east.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $1,800.
Central Asia · Dashoguz Region
Fragments of a former Khwarezm capital, including one of Central Asia's tallest minarets
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 10 days · $2,400.
East Asia · Qufu, Shandong
A large Confucian complex with a 14-hectare temple and 104 buildings, a 183-hectare cemetery and a 7-hectare mansion where Confucius' direct male descendants lived and worked.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Middle East · Central Tel Aviv
UNESCO-listed group of three central Tel Aviv zones with International Style buildings adapted to local climate and cultural traditions.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Southern Europe · Greece
A serial UNESCO property of three middle-Byzantine monasteries with related octagonal church plans, marble revetments and gold-ground mosaics.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Southeast Asia · East Java
The only active cone in the roughly 16-km Tengger caldera, rising above the Sea of Sand
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $550.
Middle East · State of Palestine
The present church is essentially mid-6th-century and preserves parts of the 4th-century basilica below ground; the property also includes the grotto, monastic buildings and Star Street pilgrimage route.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Southeast Asia · Yangon Region
Shwedagon and the colonial street grid sit inside a city of 5.21 million people. The U.S. and Australian do-not-travel advisories make this an unusual large-city stop for Western leisure travelers.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $900.
Caribbean · Central Haiti / Artibonite
Haitian Vodou pilgrimage links African religious traditions with Catholic practice and Indigenous elements at sites such as Saut-d’Eau and Souvenance
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 7 days · $2,400.
Oceania · Middle Island, Western Australia
A remote island salt lake known for its pink colour, which can fade when heavy rain dilutes the brine
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $2,900.
West Africa · Agadez, Aïr region
An old town of 11 irregular quarters with Aïr-specific mudbrick architecture and a 27-metre minaret, the highest such structure in the world.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
An unusual border quadrilateral that neither Egypt nor Sudan claims under its preferred boundary
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $3,000.
Oceania · Western Highlands / Wahgi Valley
Papua New Guinea has more living indigenous languages than any other country, and Kuk is one of the few places with archaeological evidence for independent agricultural development.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 12 days · $5,700.
Eastern Europe · Kyiv, Ukraine
A single UNESCO property links two separate monastic complexes: Saint Sophia's 11th-century mosaics and frescoes, Ukrainian Baroque buildings and the Lavra's surface churches with more than 600 metres of underground caves.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Eastern Europe · Belarus
UNESCO-listed castle combining Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Middle East · Hebron, West Bank
Largely intact Mamluk urban fabric around the Al-Ibrahimi Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs complex, with traditional quarters, suqs and the hosh residential system.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Middle East · Iran
A walled Qajar palace complex with Persian decorative work and European motifs arranged around formal gardens
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Eastern Europe · Lviv, Ukraine
UNESCO-listed historic centre with a near-intact medieval street pattern, visible traces of separate ethnic and religious communities and a fusion of Eastern European, Italian and German traditions.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
Middle East · Tabriz, East Azerbaijan Province
One of Iran's most complete traditional commercial and cultural complexes, with interconnected covered brick structures still functioning as a market
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Middle East · Chibayish and southern Iraq
A reed-wetland culture tied to ancient Mesopotamia, with portions of the marshes reflooded after catastrophic 20th-century drainage
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,300.
Middle East · Yemen
UNESCO-listed fortified town with about 86 mosques, narrow alleys and Tihama courtyard-house architecture
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Polar Regions · Queen Maud Land
A perennially ice-covered alkaline lake with large modern conical stromatolites
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 28 days · $63,000.
Middle East · Iran
UNESCO-listed religious heritage with preserved cultural fabric
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
East Africa · Gedeo Zone
A living Gedeo agroforestry system with sacred forests and megalithic sites
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,000.
Middle East · Iran
UNESCO-listed working mountain railway, 1,394 km long, with 174 large bridges, 186 smaller bridges, 224 tunnels including 11 spiral tunnels and 89 stations.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Polar Regions · Princess Elizabeth Land
The site of the coldest directly measured natural air temperature on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 34 days · $123,000.
North Asia · Perm Krai
A large gypsum karst cave with perennial ice outside continuous permafrost
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $650.
Eastern Europe · Odesa, Ukraine
A preserved 19th-century port-city grid of low-rise eclectic buildings, with theatres, religious buildings, palaces, tenements and former commercial buildings in one urban ensemble.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $600.
East Asia · Kaesong, North Korea
A 12-part World Heritage property covering the former Koryo capital's palace ruins, city walls, gates, Confucian academy, bridge and royal tombs.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 5 days · $1,800.
Middle East · Iran
A living cultural landscape where steep-slope villages and dry-stone terraces remain tied to Hawrami seasonal migration.
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Polar Regions · Victoria Land
A blue-ice field that concentrates meteorites, including the Martian ALH 84001, while preserving ice and trapped air dating back millions of years
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 34 days · $93,000.
West Africa · Sahara edge
Private manuscript libraries from Timbuktu, many evacuated during the 2012–13 conflict
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $1,900.
East Asia · Pyongyang / Rason
One of the world's most controlled potential travel destinations, currently not viable for most visitors
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 8 days · $3,000.
Middle East · Battir, west of Bethlehem
A living system of dry-stone terraces, channels fed by underground sources and traditional water sharing among Battir families
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 4 days · $800.
Polar Regions · East Antarctic ice sheet
The largest known subglacial lake on Earth, buried beneath roughly 4 km of ice
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 34 days · $123,000.
Polar Regions · South Pole
A cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice turned into the world's largest neutrino detector
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 12 days · $68,000.
Polar Regions · East Antarctic Plateau
The coldest, driest and calmest high plateau conditions on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 34 days · $153,000.
Polar Regions · Wright Valley
Antarctica's longest river, flowing inland away from the sea
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 34 days · $48,000.
Polar Regions · Wright Valley
The second-most saline known natural body of water on Earth
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 34 days · $48,000.
A marine-derived lake so salty it can remain liquid through deep Antarctic cold
From-listed regional gateway trip estimate: 28 days · $63,000.