Architecture

Barcelona's old town, much of which was built or rebuilt in the 1920s and 1930s to look medieval, with the genuine Roman city underneath it.

The basilica, under construction since 1882 and the tallest church in the world since late 2025. What is finished, what is not, and why entry needs booking.

The Nasrid palace complex above Granada and Spain's most visited monument. Tickets are nominative, timed and checked against a passport, and must be booked well in advance.

The junction has not been a circus since Shaftesbury Avenue was driven through it in 1886, and the lights occupy a single frontage.

The Bronze Horseman stands on a boulder of rapakivi granite hauled overland on a hand-built bronze ball race, and the Alexander Column is held on its pedestal by nothing but its own weight. Older accounts swap the two stones over.

Nevsky Prospekt is named after the Alexander Nevsky monastery at its eastern end, not after the river, and it runs four and a half kilometres from the Admiralty to the monastery gates.

Peter the Great founded this monastery in 1710 on the spot where Alexander Nevsky beat the Swedes on the Neva in 1240. It was the wrong spot, and the city's own encyclopaedia says so.

The Summer Garden's marble statues came indoors in 2009 and what stands there now is polymer concrete. Behind that small correction lies the most contested restoration carried out in this city in thirty years.

The Winter Palace was finished in 1762 for an empress who had already died, and the museum inside it began with a collection bought from a Berlin merchant whose first customer could not pay. Two Leonardos, two Raphaels and one Michelangelo sculpture, with three million objects behind them.