In 1887, a Maori chief named Te Heuheu Tukino IV gifted the summits of Tongariro, Ngauruhoe, and Ruapehu to the people of New Zealand. He reasoned that the mountains were too sacred to be sold and that making them a national park was the best protection available. That gift created the Tongariro National Park, the first in New Zealand and one of the earliest in the world, and it is the reason...

Delhi: Eight Cities in One, and Why That Makes It Difficult and Irreplaceable Historians count seven or eight successive cities on the Delhi plain, each built over or next to the last, which means the urban geography is not so much a city as an archaeological argument conducted at enormous scale across 1,500 square kilometres. The Mughal Red Fort and the medieval Qutub Minar are 15 kilometres...

Warsaw’s Old Town Is a Fake, and That Is What Makes It Remarkable More than 85% of Warsaw was deliberately destroyed by Nazi forces following the suppression of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. The German plan was not simply to win militarily; it was to erase the city as a physical object and, with it, the evidence of Polish urban civilisation. After the war, Polish architects working from...

Mont Blanc and Chamonix: Europe’s Highest Peak and the Town That Lives Under It Mont Blanc stands at 4,808 metres, which makes it Western Europe’s highest mountain and one of the most contested measurements in geography: the summit shifts slightly as ice accumulates or retreats, and France and Italy have disagreed about the border location for decades. What is not contested is that the...

Piazza San Marco is the lowest point in Venice, which is why it floods first Napoleon famously called it the drawing room of Europe. In an acqua alta event above 110 centimetres, St. Mark’s Square is a shallow lagoon. Venetians in waders step around tourists who did not check the forecast; the tidal forecast website (CPSM) predicts events 72 hours ahead, and the city’s MOSE barrier...

On the night of 3 July 1945, American incendiary bombs destroyed much of Himeji city. One bomb landed on the top floor of Himeji-jo and failed to detonate. The castle survived the war. It is worth leading with this fact because most Japanese castles you can visit today are 20th-century concrete reconstructions, some of them built with elevators inside. Himeji-jo is one of only twelve Japanese...

The main church at Rila Monastery was built between 1834 and 1837, and its frescoes were completed by 1846. This matters because the building that most visitors photograph and admire is not ancient: it is a product of the Bulgarian National Revival period, painted by masters from Bansko and Samokov including the brothers Zahari Zograf, whose work decorates nearly every surface inside. The...

The Great Barrier Reef has experienced six mass bleaching events since 2016, with 2024 producing the most spatially extensive bleaching since monitoring records began in 1986. In 2025, the Australian Institute of Marine Science surveyed 124 reefs and found that 48 percent had undergone a decline in coral cover. The reef is under serious, documented, ongoing stress. Saying this upfront is not...

Visiting the Louvre After the Heist: What Has Changed and What Has Not On October 19, 2025, a team of thieves disguised as construction workers stole eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels from the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon in under eight minutes. The total value of the stolen pieces was estimated at around 88 million euros. The museum closed for one day. By week’s end, two...

Only three cable street tramways still operate in the world. San Francisco’s is the most famous. Lisbon runs three funiculars through its steep historic neighbourhoods. And then there is the Great Orme Tramway in Llandudno, North Wales, which has been hauling passengers up a limestone headland since 1902 and which most people outside Britain have never heard of. It is, by a reasonable...

Greece Is Actively Trying to Reduce Crowds on Its Most Famous Islands Starting in the summer of 2025, Greece introduced a per-person cruise passenger levy at Santorini and Mykonos: 20 euros per person during peak season (June to September) and 12 euros in shoulder months. Santorini went further and introduced a hard daily cap of 8,000 cruise visitors, backed by a berth-allocation system. For 2026,...

Fiji Has 333 Islands and Most Visitors See Three of Them The Mamanuca and Yasawa island chains northwest of the main island of Viti Levu get the bulk of Fiji’s tourist traffic, and for reasonable reasons: the water is extraordinarily clear, the snorkelling is accessible without equipment training, and the island-hopping catamaran makes it easy to move between resorts without booking a...

Festung Hohensalzburg, Salzburg Hohensalzburg Fortress was never successfully attacked. In nearly a thousand years of standing above Salzburg on a rocky ridge, it was besieged once, in 1525, during the German Peasants’ War, when miners and farmers tried to oust Prince-Archbishop Matthäus Lang. The fortress held. Lang, whose treatment of his subjects had provoked the uprising in the first...

