Edinburgh: The Old Town, the Festival, and What to Do the Rest of the Year Edinburgh is one of Europe’s finest cities for concentrated historical and architectural interest, and it is also, during August, one of the most overwhelmed. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the International Festival together generate three weeks of programming that draws 900,000+ visitors to a city of 500,000. If...

Marrakech: What to Expect When You Actually Arrive Marrakech is an excellent city to visit and a genuinely difficult one for first-timers who have not done any preparation. The medina is a working city, not a heritage museum, and it operates on its own logic. Visitors who expect the navigation, social dynamics, and commercial transactions to resemble European tourism have a harder time than those...

Oxford: The University Is the City, and Vice Versa Oxford University is not a single institution with a campus you can visit. It is a federation of 38 colleges distributed across a small city, and understanding this is key to visiting it properly. There is no main gate, no central visitor centre with a $30 admission ticket. Much of the university is accessible for free or at low cost, but which...

The Kalahari: Not Quite What “Desert” Usually Means The Kalahari is technically not a true desert. Annual rainfall in most of the Kalahari (200-500mm per year) is too high to qualify under the scientific definition. It is a fossil desert: an ancient sandy environment that was arid millions of years ago and retains characteristic red sand dunes and sparse vegetation but now supports...

Santorini: The Honest Version The photographs of Santorini are real. The white-washed buildings, blue-domed churches, and caldera views are everything the images suggest. The island is genuinely beautiful. It is also genuinely overcrowded in summer, genuinely expensive, and genuinely difficult to navigate on foot from one famous viewpoint to another without either a vehicle or time to spare. This...

Sossusvlei: The Dunes, the Light, and the Practical Details Sossusvlei is a salt and clay pan in Namibia’s Namib-Naukluft National Park, surrounded by some of the largest sand dunes in the world. The dunes here are not yellow; they are deep orange and red, coloured by iron oxide, and they change shade from near-white in the middle of the day to vivid burnt orange at sunrise and sunset. The...

Piazza San Marco: Venice’s Main Square, Done Without Being Done By It Piazza San Marco is the only piazza in Venice; every other square is a campo. Napoleon supposedly called it the “finest drawing room in Europe.” What it currently is, from May through September, is one of the most densely packed tourist areas in the world: cruise ship passengers arrive by the thousands, tour...

Tayrona National Park: Colombia’s Best Coastline, With Some Honest Caveats Tayrona National Natural Park occupies 150 square kilometres on Colombia’s Caribbean coast at the base of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the world’s highest coastal mountain range. The park’s geography produces conditions that exist almost nowhere else: jungle-covered peaks descending sharply to...

St. Mark’s Basilica: How to Actually See It St. Mark’s Basilica is the most important church in Venice and one of the finest examples of Byzantine architecture in Western Europe. The interior is covered in 8,000 square metres of gold mosaic, accumulated between the 11th and 13th centuries, which creates an effect of almost organic richness when the light is right. The building has been...

The Yangtze River: Cruises, the Three Gorges, and What the Dam Changed The Yangtze is the longest river in Asia and the third longest in the world. It rises in the Tibetan Plateau and runs 6,300 kilometres east to the sea at Shanghai, passing through Chongqing, the Three Gorges, Wuhan, Nanjing, and dozens of smaller cities. For most Western visitors, the Yangtze means one thing: the Three Gorges...

The Royal Observatory Greenwich: Where Time Was Standardised The Royal Observatory sits on the hill above the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, built in 1675 on Charles II’s instruction. Its original purpose was practical and urgent: Britain needed better astronomical tables to enable safe maritime navigation, particularly for calculating longitude at sea. The problem of longitude had...

The Shard: Is the View Worth £40? The Shard is 310 metres of glass and steel designed by Renzo Piano, completed in 2012 on the South Bank at London Bridge. It is the tallest building in the United Kingdom and the Western Hemisphere’s sixth tallest. The view from The View from The Shard observation experience on floors 68-72 is exceptional on a clear day. The question is whether it justifies...

Ocean Park Hong Kong: The Theme Park That Takes the Harbour View Seriously Ocean Park sits on a headland on the south side of Hong Kong Island, divided by the mountain into two sections: the lowland Waterfront area near the entrance, and the Summit area at the top, connected by cable cars, funicular, and roller coasters depending on which route you choose. The South China Sea is visible from the...

