Sagrada Familia: The Cathedral That Has Been Under Construction Since 1882 Construction on Antoni Gaudi’s basilica in the Eixample district of Barcelona began in 1882, and is currently projected to complete in the early 2030s - more than 150 years after the foundation stone was laid. Gaudi died in 1926, hit by a tram, with the crypt and apse complete but the rest of the building a model and...

Redwoods at Whakarewarewa: California Trees in a Rotorua Forest In 1901, a small experimental plot of California coast redwoods was planted on the edge of Whakarewarewa State Forest near Rotorua, New Zealand. The experiment was straightforward: the New Zealand Forest Service wanted to know whether redwoods would grow in the North Island’s volcanic soil. They grew. By the 2020s, the original...

Queenstown: More Than the Adventure Cliches Queenstown gets sold as the adventure capital of the world, and it is. Bungee jumping, skydiving, jet boating, white-water rafting, paragliding: the tourism infrastructure for adrenaline activities here is unmatched anywhere in the southern hemisphere. If that’s why you’re coming, you’ll be well served. But the town is also a serious...

Darvaza: The Burning Gas Crater in the Karakum Desert The Darvaza gas crater (called the “Door to Hell” by travel writers, a name that has stuck regardless of its accuracy) is a burning pit in the middle of the Karakum Desert in central Turkmenistan, roughly 260 km north of the capital Ashgabat. It is approximately 69 metres wide and has been burning continuously since 1971. The origin...

Dublin: What to See, What to Skip, and How to Spend Your Days Dublin is a compact capital of about 1.4 million people (greater city area), sitting on the south shore of Dublin Bay at the mouth of the Liffey River. It is one of the few European capitals where you can see most of the significant sites on foot, and the concentration of pubs, literary history, and Georgian architecture within the city...

Meteora: Six Monasteries on Top of the World Meteora, in the Thessaly region of central Greece, is one of the most photographed monastic complexes on earth - and for good reason. The monasteries are not merely old buildings in a dramatic landscape. They are active monasteries constructed on top of sandstone rock pillars that rise 300-400 metres above the Pineios valley floor, some of them...

Glacier Bay: What 200 Years of Glacial Retreat Looks Like In 1750, the entirety of what is now Glacier Bay was covered by a single vast glacier more than a kilometre thick. By the time George Vancouver sailed past the entrance in 1794, the ice had retreated 5 km. By 1879 when John Muir arrived, the bay had opened 77 km. Today the bay extends 105 km from the entrance and the glaciers continue to...

Kolkata: India’s Most Underrated Major City Every major Indian city has a reputation that precedes it. Delhi has power and monuments; Mumbai has money and ambition; Jaipur has forts and tourists. Kolkata gets sadness and decay, which is unfair and increasingly outdated. The city that served as British India’s capital for nearly a century has extraordinary colonial architecture, a...

The Serengeti: How the Migration Works and When to Go The Serengeti is 14,763 square kilometres of savanna in northern Tanzania, sharing a border with Kenya’s Masai Mara to the north. The Maasai name Siringet means “the place where the land runs on forever,” which is a reasonably accurate physical description of the central plains. It is one of the oldest ecosystems on earth -...

Vimy Ridge: Why Canadians Come Here, and Why You Should Too On April 9, 1917, all four divisions of the Canadian Corps attacked Vimy Ridge simultaneously, taking a position that French and British forces had failed to capture for two years. They succeeded in four days. The battle cost 10,602 Canadian casualties. Today, the ridge is Canadian soil, preserved under a 1922 land grant from France, and...

Kruger National Park: Self-Drive vs Guided Safari and How to Plan Kruger National Park is 19,485 square kilometres of savanna, bushveld, and riparian forest in Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, on South Africa’s border with Mozambique. It is the size of Wales or the state of New Jersey. It is one of the few large African national parks where self-drive safari is genuinely practical and...

Mansudae Grand Monument: Visiting North Korea’s Most Symbolic Site The Mansudae Grand Monument in Pyongyang consists of two 20-metre bronze statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, standing side by side on Mansu Hill. A 70-metre mosaic mural of Mount Paektu - the sacred Korean mountain central to the Kim family’s origin mythology - fills the wall behind them. The original Kim Il-sung...

