Monuments travel tips and stories. Vacations ideas, cruises spa and resorts

If you approach Porto Santo by air, the whole island seems a glorious-golden yellow against the glistening cobalt blue sea. The island is known as ‘painting made by god’ and is 46 km to the northeast of Madeira in the Atlantic Ocean. The island tending to remind of North Africa, rather than Europe – a starkly beautiful desert landscape of palm trees and cacti, dotted with pine groves and small wheatfields. Photo by: Tiagoto
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Suomenlinna or Viapori (Finnish), or Sveaborg (Swedish), is an inhabited sea fortress built on six islands, today within Helsinki, the capital of Finland. The Sea fortress Suomenlinna is a unique architectural monument, a popular recreation area and museum. Although the island is located off the coast of Helsinki, it is part of the city. The Fortress was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage in 1991!
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Wachau is one of the most prominent tourist destinations of Lower Austria , located precisely between the towns of Melk and Krems. It is 30 km in length and was already settled in prehistoric times. It preserves in an intact and visible form many traces – in terms of architecture, urban design, and agricultural use, principally for the cultivation of vines. The Wachau was added to the UNESCO list of world heritage sites in recognition of its architectural and agricultural history.
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The Kirche St. Leopold is an extraordinary monument, which sits high atop the Baumgartner Hohe at the city outskirts. Locals people jokingly say to this splendid site as ‘Mount Lemon‘, because of the church’s shining gilded dome that beckons from afar. This new masterpiece was built by architect Otto Wagner from 1903–07 on the grounds of Vienna’s Steinhof psychiatric hospital. Planned for the use of patients, many of the church’s salient design features fascinatingly address the special concern for hygiene prevalent at the time.
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The Cathedral of Basil the Blessed, is a Russian Orthodox cathedral erected on the Red Square in Moscow in 1555–1561. The Monument to Minin and Pozharsky is made of bronze. Not particularly large, it consists of nine chapels, built on a single foundation. According to legend, however, it was built by an Italian architect who was blinded so that he could never create anything that was similar or equal. The St. Basil’s Cathedral, along with the Red Square were inscribed by Unesco as World Heritage Sites in 1990!
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Nemrut is a 2,150 meters high mountain in Turkey, located near the province of Adiyaman. At the top of the mountain, King Antiochus I Theos (69-36 B.C.) built his tomb-sanctuary along with huge statues (8-9 m high) – two lions and two eagles, and various Greek and Persian gods. Mt. Nemrut was designated a World Heritage Site in 1987. The nearby town of Ad?yaman is a popular place for car and bus trips to the site, and one can also travel by helicopter. Tourists typically visit Nemrut during June through August.
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There are so many perfect islands in the Aegean – more than 3,000 of them – that i can be hard to distinguish between them. But Bozcaada really is different – it is one of the only two islands in the region that is Turkish. In Greek mythology it was called  Tenedos and because of its strategic position, just south of the Dardanelles Strait, it has been occupied since time immemorial. Over the centuries the population was ethnically Greek, these days, although it is almost entirely Turkish, the island’s culture bears many traces of its Greek inheritance. Photo by: m.f.t.
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