Rapa Nui National Park
Hanga Roa, Chile
Rapa Nui National Park covers almost half of Easter Island, the remote Chilean island in the South Pacific, and…
55 tickets & tours
By civilisation
Other ancient ruins and sites to visit
Other collects the cultures that fit none of the larger labels: the Etruscans of central Italy, with painted and house-shaped tombs; the Ancestral Puebloans of the American South-West, with cliff dwellings in canyon alcoves; the Swahili trading towns of Gede and Kaole; the mortarless stone capital of Great Zimbabwe; the moai of Rapa Nui; the royal tomb of Mauretania near Tipasa; the caliphal palace city of Medina Azahara; the Bulgar relief of the Madara Rider; and the cave monastery of Old Orhei.
Roman Sites 105Greek Sites 63Egyptian Sites 15Near Eastern Sites 25Maya Sites 34Mesoamerican Sites 16Andean Sites 33Prehistoric Sites 35Asian Sites 13
Medina Azahara
Córdoba, Spain
Medina Azahara is the ruined palace-city that the first caliph of al-Andalus, Abd al-Rahman III, built in the 10th…
17 tickets & tours
Gede Ruins
Malindi, Kenya
Gede is a medieval Swahili stone town hidden in coastal forest between Malindi and Watamu on the Kenyan coast.
11 tickets & tours
Old Orhei
Orhei, Moldova
Old Orhei is a limestone ridge in a loop of the Raut river, about 60 km north-east of Chisinau in Moldova, where a cave…
8 tickets & tours
Mesa Verde
Cortez, United States
Mesa Verde National Park in south-western Colorado protects more than 5,000 Ancestral Puebloan sites, including about…
7 tickets & tours
Canyon de Chelly
Chinle, United States
Canyon de Chelly is a national monument in north-eastern Arizona where red sandstone canyons hide cliff dwellings built…
3 tickets & tours
Kaole Ruins
Bagamoyo, Tanzania
Kaole is a ruined Swahili trading town on the Indian Ocean coast just outside Bagamoyo in Tanzania.
2 tickets & tours
Montezuma Castle
Camp Verde, United States
Montezuma Castle is a five-storey cliff dwelling built by the Southern Sinagua people in a limestone alcove about 27…
2 tickets & tours
Wupatki National Monument
Flagstaff, United States
Wupatki National Monument protects red sandstone pueblos built by Ancestral Puebloan farmers on the dry plains…
2 tickets & tours
Tuzigoot National Monument
Clarkdale, United States
Tuzigoot is a Sinagua pueblo of about 110 rooms built along the crest of a ridge 37 metres above the Verde River near…
1 ticket or tour
Banditaccia Necropolis, Cerveteri
Cerveteri, Italy
The Banditaccia necropolis outside Cerveteri is a city of the dead built by the Etruscans of Caere from the 9th to the…
No online ticket
Great Zimbabwe
Masvingo, Zimbabwe
Great Zimbabwe is the ruined capital of a medieval African kingdom near Masvingo and the largest stone structure built…
No online ticket
Madara Rider
Madara, Bulgaria
The Madara Rider is an early medieval relief of a horseman spearing a lion, carved about 23 metres up a sheer cliff…
No online ticket
Necropolis of Tarquinia (Monterozzi)
Tarquinia, Italy
The Monterozzi necropolis, on a ridge just outside Tarquinia north-west of Rome, holds about 6,000 Etruscan tombs,…
No online ticket
Royal Mausoleum of Mauretania
Sidi Rached, Algeria
The Royal Mausoleum of Mauretania is a huge round stone tomb on a hilltop near Tipasa, west of Algiers, linked to King…
No online ticket
The United States has five, all in Arizona and Colorado: Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly, Montezuma Castle, Wupatki and Tuzigoot, the last three combinable in a day from Flagstaff. Italy has the two Etruscan necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia, both within reach of Rome. The rest are single sites in Chile, Spain, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Moldova, Bulgaria and Algeria. At Mesa Verde, book the ranger tours ahead, as summer dates sell out.
Rapa Nui comes first, with close to 900 moai from the quarry to the coastal platforms. Mesa Verde’s Cliff Palace is the largest cliff dwelling, and the Monterozzi tombs at Tarquinia hold the largest group of Etruscan wall paintings. Great Zimbabwe has walls up to 11 metres high laid without mortar, Medina Azahara the terraced palaces of the Cordoba caliphs, and Gede coral-stone mosques and houses in coastal forest.