Choose the place.

Marrakech-Safi, Morocco

An audio walk through Essaouira, from the fishing harbour and the sea gate through the merchants' Kasbah and the Jewish quarter to the caravan gate.

10 stops · 2.5 km (1.6 mi) · about 100 min

Marrakech-Safi, Morocco

An audio walk through Marrakech, from the booksellers' mosque through the royal kasbah and the Jewish quarter to the storytellers' square.

10 stops · 3 km (1.9 mi) · about 120 min

Oeste, Portugal

An audio walk through Óbidos, from a queen's aqueduct through the town gate and up the main street to the castle, ending at a painter's grave.

10 stops · 1.4 km (0.9 mi) · about 80 min

Lisbon, Portugal

An audio walk through Sintra, from the railway station past the palace of the two chimneys and the bakers' lane to the field at Seteais the town kept open.

9 stops · 2 km (1.2 mi) · about 100 min

Alentejo, Portugal

An audio walk inside Évora's walls, from the Giraldo square past the Chapel of Bones and the Roman temple to the aqueduct people built their houses into.

9 stops · 2.5 km (1.6 mi) · about 100 min

Centro, Portugal

An audio walk through Coimbra, from the first king's tomb up to the university on the hill and down past two cathedrals to the river.

11 stops · 3.1 km (1.9 mi) · about 110 min

Porto, Portugal

An audio walk through Porto's Ribeira, from the tiled hall of São Bento up to the bishop's cathedral, down the old wall to the Douro, and back up the goldsmiths' street.

11 stops · 2.2 km (1.4 mi) · about 130 min

Lisbon, Portugal

An audio walk through Alfama, the Lisbon quarter named for its hot springs, from the saint's birthplace over the old wall and down the lanes to the fountains by the river.

11 stops · 2.9 km (1.8 mi) · about 140 min

Istanbul, Türkiye

A self-guided audio tour along the Golden Horn through Fener and Balat, the quarters where Istanbul's Greeks, Jews, Armenians and Bulgarians were allowed to build, and what they left behind.

11 stops · 3.1 km (1.9 mi) · about 150 min

Puglia, Italy

A self-guided audio tour through Lecce's Roman remains, Baroque churches, carved limestone, and Adriatic defenses.

9 stops · 2.3 km (1.4 mi) · about 115 min

Basilicata, Italy

Matera's Sassi are two hollows of cave-houses carved into a ravine wall, inhabited from prehistory, emptied by law in the 1950s, and now the first UNESCO World Heritage site in southern Italy.

9 stops · 2.3 km (1.4 mi) · about 120 min

Puglia, Italy

Bari spent a thousand years being handed back and forth across the Adriatic — Byzantine capital, Saracen emirate, Norman duchy — and made a saint of the traffic.

9 stops · 2 km (1.2 mi) · about 110 min

Puglia, Italy

Alberobello's old town is built almost entirely of trulli — conical houses of dry limestone, laid without a drop of mortar.

9 stops · 1.9 km (1.2 mi) · about 95 min

Puglia, Italy

Otranto is the easternmost town in Italy — a whitewashed, walled port that for a thousand years faced Byzantium and the Balkans across a seventy- kilometre strait, not Rome.

8 stops · 1.5 km (0.9 mi) · about 90 min

Fès-Meknès, Morocco

A self-guided audio tour of Volubilis, from Roman houses and mosaics to olive presses, civic monuments, and later archaeological layers.

11 stops · 1.3 km (0.8 mi) · about 85 min

Fès-Meknès, Morocco

Meknes is two cities pressed together: an older trading medina and the immense royal capital Moulay Ismail drove into its southern edge.

10 stops · 3.2 km (2 mi) · about 150 min

Rabat-Salé-Kénitra, Morocco

Rabat carries two capital projects in the same walk: Ya'qub al-Mansur's twelfth-century vision, left legible in walls, gates and an unfinished mosque, and the twentieth-century administrative city laid beside the medina.

11 stops · 5.2 km (3.2 mi) · about 165 min

Fès-Meknès, Morocco

Fez el-Bali is not a museum quarter but a living city folded into a steep river valley.

