In the Monastery of São Vicente resides a gallery devoted to a breathtaking collection of seashells.

Portugal's National Pantheon has a history of curses, collapses and financial problems.

This tiny island is home to the world's largest colony of Northern gannets.

The one-time stronghold of the noble Douglas family, now home to ghost sightings and nesting birds.

This alley off Edinburgh's Royal Mile contains remnants of the city's seedier history.

Anonymously sculpted and donated, these sculptures made from poetry books and pages are sprinkled around the city.

A 18th century graveyard and its astonishing cortege of macabre iconography.

Now home to a drinking establishment, this building has a macabre history.

A verdant 17th-century-style garden hidden along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.

This Scottish graveyard is the final resting place of the man who inspired the character Ebenezer Scrooge.

This obscure walkway links Edinburgh’s Old Town with one of the city's prime vantage points.

A stone monument acknowledging Scotland's right to have a separate Parliament from the one in Westminster.

The dance of this huge clock is a magnificent and eerie commentary on good and evil in the history of humankind.

This Roman relic was discovered in Scotland by a mudlarking ferryman.

There are plenty of wonderful panoramic vistas in Edinburgh, but not many are hidden smack in the middle of the Old Town.

The world's first experimental nutritionist is memorialized as the "Hippocrates of naval medicine."

This early version of the guillotine was used to execute the man responsible for its construction.

The taxidermy remains of the first mammal ever cloned from an adult cell are on display in Edinburgh.

Small sculpted heads of prominent phrenologists mark the outside of their former headquarters.

These wooden pipes were crucial to providing water to Medieval Edinburgh.

The 16th-century church has the only stained glass windows that survived the Scottish Reformation intact.

Tiny effigies of the victims of Edinburgh's famous Anatomy Murders.

The tomb of one of Scotland's bloody historic villains is a magnet for bumbling desecrators.

The most loyal of little dogs, or a Victorian era publicity stunt?