Lake Garda: Italy’s Largest Lake and What Actually Differentiates Its Towns Lake Garda (Lago di Garda) is 51 kilometres long and up to 17 kilometres wide, making it the largest lake in Italy. Its northern section is flanked by the Alps, which give it a microclimate mild enough for olive groves and lemon trees on the western shore; the southern end opens into the Po Valley and has a more...

Shwedagon Pagoda: Myanmar’s Most Sacred Buddhist Site A note before beginning: Myanmar has been under military rule since the coup of February 2021. Visiting the country involves ethical and practical considerations that should inform any travel decision. Revenues from tourism go partly to the state; security conditions in many regions outside Yangon are dangerous; and the political...

Fairy Pools, Skye: Beautiful, Crowded, and Worth It If You Time It Right The Fairy Pools sit below the Black Cuillin at Glenbrittle, fed by streams descending from the mountains through a series of clear rock pools connected by small falls and underwater arches. The water is cold year-round (around 10 degrees Celsius even in August), transparently clear due to the limestone geology, and coloured a...

Mecca: The Holiest City in Islam Mecca is the spiritual centre of the Islamic world, located in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia in the Sirat Mountains. Every Muslim who is physically able and financially capable is required to perform the Hajj pilgrimage at least once in their lifetime, and millions do exactly that each year, making Mecca the site of one of the largest regular human...

The Little Mermaid Statue: Honestly, You Need More Than This The Little Mermaid (Den Lille Havfrue) is a bronze statue sitting on a rock at the Langelinie promenade in Copenhagen harbour, 1.25 metres tall. It was commissioned by the Carlsberg brewery founder Carl Jacobsen and unveiled in 1913, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale and by a ballet performance of the same...

Wawel Hill: Krakow’s Castle and Cathedral Above the Vistula Wawel Hill is a limestone outcrop rising 28 metres above the Vistula River in the centre of Krakow, and on it sit the Wawel Royal Castle and the Wawel Cathedral, the two most historically significant buildings in Poland. The castle was the seat of Polish kings from the 11th century until the capital moved to Warsaw in 1596. The...

Wadi Rum: Jordan’s Red Desert Wadi Rum (formally the Wadi Rum Protected Area, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2011) covers 720 square kilometres of desert in southern Jordan, about 60 kilometres north of Aqaba. The landscape is sandstone and granite, sculpted into towers, arches, narrow canyons, and vast open plains of red and orange sand. The colours shift dramatically across the day,...

The Okavango Delta: Africa’s Most Extraordinary Safari Destination The Okavango River flows from the Angolan highlands southeast into the Kalahari Desert, where it does not reach the sea. Instead, it spreads out across 15,000 square kilometres of flat delta, soaking into the Kalahari sand and evaporating. The resulting inland delta is a permanent wetland in the middle of a desert – a...

The British Virgin Islands Beyond the Main Crowd The British Virgin Islands consist of around 60 islands, islets, and cays, of which perhaps ten have regular tourist facilities. Most visitors to the BVI concentrate on Tortola (the largest and most developed), Virgin Gorda (the Baths, the Bitter End), and Jost Van Dyke (Foxy’s, White Bay). These are genuinely worth visiting. But the smaller...

The Dome of the Rock: Jerusalem’s Most Contested Sacred Ground The Dome of the Rock stands on the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif) in Jerusalem’s Old City and is simultaneously one of the world’s most recognisable buildings, one of the holiest sites in Islam, and the centre of the most contested real estate dispute in the Middle East. Understanding what it is requires holding...

Table Mountain: Getting Up There, and What to Do When You Do Table Mountain is a flat-topped sandstone massif rising 1,086 metres above Cape Town, visible from nearly everywhere in the city and from ships far out in the Atlantic. It is one of the New Seven Wonders of Nature and a national park. It also has a cable car that fills up for hours on end in summer, a narrow summit plateau that fools...

Changdeokgung Palace: Seoul’s Best-Preserved Joseon Complex Seoul has five grand palaces from the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), and most visitors default to Gyeongbokgung, the largest and most reconstructed, because it is on every map and features the changing of the guard ceremony that fills tour group schedules. Changdeokgung, a 20-minute walk east, is better. It received UNESCO World...