Glover’s Reef Atoll, Belize: The One That Actually Rewards the Journey Glover’s Reef is Belize’s most remote atoll. It sits roughly 45 kilometres from the mainland coast in the southern Caribbean Sea, far enough out that the tourist infrastructure has never quite caught up with the ecology. Inside its lagoon are more than 700 patch reefs. Along its outer walls, the seafloor drops...

A Victorian general named Charles Gordon visited Praslin in 1881, stood in the Vallee de Mai palm forest, and concluded that he had found the original Garden of Eden. The coco de mer, he decided, was the forbidden fruit. Gordon was a general, not a botanist, and his theology was creative. But standing inside that palm forest, where the canopy has remained essentially unchanged since prehistoric...

Antelope Canyon: The Most Photographed Slot Canyon in the World On August 12, 1997, eleven tourists died inside Lower Antelope Canyon. A storm broke fifteen miles away, in a watershed most of them would not have been able to find on a map, and within minutes the slot was a wall of water. There were no guides required. There was no safety infrastructure. You paid a small fee and walked in alone.

The competition to design the current Rialto Bridge was one of the more embarrassing episodes in Renaissance architectural history. Palladio submitted plans. So did Michelangelo, Jacopo Sansovino, and Vignola. The Venetian authorities rejected all of them in favor of Antonio da Ponte, a relatively unknown local builder whose main qualification was that his single-arch design was the only one that...

Ilulissat Kangerlua: What Visiting the World’s Most Productive Glacier Actually Involves The Sermeq Kujalleq glacier discharges approximately 20 billion tonnes of ice into the fjord annually. It is the fastest-moving glacier in the northern hemisphere, advancing and calving at a rate that researchers measure in metres per day rather than per year. The icebergs that result from this process...

Diocletian’s Palace, Split: A Roman Emperor’s Retirement Home That Became a City Roman emperors did not retire. Diocletian was the first to do so voluntarily, abdicating in 305 AD and retreating to this fortified complex on the Dalmatian coast. He spent his final years here growing cabbages, as the historical record unironically confirms he told colleagues who begged him to return to...

The Dome Nobody Thought Could Be Built When the Opera del Duomo in Florence opened a competition in 1418 to find someone who could vault the cathedral crossing, the hole in the roof had been sitting open for decades. The cathedral had been under construction since 1296 and nobody could work out how to close it. The eventual winner, Filippo Brunelleschi, had no formal training as an architect or...

The Mezquita of Cordoba: A Building That Should Not Exist The Great Mosque of Cordoba faces the wrong direction for prayer. Mecca lies to the east-southeast of Andalusia, but Abd al-Rahman I oriented the mosque southward in 784 CE, following the alignment of the existing Roman street grid rather than the religious requirement. Scholars disagree on whether this was an error, a political statement,...

Khongoryn Els: Mongolia’s Singing Sand Dunes and What Makes Them Hum The Mongolians call them Duut Mankhan, the Singing Sands. On days when the wind runs east to west across the ridgelines, the dunes at Khongoryn Els emit a deep, resonant hum that travellers have compared to distant aircraft engines, to a cello, to the sound of a bow drawn slowly across a bass string. The scientific...

Travel advisory: Western governments currently advise against all travel to Russia Before any description of Mamayev Kurgan, this point must be stated plainly. As of mid-2026, the United States Department of State maintains a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory for Russia, citing the ongoing war with Ukraine, risk of wrongful detention of foreign nationals by Russian security services,...

The Great Blue Hole sits at the centre of Lighthouse Reef Atoll, 43 miles from the Belizean mainland, and it is 1,043 feet across and 407 feet deep. Jacques Cousteau brought his ship Calypso here in 1971, declared it one of the five best dive sites on earth, and the world has been trying to book liveaboard trips ever since. What most accounts leave out: at roughly 300 feet depth, a layer of...

Cartagena’s Rafael Nuñez International Airport is 3 kilometres from the walled city. That proximity, the combination of a working Caribbean port town and a near-perfectly preserved Spanish colonial centre, and a food scene that has been quietly catching up with Bogota over the past decade, make this one of the more underrated city breaks in Latin America. Most guides lead with the obvious:...

