Torres del Paine: What You Need to Know Before You Go Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia covers 181,000 hectares of granite towers, glaciers, lakes, and steppe. The three main granite spires the park is named for - the Torres - rise 2,850 metres above sea level and were formed 12 million years ago when a magma intrusion cooled inside older sedimentary rock. Erosion did the...

Stari Most: Mostar’s Bridge The original Stari Most (Old Bridge) was built in 1566 by the Ottoman architect Mimar Hayruddin, commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent. It spanned the Neretva River in a single arch of locally quarried tenelija limestone and stood for 427 years. Croatian forces destroyed it with tank fire in November 1993. The reconstruction, completed in 2004 using the same...

Hue: Vietnam’s Imperial Capital, and Worth More Than a Day Trip Hue sits on the Perfume River in central Vietnam, roughly equidistant between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Most travellers stop here for a day or two as part of a north-south journey. Two days is the minimum; three is better, especially if you want to explore the imperial tombs properly rather than rushing through the most famous...

Hollywood Studios: The Most Uneven Park at Disney World Hollywood Studios has the best single attraction in the entire Walt Disney World resort (Rise of the Resistance) and also some of the most dated filler you’ll find anywhere in Florida. Understanding what’s worth your time here is genuinely important because the park is smaller than it looks on the map and waits stack up fast. The...

Dartmoor: What You Need to Know Before You Go Dartmoor covers 954 square kilometres of upland moorland in Devon, most of it above 300 metres, and it is the largest and highest area of granite moorland in southern England. The landscape is bleaker than most of Devon and that is the point. Granite tors sticking up from bog, wild ponies, fog that arrives without warning in summer - this is not the...

Lake District: England’s Most Visited National Park The Lake District National Park covers 2,362 square kilometres in Cumbria, northwest England, and contains 16 lakes, the highest point in England (Scafell Pike, 978m), and about 15 million visitors per year. The popularity creates two problems: summer weekend parking is a genuine ordeal in the central valleys around Windermere and Grasmere,...

The Mekong Delta: Vietnam’s Agricultural Engine The Mekong Delta occupies the southern tip of Vietnam, a flat alluvial plain criss-crossed by the nine distributary channels the Vietnamese call the Nine Dragons. The river carries silt from the Tibetan plateau across China, Laos, Cambodia, and 200km of Vietnamese lowland before reaching the South China Sea. The delta produces about half of...

Galapagos Islands: The Honest Planning Guide The Galapagos Islands sit 1,000km west of the Ecuadorian coast. Eighteen main islands and over 100 smaller islets form an archipelago of volcanic origin, the youngest islands still geologically active. Darwin arrived on HMS Beagle in 1835 and spent five weeks observing the fauna. The islands are a UNESCO World Heritage Site and about 97% of the land...

Xochimilco: Mexico City’s Ancient Canal Network Xochimilco sits in the southern part of Mexico City, about 28km from the historic centre, and is one of the few remaining places where you can see what the Aztec lake system looked like before the Spanish drained most of it. The chinampas — artificial islands built by the Aztecs for agriculture, created by layering aquatic vegetation and lake...

Millau Viaduct: The World’s Tallest Road Bridge The Millau Viaduct opened in December 2004, designed by Norman Foster and structural engineer Michel Virlogeux. It carries the A75 motorway across the Tarn Valley in the Massif Central, connecting Paris to the Mediterranean coast via a route that previously required descending 270 metres into the valley and climbing back out, causing chronic...

Timbuktu: What It Actually Is and Whether You Can Go The most important thing to know about Timbuktu in 2024 is that most travel advisories for Mali are at their highest warning level. Armed groups control large areas of northern Mali, including the roads to Timbuktu, and several Western governments advise against all travel to the region. The last reliable overland route, the Niger River boat...

San Diego Zoo: What to Prioritise in a Full Day San Diego Zoo covers 100 acres of Balboa Park and houses around 3,500 animals across 650+ species. It is one of the larger zoos in the United States and requires a full day to see the main exhibits without rushing. Admission in 2024 runs USD 64 for adults, USD 54 for children 3-11, with discounts available for San Diego residents and military...

Pienza: The Pope’s Utopian City and Its Actual Good Cheese In 1459, Pope Pius II decided to rebuild his birthplace as a model Renaissance city. He hired the Florentine architect Bernardo Rossellino, gave him three years and unlimited budget, and got Pienza: a small town with a coherent central piazza, a cathedral, a bishop’s palace, and the pope’s own palazzo, all constructed to...

