From the viewpoint at the chapel of San Marcos, it looks like the work of an army of stonemasons. Two lines of pale limestone, almost vertical, run down a hillside and disappear into the green water of the Canelles reservoir. A half-ruined chapel peeks out between them. Nobody built those walls. They are the Roques […]

Before Rome existed, before Phoenician ships ever reached the western Mediterranean, and around the same time the first fortified villages of the Argaric culture were rising in southeastern Iberia, a farming community on a rocky ridge in inland Morocco was already digging a ditch and piling up earth. What they were defending against is still […]

In the German state of Brandenburg, barely a hundred meters (about 330 feet) from the border with Saxony-Anhalt, the Havel River curls around a low rise of land that locals call the Pilatsch. For generations, a local legend held that a knight named Pilatus lived there, ambushing boats on the river and locking captured boatmen […]