Baku, Azerbaijan

Baku sits on the Absheron Peninsula on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, the world's largest inland body of water, and is one of the lowest-lying national capitals on earth at roughly 28 metres below sea level. Its skyline pairs two very different eras: the walled Old City (Icherisheher), a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000 whose stone lanes hold the Maiden Tower and the Shirvanshahs' Palace, and the Flame Towers — three flame-shaped skyscrapers completed in 2012 whose LED facades turn the shoreline into a nightly light show. Between them, the curving white forms of the Heydar Aliyev Center, designed by Zaha Hadid and opened in 2012, won the London Design Museum's Design of the Year in 2014. Baku's oil wealth is not a recent story — the Absheron Peninsula's natural seeps have burned for centuries, giving the region its old name 'land of fire,' and 19th-century Baku briefly produced roughly half the world's oil during a boom that drew the Nobel and Rothschild families. That history is visible at Yanar Dag, a hillside gas seep that has burned continuously for decades, and at the Ateshgah fire temple in Surakhani, built by Zoroastrian, Hindu and Sikh traders over a natural gas vent. Since 2016 the city has also hosted Formula 1's Azerbaijan Grand Prix on a street circuit that runs directly past the Old City walls.