Sigiriya

A granite plug from a dead volcano standing 180 metres out of the Sri Lankan plain, and King Kashyapa put his palace on top of it between 477 and 495 CE. You climb to it through water gardens, past a mid-level terrace where a colossal lion once crouched and only the paws remain, so the last stair went up through the animal’s mouth. The western rock face carried frescoes over 140 by 40 metres of celestial women, most now lost. Below them runs the mirror wall, plaster polished until the king could see himself walking beside it, and between the eighth and tenth centuries visitors scratched over 1,500 poems into it, most of them about the painted women, which makes it one of the oldest visitor books on Earth. UNESCO listed it in 1982. It is a real climb in real heat; go early.