The ground the Lincoln Memorial sits on was a tidal mudflat for most of the nineteenth century, half-river and half mosquito swamp, with the Potomac sliding in and out of it twice a day. The Army Corps of Engineers began dredging and dumping spoils on those flats in 1882 and kept going for thirty years. By 1911 there was solid land where the memorial now stands. That origin story is almost never...

Washington Square Park Was an Execution Ground Before It Was a Dog Run The park’s gravel surface has served as a potter’s field for an estimated 20,000 bodies, a place of public hanging, and subsequently a military parade ground, before becoming the Greenwich Village neighbourhood square it is today. The arch at the north entrance, modelled on the Arc de Triomphe, was built temporarily...

In January 1913, Leon Trotsky, Josef Stalin, Sigmund Freud, and Josip Broz Tito were all, at various points, regulars at Café Central in Vienna. Whether they ever sat in the same room is unknown. What is certain is that none of them paid more than a few Kreuzer for the right to stay all afternoon, read the newspapers, argue, and write. That was the point of the Viennese coffeehouse: a subscription...

The Great Buddha of Kamakura (Kotoku-in), Japan The Great Buddha of Kamakura has been sitting outdoors since 1498, not by design but because the hall that housed it was washed away in a tsunami triggered by the Nankai earthquake on September 20 of that year. The temple authorities never rebuilt it. Whether this was a pragmatic response to the difficulty of protecting a structure on that coast, a...

Zhangjiajie remained largely unknown outside Hunan Province until 1979, when a local painter named Wu Guanzhong visited and published work that drew national attention to the landscape. Three years later, in 1982, it became China’s first designated national forest park. The pillars and peaks that now feature in thousands of travel photographs were treated, until quite recently, as...

Necker Island: Richard Branson’s Private Island in the BVI In 1978, Richard Branson was 28 years old and six years into building Virgin Group when he bought a 74-acre uninhabited island in the British Virgin Islands for around $180,000. The deal required him to develop it within five years. He spent closer to $10 million transforming it into a private retreat and opened it as a commercial...

The Forth Bridge: A Steel Cantilever That Changed What Buildings Could Be When the Forth Bridge opened on 4 March 1890, it used 53,000 tonnes of steel, 6.5 million rivets, and the labour of over 4,000 men across seven years of construction. It was also the first major structure in Britain ever built of steel rather than cast or wrought iron. The Eiffel Tower, completed the previous year in Paris,...

The D-Day Beaches and Normandy American Cemetery Starting April 1, 2026, visitors to the Normandy American Cemetery will be required to pre-register before arriving. The pre-registration system is being introduced by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) to manage visitor volumes, which have grown significantly in the years following the 80th anniversary commemorations in 2024. Entry...

How to Actually Get on Radiator Springs Racers Disney’s California Adventure opened in 2001 to almost universally negative reviews. It felt rushed, thin, and oddly cheap for a Disney park, critics called it a glorified state fair. Disney spent the following decade fixing that assessment with a series of expansions that eventually rewrote most of the original park. The result is now genuinely...

Four of Asia’s greatest rivers begin their lives within a few dozen kilometres of Lake Manasarovar. The Indus, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra, and the Karnali all rise in the area around this lake and Mount Kailash in western Tibet, eventually draining into the Indian Ocean through four separate routes spanning the length of the subcontinent. That hydrological fact alone makes the region one of...

The Egyptian Museum, Cairo The golden funerary mask of Tutankhamun is no longer in the old Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square. It moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza when that building opened officially in November 2025, along with all 5,398 catalogued pieces from Howard Carter’s 1922 excavation, displayed together in a single institution for the first time in their history. If you are...

Phang Nga Bay: Skip James Bond Island, Find a Hong The word “hong” means “room” in Thai. These are the enclosed lagoons hidden inside the hollow limestone towers of Phang Nga Bay, accessible only by kayak through narrow tidal caves that you must time precisely to pass through at the right water level. From outside, the towers look like solid rock. Inside, they open into...

