The Palmyra ruins cover a six-kilometer area, and it requires a full day of exploration to absorb the beauty of architecture.
What does absorb mean in this text?
Does it mean to suck up or does it carry any metaphorical or figurative meaning? If so what is that meaning?
And how can you simplify it to simple English?
I means that you need a whole day to view, think about and appreciate the beauty of the architecture and to make it a part of yourself.
It is a metaphorical usage of the word absorb, but we say that so commonly that we don’t think of it as a metaphor.
Look up the word “absorb” in an English-to-English dictionary, and you might understand better how we use it.