The Terracotta Army: Eight Thousand Soldiers No One Was Meant to Find In 1974, a group of farmers sinking a well near Lintong, 35km east of Xi’an, hit a pottery shard at three metres depth. Then another. Then a terracotta head. What they had struck was the eastern flank of the mausoleum complex of Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor, who unified the warring states in 221 BCE and...

Dartmoor Looks Featureless in Cloud. That Is Not a Metaphor. Do Not Underestimate Navigation. Dartmoor covers 954 square kilometres of upland moorland in Devon, most of it above 300 metres. The landscape is bleaker than most of Devon and that is the point. Granite tors emerge from bog, wild ponies graze among them, fog arrives without warning in summer, and the military uses parts of the northern...

Tibidabo Has Both a Neo-Gothic Church and an Amusement Park Operating in the Same Hilltop At 512 metres above Barcelona, the two things coexist on the Collserola ridge without apparent conflict. The Sagrat Cor basilica with its bronze Christ statue is visible from most of central Barcelona on a clear day. Directly below the church, on the hillside, is an amusement park that opened in 1901 and...

Isle of Wight: Small Island, Surprisingly Good The Isle of Wight is 23 miles wide and 13 miles north-to-south, separated from the Hampshire coast by the Solent. It takes about 40 minutes by car ferry from Southampton or 10 minutes on the high-speed foot-passenger catamaran from Southampton or Ryde. It is not technically far from London (2 hours by train to Southampton), but it feels like a...

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...

Melk: The Abbey That Justifies Stopping a River Cruise Most travellers see Stift Melk from a Danube cruise ship, spend 90 minutes inside, and continue downstream. That is the correct strategy if your time is limited, and the 90 minutes are well spent. But the abbey rewards more deliberate attention than cruise passengers usually give it. Melk is a small town 85 kilometres west of Vienna on the...

Darwin Has Been Rebuilt From Scratch Twice – and the Second Rebuild Was in 1975 Most visitors know the first story. The Japanese bombing of February 19, 1942 killed over 230 people in the first and largest of 64 air raids on Australia, destroying much of the city. What fewer know is that Cyclone Tracy, which hit on Christmas Eve 1974, destroyed roughly 70 percent of Darwin’s buildings...

Namsan Has Been the Geographic Centre of Seoul Since the Joseon Dynasty Long before N Seoul Tower was built in 1969 as a broadcast relay station, Mount Namsan at 265 metres served as the symbolic heart of the city. Warning beacons on its summit signalled military and diplomatic events from the border regions to the king in Gyeongbokgung Palace. Five reconstructed beacon mounds near the tower base...

Austria Built This Road During the Great Depression and It Remains the Best Drive in the Alps The Grossglockner Hochalpenstrasse is 48 kilometres of mountain road cutting across the High Tauern range between Bruck an der Glocknerstrasse in Salzburg state and Heiligenblut in Carinthia. Construction ran from 1930 to 1935, employed 3,200 workers, and required blasting through granite and limestone at...

The Amazon Has Lost 17 Percent of Its Original Forest. The Trip You Take Now Is Not the Trip Available in Twenty Years. That is not fearmongering – it is the state of the science. Scientists have identified a tipping point at 20 to 25 percent deforestation at which the ecosystem shifts from generating its own rainfall to degrading toward savanna. The Amazon currently sits at roughly 17...

The Animals in the Galapagos Have Never Learned to Fear You That is the fact that changes the experience. A blue-footed booby will perform its entire courtship dance – foot by foot, wing by wing – 90 centimetres from your feet without moving away. A Galapagos sea lion will swim directly toward your mask underwater, turn sideways to look at you with one eye, then loop back to do it...

What the 2011 Earthquake Forced Christchurch to Become Is More Interesting Than What It Was When the February 2011 earthquake killed 185 people and demolished most of the city centre, the first notable piece of rebuilding was a church made from cardboard tubes. Japanese architect Shigeru Ban designed it; when it opened in 2013, most visitors agreed it was more architecturally interesting than the...

Anakena Beach: The Best Beach on the Most Isolated Island on Earth Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is 3,500 kilometres from the South American mainland and 2,000 kilometres from the nearest inhabited island. It has 7,750 residents and roughly 100,000 visitors per year. It is one of the most remote places any commercial flight regularly serves, and Anakena Beach, on the sheltered north coast, is where you...

