Iceland: home to volcanoes, waterfalls and, apparently, Santa?

Rising from the sea like a stone monster.

An Icelandic island full of diving birds and legend.

The oldest church in Iceland is one of the few to feature ornate decoration.

In the northernmost city in the world, it's illegal to be buried because it’s too cold for bodies to decompose.

This abandoned mining village was predicted to resist decay longer than any other modern human settlement.

A museum that cashes in on its infamous little people while teaching you a thing or two about the Irish fey.

The mummified heart of a saint lives on in this church—after a brief hiatus when it was stolen.

The gorgeous library at Trinity College is home to remarkable treasures of Irish identity.

A statue in the center of Dublin dedicated to one of their favorite sons of rock & roll.

The comedy and tragedy of Oscar Wilde is preserved in a Dublin park, captured in a sculpture of colorful stone.

Some of the saint's blood and bones are said to reside in Dublin.

The oldest public library in Ireland.

Dublin's "Dead Zoo" serves as a window to Victorian museum design.

There might not be much left of these Irish ruins, but their linguistic legacy is still going strong.

This courtly monument celebrates an influential comedian who turned taking the piss out of the powers-that-be into an art.

An eccentric garden of sculptures crafted in India decorate an Irish green space dedicated to Alan Turing.

Winding paths and ramshackle mausoleums in the oldest "park cemetery" in London.

Catacombs turned marketplace.

The pioneer of psychoanalysis spent the final year of his life here, still seeing patients on that famous couch.

A flourishing garden with pigs, donkeys, goats, rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, ducks, and sheep.

A historic arboretum and non-conformist, non-denominational park cemetery.

This shop and gallery is a modern-day cabinet of curiosities, unassumingly positioned along an urban thoroughfare.

Thanks to modern navigational tools we now know that the true prime meridian runs through a park next door.