The 20 Best Cultural Experiences in North America

Chichen Itza was one of the great cities of the Maya world, and its restored centrepiece, the stepped pyramid of El Castillo, is the image of pre-Columbian Mexico.

The temple is a stone calendar: at the equinoxes the afternoon sun casts a serpent of shadow down its northern staircase.

Beyond it sprawl the Great Ball Court, the Temple of the Warriors and a thousand columns.

Towering limestone pyramids rise straight out of dense rainforest canopy at this former Maya city-state, once home to an estimated 90,000 people at its peak around 800 CE.

Howler monkeys and toucans fill the surrounding jungle, and climbing Temple IV at dawn puts visitors above the canopy to watch other temple roofs emerge from mist.

Far less restored than Mexico's Chichen Itza, Tikal feels genuinely like a lost city rather than a manicured park.

The walled heart of Quebec City is the only fortified colonial city north of Mexico still standing, its narrow cobblestone streets climbing from the St.

Lawrence River up to the castle-like Chateau Frontenac hotel.

Founded by French settlers in 1608, the Old Town's stone houses and ramparts earned it UNESCO World Heritage status, and the Dufferin Terrace boardwalk gives sweeping river views.

For one week every year, Nevada's Black Rock Desert hosts Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis of over 70,000 people built from scratch and dismantled without trace afterward.

Towering art installations, mutant art cars and elaborate theme camps fill the white playa, leading to the ceremonial burning of a giant wooden effigy on the penultimate night.

Teotihuacan was one of the largest cities in the ancient world, and its two great pyramids — the Sun and the Moon — still dominate the Mexican plateau just outside the capital.

The Avenue of the Dead runs more than two kilometres between them, past palace complexes decorated with faded murals.

Both main pyramids can be climbed, and the view from the top of the Pyramid of the Sun takes in the whole site and the mountains beyond.

Pastel colonial facades line the streets of Old Havana, many crumbling in ways that somehow add to the city's atmosphere rather than detract from it.

Vintage American cars from before the 1959 revolution, kept alive through decades of improvised repairs, still work as everyday taxis along the seafront Malecon.

Live salsa and son music spills from bars most nights.

Guanajuato is a former silver-mining city built into a ravine, its brightly painted houses stacked up impossibly steep hillsides and connected by a maze of underground tunnels and narrow alleys.

The centre is a UNESCO World Heritage site of baroque churches and plazas, and the Callejón del Beso — an alley so narrow that neighbouring balconies almost touch — draws crowds for its star-crossed-lovers legend.

Pastel-painted colonial buildings and crumbling Spanish Baroque church ruins fill this former capital, framed on clear days by the smoking cone of Volcan de Fuego.

Cobblestone streets laid out in a strict grid by 16th-century Spanish planners still define the town today.

Climbing a nearby volcano for sunrise, with Antigua's rooftops spread out below, is the classic local excursion.

New Orleans' Mardi Gras builds for weeks through parades run by dozens of krewes, social clubs that design elaborate floats and toss beads, cups and doubloons to crowds along St Charles Avenue and through the French Quarter.

By Fat Tuesday the city is in full costume, with the Krewe of Zulu and Krewe of Rex parades considered the day's centrepiece events.

Tulum is the only major Maya city built directly on the coast, its stone temples and watchtowers standing on a low cliff above a beach of white sand and turquoise water.

The site is small compared to Chichén Itzá, but the setting — walled ruins on one side, Caribbean Sea on the other — is unmatched.

Visitors can walk the perimeter path in under an hour, then head down the wooden stairs to swim below the cliffs.

Cobblestone streets in this 16th-century sugar-trade town are lined with candy-coloured colonial houses, many still lived in by the families who've owned them for generations.

Vintage American cars from the 1950s, kept running through decades of improvisation, cruise past pastel facades and a crumbling bell tower overlooking the town.

Live music spills from open doorways most evenings.

Ringed by three volcanoes and a dozen distinct Maya villages, each with its own dialect, dress and market traditions, Lake Atitlán fills a volcanic caldera with water famously described by Aldous Huxley as almost too beautiful.

Boats shuttle between lakeside towns like laid-back Panajachel, spiritual San Marcos and traditional Santiago Atitlán, each offering a genuinely different pace and character rather than interchangeable lake stops.

Twice a week, the highland town of Chichicastenango fills with Maya K'iche' vendors from surrounding villages selling hand-woven textiles, wooden masks and pottery in one of Central America's most vividly colourful markets.

The steps of Santo Tomas church, where Maya rituals still take place alongside Catholic worship, form the market's unofficial centrepiece.

A cinder cone volcano that famously erupted from a level cornfield in 1943, growing to over 400 metres within a decade and burying two villages under lava - one of the few volcanoes in the world whose entire life cycle has been documented from birth.

The half-buried bell tower of San Juan Parangaricutiro's church still protrudes from the hardened lava field, an eerie, singular sight.

Horseback rides across the black lava field to the church ruins, followed by a hike up the cinder cone itself, make for a genuinely unusual full day out.

Tucked into the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, Jacob's Pillow has hosted a summer dance festival on the same rural farmstead since 1933, making it the longest-running dance festival in the United States.

Companies spanning ballet, contemporary, and world dance perform across an intimate wooden theatre and outdoor stages, with free daily talks and showings that make top-tier dance accessible without a ticket.

Cuba's second city and historic revolutionary heartland has a distinctly different feel from Havana — hillier, hotter, and steeped in Afro-Cuban culture that shows up in its music, religion and the country's biggest Carnival celebration each July.

Landmarks include the Moncada Barracks, site of Castro's failed 1953 attack that kicked off the revolution, and the hilltop Castillo del Morro fortress guarding the harbor mouth.

One of Cuba's oldest towns, founded in the 1500s, Remedios is a pocket-sized colonial gem that sees a fraction of the visitors that flock to Trinidad.

Pastel-painted arcaded buildings ring a central plaza dominated by two churches, including one with an extraordinary gilded baroque altar.

Its quiet daily calm gives no hint that it hosts Las Parrandas, one of Cuba's wildest festivals, every Christmas Eve.

Founded by French settlers rather than the Spanish, Cienfuegos carries a distinctly different architectural character from the rest of Cuba, its neoclassical Parque José Martí and grand Tomás Terry Theatre earning it the nickname 'Pearl of the South' and UNESCO status.

Set on a wide, protected bay, the city has a more orderly, less weathered feel than Havana's crumbling grandeur, with a genuinely pleasant waterfront Malecón for evening walks.

Route 66 is America's original cross-country highway, and its Arizona stretch preserves the longest unbroken original section still open to traffic.

Neon-lit diners, vintage motor courts, and hand-painted signs line the road through Seligman, Kingman, and Oatman, where wild burros wander the main street.

The 191-bend Oatman Highway climbs through the Black Mountains into the Mojave Desert - a rolling time capsule of mid-century road culture.

A small colorful island town connected to the mainland by a short causeway, Flores serves as the main gateway to Tikal but has enough charm — cobbled streets, lakeside cafés, pastel buildings — to justify a night or two beyond being a transit stop.

Built on the site of the last independent Maya kingdom to fall to conquest, in 1697, it sits on Lake Petén Itzá, where sunset boat rides round out a low-key stay before or after the ruins.