Butrint

Lagoon and forest have kept watch over Butrint since the city emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, when spreading marshland drove its people away. Beneath the greenery lie the layers of two and a half millennia: a Greek colony, a Roman town, an early Christian bishopric with a celebrated baptistery, Byzantine walls and a Venetian fortress. Few Mediterranean sites preserve so complete an urban sequence in so wild a setting, and UNESCO inscribed Butrint on the World Heritage List in 1992.