Mutrah Souq: Muscat’s Old Market and the Corniche Around It Mutrah is the historic port district of Muscat, Oman’s capital, about 5 kilometres east of the modern city centre. The Mutrah Souq is one of the oldest traditional markets in the Gulf region, a covered labyrinth of around 4,000 shops selling frankincense, silver, khanjar daggers, textiles, pashminas, copper, ceramics, and the...

The Pantheon: What Happens When a Roman Emperor Gets Engineering Right The Pantheon in Rome is a building that architects have been studying, arguing about, and copying for nearly two thousand years. Built around 125 CE under the Emperor Hadrian on the site of two earlier temples, it remains the best-preserved building from classical antiquity and arguably the most influential structure in western...

The Roman Baths, Bath: One of the Best Preserved Roman Sites in Britain The Roman Baths are a first-century CE bathing complex built around a naturally occurring hot spring that produces approximately 1.2 million litres of water per day at a constant 46 degrees Celsius. The spring has been known and used since at least the Iron Age; the Romans built the large bathing complex around it between...

Falling in Love with Milan: The Complete Guide to Italy’s Most Underrated Great City Milan is the city that Italy’s tourists routinely skip and Italians routinely move to. It has none of Florence’s Renaissance theatre or Rome’s heap of ruins, but what it offers is different and, once you feel it, persistent: the vast white-marble forest of the Duomo’s spires rising...

The Cuillin: Skye’s Ridge That Separates Walkers From Climbers The Cuillin massif on the Isle of Skye divides neatly into two distinct ranges: the Black Cuillin, which is serious mountaineering terrain requiring rock climbing ability and rope, and the Red Cuillin to the east, which is steep walking on scree slopes but accessible to fit hillwalkers. Most visitors to Skye see the Black Cuillin...

St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland: What It Actually Looks Like St. Patrick’s Day (March 17th) in Ireland is different from what people in New York, Chicago, or Sydney celebrate on the same date. In Ireland it is a national public holiday with roots in a Catholic feast day, and while it has become increasingly festive since the 1990s – when the Irish tourist board more or less decided...

Colca Canyon: Deeper Than the Grand Canyon and Less Visited Colca Canyon in southern Peru is approximately 3,270 metres deep at its deepest point, making it one of the deepest canyons in the world and deeper than the Grand Canyon by over 1,000 metres. The comparison gets traction in every tourism piece, but the relevant difference for visitors is experiential: the Grand Canyon is viewed primarily...

Notre-Dame de Paris: The Cathedral That Burned and Came Back On April 15, 2019, the 850-year-old spire of Notre-Dame de Paris collapsed into the fire, visible across the city. The north-south and east-west rose windows survived. The medieval nave survived, though badly damaged. The stone vaulting was partially destroyed. The fire was caused by an electrical fault in the attic during restoration...

The Gherkin: London’s Most Distinctive Skyscraper and the City of London Around It 30 St Mary Axe, known as the Gherkin since before it was completed, was designed by Norman Foster and Partners and opened in 2003. It stands 180 metres tall across 41 storeys, tapers to a dome at the top, and uses a structural steel diagrid skin that allows the building to flex slightly in wind without the...

St. Peter’s Basilica: How to Actually See It Without Wasting Your Day St. Peter’s Basilica is, by most measures, the largest church in the world. It can hold roughly 20,000 people and is decorated with enough marble, mosaic, bronze, and gilded plasterwork to disorient you entirely. Most visitors give it ninety minutes and leave feeling like they half-saw it. This guide is for doing it...

Vancouver: The City That Cannot Stop Looking at Its Own Mountains Vancouver is the third-largest city in Canada, built on a peninsula between Burrard Inlet and the Fraser River delta, and the mountains that frame its north shore are visible from almost every elevated point in the city. On a clear day from Granville Bridge or the roof of any downtown building, you can see the Coast Mountains above...

Disneyland Paris: How to Get the Most Out of It Without Losing Your Mind Disneyland Paris is the most visited theme park in Europe, drawing around 9-10 million visitors a year to Marne-la-Vallee, 32 kilometres east of central Paris. It operates two parks – Disneyland Park (opened 1992) and Walt Disney Studios Park (opened 2002, now significantly expanded with a new Avengers and Frozen-themed...

The Waterloo Monument and Calton Hill: Edinburgh’s Underrated Viewpoint Calton Hill in central Edinburgh is not Arthur’s Seat, which is the larger volcanic hill further east that tourists invariably photograph and occasionally climb. Calton Hill is smaller, easier, and topped with an unusual collection of 19th-century monuments that make it one of the stranger hilltops in any British...

