Visitors to Red Bay National Historic Site, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Canada’s Labrador province, can book hour-long tours with a park ranger to the 16th-century Basque whaling outpost there.
“If These Bones Could Talk” takes visitors along the beach through the skeletal remains of the harvested whales. A second tour, “Digging Through Time,” goes by boat to Saddle Island to the former whale-oil-processing area and other archaeological sites.
The three monumental doors of the Florence Baptistery were reunited in December 2019 after being apart for almost 30 years for restoration. The three gilded-bronze doors were crafted by different artisans between 1330 and 1452. Each is more than 16 feet tall and almost 10 feet wide and weighs over eight tons. The oldest, the South Door, damaged by flooding in 1966, was the last to be restored.
In Cornwall, United Kingdom, a footbridge over a rocky chasm now connects the ruins of Tintagel Castle, on a land-tied island, with the mainland. Opened on Aug. 7, the bridge restores a medieval crossing that fell into the ocean centuries ago.
Before the opening of the 223-foot bridge, visitors had to walk down a steep flight of steps on one side of the chasm, cross a shorter footbridge and then climb up stairs on the other side. Tintagel Castle, which dates to the 13th century, has long been associated with Arthurian legend as the castle of Uther Pendragon.
Shuri Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the city of Naha on the island of Okinawa, Japan, burned down on Oct. 31. The castle, which was the largest wooden structure on Okinawa, was a reconstruction of the original 500-year-old castle that was destroyed by US troops during the Battle of Okinawa in World War II.
Shuri Castle was the seat of the Ryukyu Kingdom, comprising the Ryukyu Islands, until the islands were annexed by the Japanese Empire in 1879. The islands rim the East China Sea just northeast of Taiwan.
