Japanese national treasure originally built in 593 CE.

1,001 carved statues of the Buddhist God of Mercy, each with a unique face.

This medieval castle overlooking the Elzbach river looks just like it did hundreds of years ago.

A peculiar mansion built by the troubled heir to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune.

Under a glass sidewalk lie the remains of some of Manhattan's oldest buildings.

A beautiful and abandoned New York subway station from 1904, complete with chandelier.

The sound of swaying stalks in this stunning grove has been named a governmentally recognized sound.

An exquisite tunnel of cascading flowers.

On Japan's Tashirojima Island, cats are king.

This dramatic landscape hidden on the Isle of Skye looks as though you've stepped into the magical realm.

The oldest family-run luncheonette in New York, last renovated in 1948, still serves food and drinks the old-fashioned way.

An Italian crevasse filled with abandoned buildings gives visitors a look at the world without humans.

This astonishingly geometric cave has inspired everyone from Jules Verne to Pink Floyd.

This shop and gallery is a modern-day cabinet of curiosities, unassumingly positioned along an urban thoroughfare.

The mysterious, fantastical woodland inspiration for "The Lord of the Rings."

A tiny museum housed in a New York freight elevator specializes in the "overlooked, dismissed, or ignored."

The sign at the garden gate reads: "These Plants Can Kill."

This overgrown Victorian chapel made of corrugated metal looks utterly out of place.

Ask nicely, and stewards of a centuries-old charitable tradition will give you free bread and beer.

Giant topiary dog once played a role in a terrorist bomb plot.

This 19th-century fountain's namesake animal isn't what you think it is.

Half-eaten food on display at an English café.

One of the last doorless, continuously moving elevators still in use in the U.K.

A quaint hamlet of nine cottages around a small green near Blaise castle.