The Great Orme Tramway Runs on the Same Cable System as San Francisco’s Street Cars The tram is not self-propelled. It is pulled by a continuous underground cable – exactly the mechanism that has operated the San Francisco cable cars since 1873, and which has operated here on the Great Orme headland since 1902. The lower section threads through actual residential streets in Llandudno...

The Sher-Dor Madrasah Has Lions on Its Facade and That Was Controversial in the 1620s Depicting living creatures in Islamic religious architecture was generally prohibited. The lion-and-sun motifs on the upper tympanums of the Sher-Dor Madrasah (its name means “lion-bearing”) were an assertion of the builder’s ambition over conventional religious rules. Apparently he got away...

The Roman Aqueduct in Segovia Was Built Without a Single Drop of Mortar The 728-metre, 167-arch granite aqueduct standing in the centre of Segovia has been there since the 1st or 2nd century CE. Roman engineers fitted the stones against each other using nothing but precision and gravity, and the structure still stands today because that method, done properly, is more durable than mortar. It was...

Amber Fort: The Sheesh Mahal Alone Justifies the Visit Eleven kilometres from Jaipur’s city centre, Amber Fort sits on a hilltop above Maota Lake in a position that was tactically deliberate – high ground, lake below as a moat, the Aravalli hills forming a natural defensive perimeter behind. Raja Man Singh I began construction in 1592 under the patronage of Mughal Emperor Akbar, whose...

Semmering Pass: An Hour From Vienna and Forgotten by Most Tourists Most Viennese have childhood memories of Semmering. Very few international visitors bother, which is precisely the reason to go. The pass sits at 985 metres in the eastern Alps, an hour south of Vienna by train on a railway that UNESCO declared a World Heritage Site in 1998. The combination of Belle Epoque resort architecture...

Borobudur: Two Million Stones and the Walk Toward Enlightenment The scale only resolves when you are standing in front of it. Borobudur is the largest Buddhist monument in the world, built from roughly two million carved stone blocks without mortar on a hilltop in Central Java during the 9th century under the Sailendra dynasty. It was abandoned sometime after the 14th century, buried under...

St. Louis Has a World-Class Art Museum That Charges No Admission The Saint Louis Art Museum in Forest Park is free, open Tuesday through Sunday, and has strong holdings in German Expressionism, pre-Columbian art, and 19th-century American painting. It is consistently ranked among the top art museums in the United States for the quality and depth of its collection, and the vast majority of American...

The Aleutians: The Only Part of North America Occupied by Japan in World War Two In June 1942, Japanese forces occupied Attu and Kiska, the two westernmost inhabited Aleutian Islands. They held them for over a year before American forces retook Attu in May 1943 in a 19-day battle that killed 550 American and approximately 2,350 Japanese soldiers – one of the most casualty-intensive island...

Bora Bora Is Genuinely as Beautiful as Advertised and Genuinely as Expensive The overwater bungalows exist. The turquoise lagoon inside the barrier reef exists. The twin volcanic peaks of Mount Otemanu and Mount Pahia rising from the coral ring look exactly like the photographs. Bora Bora, 230 kilometres northwest of Tahiti in French Polynesia, earned its reputation as a honeymoon and...

Hadrian’s Wall: A Journey Through Roman Britain The Wall in Context In AD 122, the Emperor Hadrian arrived in Britain and ordered the construction of a wall 117 kilometres long, from the Solway Firth in the west to the mouth of the Tyne in the east. The conventional explanation is defensive – keeping out the northern tribes. A more plausible reading is that it was partly a statement:...

Arthur’s Seat: Edinburgh’s Volcano, Free to Climb, Worth Every Step In the middle of Scotland’s capital city, rising 251 metres from the Holyrood Park floodplain, is an extinct volcano. Arthur’s Seat is not a hill that happens to be volcanic in origin; it is a recognisably volcanic shape, formed around 350 million years ago during the Carboniferous period, and its craggy...

Most of Lucerne’s Most Photographed Bridge Is a Reconstruction The Kapellbrücke (Chapel Bridge) dates to 1333, crosses the Reuss River on a diagonal, and appears in a significant proportion of all photographs taken in Switzerland. What less of the promotional literature mentions is that the bridge burned in August 1993 – a tourist’s cigarette, officially the cause – and was...