Caye Caulker: The Split, the Lazy Lizard, and How the Island Actually Works Caye Caulker is a small island (4 km long, 0.8 km wide) in the Belize Barrier Reef system, 35 km northeast of Belize City. It has no roads in the conventional sense - golf carts, bicycles, and foot traffic are how you get around. There are no traffic lights, no banks, and until recently no ATM on the island’s south...

Galle Fort: The Dutch Colonial Town on Sri Lanka’s South Coast Galle Fort sits on a peninsula on Sri Lanka’s southwestern coast, 120 km south of Colombo. The Portuguese built the first fortification here in 1588; the Dutch East India Company captured it in 1640 and spent the next century constructing the fortifications and town layout that survive today. The British took control in...

Three Gorges: The Yangtze Cruise and What Came After the Dam The Three Gorges are the Qutang, Wu, and Xiling gorges on the Yangtze River between Chongqing and Yichang in central China. The rock walls rise 1,200 metres above the river in places. The river passes through 192 km of gorge scenery. In the early morning, mist fills the lower gorges and the scenery is genuinely extraordinary. The Three...

Split: The Roman Emperor’s Retirement Palace and Everything Else Diocletian built his retirement palace in Split between 295 and 305 AD - a fortified complex on the Dalmatian coast where he planned to spend his final years growing cabbages (his own explanation when urged to return to power). He died there in 311 AD and the palace eventually became the city itself. Today roughly 3,000 people...

San Antonio River Walk: What It Is and What It Isn’t The River Walk (Paseo del Rio) is a 25-km network of paths along both banks of the San Antonio River, running through the city’s downtown area at roughly 1.5 metres below street level. The sunken position means you can hear the city above but not see it, which creates an unusual enclosed quality - particularly at night when the...

Masjid al-Haram: The Logistics and Meaning of the World’s Largest Mosque Masjid al-Haram in Mecca is the largest mosque in the world by capacity and one of the most significant sites in any religion. The current complex covers approximately 356,800 square metres and can accommodate more than 1.5 million worshippers simultaneously during peak Hajj periods; with the outdoor areas included,...

Da Nang: Vietnam’s Most Liveable City Done Right Da Nang occupies a position on Vietnam’s central coast that makes it almost unfairly convenient: 30 km south is Hoi An, 70 km northwest through mountain passes is Hue, and the city itself has 30 km of beach running through its urban centre. Vietnamese travellers have recognised this for years; international visitors are catching on more...

New Zealand: North Island vs South Island and How to Decide New Zealand comprises two main islands with very different characters and a total land area slightly larger than the United Kingdom. Most first-time visitors do not have enough time to do both islands justice, and the classic error is to rush through everything with no depth anywhere. A better two-week itinerary covers one island...

Tokyo DisneySea: Why It’s Considered the Best Disney Park in the World Tokyo DisneySea is the park that Disney theme park enthusiasts who have done the other 12 parks in the Disney portfolio often describe as the best. This is not universal, but the argument is coherent: DisneySea has a physical setting (a constructed harbour with a volcanic island at its centre), architectural consistency...

Times Square: Honest Advice for First-Time Visitors Let’s get this out of the way: Times Square is not a neighbourhood. It’s a commercial intersection dressed up in LED advertising, and New Yorkers mostly avoid it. The good news is that it’s still worth visiting, just not in the way most tourist guides suggest. Treat it as a 45-minute spectacle rather than a destination in...

Banaue and Batad: The Ifugao Rice Terraces in Practice The Ifugao rice terraces of the Cordillera region in northern Luzon have been cultivated continuously for more than 2,000 years. The Ifugao people carved roughly 20,000 sq km of mountainside into a stacked system of irrigated paddies fed by an engineering network of channels and wooden aqueducts flowing from the forests above. The system still...

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: The Building Is the Exhibit Frank Lloyd Wright completed the Guggenheim in 1959 after 16 years of revisions and battles with New York City building codes. He died six months before it opened. The building is the most important piece of architecture in New York and one of the finest examples of organic architecture anywhere in the world. People come to see the art;...

The Three Gorges Dam and the Yangtze Cruise: Engineering, Displacement, and the River Landscape The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River was completed in 2006 after 17 years of construction. It is the largest hydroelectric dam in the world by installed capacity (22,500 megawatts), and the reservoir it created - the Three Gorges Reservoir, stretching 660 km upstream to Chongqing - flooded 1,000...