Sigiriya: The Rock That King Kashyapa Built His Palace On Sigiriya is a 200-metre volcanic rock plug rising from the Sri Lankan jungle in the North Central Province. Between roughly 477 and 495 AD, King Kashyapa built his palace on the summit, surrounded the base with water gardens and boulder gardens, painted the cliff face with frescoes, and enclosed the whole complex with a series of defensive...

Hal Saflieni Hypogeum: The Most Restricted Tourist Site in Europe The Hal Saflieni Hypogeum is a Neolithic underground cemetery and temple complex in Paola, Malta, carved into the limestone between roughly 3600 and 2500 BC. It is the only prehistoric underground temple in the world, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and almost certainly the single hardest museum in Europe to get a ticket for. Daily...

Notre Dame Cathedral: After the Fire, the Rebuild, and the Reopening Notre Dame reopened in December 2024, five years after the April 2019 fire that destroyed the spire and most of the roof. The restoration was, by any measure, an extraordinary achievement: some 250,000 craftspeople, conservators and volunteers contributed to the work, and the rebuilt interior is now brighter and better lit than...

Independence National Historical Park: The Place Where America Was Argued Into Existence The Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia covers about 45 acres in the heart of the old city and contains the most significant concentration of early American political history in the country. Independence Hall. The Liberty Bell. The Declaration House. Carpenters’ Hall. Congress Hall. All...

Saint Augustine: The Oldest City in the US, With the History to Back It Up Saint Augustine was founded by Spanish colonists in 1565, making it the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States, predating Jamestown by 42 years. It sits on a peninsula between the Matanzas River and the Atlantic Ocean in northeast Florida, and its historic district is compact...

Kinkaku-ji: The Most Famous Building in Kyoto and Why You Should Visit It Last Kinkaku-ji (Temple of the Golden Pavilion) is the single most-visited site in Kyoto and often the most-visited in all Japan by foreign tourists. This creates a practical problem. The approach path from the ticket booth to the reflecting pond is almost always crowded, and the standard photograph of the gold-and-lacquer...

San Antonio: The Alamo, the River Walk, and the Parts That Make It Genuinely Good San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in the United States and the most visited city in Texas. Its identity as a tourist destination rests primarily on two things: the Alamo (the 1836 siege where 189 Texian defenders held a converted Spanish mission against 1,800 Mexican soldiers for 13 days before being killed,...

Yosemite: The Reservation System, the Crowds, and Why It’s Still Worth It Yosemite Valley is one of the most beautiful places in North America and one of the most logistically challenging national parks to visit. Four million people visit annually, the majority in July and August, and almost all of them go to the same 7-mile valley floor. The waterfalls, El Capitan, Half Dome, and the mirror...

Socotra Island: The Galapagos of the Indian Ocean, With Some Caveats Socotra is an archipelago of four islands in the northwest Indian Ocean, part of Yemen but geographically closer to Somalia than to mainland Yemen. The main island, also called Socotra, is about 3,600 square kilometres and contains an ecosystem that was isolated from the African and Arabian mainlands for millions of years. The...

Privilege Ibiza: The Club, the Island, and What the Brochures Leave Out Privilege is a nightclub, arguably the largest in the world by capacity at around 10,000. It opened in the late 1980s under the name KU and transformed Ibiza’s club landscape in the process. The island’s club scene has evolved considerably since then, but Privilege has retained a certain mythic status even as it...

Hay-on-Wye: The Town That Became a Bookshop Hay-on-Wye is a small Welsh market town on the Wye Valley border with England, and it has around 30 secondhand and antiquarian bookshops for a population of fewer than 2,000 people. This is not a natural ratio. It resulted from a deliberate strategy by Richard Booth, who started buying and selling secondhand books in Hay in the 1960s and gradually...

Shackleton’s Hut: The Most Improbable Building You Will Ever Visit There are two Shackleton huts in Antarctica, and which one you visit depends entirely on your expedition route. The more famous is Cape Royds on Ross Island, used during the Nimrod Expedition of 1907-1909. The second is Cape Evans, used during the Terra Nova Expedition. Both are preserved and protected as Historic Sites and...