Picos de Europa: Spain’s Most Underrated Mountain Range The Picos de Europa sit in northern Spain, straddling the regions of Asturias, Cantabria, and Castilla y Leon, a compact limestone massif roughly 40 kilometres wide that rises abruptly from a coastline only 20 kilometres to the north. These are not gentle hills; the Picos reach 2,648 metres at the Torre de Cerredo and are made of karst...

Seeing Lemurs in Madagascar: Where, When, and How Not to Waste the Trip Madagascar separated from the Indian subcontinent roughly 88 million years ago and from Africa about 165 million years ago. This extraordinary isolation produced a fauna found nowhere else on earth: over 100 species of lemur (from mouse lemurs weighing 30 grams to the Indri at 9 kilograms), the chameleons, the fossa, and the...

Jeju Island: South Korea’s Volcanic Escape Jeju is South Korea’s largest island and its most popular domestic holiday destination. Roughly 1.5 million people live here, and several million more visit each year, many arriving on flights that are among the busiest domestic routes in the world. The island’s appeal is legitimate: a dormant shield volcano at its centre, lava tube...

Kinderdijk: Nineteen Windmills and Why They Were Actually Necessary Kinderdijk is a polder area in South Holland, about 15 kilometres east of Rotterdam, where nineteen 18th-century windmills stand in two rows beside the waterways of the Alblasserwaard. It is UNESCO World Heritage listed and receives around 900,000 visitors per year, making it the most visited tourist site in the Netherlands...

Eisriesenwelt: The World’s Largest Ice Cave, in Austria’s Salt Mountains Eisriesenwelt (literally “World of Ice Giants”) is a 42-kilometre-long system of natural caverns in the Tennengebirge massif above the town of Werfen in the Salzburg region of Austria. About one kilometre of the system is open to visitors, and that kilometre contains the largest natural ice formations...

The Louvre: Surviving It The Louvre is the world’s most visited museum, receiving nine to ten million visitors per year in a building originally constructed as a royal fortress in the 12th century, expanded into a palace in the 16th, converted into a public museum by the Revolutionary government in 1793, and extended by I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid entrance in 1989. It covers approximately...

Windy City Wonders: Exploring the Charm of Wellington, New Zealand Wellington is New Zealand’s capital and one of the southernmost capital cities in the world. Cupped between a deep natural harbour and steep forested hills, it is a compact, walkable city of around 220,000 people that punches far above its weight in food, coffee, film, and the arts. The nickname “Windy Welly” is...

The Pantanal: The World’s Best Place to See a Jaguar The Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland, covering approximately 150,000 to 195,000 square kilometres across south-western Brazil, eastern Bolivia, and north-eastern Paraguay. It floods seasonally when the Paraguay River and its tributaries overflow their banks, inundating the vast flat plain. About 80 percent of the...

Cordoba: The Mezquita and Everything Else the City Has to Offer Cordoba was the most populous and culturally advanced city in Europe during the 10th century, when it served as the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate of al-Andalus and had a population of around 500,000. It was a centre of philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and translation scholarship at a time when most of Europe was significantly less...

Mount Rigi: The One Alpine Summit Worth Doing Without Hiking Rigi sits above the convergence of Lake Lucerne, Lake Zug, and Lake Lauerz in central Switzerland, and at 1,798 metres it is tall enough to lift you clear above the haze and give you a proper alpine panorama without requiring the serious elevation of the Jungfraujoch or the effort of a technical climb. The “Queen of the...

San Francisco: What the City Gets Right and What Gets Overstated San Francisco is 7 miles by 7 miles on a peninsula, so compact that from Twin Peaks you can see most of the city and both bays simultaneously. It has 900,000 people (city proper), a GDP larger than most countries, the most famous bridge in the United States, a food culture of genuine global standing, and Alcatraz. It also has a...

Wieliczka Salt Mine: Nine Levels of Salt Carved History The Wieliczka Salt Mine is 14 kilometres south-east of Kraków, has been continuously mined since the 13th century, extends to nine levels reaching 327 metres underground, and contains 300 kilometres of passages. The tourist route covers about 3 kilometres of those passages, descending to the third level at 135 metres depth. The journey takes...

