Da Nang was Champa's harbour, Tourane under the French, and the beachhead where America's ground war began in March 1965. Three days here trace 1,600 years: brick towers, a Vauban citadel, a Nguyen mountain gate and villages that outlived them all.
Founded by the École française d'Extrême-Orient in 1915, this holds the world's largest collection of Cham art — about 2,000 sandstone pieces from the 7th–15th centuries, including the My Son E1 altar. Open 07:00–17:00.
Excavated from 2011 after a family found carved brick in their Cam Le garden, this 9th-century temple base is the largest Cham tower footprint ever uncovered in Vietnam, with a ritual well packed with quartz and gold leaf.
Seventy brick towers raised between the 4th and 13th centuries as Champa's spiritual capital, 70km southwest. Group A was flattened by B-52 strikes in 1969 and the craters are still open; Groups B, C and D survive with lingams in place.
Simhapura was the Champa capital from the 4th century and is now rice fields. Climb Buu Chau hill to the church built on the old watchtower mound; the rectangular moat lines and brick scatter are visible in the fields below.
The 1813 Vauban-style fortress where Nguyen Tri Phuong held off the French-Spanish invasion of 1858. Restored ramparts and bronze cannon now front the city museum, rehoused in the 1900 French colonial town hall on Bach Dang.
Tourane's French parish church of 1923, designed by Father Louis Vallet in Gothic style with a 70m spire topped by a weathercock — hence the nickname. Pink walls and Grenoble stained glass came through both wars intact.
Twelve halls on the 1954–75 campaigns across central Vietnam, with a captured Huey, an M48 tank and F-5 fragments in the yard, plus a replica of Ho Chi Minh's Hanoi stilt house at the rear. Open 07:30–16:30.
Da Nang's oldest bridge, built in 1965 by American contractors RMK-BRJ to move materiel from the port to the airbase. Named for the resistance fighter executed in 1964, it is now pedestrian-only on its original steel trusses.
The 1826 Nguyen dynasty gate at 496m, inscribed 'the grandest pass under heaven' by Emperor Minh Mang. It reopened in August 2024 after a 42-billion-VND restoration that cleared the French and American bunkers built into it.
A 400-year-old village that watched the Hai Van approach and supplied fish sauce to the Nguyen court. Families still ferment anchovies in wooden barrels for twelve months, and the ancient banyan shrine stands at the river mouth.
Founded around 1470 by five clans sent south under Le Thanh Tong. The communal house rebuilt in 1888 keeps royal edicts from five emperors, and the same families still hand-cut rice paper grilled over coconut husk.
The city's oldest communal house, raised in 1806 by settlers from Thanh Hoa and hidden in a walled courtyard off Phan Chu Trinh. Ancestral tablets, a lotus pond and an 1856 bronze bell survive behind shell-scarred walls.