The MuseumsQuartier Vienna: One of Europe’s Best Museum Districts, Used Properly The MuseumsQuartier (MQ) occupies the former imperial court stables, a Baroque complex designed by Johann Fischer von Erlach in the early 18th century. The stables were converted into a cultural district in 2001 by adding four major museum buildings to the historic structure. The complex is the seventh-largest...

Segovia: Day Trip Done Right, or Two Days Done Better Segovia is only 90 kilometres from Madrid, which makes it the most popular day trip from the capital. That also means it gets very crowded between 11am and 4pm on weekends and public holidays. If you have the flexibility to stay overnight or arrive on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, you will see a completely different, far quieter city. The...

Glacier National Park: Before the Glaciers Are Gone The park’s name requires honest context. When the park was established in 1910, it had 150 glaciers. The current count is around 25 active glaciers, down from 37 in 1966. The named glaciers are retreating at rates that have accelerated significantly since the 1990s. Climate projections suggest that without dramatic changes, most of the...

Durdle Door: Beautiful, Accessible, and Busier Than It Should Be Durdle Door is a natural limestone arch on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, formed over hundreds of millions of years as the sea eroded softer rock from either side of a harder limestone ridge. The resulting structure, a stone arch with its legs in the water and the sea visible through the opening, is one of the most photographed...

The Alhambra: Book the Nasrid Palaces First, Everything Else Second The Alhambra is a fortified palace complex on a red-earth hill above Granada, built primarily between the 13th and 15th centuries by the Nasrid sultans who ruled the last Moorish kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula. It is not simply a building; it is an interlocking set of palaces, gardens, fortifications, and water features spread...

Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre: Zaha Hadid’s Most Accomplished Building The Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre in Baku opened in 2012 and immediately won multiple major architecture awards, including the Design Museum’s Design of the Year in 2014. Zaha Hadid designed it; her firm built it. The building is extraordinary from every angle: a continuous white surface that flows from ground to...

Knossos: Europe’s Oldest Palace and Its Controversial Restoration Knossos is the largest Bronze Age archaeological site on Crete and what most archaeologists consider the central palace of the Minoan civilisation, which flourished between roughly 2700 and 1450 BC. The Minoans were literate, administered a complex economy, produced elaborate art, and built multi-storey palaces with indoor...

Valle de Viñales: Cuba’s Most Spectacular Landscape, with a Few Catches The mogote limestone formations that rise from the floor of the Viñales valley are some of the most dramatic scenery in the Caribbean. Steep, forested, geologically ancient, they stand in abrupt contrast to the tobacco fields and red soil of the valley floor. It is a genuinely spectacular place, and the small town of...

St. Peter’s Basilica: Separating the Queue from the Experience St. Peter’s Basilica is free to enter. This is worth stating clearly because the Vatican Museums (which require expensive tickets and advance booking) are adjacent, and confusion between the two leads to thousands of visitors every year paying to join a queue that eventually delivers them to the Sistine Chapel rather than...

The Grand Erg Occidental: Algeria’s Great Sand Sea The Grand Erg Occidental is one of two major erg (sand sea) regions in Algeria, covering roughly 78,000 square kilometres in the northwest Sahara between the Atlas foothills and the Saharan interior. Erg landscapes are what most people picture when they think of the Sahara: continuous dunes, some reaching 300 metres in height, arranged in...

Page, Arizona: The Slot Canyons, the Reservoir, and the Permit Reality Page, Arizona sits on the Colorado Plateau near the Utah border, at the edge of Lake Powell and within 20 kilometres of some of the most distinctive sandstone scenery on Earth. The concentration of remarkable formations in this small area is unusual even by the standards of the Colorado Plateau, which is itself one of the most...

The Twelve Apostles: Victoria’s Most Photographed Coastline, Correctly Named or Not There are not twelve of them. There were originally nine stacks still standing when the site was formally named the Twelve Apostles in 1922 (it was previously called Sow and Piglets, which gives a sense of the naming committee’s creativity). Since then the number has declined: one collapsed dramatically...

Honolulu: Beyond Waikiki Waikiki Beach is famous and genuinely good for a reason: the water is calm, the sand is clean, and Diamond Head provides a photogenic backdrop to the east. It is also, in peak season, dense with tourists to a degree that some visitors find overwhelming. The rest of Honolulu, and the rest of Oahu beyond the city, is considerably less crowded and often more rewarding. The...