10 stops · 2.4 km (1.5 mi) · about 135 min

Casablanca-Settat, Morocco

Casablanca is often treated as a twentieth-century city, but this walk tests that claim against what survives: a planned civic centre, a working market, a repeatedly altered medina, and religious buildings restored or rebuilt after rupture.

9 stops · 4.2 km (2.6 mi) · about 145 min

Tanger-Tétouan-Al Hoceïma, Morocco

Chefchaouen was built in 1471 as a fortress-refuge by people driven out of Spain, and for four and a half centuries it kept the world out — the Westerners who saw inside before 1920 came in disguise, and one stayed barely an hour.

10 stops · 1.4 km (0.9 mi) · about 110 min

Andalusia, Spain

Seville is an inland river port where, for over two centuries, the Crown registered every cargo of the American trade — and the city is what that monopoly built, then left behind.

11 stops · 2.9 km (1.8 mi) · about 150 min

Andalusia, Spain

Around the year 950, Córdoba was the seat of a caliphate that built itself to rival Constantinople, Damascus and Baghdad — and then tore itself apart within a lifetime.

11 stops · 3.2 km (2 mi) · about 150 min

Andalusia, Spain

Everyone climbs the Albaicín to look at the Alhambra.

12 stops · 2.9 km (1.8 mi) · about 150 min

Andalusia, Spain

Ronda sits on the flat top of a rock, and for most of its history its water was a hundred metres below.

11 stops · 2.7 km (1.7 mi) · about 150 min

Andalusia, Spain

Cádiz began as Gadir — an enclosure on a small Atlantic island — and has spent almost three thousand years changing what its walls were for.

11 stops · 3.2 km (2 mi) · about 150 min

Andalusia, Spain

Málaga's centre is full of structures that survived by changing jobs.

10 stops · 2.3 km (1.4 mi) · about 125 min

Sicily, Italy

Palermo's oldest street was traced when the city was founded and runs dead straight from the high ground down to the water.

12 stops · 3.9 km (2.4 mi) · about 165 min

Sicily, Italy

Catania is a city you read vertically.

9 stops · 2.6 km (1.6 mi) · about 135 min

Sicily, Italy

Taormina has one street, running between two gates along a shelf of Monte Tauro, and everything the town has ever been is arranged along it: a cathedral built like a fort, a fountain whose crowned half-horse woman is the town's emblem, a wall of Roman brick holding back a buried reservoir, and a palace where the Sicilian parliament sat in 1411.

8 stops · 1.9 km (1.2 mi) · about 130 min

Sicily, Italy

Agrigento's temples did not survive by standing still.

10 stops · 2.5 km (1.6 mi) · about 150 min

Sicily, Italy

In 1131 Roger II moved this town down off its rock and began a cathedral on the shore — a fortified church that was also to be his own mausoleum, and far too big for the settlement it stood in.

8 stops · 2.6 km (1.6 mi) · about 165 min

Istanbul, Türkiye

A self-guided audio tour through Sultanahmet, from the Hippodrome’s reused monuments and Hagia Sophia to the gate of Topkapı.

9 stops · 2.1 km (1.3 mi) · about 140 min

İzmir, Türkiye

Ephesus was the Roman capital of Asia — a marble port city of temples, fountains, and a library built over its founder's tomb, home to perhaps the largest urban population on the Aegean's eastern shore.

12 stops · 2 km (1.2 mi) · about 120 min

Bukhara Region, Uzbekistan

Bukhara got rich carrying the world's goods and spent the money on holiness — minarets, madrasas and mausoleums built beside the bazaars that paid for them.

11 stops · 3.1 km (1.9 mi) · about 150 min

Samarkand Region, Uzbekistan

Timur conquered half of Asia and marched its best craftsmen home to build his capital — a city meant to make every visitor feel the size of the empire.

9 stops · 3 km (1.9 mi) · about 140 min

Xorazm Region, Uzbekistan

Khiva was the last oasis before the desert and the last khanate to fall — a 19th-century boom city in medieval dress, paid for by caravan tolls and the largest slave market in Central Asia, then frozen whole when the Soviets turned it into a museum.

10 stops · 1.8 km (1.1 mi) · about 130 min

Lombardy, Italy

Milan has repeatedly made power visible, then changed the meaning of the same streets and monuments.

8 stops · 3.2 km (2 mi) · about 115 min