This golden temple is surrounded by hundreds of stone tablets that comprise the "world's largest book."

America's most famous museum of medical oddities is home to the remains of Albert Einstein's brain.

Life and death are on parade at the most reliably perilous site of “the Great Migration.”

This Buddhist temple is home to the graves of the Japanese national legends, the 47 Ronin.

Even after the church tried to wipe the practice out, this pagan festival lives on each year in a small Scottish village.

This collection of lakeside pagodas and temples are flanked by giant lions, tigers, and dragons as well as their welcoming maws.

This elegant Colombian fortress was one of the torture headquarters for the Spanish Inquisition.

One of the largest Buddhist stupas in the world keeps an eye out in every direction.

This chapel on a cliff is renowned for its healing powers and was founded on the site of a supposed divine intervention.

A phenomenal assembly of pueblos in New Mexico is the most complete example of ancient ruins north of the border.

The home of the Dead Sea Scrolls is an abstract modernist dream.

Twelve natural mummies are displayed in the crypt of this former monastery school.

The quintessential Japanese rock garden has existed for more than 500 years.

An authentic replica of an Asian temple and garden hidden amongst the natural beauty of Hawai'i.

A museum dedicated to the Spanish occult in a town that was terrorized by the Inquisition.

The mortal remains of an estimated 70,000 people lie in the basement of a monastery in Lima, Peru.

This famous city eluded concrete detection until the early 2000's.

An unsettling shrine dedicated to the ravenous beast that prowled 18th-century France.

A church of bones, decorated with 40,000 human skeletons.

The largest prehistoric ruins south of the Sahara, once a powerful center of international trade.

A church dedicated to the Mexican skeleton saint.

One of the most beautiful bookstores in the world hides a neo-Gothic interior behind an art nouveau facade.

A grand Gothic Revival basilica with stained glass depictions of Montreal's religious history has only one soul resting in its crypt.

This black shoreline is made up of exploded lava particles.