United States

The French Quarter of New Orleans is the oldest neighbourhood in the city, a 36-block grid of Spanish-colonial and French-Creole architecture that predates the Louisiana Purchase. It is the city's cultural as well as geographic heart: the birthplace of jazz, the site of its most famous festivals, and the place where the sounds, smells and rhythms of the city are most concentrated.

When it opened in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge was the longest suspension bridge span in the world and an engineering triumph of the Depression era. Spanning the Golden Gate strait to connect San Francisco with Marin County, its Art Deco towers and distinctive International Orange colour have made it one of the most photographed structures on earth.

Carved by the Colorado River over roughly six million years, the Grand Canyon exposes nearly two billion years of Earth's geological history in its layered walls of colourful rock — a scale so vast it resists mental capture until you stand at the rim.

A gift from France to the United States, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886 on Liberty Island in New York Harbor. Designed by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi with an iron framework engineered by Gustave Eiffel, it remains the most recognizable symbol of American freedom and opportunity.

Straddling the volcanic caldera of a supervolcano, Yellowstone National Park is a landscape of contradictions: geysers that erupt predictably alongside rivers that run warm, bison herds that wander through thermal fields, and a caldera floor that rises and falls centimetres each year. It is also the oldest national park in the world, established in 1872.

Covering nearly 7,500 square kilometres of California's Sierra Nevada, Yosemite National Park is less a single vista than a collection of granite peaks, hanging valleys, giant sequoia groves and waterfalls that collectively defined the idea of wilderness beauty for the modern world.