Highlights
01Dragon Bridge
A 666-metre steel dragon arched over the Hàn River — gold by day, lit through every colour after dark, modelled on the dragons of the 11th-century Lý kings. Time it for a weekend night: at 9pm Friday through Sunday the head breathes real fire, then swings round and sprays the crowd with water.
02Am Phu Cave
Cross the yin-yang bridge and its twelve zodiac guardians, and the mountain opens into a cave sculpted as the Buddhist underworld — demons, the scales of judgment, the King of Hell waiting in the dark. The path forks: down into hell, jagged and cold, or up a steep tunnel to a crack of daylight — King Minh Mạng named it after a draught from inside snuffed his soldiers' torches.
03My Son Sanctuary
The Champa kings raised these red-brick towers to Shiva between the 4th and 13th centuries, laid without mortar by a bonding technique engineers still can't fully explain. Of more than seventy, about twenty survive — American B-52s flattened the finest in 1969, and the craters still sit among the ruins in the jungle valley.
04Marble Mountains
Five marble hills named for the five elements, rising straight off the coast road between Đà Nẵng and Hội An. Climb the stone steps of Thủy Sơn into a warren of caves and pagodas — grottoes where daylight falls through holes in the ceiling onto Buddhist altars, and where the Việt Cộng ran a field hospital all through the war, dug in directly beneath the American air base.
05Linh Ung Pagoda
Vietnam's tallest Buddha — a 67-metre Lady of Mercy on the Sơn Trà headland, facing the open sea with her back to the mountain to watch over the fishing fleet. The pagoda below has the curved-roof halls and bonsai courtyard, but the climb up the peninsula is half of it: forest, hairpins, and the whole of Đà Nẵng Bay opening behind you.