Venice: How to Stop Being a Tourist and Start Being a Visitor Venice is both more extraordinary and more annoying than its reputation suggests. The city built on 118 islands connected by 400 bridges across 170 canals is genuinely unlike anything else in existence. It is also flooded with day-trippers from cruise ships every morning between May and October, which turns the route between the station...

Easter Island (Rapa Nui): Remote, Expensive, and Genuinely Worth It Rapa Nui is one of the most isolated inhabited islands on earth. The nearest continental landmass is about 3,700km to the east; the nearest inhabited island, Pitcairn, is 2,000km away. The moai statues — 900 of them, spread across 163 square kilometres — were carved by a Polynesian civilisation at its peak and then largely toppled...

Bryggen: Bergen’s Hanseatic Wharf Bryggen is the row of timber-fronted houses along the eastern side of Vågen harbour in Bergen, Norway. The German Hanseatic League established its Bergen trading post here in 1360; for two centuries Bergen was the most important fish market in northern Europe, handling dried cod from Arctic Norway and shipping it to the rest of the continent. The Hanseatic...

Foteviken Viking Reserve: Sweden’s Living History Experiment Foteviken Viking Reserve (Fotevikens Vikingareservat) sits on the Falsterbo Peninsula in Skane, southern Sweden, about 30km southwest of Malmo. It occupies the site of the Battle of Foteviken in 1134, a naval engagement between Danish forces under King Niels and the rebel King Erik Emune in which Niels was killed and roughly 4,000...

Tokyo Tower: The One That Started It All Tokyo Tower opened in 1958, two years ahead of schedule and on a budget, to transmit television signals across the Kanto region. At 333 metres it was briefly the tallest structure in the world (it was surpassed almost immediately by the KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota). It was modelled loosely on the Eiffel Tower, painted in red and white because aviation...

Portland, Oregon: The City That Peaked and Is Figuring Out What Comes Next Portland in 2024 is not the same city it was in 2015, and pretending otherwise would be misleading. The downtown core along SW 4th and Burnside saw significant disruption during 2020-2022 and some blocks are still noticeably rough. The city has been actively working on recovery, and the outer neighbourhoods - Alberta Arts...

Newgrange: Ireland’s 5,000-Year-Old Solar Monument Newgrange was built around 3200 BCE — several centuries before Stonehenge and nearly a millennium before the Great Pyramid at Giza. It’s a passage tomb of considerable size: the mound is roughly 76 metres in diameter and about 12 metres high, covering a stone passage 19 metres long that leads to a central chamber with a corbelled...

Portland Head Light: Maine’s Most Photographed Landmark Portland Head Light in Cape Elizabeth is genuinely worth the short drive from downtown Portland - about 20 minutes on a clear day. It is the oldest lighthouse in Maine, commissioned in 1791 and still operational, and it sits at the tip of a rocky promontory where the surf comes in hard enough to feel it through your boots on a windy...

Piazza San Marco: Venice’s Public Living Room Napoleon called it “the drawing room of Europe,” which is memorable but slightly wrong. Piazza San Marco is a working civic space that has served as Venice’s ceremonial and commercial heart since the 9th century. At 176 metres long and 82 metres wide at its eastern end, it’s one of the larger urban squares in Italy but not...

The Taj Mahal: What to Expect When You Arrive The Taj Mahal was completed in 1653 after 22 years of construction under the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, built as a mausoleum for his third wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth in 1631. Twenty thousand craftsmen worked on it. The white Makrana marble came from Rajasthan; the inlay stones - carnelian, lapis lazuli, jade, crystal - from across Asia...

Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City: Beijing’s Historical Core Tiananmen Square covers 440,000 square metres in the centre of Beijing — one of the largest public squares on earth. It sits between the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen Gate) to the north and Qianmen Gate to the south, and is framed to the east and west by the National Museum of China and the Great Hall of the People. The...

Niagara Falls: The Canadian Side Is Better and Here Is Why The Niagara River flows north from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario and drops 57 metres at the falls. The border between Canada and the United States runs through the middle of the river. The falls are divided into three sections: the American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls on the US side, and the Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side. Horseshoe...

Kathmandu Valley: Three Cities, Seven UNESCO Sites The Kathmandu Valley is a bowl-shaped plateau at about 1,350 metres elevation, containing three former city-states that were rivals until Prithvi Narayan Shah unified Nepal in 1768: Kathmandu, Patan (officially Lalitpur), and Bhaktapur. Each city has a Durbar Square (palace square) with concentrations of temples, courtyards, and carved woodwork...