Molokai: The Hawaiian Island That Deliberately Stayed Small Molokai has the highest percentage of Native Hawaiian residents of any island in the state - approximately 60% - and that demographic reality shapes everything about visiting it. The island’s communities have consistently voted against large resort development, casino proposals, and the kind of tourist infrastructure that defines...

Washington Monument: What You Actually Get for the Time Investment The Washington Monument is a 169-metre white marble obelisk on the National Mall, the tallest obelisk in the world and for a brief period after its 1884 completion the tallest man-made structure on earth. It’s a monument to George Washington, the first US president, and it is made of three visibly different types of marble...

Provence: The Region, the Landscape, and How to Actually See It Provence is a large region of southeastern France running from the Rhone Valley in the west to the Italian border in the east, from the Alps in the north to the Mediterranean coast in the south. The Cote d’Azur (Nice, Cannes, Monaco) is technically part of Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, but the Provence that most visitors...

The Grand Canyon: South Rim vs North Rim, and What Actually Matters The Grand Canyon is 446 km long, up to 29 km wide, and up to 1,857 metres deep. The Colorado River has been cutting it for the past 5-6 million years, exposing rock layers up to 1.8 billion years old at the bottom. The basic statistics are accurate but they do not adequately explain the visual experience of standing at the rim for...

The Guggenheim Bilbao: The Building, the Art, and the City It Changed The Guggenheim Bilbao opened in October 1997 on the south bank of the Nervion River in what had been a derelict industrial zone. Frank Gehry’s design - titanium cladding over a complex curved steel structure, with the building dissolving into the river at one end and stretching under a bridge at the other - was immediately...

Lake Baikal: The World’s Deepest Lake and How to See It Properly The numbers are absurd. Lake Baikal is 636 km long, 80 km wide at its broadest, and 1,642 metres deep at its deepest point. It holds roughly 20% of Earth’s total unfrozen freshwater. The lake formed 25 to 30 million years ago, making it the oldest lake on the planet, and it sits in a rift zone that continues to widen by...

Lisbon: The Hills, the Tiles, and the Things Worth Planning Around Lisbon has become one of Europe’s most visited cities in the past decade, with visitor numbers roughly tripling between 2010 and 2019. This has changed the economics of the city significantly - accommodation prices have risen sharply, several neighbourhoods have gentrified heavily, and certain streets (the Bairro Alto on...

London: The Honest Guide London is the largest city in Europe, capital of a country that has been producing opinion and exporting culture for several centuries, and a genuinely excellent place to spend a week provided you understand a few things in advance. The cost of living is high. The weather is not reliably good. The tube is mostly reliable but old and prone to overcrowding. The free museums...

The Loreley: The Rock, the Myth, and the Middle Rhine The Loreley is a 132-metre high slate cliff on the east bank of the Rhine River at the town of Sankt Goarshausen, in the Rhineland-Palatinate state of Germany. It marks the narrowest section of the Upper Middle Rhine, where the river compresses between two steep rock faces and the current is strong enough to have wrecked ships historically. The...

Venice Simplon-Orient-Express: What the Money Actually Buys The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express is operated by Belmond and runs on several routes across Europe. The most iconic is London to Venice, which takes roughly 33 hours via Paris, the Simplon Tunnel through the Swiss and Italian Alps, and down to Venice Santa Lucia. Prices in 2024 started at approximately £2,000 per person for a...

Vancouver: A City That Looks Better Than It Sounds on Paper The view from the water makes the pitch: glass towers backed by mountains that still have snow in June, a working port with freighters queuing for the grain terminal, and Stanley Park’s dark wall of Douglas fir. Vancouver is genuinely one of the more striking urban settings in North America. It also has a housing crisis, a...

The Gobi Desert: Two Countries, One Desert, Very Different Trips The Gobi covers approximately 1.3 million square kilometres across southern Mongolia and northern China. It is not a single landscape: the desert contains sand dunes, rocky plains, saxaul forests, seasonal rivers, and mountain ranges within its boundaries. Most of what visitors picture when they think of the Gobi - the Khongoryn Els...

Tikal: Maya Ruins in the Jungle, Done Properly Tikal was one of the largest cities in the Maya world at its peak in the 7th and 8th centuries AD, with a population estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000 people. The ruins extend over roughly 576 sq km, though only a small central zone (about 16 sq km) is excavated and open to visitors. The rest - the majority of Tikal’s extent - lies buried...

