Choose the place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone climbs the Albaicín to look at the Alhambra.

12 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

Sicily, Italy

Agrigento's temples did not survive by standing still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sicily, Italy

Catania is a city you read vertically.

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