Siena Cathedral: One of Italy’s Most Extraordinary Buildings The Duomo di Siena is not subtle. The facade is striped black and white marble, heavily ornamented, almost aggressive in the amount of detail it throws at you. Construction stretched across several centuries from the 13th onwards, and the building was nearly doubled in size in the 14th century before the Black Death killed off the...

The French Quarter: Bourbon Street is Not the Point The Vieux Carre - the original grid of New Orleans, laid out by French and Spanish colonial administrators in the 18th century - covers about one square mile between the Mississippi River and North Rampart Street. The cast-iron balconies that define the neighbourhood’s visual character are largely 19th-century Spanish Creole additions, not...

National Museum of China: How to Actually Use Your Time There The National Museum of China sits on the east side of Tiananmen Square, directly opposite the Great Hall of the People. At 192,000 square metres of floor space, it holds the claim of being the largest museum in the world, which means planning matters more here than almost anywhere else. The Collections The museum splits roughly into two...

The Pantheon: Rome’s Most Underrated Building The Colosseum gets the queues. The Trevi Fountain gets the coins. The Pantheon gets overlooked by visitors who walk past it to photograph the fountain in Piazza della Rotonda and only step inside because it is there and free. This is backwards. The Pantheon is the most technically extraordinary building in Rome and arguably in the world, and it...

Parc National d’Andringitra: Madagascar’s Mountain Wilderness Andringitra National Park sits in the southern highlands of Madagascar, about 60km south of Ambalavao. It covers approximately 316 square kilometres of granite massif, high plateau, and valley forest, ranging in altitude from around 700 metres at the park edges to 2,876 metres at Pic Boby — the second-highest point in...

Knossos: Europe’s Oldest Palace and Its Complicated Reconstruction Knossos is the largest Bronze Age site on Crete, occupied continuously for around 7,000 years and built into a major palatial complex by the Minoans from roughly 1900 BCE. At its peak, around 1600 BCE, this was the administrative centre of a civilisation that controlled most of the Aegean and traded as far as Egypt. The ruins...

Sagarmatha National Park: Planning the Everest Base Camp Trek Sagarmatha National Park covers 1,148 sq km of northeastern Nepal, from the Dudh Koshi river valley up to the summit of Everest at 8,849m. The park entry fee is USD 30 (collected at Monjo gate after the flight to Lukla). A TIMS card costs USD 20 and is obtained in Kathmandu. These are not optional. Budget a full day in Kathmandu for...

Theresienwiese: Munich’s Festival Grounds Beyond Oktoberfest The Theresienwiese is a 420,000 square metre open space on the western edge of Munich’s city centre. For eleven months of the year it’s an unremarkable green area next to a fairground. For two weeks in late September and early October, it becomes one of the most visited places on earth. Oktoberfest began in 1810 to...

Eating Pizza in Naples: What You Need to Know Neapolitan pizza has a legally protected specification (Verace Pizza Napoletana, certified since 2009 by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana). The rules cover everything: tipo 00 flour, fresh yeast, San Marzano tomatoes from the slopes of Vesuvius, fior di latte or buffalo mozzarella, wood-fired oven at 485°C, cooking time of 60-90 seconds. The...

Everest Base Camp Trek: What the Guidebooks Get Wrong Everest Base Camp (5,364 metres) is not actually a great view of Everest. By the time you’re standing on the moraine looking at the Khumbu Icefall, the mountain itself is largely obscured by the surrounding peaks. The best Everest views on the trek come from Kala Patthar (5,643 metres), the small peak above Gorak Shep that you climb on...

Pamukkale: Thermal Terraces and a Ruined Roman City Pamukkale — “cotton castle” in Turkish — is a hillside in southwestern Turkey covered in white travertine terraces formed by calcium carbonate precipitation from thermal spring water. The hot water emerges at 35°C from about 17 springs, runs down the hillside, and deposits calcium carbonate as it cools, building up the characteristic...

Paro Taktsang: The Cliff Monastery and the Tourist Fee That Funds It The Paro Taktsang - Tiger’s Nest Monastery - is built into a 900m cliff face above the Paro Valley in western Bhutan. The main temple complex, constructed in 1692 around a cave where the Buddhist master Padmasambhava is said to have meditated in the 8th century, clings to the rock at 3,120m elevation. The approach from the...