Isla Mujeres: Cancun’s Better Neighbour Isla Mujeres is 8 kilometres off the coast of Cancun’s Hotel Zone and about 40 minutes by ferry. That small distance produces a large change in atmosphere. The island is 7 kilometres long and less than a kilometre wide, has no large resort towers, and operates at a pace that the mainland hotel strip definitively does not. That said, it is not a...

The Smithsonian: Which Museums Are Actually Worth Your Time Nineteen museums and galleries, nine research centres, and a zoo: the Smithsonian Institution is a collection of institutions more than a single place. All of the DC museums on the National Mall are free. That removes the pressure to rush through everything, which is fortunate, because trying to see more than two of them in a day is a...

Windermere and the Lake District: A Guide That Doesn’t Pretend It’s Not Crowded The Lake District is the most visited national park in the UK, receiving around 20 million visits annually. Windermere is its busiest lake, and the towns of Windermere and Bowness-on-Windermere at its eastern shore are the most tourist-dense settlements in the park. On a July or August bank holiday weekend,...

Wawel Hill: The Heart of Polish History Above the Vistula Wawel Hill is a limestone outcrop above the Vistula River in the centre of Kraków, topped by the Royal Castle and the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Stanislaus and Václav. For five centuries it was the seat of Polish kings; the history of the Polish state from the 10th century through the 17th century is concentrated on this one hill. It is...

CN Tower: A Practical Guide to Visiting Toronto’s Most Recognisable Structure The CN Tower held the record for world’s tallest free-standing structure from 1976 to 2009, when the Burj Khalifa took it. At 553 metres, it is still the tallest in the Western Hemisphere, and the views from the observation decks on a clear day are exceptional: Lake Ontario to the south, the city grid...

Krabi: The Limestone Towers, the Crowded Beaches, and the Places to Go Instead Krabi Province on Thailand’s Andaman coast has some of the most dramatic coastal scenery in Southeast Asia: vertical limestone karsts rising directly from the sea, clear turquoise water, and white sand beaches. It is also, during high season, intensely crowded at its most famous locations. This guide covers both...

Nizwa: Oman’s Ancient Capital and One of the Country’s Most Rewarding Day Trips Nizwa sits 165 kilometres south of Muscat in the Hajar Mountains, and it is the most historically significant city in Oman. For much of the country’s history, Nizwa was the capital, the seat of the Ibadi Islamic imams who ruled with religious and temporal authority. The city’s fort, souk, and...

Valparaíso: The Vertical City That Rewards Getting Lost Valparaíso is built on 42 cerros (hills) above a flat port district at sea level. The port was the most important on the Pacific coast of South America before the Panama Canal opened in 1914 and redirected trans-oceanic shipping away from Cape Horn. The city entered a long economic decline after that, which had an unintended architectural...

Phong Nha-Ke Bang: Vietnam’s Cave Country The Phong Nha-Ke Bang karst landscape in Quang Binh Province is one of the oldest karst formations in Asia, an estimated 400 million years old, and the cave systems hidden within it are extraordinary in scale. Son Doong, the world’s largest cave by volume, is here. Hang En, large enough to fit a 40-storey building inside, is here. Paradise Cave...

Foteviken Viking Reserve: The Living Museum That Takes It Seriously Foteviken Viking Reserve is not on Gotland (as one might assume from a quick read). It is on the mainland Scanian coast of southern Sweden, at the edge of a bay called Foteviken about 30 kilometres south of Malmö. The reserve was established in 1995 and is unusual in the Viking heritage world for being a working community rather...

Victoria Falls: Zambia vs Zimbabwe, and What Nobody Tells You The falls straddle the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. Most visitors enter from one side only; the better strategy, if your schedule allows, is to cross both borders and experience both perspectives. The falls are 1.7 kilometres wide; no single viewpoint captures the full picture. The Zimbabwean town of Victoria Falls (the town, as...

Discover Chapel Bridge (Kapellbrücke) in Lucerne, Switzerland Introduction Chapel Bridge, known in German as Kapellbrücke, is a covered wooden footbridge spanning the Reuss River in the centre of Lucerne, Switzerland. Originally built in 1333, it ranks among the oldest surviving wooden bridges in Europe and is one of the most visited landmarks in the country. The bridge runs diagonally across the...