Sydney

Australia's oldest and largest city, born as a convict settlement on a great blue harbour and grown into a global metropolis of sails, sandstone and beaches. On the harbour edge The Rocks keeps the narrow lanes, cut steps and terraces of the first town, hewn from sandstone by convict hands on the land of the Gadigal people; along Macquarie Street a convict architect raised the barracks, church and hospital of a young Georgian colony. Around the cove rise the two great emblems of the modern city, the white shells of the Opera House and the steel arch of the Harbour Bridge, framed from the governor's old garden at Mrs Macquarie's Chair. Read the layers of the city, from the First Fleet to the sails, at your own pace.