Guggenheim Bilbao: The Building Is the Exhibit, But the Collection Is Better Than People Think The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in 1997 and is credited with transforming Bilbao from a declining post-industrial port city into a major European cultural destination. The “Bilbao Effect” – the idea that a single landmark building could revitalise a city’s economy and image...

Laissez les bons temps rouler! A Guide to Bourbon Street in New Orleans Bourbon Street runs through the heart of the French Quarter in New Orleans, and it delivers a sensory experience unlike anywhere else in the United States. Music spills out of open doorways at all hours, the smell of Creole cooking drifts down the block, and the crowd is always moving. It is loud, it is unpredictable, and for...

St. Louis: Underrated, Overdue St. Louis does not get the credit it deserves. It is frequently omitted from lists of American travel destinations despite having a world-class free art museum, one of the most unusual museums in the country, 1,300 acres of urban park, and a food scene that has generated genuine national attention in recent years. It is also, by the standards of most large American...

New York City: A Practical Guide to the First Trip New York City is five boroughs covering 302 square miles with a population of approximately 8.3 million. Most visitors spend most of their time in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, which is understandable and also limits what you experience. The subway connects all five boroughs and is the only practical way to get around a city where taxis and...

Choeung Ek and S-21: Why Phnom Penh’s Darkest Sites Matter Between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia and killed between 1.5 and 2 million people out of a population of approximately 8 million. The exact figure remains debated. The mechanisms were systematic: evacuation of cities, forced agricultural labour, execution of perceived class enemies, intellectuals, people who wore...

Edinburgh Castle: Worth the Price, Worth the Queue Edinburgh Castle sits on Castle Rock, a volcanic plug that rises 130 metres above the city. The rock has been fortified in some form since at least the 12th century, and possibly since the Iron Age. The fortress you see now is partly medieval (St Margaret’s Chapel dates to around 1130 AD and is the oldest surviving building in Edinburgh),...

The Gobi Desert: Mongolia’s Side and What to Actually See The Gobi is the largest desert in Asia and the fifth-largest in the world, covering approximately 1.3 million square kilometres across southern Mongolia and northern China. The term Gobi means “waterless place” in Mongolian. Unlike the Sahara, it is predominantly a cold desert: winter temperatures can reach -40 degrees...

Versailles: How to Not Hate Your Day Trip Three million people visit the Palace of Versailles every year. On a summer Tuesday, around 20,000 of them are doing it at the same time as you. The palace itself is extraordinary and worth the effort, but arriving unprepared means you will spend your afternoon in a queue and leave with sore feet and a poor opinion of Louis XIV. Here is how to do it...

Dali’s Rhinoceros at Puerto Banus: The Sculpture and the Town Around It Salvador Dali’s “Rinoceronte Vestido con Puntillas” (Rhinoceros Dressed in Lace) stands at the entrance to Puerto Banus marina in Marbella, a bronze rhinoceros approximately 4 metres tall with its horn raised and its form draped in what the title describes as lace. Dali created the original concept in...

St. Peter’s Basilica: The Size Problem and How to Deal With It St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City is the largest church in the world by interior volume: 5,000 square metres of floor area, 136 metres to the top of Michelangelo’s dome. The nave is 211 metres long. These numbers are difficult to internalise until you are standing inside and realise that the marble cherub on the...

Washington D.C.: The Free City That Most People Under-visit The single most important fact about Washington D.C. is that the Smithsonian Institution operates 17 museums and galleries here, most of them on the National Mall, and all of them are free. This includes the National Air and Space Museum (one of the most visited museums in the world), the National Museum of Natural History, the National...

Fingal’s Cave: The Acoustics Are the Point Fingal’s Cave is on the uninhabited island of Staffa in the Inner Hebrides, roughly 10 kilometres off the western coast of Mull. The cave is formed from hexagonal basalt columns of the same volcanic origin as the Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland – both are part of the same ancient lava flow from approximately 60 million years ago. The...

Honolulu: Waikiki, Pearl Harbor, and What Oahu Is Actually Like Honolulu is the capital of Hawaii, located on the south shore of Oahu, the third-largest Hawaiian island. It has a permanent population of approximately 350,000, receives around 5 million tourists annually, and is the most-visited destination in the Pacific. Waikiki, the hotel district 3 kilometres east of downtown, accounts for most...

