Photo: Alhambra view

View looking south from the Calle de San Nicolas by the Iglesia de San Nicholas in the Albaycin of Granada. This is the usual viewing point for the Alhambra – it’s one of the few places in Granada where you can get high enough to get a decent perspective across the small valley at the northern foot of the Alhambra.

Visitor note: buy your tickets in advance – don’t go on the day and hope tickets will be available. Hope is not a good strategy.

Photo: The road to enlightenment

40 George Square (previously The David Hume Tower – see this BBC article for background on why it was renamed) is part of the University of Edinburgh’s city centre campus and is located at the south-east corner of George Square.

George Square is notable for not only being the first planned square in Edinburgh, but for being the first real suburban development outside of the city’s southern wall – predating the development of Edinburgh’s New Town, which immediately eclipsed it as the ‘suburban’ destination of choice. Despite its apparent solidity, it is a rickety building – not only does it move in the wind but the wind whistles through the building in a frankly rather terrifying manner.

Photo: The power of Scotland

Designed by Catalan architect Enric Miralles, the Scottish Parliament has won a number of architectural awards, including the 2005 Stirling Prize.

The Scottish Parliament is (by some degree) the most incoherent building I have ever seen. Renowned postmodernist Charles Jencks described it as “quite a meal” – faint praise indeed. A very strange mix of post-modernism, brutalism and vernacular architecture, individual bits of the building are spectacular, but the whole is little more than a regurgitated mass of juxtapositions and alien iconographies.