During the summer months, giant teddy bears take over Paris near Les Gobelins metro station.

This 18th-century sundial was designed to calculate the date of Easter each year.

This innocuous-seeming building is actually the remnant of a major wartime brothel.

In this Parisian garden's grotesque former life as a zoo it fed exotic animals to the bourgeois and put humans on exhibit.

The headless bodies of more than 1,300 guillotined victims of the Reign of Terror are buried here in mass graves.

This off-limits room in the National Library of France is home to a system of pneumatic tubes, once used to bring books to readers.

A Parisian exterminator's shop whose storefront displays stuffed rats hanging from traps.

This former “ante-chamber to the guillotine” has been refurbished to illustrate the brutal history of French justice.

The subterranean "lake" below the Paris opera house inspired the Phantom of the Opera's lair.

France's national museum of scientific and industrial instruments.

This iconic Parisian bookstore doubles as the "Tumbleweed Hotel" for traveling writers.

The eclectic seaside sanctuary caters to a rather fowl crowd.

The astonishing collection of an infamous criminologist.

Volcanic rocks ground down into sand make this Spanish beach as black as night.

A once grand hotel now sits eerily abandoned in the Catalan countryside outside Barcelona.

This massive fiberglass Gulliver turns every visitor into a Lilliputian.

This whimsical winery by Antoni Gaudí looks ripped from the pages of a fairytale.

Step inside the first house designed by Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, considered to be one of the first Art Nouveau buildings.

Once a place of peaceful repose, this sanitarium now faces an uncertain future.

Norway's national monument to fallen seamen.

The design of this beautifully crafted building was inspired by Norwegian glaciers.

The world's largest underwater restaurant is submerged off the southern tip of Norway.

According to the locals, the sands of this secluded Norway beach are infused with gemstone particles.

Cold storage for agricultural biodiversity.