Kyoto’s Gion district operates under rules that have been progressively tightened since 2024, and if you visit without knowing them, you may leave with a fine, a confrontation you did not expect, and a bad experience in a place that deserves better than that. The restrictions are enforced, not just posted. Understanding why Gion matters before you arrive makes the visit considerably richer...

Universal Studios Japan: What the Guide Books Get Wrong Let me say it plainly: most Universal Studios Japan advice tells you to buy an Express Pass and prioritise Harry Potter. That is not wrong, exactly, but it is also the advice that everyone follows, which means the Wizarding World is packed by 10am regardless. There is a smarter way to approach USJ, and it starts with understanding that this...

In 708 AD, according to the account, the Archangel Michael appeared three times to Bishop Aubert of Avranches and told him to build a sanctuary on a tidal island off the Normandy coast. Aubert kept ignoring the instruction. On the third visit, Michael pressed his finger through the bishop’s skull to make his point clear. The skull, complete with the alleged fingerhole, is preserved in...

The Tehuelche people who lived in Patagonia before European contact called Monte Fitz Roy “Chalten,” meaning roughly “Smoking Mountain.” Looking up from the valley floor, the clouds that permanently swirl around the granite spires at 3,405 metres looked to them like volcanic smoke. They believed the mountain was alive. When Argentine explorer Francisco Moreno reached it in...

The Forbidden City, Beijing: Getting In Before It Sells Out The tickets go on sale exactly seven days before the visit date, at 8:00 PM Beijing Time (UTC+8). On weekends and national holidays they sell out within hours. This is the most important logistical fact about visiting the Forbidden City in 2026, and most international travel guides bury it in fine print or skip it entirely. The palace is...

Edinburgh Castle: The Rock That Rewarded a Merchant’s Idea from Paris A businessman named John Hewat brought the idea for the One O’Clock Gun to Edinburgh in 1861, having seen something similar in Paris. The gun was first fired from the Half Moon Battery on 7 June 1861, after two failed attempts, and it has fired at 1:00 pm every day since (except Sundays, Good Friday, and Christmas...

Kilauea Is Erupting Right Now Kilauea’s Halemaumau crater entered Episode 50 of its ongoing eruption on June 27, 2026, producing lava fountains rising 30 metres and expected to climb above 180 metres within hours of onset. The eruption is confined to the summit crater inside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. From the Crater Rim overlooks, the fountaining is visible day and night during active...

NASA uses the Salar de Uyuni to calibrate the altimeters on Earth observation satellites. The salt flat at 3,656 metres above sea level is so large (10,582 square kilometres) and so flat (total elevation variation across the entire surface is less than one metre) that it is the most reliable reference point on Earth for measuring altitude from space. That fact tends to land differently than the...

The Isle of Man’s parliament, Tynwald, has been meeting continuously since 979 CE, making it the oldest continuously active legislature in the world. It predates the English Parliament by around 300 years and operates under laws and constitutional arrangements entirely separate from either the United Kingdom or the European Union. The island is a Crown dependency: the British monarch is its...

Fatehpur Sikri: The Capital That Akbar Built and Then Walked Away From The most common explanation for why Akbar abandoned Fatehpur Sikri after only fourteen years is water scarcity. It is a reasonable story and almost certainly wrong. The site was known to Babur before Akbar’s time because it was a well-watered location. Akbar himself later dammed the water body and converted it into a...

Every spring, the ICEHOTEL in Jukkasjärvi, Swedish Lapland, melts back into the Torne River. The following autumn, workers harvest ice blocks from the same river, truck them 200 metres to the building site, and begin again. The hotel is rebuilt from scratch each winter, and has been since 1989, making it both the oldest ice hotel in the world and a structure that has never technically survived a...

When the Millennium Monument was first completed in Budapest, five of the statues in the left colonnade depicted members of the Habsburg dynasty: Ferdinand I, Leopold I, Charles III, Maria Theresa, and Franz Joseph. The monument had been built in 1896 to celebrate a thousand years of Hungarian statehood, but Hungary was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Habsburg rulers occupied a...

One World Trade Center and the 9/11 Memorial, Lower Manhattan One World Trade Center stands 1,776 feet tall, a number chosen for its symbolic weight rather than its structural logic. The reference to the year of American independence was deliberate, and the building’s architects were aware that it would invite scrutiny that purely commercial skyscrapers rarely receive. The result is a tower...