Mount Kenya Is Africa’s Second-Highest Peak and the Conservancy Around It Is Protecting Things That Safari Circuits Normally Miss The Laikipia Plateau north of Nairobi is not the Kenya that wildlife television covers. It has no Mara, no wildebeest crossing, no fixed-camera watering hole circuits. What it has instead is a functioning community-based conservation model, viable black rhino...

The French Quarter: What the Name Gets Wrong and the City Gets Right The Vieux Carre’s cast-iron balconies are Spanish Creole work, not French. The street grid, laid out in 1721, is the French part. The name “French Quarter” stuck despite the fact that the most visually distinctive architecture – the lacework ironwork, the interior courtyards, the coloured stucco facades...

The Rialto Bridge Architect Beat Palladio, Sansovino, and Michelangelo to Win the Commission Antonio da Ponte – not a famous name in architectural history – won the design competition for the bridge over the Grand Canal in the 1580s. His competitors included Palladio, Sansovino, and Michelangelo, which either reflects well on da Ponte or says something uncomfortable about politics in...

The Alhambra Sells Out Months in Advance and Most People Find Out Too Late You can visit Granada without entering the Nasrid Palaces. Thousands of tourists do it every year, usually because they arrived in Spain and then discovered that the most important rooms in the most important palace in the country have been booked solid for weeks. Tickets are EUR 21 for adults in 2026 and available online...

Birmingham: The UK’s Most Underrated Eating City Birmingham holds more Michelin stars per head of population than any UK city outside London, and most people who haven’t been there recently still think it peaked in 1975. That gap between reputation and reality is one of the more reliable travel finds in England. The city is the UK’s second largest, was the engine room of the...

The View from Temple IV Appeared in Star Wars Before Most People Had Heard of Tikal In 1977, the view of Tikal’s jungle canopy with temple combs rising through the mist was used as the Rebel Base on Yavin 4 in the original Star Wars film. Filmmakers chose it because nothing else on earth looked quite like it – massive stone structures emerging from intact tropical forest, neither...

Waitomo Glowworm Caves: Worth the Hype, Mostly The glowworms that name these caves are Arachnocampa luminosa, a fungus gnat found only in New Zealand and Australia. The larvae produce bioluminescent light to attract prey into their sticky threads – a hunting mechanism that happens, in total darkness with several hundred thousand individuals on a cave ceiling, to produce something that looks...

The Moai Are Not Mysterious. The Collapse That Preceded Their Abandonment Is. The purpose of the moai is understood: they are ancestral figures, carved to embody the spiritual power (mana) of specific ancestors and erected on ahu (stone platforms) facing inland toward the villages they protected. The carving technique is documented. The transportation method has been demonstrated through...

Disney’s Animal Kingdom: The Disney Park That Tries to Be a Zoo and Almost Succeeds Animal Kingdom opened in 1998 as Walt Disney World’s largest and most ambitious theme park, covering 500 acres. The central conceit is unusual for a theme park: real animals living in designed habitats alongside thrill rides and theatrical entertainment. The Tree of Life at its centre, 145 feet tall and...

Jokhang Temple: The Holiest Site in Tibet, and How to Actually Get There The Jokhang is not difficult to find once you are in Lhasa – it sits at the centre of the Barkhor, the pilgrimage circuit that encircles it, and from most points in the old city you can orient by the direction pilgrims are moving. What is genuinely difficult is getting to Lhasa as a foreign visitor. Tibet requires a...

Krakow’s Old Town Is Not a Reconstruction. Unlike Warsaw, It Survived the War Intact. What you walk through in Krakow’s Stare Miasto is the genuine medieval article: cobbled alleys, Gothic vaulting, Renaissance arcades in the market square. Warsaw was obliterated and rebuilt. Krakow was mostly spared. This single historical accident is why Krakow’s tourist numbers have grown each...

Newgrange Was Built Several Centuries Before Stonehenge and 1,000 Years Before the Great Pyramid The numbers place it correctly. Newgrange was constructed around 3200 BCE: before Egypt had the Pyramids, before Stonehenge’s sarsen circle, before writing was invented in Mesopotamia. The mound is 76 metres in diameter and about 12 metres high, covering a stone passage 19 metres long that leads...

Miami Beach: A City Marking Its First 100 Years of Art Deco January 2026 marked the centennial of Art Deco architecture in Miami Beach, and the city did not let the occasion pass quietly. The 49th Annual Art Deco Weekend celebration in January drew visitors to Ocean Drive with guided tours, expert-led talks, vintage experiences, and the reveal of the Reefline – a major public art project...

