Category: historic site

Chateau des Maures

The Stoneworks at Chateau des Maures

The Chateau des Maures, also known as the Castle of the Moors, in the Extremadura, is situated in the town of Sintra, in the parish (Freguesia) of São Pedro de Penaferrim, in the council Sintra district in Lisbon, in Portugal. It is now classified as a National Monument, part of the Sintra Cultural Landscape, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The castle is an irregularly planned military outpost that follows a 450 metre perimeter on top of a mountainous cliff, oriented southwest to northwest. It consists of a double line of military walls that meanders over the granite terrain of the promontory. Its place on the hilltop, surrounded by and including the natural and exotic vegetation, accentuates the Romantic character of the place.

The outer walls open near Abelheira (west of Tapada dos Bichos), from a main access door, where several paths wind around the hilltop of the castle. A second ring of walls reinforces the castle with both circular and square turrets, thick wall battlements and railings, and crowned with pyramid-shaped merlons. At this second wall is the main entrance to the castle, protected by two turrets and battlements.

Alfred Janniot, “Fontaine du Soleil”

Alfred Janniot, “Fontaine du Soleil”, Nice, France

The “Fountain of the Sun” or “Fontaine du Soleil” is located on the south side of Place Masséna. The founatin in its original form was inaugurated in 1956. On it are five bronze statues respresenting Earth, Mars, Mercury, Venus and Saturn that were sculpted by Alfred Janniot. A seven metre high statue of Apollo sits at the centre of the fountain.

At one point the statue of Apollo was moved due to censorship to the sports park Charles Ehrmann in the 1970s and was eventually returned on June 20, 2011.

The son of Zeus and Leto, and the twin brother of Artemis, Apollo was the god of music (principally the lyre, and he directed the choir of the Muses) and also of prophecy, colonization, medicine, archery (but not for war or hunting), poetry, dance, intellectual inquiry and the carer of herds and flocks. He was also a god of light, known as “Phoebus” (radiant or beaming, and he was sometimes identified with Helios the sun god). He was also the god of plague and was worshiped as Smintheus (from sminthos, rat) and as Parnopius (from parnops, grasshopper) and was known as the destroyer of rats and locust. Sacred to Apollo are the swan, the wolf and the dolphin.

Cliffside Palace

Cliffside Palace, Mesa Verde, Colorado

Mesa Verde National Park is a U.S. National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Montezuma County, Colorado. It protects some of the best preserved Ancestral Puebloan archeological sites in the United States.

The park was created by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. It occupies 52,485 acres (21,240 ha) near the Four Corners region, and with more than 4,000 sites and 600 cliff dwellings, it is the largest archeological preserve in the US. Mesa Verde (Spanish for “green table”) is best known for structures such as Cliff Palace, thought to be the largest cliff dwelling in North America.

The Mesa Verdeans survived by utilizing a combination of hunting, gathering, and subsistence farming of crops such as corn, beans, and squash. They built the mesa’s first pueblos sometime after 650, and by the end of the 12th century they began to construct the massive cliff dwellings for which the park is best known. By 1285, following a period of social and environmental instability driven by a series of severe and prolonged droughts, they abandoned the area and moved south to locations in Arizona and New Mexico, including Rio Chama, Pajarito Plateau, and Santa Fe.

Howe Caverns

Howe Caverns, New York

Howe Caverns is located in Howes Cave, NY, near the town of Cobleskill in New York State’s Central-Leatherstocking region, Tour groups board an elevator for a 16-story, 156-foot descent into the Earth and step out into a limestone cave that is every bit the marvel it was in 1842 when farmer Lester Howe discovered it. After hunting around in some bushes, Howe found the entrance to a cave, and on May 22, 1842, he and his neighbor, Henry Wetsel, entered the caverns for the first time.

More than 14 million people have explored Howe Caverns since it formally opened to the public in 1929.

Ceiling at Dendera

 

Astronomical Ceiling, Dendera

The ceiling of the Hypostyle Hall at Dendera Temple is enriched with an incredible amount of figurative detail carved in low relief and painted in subtle shades against a blue background. The subjects include numerous deities and hybrid figures (some familiar, others much less so) and even astrological elements, such as recognisable figures from the zodiac.

Fantastic photos of the “astronomical ceiling” at Dendera, posted on LiveJournal by aksanova.