Notting Hill Carnival: Two Million People, One Weekend, One Borough Notting Hill Carnival takes place on the Sunday and Monday of the August Bank Holiday weekend, which falls at the end of August. It is the largest street festival in Europe by attendance, with around 1-2 million people across both days concentrated in the streets of W10 and W11 in west London. It began in 1966 as a celebration of...

Plitvice Lakes: The Crowds Are Real and the Lakes Are Still Worth It Plitvice Lakes National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Lika region of Croatia, approximately 130 kilometres south of Zagreb. It covers 29,630 hectares of karst terrain, with the central feature being 16 terraced lakes connected by waterfalls and cascades across a 8-kilometre stretch of the Korana River gorge. The...

Cristo Redentor: The One Monument That Justifies the Hype Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer) is a 30-metre Art Deco statue of Jesus Christ completed in 1931, standing at 710 metres on the summit of Corcovado Mountain in Tijuca National Park. The project took nine years and was funded partly by donations from Brazilian Catholics. French sculptor Paul Landowski created the head and hands while...

Ilha de Mocambique: One of Africa’s Most Overlooked UNESCO Sites The Island of Mozambique (Ilha de Mocambique) is a 3-km long coral island connected to the mainland by a single two-lane bridge. It served as the capital of Portuguese East Africa for 400 years, from 1507 until 1898, when the colonial administration moved south to Lourenco Marques (now Maputo). Since then, Ilha has been slowly...

The Forth Bridge: Cantilever Engineering at Its Clearest The Forth Bridge is a railway bridge crossing the Firth of Forth between Queensferry on the south bank and Inverkeithing on the north, 14 kilometres west of Edinburgh. It opened in March 1890 and remains in daily rail service, carrying approximately 200 trains per day. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the most immediately recognisable...

Sigiriya: A 5th-Century Rock Palace That Earns the Hype Sigiriya is a 200-metre column of volcanic rock rising from the plains of north-central Sri Lanka, topped by the ruins of a palace complex built by King Kashyapa I between 477 and 495 AD. He constructed it after killing his father and taking the throne from his brother, then spent his reign waiting for the revenge that eventually came. The...

The Summer Palace: Beijing’s Best Day Out The Summer Palace is 3,000 hectares of lakes, gardens, temples, and pavilions. It took the reign of Emperor Qianlong (who began construction in 1750) and a further renovation by Empress Dowager Cixi (who spent navy funds on it in 1888) to produce what you see today. Even knowing that history, the scale surprises you when you arrive. Most visitors...

The Verdon Gorge: France’s Best-Kept Natural Secret The Verdon Gorge (Gorges du Verdon) runs for 25 km through limestone mountains in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, southeast France. At its deepest it drops 700 metres. The Verdon River at the bottom runs a mineral turquoise that is genuinely that colour, not a filter or enhancement, produced by the calcium carbonate suspended in the...

Spanish Riding School: Classical Dressage in the Hofburg The Spanish Riding School in Vienna is the oldest continuously operating classical riding school in the world. It has occupied the same baroque riding hall inside the Hofburg Imperial Palace since 1729, when the Winter Riding School was completed by architect Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach for Emperor Charles VI. The hall’s white...

Rhodes Old Town: Medieval Europe Preserved by Accident Rhodes Old Town is enclosed by 4 km of medieval walls built by the Knights Hospitaller, a crusading military order that controlled the island from 1309 until the Ottoman conquest of 1522. The walls were not just effective enough to hold off the Ottomans for six months in one siege; they were also durable enough that most of them are still...

Uluru: The Climb Closed in 2019 and That Is the Right Call Uluru is a sandstone inselberg (an isolated rock hill rising from a flat plain) 348 metres high above the surrounding desert and 3.6 kilometres long. It sits in the Northern Territory, 450 kilometres south of Alice Springs, within Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. The rock is arkosic sandstone, deposited as sediment approximately 550 million...

St Mark’s Basilica: Managing the Crowd, Finding the Gold St Mark’s Basilica is the most important Byzantine building in Western Europe and one of the most atmospheric churches anywhere. It is also one of the most crowded single sites in Venice, sharing Piazza San Marco with the Campanile, the Doge’s Palace, and several thousand visitors at any given moment in summer. The trick is...

Khao Sok: The Rainforest That Pre-dates the Amazon Khao Sok National Park is one of the least-visited spectacular places in Southeast Asia. It sits in Surat Thani province in southern Thailand, inconveniently located between the twin tourist magnets of Krabi and Koh Samui, and most people drive straight past. Those who stop tend to return. The park covers 739 square kilometres of limestone karst...

