Places Edited by Allison Meier

Monastery, army base, and infamous Soviet Gulag in the far Russian north.

These remote Florida islands have a history of sea turtles and sunken treasures, and one of the world’s largest coastal brick fortresses.

London's largest outsider art museum.

The small cliffside monastery known as the Tiger's Nest is said to be the meditation site of an 8th-century Buddhist master.

The key to turning shifting dunes into the green oasis of Golden Gate Park.

Lone survivor from Custer's Last Stand forever preserved.

A modernist landscape of water and sci-fi concrete.

A Turkish ghost town abandoned in a population exchange with Greece.

Reverend Franzo Wayne King administers spiritual enlightenment through the music of the jazz legend.

Site of a former hidden treehouse in New Orleans.

Resonating tubes make music from highway overpass.

The Cathedral of Salamanca has a number of unusual carvings but none so surprising as a modern astronaut.

One of the world's largest telescopes, stares into the night sky with two huge mirrors.

A vortex fountain that seems to rise out of the ground.

The farthest you can be in the contiguous U.S. from a McDonald's location.

Where Nor'easters go to die.

This Arizona observatory is famous for investigations into Martian life, and as the place humans first spotted Pluto.

A pair of giant legs paying homage to a poem, a king, and it would seem, socks.

Various forms of phallic art decorate this hill in commemoration of legendary local tragedy.

Old-fashioned knowledge and modern engineering create the world's only rotating boatlift.

The world's smallest park was dedicated in 1948 as the only colony for leprechauns west of Ireland.

One of the world's most complex timepieces.

This Tang Dynasty behemoth is the biggest Buddha in the world.

A giant Troll lurks under one of Seattle's oldest bridges.