Europe Archives | Page 6 of 8 | World Heritage Sites

An exterior view of the Plantin-Moretus Museum's courtyard: red brick, 2-3 stories high, with 2 gables visible, and a portico along the ground floor.

Plantin-Moretus House-Workshops-Museum Complex

300 years of printing history and domestic life, with art by Rubens.

A very elegant central entrance: stairs up to an arched doorway, a rose window above that, rows of statues on the ground floor and above the door, three square towers on top, all with detailed carved ornamentation. The rest of the building is much smaller and extends on both sides out of the picture, two stories tall with simple rows of windows.

Monastery of Alcobaça

A masterpiece of Gothic Cistercian art and architecture.

View along a cobbled street in Lyon, with a few arched storefronts in the foreground.

Historic Site of Lyon

A city with 2000 years of history visible in its urban center’s architecture.

A long building with a row of columns all along the front like a Greek temple. In front of it, a fountain.

Museumsinsel (Museum Island), Berlin

5 museums that demonstrate the evolution of museums and museum design.

View down a canal with a range of medieval-era buildings one either side.

Historic Centre of Brugge

A completely intact, mostly Gothic, core of a medieval trading city.

Looking down a long row of houses, all with about 4 stories, all painted in pastel colors, all with decorative gables and shops on the ground floor.

Historic Centers of Stralsund and Wismar

Remarkable collections of “Brick Gothic” churches and other buildings unique to these former Hanseatic ports.

Ruins of a temple, with tall columns supporting ornate pediments.

Pergamon and its Multi-Layered Cultural Landscape

A collection of 9 archeological sites covering several historical periods of an important city’s grand monuments.

A sloped landscape with a scattering of ruins: a well is visible, and a small building, as well as foundations of more buildings and some retaining walls at Troy Archaeological Site.

Archaeological Site of Troy

Excavation of the ancient Greek city of Troy, site of the Trojan War.

The hall is large, with a row of pillars down the center and tall arched windows on either side. the pillars support a ceiling with gothic arches.

Maulbronn Monastery Complex

An intact and complete medieval monastery that demonstrates the transition from Romanesque to Gothic architecture.

Val d’Orcia

A beautiful agrarian landscape reflecting a Renaissance aesthetic.

Vlkolínec

A well-preserved rural mountain village with traditional wooden architecture.

A view of the Piazza del Plebiscito, with its elegant porticos, in the historic center of Naples.

Historic Centre of Naples

An ancient Italian city containing a wealth of elements – architecture, art, archeology – displaying its long history.

In Vilnius historic center, a street view with what look like medieval era residential buildings along the street, painted in pastels. In the distance a church spire in Baroque style is visible.

Vilnius Historic Centre

An Eastern European city center with its original medieval street layout and architectural forms spanning centuries.

A view from the land over a section of the Amalfi Coast: clusters of houses on steep hills that drop into the sea.

Costiera Amalfitana (Amalfi Coast)

A scenic and dramatic landscape of rugged mountainous coastline and small towns crowding the slopes above the sea.

Convent of Christ in Tomar

An architectural retrospective of Portugal and the Knights Templar in the form of a monastic center dating to the 12th-16th century.

Su Nuraxi di Barumini

Ruins of a Bronze Age society that built unique circular defensive structures.

The front of the cathedral in Modena, with typical Romanesque rounded arches above the entry door and upper windows.

Cathedral, Torre Civica and Piazza Grande, Modena

Romanesque architecture and art in harmony, in a charming Italian city.

Delos

Extensive archeological site of an ancient Greek commercial center on an Aegean island.

A view down on the lower city from a city wall in Luxembourg: below are pretty smaller buildings as well as a simple church.

City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and Fortifications

Impressive fortifications and the original urban center of a historically important city.

Van Nellefabriek

A masterpiece of modernist industrial design from the inter-war period.

A huge empty market square in Krakow, Poland. At the far end is a tall square tower.

Historic Centre of Kraków

An important market town for hundreds of years and an outstanding example of urban planning, with a range of historical architectural styles.

View over the old town of Dubrovnik: lots of red roofs and the blue sea beyond that.

Old City of Dubrovnik

A well-preserved medieval, Renaissance and Baroque city inside extensive intact fortifications.

Mont-Saint-Michel appears as a pile of stone structures up a hill, forming a conical shape with a recognizably Gothic church spire at the top.

Mont-Saint-Michel and its bay

A magnificent Gothic abbey on top of a small island in a bay with dramatic tides.

A short length of street in Provins lined with medieval-period houses. The one on the left is half-timbered.

Provins, Town of Medieval Fairs

A beautifully intact example of a medieval trading city.

A round building with a semi-spherical green roof, surrounded by very precise formal gardens with low hedges and flowers.

Gardens and Castle at Kroměříž

A palace and three gardens, one of which represents the epitome of Baroque garden design.

A bridge leads to an arched gateway with a square tower next to it in Regensburg, Germany.

Old Town of Regensburg with Stadtamhof

A beautifully-preserved and very picturesque medieval trading city.

In the foreground, a church with a square bell tower. In the background, on a hill, the castle Castelgrande in Bellinzona. Beyond that, a higher mountain.

Three Castles, Defensive Wall and Ramparts of the Market-Town of Bellinzona

Medieval-era fortifications that once guarded a key strategic pass in the southern Alps.

A view into a wide gorge - a river cut through the bottom, and low shrubs or grasses along both banks and up the sides of the gorge.

The Causses and the Cévennes, Mediterranean agro-pastoral Cultural Landscape

A rural landscape shaped by centuries of farming, where old agricultural techniques are still in use.

Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak

A 4th-century tomb containing frescoes that are masterpieces of Hellenistic Thracia.

A view of Edinburgh castle, with a sunset sky behind it. The castle has an arched entryway and much higher walls behind the entry, with rounded walls and crenellations.

Old and New Towns of Edinburgh

A medieval Old Town and a neoclassical New Town that harmonize beautifully and that influenced European urban planning.

Two large arches in the center serve as the gateway. Two floors above lined with arched windows, an extra floor forms a short tower on the left side of the gateway. The whole is made of carved stone that looks dirty.

Roman Monuments, Cathedral of St Peter and Church of Our Lady in Trier

A collection of Roman ruins showing the importance of the “Rome of the North” in Germany.

Looking down an aisle or cloister of the cathedral: gothic arches overhead, gothic windows on the left, tombs set between the arches on the right.

Burgos Cathedral

A magnificent example of Gothic architecture.

The Church of St. Trophime in Arles has a Romanesque entranceway, shown in this photo. Rounded arches above a double door, pillars on each side of the door.

Arles, Roman and Romanesque Monuments

A grand Roman city and its later Romanesque additions, well-preserved in Arles city center.

A partial view of the Jeronimos Monastery shows a very ornate arched entrance, with lots of decorative embellishment around and above it. Along the roofline are filigreed crenellations and a corner of the building has a dome-topped little tower.

Monastery of the Hieronymites and Tower of Belém in Lisbon

Two striking buildings from Portugal’s “Golden Age” of global exploration and seafaring.

Grimeton Radio Station

For radio buffs, a surviving operational example of pre-electronic radio technology.

A view looking up the drive to the castle. It stands on a hill, and in this photo 4 of the octagonal towers show, with two of them framing the main entrance.

Castel del Monte

An unusual castle expressing Frederick II’s search for perfection, leading him to design the castle around the number 8.