Neuschwanstein: The King’s Delusion, Disney’s Inspiration, and a Surprisingly Good Castle Neuschwanstein Castle sits on a forested crag above the village of Hohenschwangau in the Bavarian Alps, 130 kilometres southwest of Munich. King Ludwig II of Bavaria commissioned it in 1869 as a personal retreat, inspired by Wagnerian opera and medieval romantic imagery rather than any practical...

Pravcicka Brana: Europe’s Largest Natural Sandstone Arch Pravcicka Brana (the Pravcice Gate) is a natural sandstone arch in the Bohemian Switzerland National Park in the northwest Czech Republic, near the German border. At 26 metres wide and 16 metres high, it is the largest natural arch in Europe. It was formed by erosion of Cretaceous sandstone over tens of thousands of years and is listed...

Krabi: The Limestone, the Climbing, and Why Ao Nang Is Not the Destination Krabi province on Thailand’s Andaman coast has approximately 150 kilometres of coastline, 80-odd islands, and one serious problem: every bus from the airport drops tourists in Ao Nang, a beachfront strip of restaurants and tour operators that looks like someone assembled a Thai resort town from a kit. Ao Nang is...

Torres del Paine: Book Six Months Out or Sleep Outside Torres del Paine National Park occupies 181,414 hectares in the Magallanes region of Chilean Patagonia, roughly 80 kilometres north of Puerto Natales and 400 kilometres from Punta Arenas. The granite towers (torres) that give the park its name rise to 2,850 metres and are what every visitor comes to see. The weather in front of them, which can...

Shanghai World Financial Center: The Bottle Opener and What It Overlooks The Shanghai World Financial Center stands 492 metres tall in the Pudong district’s Lujiazui financial zone, completed in 2008 after a decade of construction interrupted by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The building’s most notable feature is the trapezoidal aperture near its apex – a design decision taken...

Salisbury Cathedral: The Tallest Spire in England and the Magna Carta That Has Been Sitting There Since 1215 Salisbury Cathedral was built between 1220 and 1320 AD, which is fast for a medieval cathedral. The standard construction timeline was a century or more, with successive generations carrying on the work. Salisbury was built in a single continuous campaign, which is why it has a visual...

Christ the Redeemer: Getting Up There Without Losing a Day Christ the Redeemer (Cristo Redentor) sits at 710 metres on the peak of Corcovado Mountain in Tijuca National Park, looking out over Rio de Janeiro with arms spread 28 metres wide. The statue is 30 metres tall, made from reinforced concrete and covered in soapstone tiles, and was completed in 1931 after nine years of construction. It is...

The Smithsonian: 21 Institutions, All Free, Impossible to See in a Week The Smithsonian Institution is not a museum. It is 21 museums, galleries, and a zoo, collectively holding 155 million objects across Washington DC and New York. Admission to all of them is free. This is a government commitment made possible by an 1846 bequest from British scientist James Smithson, who left his estate to the...

Preikestolen: The Hike Everyone Does and Why That’s Fine Pulpit Rock (Preikestolen in Norwegian) is a 604-metre cliff above the Lysefjord with a flat top roughly 25 by 25 metres. Photographs suggest it is empty and serene. In summer, it holds around 100 people at peak times, all jostling for the same shot with their feet dangling over the edge. This is not a reason to skip it. The view is...

Copper Canyon: Bigger Than the Grand Canyon, Known by Far Fewer People The Barrancas del Cobre (Copper Canyon) in Chihuahua, Mexico, is a canyon system formed by the Rio Fuerte and its tributaries in the Sierra Madre Occidental. It consists of six major canyons covering around 65,000 square kilometres. The deepest points exceed 1,800 metres. By comparison, the Grand Canyon is 446 km long and 1,857...

Svalbard: Polar Bears Outnumber People and That Is Not Metaphor Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago at approximately 78 degrees North, midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The main island, Spitsbergen, holds the only significant settlement: Longyearbyen, population around 2,400. The total polar bear population of the archipelago is approximately 3,000. You are required to carry a...

Haida Gwaii: Canada’s Most Remote Worth-It Getting to Haida Gwaii is the first commitment. The archipelago of around 150 islands sits 130 km off the northern British Columbia coast, accessible by BC Ferries from Prince Rupert (an 8-hour sailing) or by Air Canada Jazz prop flights from Prince Rupert or Vancouver. Prince Rupert itself is 14 hours by train from Prince George or a flight from...