Yellowstone Sits on Top of a Supervolcano That Will Eventually Erupt That is not an exaggeration for effect. The Yellowstone hotspot – the magma chamber beneath the park – produced eruptions approximately 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago. The cycle suggests the next major eruption is overdue in geological time, though current seismological monitoring shows no indication...

Goa: 450 Years of Portuguese Colonialism Left Something Distinctive Goa was a Portuguese colony from 1510 to 1961 – longer than most colonies in Asia and Africa. The 450-year presence left churches that rank among the finest Baroque architecture in Asia, a cuisine unlike anything else on the Indian coast, a Catholic minority that continues to shape the state’s cultural character, and a...

Ishak Pasha Palace’s Golden Doors Are in the Hermitage in St Petersburg Russian forces removed them during the 1877 to 1878 Russo-Turkish War, and they remain there. The absence is one of the more visible reminders that this palace in far eastern Turkey has had a complicated 250 years. Ishak Pasha Sarayi sits on a rocky outcrop at 1,970 metres above sea level near Dogubayazit, approximately...

Lake Malawi Contains Between 800 and 1,000 Species of Cichlid Fish, 90 Percent Found Nowhere Else on Earth The evolutionary radiation of these fish from a common ancestor is one of the most striking examples of rapid speciation on the planet – comparable in scientific significance to Darwin’s finches, but taking place underwater in clear tropical freshwater rather than on islands....

Pravcicka Brana: Europe’s Largest Natural Arch, and Why You Can’t Walk on It A section of the Pravcicka Brana arch collapsed in 1980. The prohibition on walking on the arch surface has been permanent since 2013. This is worth stating at the start because most visitor photographs are taken from below, and because the arch – at 26 metres wide and 16 metres high, the largest natural...

Dubrovnik Has a Cruise Ship Problem and a Solution At peak summer in 2019, Dubrovnik’s Old Town received around 800,000 cruise ship passengers annually – day visitors arriving by tender from the harbour, spending 4-5 hours in the city, and contributing significantly to the crowds that made July and August in the Old Town a genuinely unpleasant experience. The Croatian government...

The Veit Stoss Altarpiece at St. Mary’s Basilica Is the Largest Gothic Altarpiece in the World and Most People Walk Past the Entrance The altarpiece is 13 metres tall and was carved in limewood between 1477 and 1489, depicting the Dormition of the Virgin. It fills the entire east end of the basilica’s nave. Entry to the basilica interior costs 10 PLN – a trivial amount –...

Salar de Uyuni: The Salt Flat That Calibrates Satellites At 10,582 square kilometres and 3,656 metres above sea level, the Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat on Earth. The surface is flat to within one metre across the entire expanse – a fact that NASA uses for satellite calibration. The crust averages 10 metres thick and rests on a brine lake with the world’s largest known...

The Industrial Revolution Started Here and the Bridge They Built to Prove It Is Still Standing The Iron Bridge over the Severn Gorge was completed in 1779 as the world’s first bridge made entirely of cast iron. Abraham Darby III engineered the 30-metre span across a gorge that had already become the centre of English metalworking. His grandfather, Abraham Darby I, had perfected the...

Twice a Day, 160 Billion Tonnes of Water Move Through This Bay That is the weight of water the Bay of Fundy exchanges with the Atlantic on every tidal cycle – 160 billion tonnes in, 160 billion tonnes back out, every 12 hours and 26 minutes. The tidal range at the Minas Basin reaches 16 metres (52 feet), the highest consistently recorded anywhere on earth. The shape of the bay is the...

Ribeira, Porto: Where the River Meets the City’s Oldest Quarter The Douro runs brown after rain upstream, but by the time it reaches Porto it widens and slows and the rabelo boats – the flat-bottomed wooden vessels that once transported Port wine barrels from the Douro Valley – sit at their moorings along the Cais da Ribeira in colours that look applied rather than weathered. The...

The Alamo Is Smaller Than Most People Expect The chapel – the iconic front facade with its curved parapet – is the surviving section of Mission San Antonio de Valero, founded by Spanish missionaries in 1718. The 13-day siege in 1836 during which approximately 189 defenders held off General Santa Anna’s forces before being overrun is the event that made the name indelible in...