New Zealand’s North Island: The Half Most Visitors Rush Through The North Island gets a lower proportion of international traveller time than the South Island, which has the dramatic fiords and Alps that dominate New Zealand’s marketing. This is a mistake. The North Island has geothermal landscapes more active than Yellowstone, a volcano that you can walk across in a day, the...

The Serengeti: Planning Around the Migration The Serengeti ecosystem covers roughly 30,000 square kilometres across Tanzania and Kenya (where it becomes the Masai Mara). The Tanzanian side – the Serengeti National Park – is 14,763 square kilometres and is managed by Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA). It is one of the oldest and largest protected wildlife areas in Africa and contains the...

Sedlec Ossuary: 40,000 Skeletons and One Very Prolific Woodcarver The Sedlec Ossuary sits below the Church of All Saints in Kutna Hora, about 80 kilometres southeast of Prague, and it contains the arranged bones of approximately 40,000 people. That number is not a dramatic rounding-up; it reflects centuries of exhumation from the surrounding cemetery, driven by the brutal practicality of plague...

The Las Vegas Strip: An Honest Assessment The Las Vegas Strip is approximately 6.7 kilometres of Las Vegas Boulevard South running through the unincorporated communities of Paradise and Winchester, Nevada. It is the most financially productive real estate in the United States and possibly the world. The Strip contains twelve of the world’s fifteen largest hotels. Everything on it is designed...

Sailing Through Serenity: A Voyage into Halong Bay Halong Bay, Vietnam. The name itself evokes images of emerald waters dotted with towering limestone islands, a scene straight out of a mythical landscape. And the reality is even more breathtaking than any photograph suggests. A boat trip through this UNESCO World Heritage site is one of those rare travel experiences that genuinely lives up to the...

The Galapagos: How to Actually Do It Right The Galapagos archipelago sits 1,000 kilometres west of the Ecuadorian coast in the Pacific, straddling the equator. Nineteen main islands, most uninhabited, host wildlife that evolved without significant predators and consequently exhibits almost no fear of humans – marine iguanas will shuffle across your feet, sea lion pups will try to play with...

St Davids Cathedral, Pembrokeshire: A Correction First The title of this post is slightly misleading: St Davids Cathedral is not in Cardiff. It is in St Davids, a city in Pembrokeshire in south-west Wales that holds the distinction of being the smallest city in the United Kingdom by population (around 1,700 residents), having been granted city status by virtue of the cathedral. Cardiff has its own...

Mount Fuji: Climbing the Volcano and Understanding the New Regulations Mount Fuji at 3,776 metres is an active stratovolcano and the highest peak in Japan, visible on clear days from Tokyo (about 100 kilometres north-east) and from across the Kanto and Chubu regions. It has been a sacred mountain since at least the 7th century, a pilgrimage site, and the subject of more Japanese art than any other...

Caernarfon Castle: Edward I’s Most Deliberate Statement of Colonial Power Caernarfon Castle was built by King Edward I of England after his conquest of Wales, beginning in 1283. It is one of several “iron ring” castles Edward constructed around Gwynedd, the last stronghold of Welsh independence, specifically designed to encircle and control a population he had just defeated in...

Djenné: The Great Mosque and the Monday Market Djenné occupies an island in the Bani River’s inland delta in central Mali, connected to the mainland by a causeway that floods during the high-water season. The city has been inhabited since around 250 BCE, making it one of the oldest known towns in sub-Saharan Africa. It became a centre of Islamic learning and Trans-Saharan trade from the 13th...

The Maritimes: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island The Maritime provinces occupy Canada’s eastern seaboard, a region of dramatic Bay of Fundy tides, lobster fishing villages, Cape Breton highland scenery, and a Acadian French cultural presence that marks it as different from the rest of English-speaking Canada. They are routinely underrated on the North American travel...

Bwindi Impenetrable Forest: Where to See Mountain Gorillas Bwindi Impenetrable National Park covers 321 square kilometres of ancient montane and lowland forest in south-western Uganda, near the borders with Rwanda and the DRC. It is UNESCO World Heritage listed and contains approximately half the world’s remaining mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei) population – around 460-500...

Salar de Uyuni: The World’s Largest Salt Flat The Salar de Uyuni covers 10,582 square kilometres of the Bolivian altiplano at 3,656 metres above sea level. It is the remains of a prehistoric lake that dried up roughly 30,000 years ago, leaving behind a crust of salt between two and twelve metres deep over a brine lake. During the rainy season (roughly November to April), a shallow layer of...