The Sahara: Choosing Your Entry Point The Sahara is 9.2 million square kilometres. It covers most of North Africa, touching 11 countries. Saying “visit the Sahara” is like saying “visit Asia”: the statement is true but meaningless without a more specific choice. The three most accessible entry points for tourists with limited time are Morocco’s Erg Chebbi,...

Crowning Glory: Exploring Bratislava Castle Perched atop a rocky hill above the Danube River, Bratislava Castle is the defining landmark of Slovakia’s capital. Its distinctive white silhouette – four corner towers rising from a rectangular palace block – has stood over the city for more than a thousand years. The site has served as a royal seat, a military garrison, and a...

Isla Mujeres: Better Than Cancun, Cheaper Than Tulum Isla Mujeres is a 7-km island in the Caribbean Sea, 13 km northeast of Cancun, accessible by a 20-minute ferry. Where Cancun is all-inclusives and convention hotels, and Tulum has become expensive and overrun, Isla Mujeres has managed to stay relatively sane. The streets are narrow enough that golf carts are the standard vehicle, the town still...

The Reichstag: Book Your Dome Visit Before Anything Else The Reichstag building in Berlin is the seat of the German Bundestag and, via Norman Foster’s 1999 glass dome, one of the city’s most visited attractions. Access to the dome and rooftop terrace is free but requires online registration through the Bundestag website (bundestag.de/en/visitthebundestag). The site opens reservations...

Ningaloo: The Reef You Can Walk Into from the Beach Ningaloo Reef is 260 kilometres of fringing coral reef off the coast of the Cape Range Peninsula in Western Australia, 1,200 kilometres north of Perth. The defining characteristic that separates Ningaloo from the Great Barrier Reef is proximity: in many places the reef edge is 100 metres from the beach. You can walk in from Turquoise Bay, swim a...

Mt. Etna: Sicily’s Most Unreliable Host Europe’s tallest active volcano is also one of its most visited, and the gap between what the brochures promise and what you actually experience depends entirely on Etna’s mood. The volcano erupts regularly, sometimes spectacularly, and the summit craters can be closed for weeks at a time due to activity or hazardous gas emissions. Check...

L’Anse aux Meadows: Where North America’s European History Actually Begins L’Anse aux Meadows sits on the northern tip of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula, 430 kilometres north of Deer Lake on an unpaved final stretch that takes about 6 hours to drive from St. John’s. The site consists of the excavated and partially reconstructed remains of a Norse settlement...

Navy Pier: Worth the Stop, But Not the Whole Day Navy Pier extends 1 km into Lake Michigan from the Streeterville neighbourhood on Chicago’s near north side. It opened in 1916 as a shipping and warehouse facility, served various wartime purposes, and was redeveloped as a public attraction in 1995. Today it is the most-visited attraction in the Midwest by attendance, which tells you something...

Plain of Jars: The Stranger Question Is Not Who Made Them The Plain of Jars sits on a plateau in Xieng Khouang province in northern Laos, and the stone vessels scattered across it are between 1,500 and 2,500 years old. Most are carved from sandstone, some from limestone, one or two from granite. They range from knee height to taller than a person. The largest weighs around 14 tonnes. Nobody is...

MONA: The Museum That Works Specifically Because Its Owner Is Obsessive MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, sits on the Berriedale Peninsula 12 kilometres north of Hobart on the Derwent River. It opened in January 2011, built by David Walsh, a professional gambler who made a substantial fortune through computer-assisted gambling syndicate systems and spent a significant portion of it on one of...

The Statue of Liberty: Tickets, Crown Access, and Why Ellis Island Is the Better Half The Statue of Liberty stands on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, accessible only by ferry. It was a gift from France to the United States, conceived by French political thinker Edouard de Laboulaye, designed by sculptor Frederic Bartholdi, and engineered with an iron framework by Gustave Eiffel (before the...

Loch Lomond: The One Within Easy Reach of Glasgow Loch Lomond is the largest lake in Great Britain by surface area at 71 square kilometres, and one of the closest significant Scottish highland landscapes to a major city: the southern end at Balloch is 25 km from central Glasgow, about 40 minutes by train. This proximity drives weekend crowds but it also means the loch is genuinely accessible...