Corcovado National Park: How to Actually Get There and What to Expect The Osa Peninsula is the most remote inhabited part of Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, and Corcovado National Park - covering 424 square kilometres of lowland tropical rainforest, rivers, beaches, and mangroves in the peninsula’s southern half - is the country’s most biologically dense protected area. National...

Theresienwiese: Munich’s Famous Field, 11 Months of the Year Most people know Theresienwiese only as the home of Oktoberfest. Which is fair: the festival that fills this 42-hectare meadow in late September and early October is the most famous mass drinking event in the world, drawing around six million visitors over its 16 days. But the Wiesn (as Münchners call the grounds) is a permanent...

Edinburgh’s Royal Mile: What It Covers and What to Skip The Royal Mile is not quite a mile (it’s 1.8 km, or 1.1 miles, if you’re measuring from the castle esplanade to the gates of Holyrood Palace). It is, however, a coherent walking route through the medieval ridge on which Edinburgh’s Old Town was built, dropping about 75 metres in elevation from castle to palace. The...

Los Angeles: How to Not Waste a Week There LA rewards visitors who understand its geography and punishes those who don’t. The city covers 1,300 square kilometres, has no centre in the European sense, and operates almost entirely by car. Planning based on neighbourhood is everything: Griffith Park and the Eastside are 25 minutes from the Westside under normal conditions and 70 minutes during...

The Skeleton Coast: Namibia’s Shipwreck Shore and What to Do There The Skeleton Coast runs approximately 500 km along the northern Namibian coastline from the Ugab River mouth in the south to the Angolan border in the north. The Namibian government has divided it into the Skeleton Coast Park (the southern section, accessible to self-drive visitors under permit) and the Skeleton Coast...

Niagara Falls: The Falls Themselves and What’s Actually Worth Your Time Niagara Falls is three waterfalls on the Niagara River where it flows between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, on the border between Ontario, Canada and New York State, USA. The Canadian side (Ontario) has the better view - the Horseshoe Falls, the largest of the three, curves in a horseshoe shape and is viewable along its...

Lisse and the Keukenhof: The Tulip Fields Without the Tourist Trap Lisse is a small town of around 22,000 people in the Duin- en Bollenstreek (Dune and Bulb Region) of South Holland, about 35 km southwest of Amsterdam. It is, in most respects, an entirely ordinary Dutch municipality. The one reason the entire world has heard of it: Keukenhof. Keukenhof is the world’s largest flower garden,...

The Washington Monument: Getting Inside, and What Surrounds It The Washington Monument is the tallest stone structure in the world and the tallest obelisk anywhere. It stands 169.3 metres (555 feet, 5 and 1/8 inches) on the National Mall, visible from essentially every part of central Washington, and was the tallest man-made structure on earth when it was completed in 1884. The 154-metre mark is...

Samarkand and Bukhara: The Silk Road Cities That Survive Uzbekistan opened significantly to tourism after 2016 when the government changed and visa restrictions eased. Since then the country has seen a substantial increase in visitors, and the infrastructure in both Samarkand and Bukhara has developed accordingly. These cities are no longer the challenging, off-the-beaten-path destinations they...

Karnak: The Largest Ancient Religious Complex in the World The Karnak Temple Complex at Luxor is not a single temple but a collection of temples, chapels, pylons, and ancillary structures built across approximately 2,000 years by successive Egyptian pharaohs. Construction began during the Middle Kingdom period around 2000 BC and continued through the New Kingdom (the period of Ramesses II and...

Whitsunday Islands: 74 Islands, One Perfect Beach The Whitsunday Islands sit off the central Queensland coast about halfway between Brisbane and Cairns, scattered across the Coral Sea in a rough 100 km arc. Of the 74 islands, most are uninhabited national park. About a dozen are accessible by boat. One, Whitsunday Island, has a beach that appears on every Australian tourism poster: Whitehaven...

St Paul’s Cathedral: London’s Greatest Building There have been churches on Ludgate Hill since the 7th century. The building you see today is Christopher Wren’s fifth attempt at designing a replacement for Old St Paul’s, which burned in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The first four proposals were rejected by the church authorities. The accepted design, the so-called...