Kuelap: The Chachapoyas Citadel Kuelap is a pre-Inca fortress built by the Chachapoyas people on a mountain ridge at 3,000 metres in the cloud forest of northern Peru. Construction began around 900 CE and continued for several centuries before the Inca conquest in the 1470s. The outer walls rise up to 20 metres and enclose about 400 round stone structures. By most assessments it is one of the most...

Blue Lagoon Iceland: The Honest Version The Blue Lagoon is not a natural hot spring. It is a geothermal spa built in 1976 as a byproduct of the Svartsengi geothermal power plant on the Reykjanes Peninsula. Workers at the plant discovered the warm mineral-rich effluent pooling on the lava field and started bathing in it. The spa grew from that. The milky blue colour comes from silica particles...

Plaza Mayor, Madrid: The Square You’ll Pass Through Twenty Times Plaza Mayor occupies the centre of Habsburg Madrid, constructed between 1617 and 1619 under Philip III. The square is 129 metres by 94, enclosed on all sides by uniform red-brick buildings nine storeys high with 237 balconies facing inward. The equestrian statue of Philip III in the middle was cast in 1616 in Italy and has been...

Jökulsárlón: Iceland’s Glacier Lagoon Jökulsárlón sits at the edge of the Vatnajökull ice cap, roughly 380km from Reykjavik on the Ring Road. The lagoon formed as the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier retreated throughout the 20th century and is still growing — it was around one square kilometre in 1934 and is now closer to 18. The icebergs you see floating across it calved from the glacier, and...

Lisse and Keukenhof: The Dutch Bulb Fields in Spring Lisse is a municipality of about 23,000 people in South Holland, 35km southwest of Amsterdam. It is the administrative centre of the Duin- en Bollenstreek (Dune and Bulb Region), the 7km-wide strip of sandy, well-drained former dune land between Haarlem and Leiden where the Netherlands grows the majority of its cut flowers and bulbs. The area...

Kolmanskop: German Diamonds in the Namib In 1908, a railway worker named Zacharias Lewala found a diamond near here and handed it to his German supervisor. Within a year, prospectors had staked 2,100 claims in the area. By 1912 Kolmanskop was a functioning German colonial town with a ballroom, a skittle alley, a hospital with the first X-ray machine in the southern hemisphere, and a tram line...

Skara Brae: The Stone Age Village on the Bay of Skaill Skara Brae on the Bay of Skaill in Orkney was occupied between roughly 3100 BCE and 2500 BCE. It predates Stonehenge by several hundred years and the Great Pyramid of Giza by around 500 years. Eight stone houses survive in remarkably complete form, preserved because they were buried under sand and domestic waste for about 4,000 years until a...

Suva: Fiji’s Overlooked Capital Most visitors to Fiji fly into Nadi on the western side of Viti Levu and head directly to a resort or island. Suva, the capital, sits on the southeastern coast three hours away by bus, and it receives a fraction of the tourist attention the resort areas do. This is partly understandable - Suva is a working port city with traffic, market noise, and occasional...

Chartwell: Churchill’s House in the Kent Countryside Chartwell is the house Winston Churchill bought in 1922 and kept as his main home until shortly before his death in 1965. He paid £5,000 for it — considered overpriced at the time — and immediately began altering it, adding a top floor and remodelling the gardens. His wife Clementine reportedly found it impractical and expensive to run....

Mount Etna: Europe’s Most Active Volcano Etna erupts, on average, several times per year. Most eruptions are effusive rather than explosive - lava flows from the flank vents or from the summit craters without the ash clouds and pyroclastic material that constitute a serious hazard. The 2021 eruption sent lava flowing down the southeastern flank and produced a 4.3 magnitude earthquake. This...

Valley of the Kings: What Nobody Tells You Before You Go The west bank of the Nile at Luxor is one of those places where the reality matches the hype, but only if you understand what you’re actually looking at. Over 60 tombs cut into a limestone valley, used for nearly 500 years from around 1550 BC. The location wasn’t random: the valley is flanked by a peak naturally shaped like a...

Kilwa Kisiwani: East Africa’s Forgotten Medieval Port Kilwa Kisiwani sits on a small island off the southern Tanzanian coast, accessible by ferry from the mainland town of Kilwa Masoko. Between the 13th and 16th centuries it was one of the wealthiest cities on the East African coast, at the centre of a trade network that moved gold from the Zimbabwe plateau to merchants from Arabia, India,...