Go to the bamboo grove before 7am. After that, the path through the bamboo fills with tour groups, the photography becomes about shooting around other people, and the quality of the experience declines steadily through the morning. This is not unique advice – you will find it everywhere – and the reason it’s everywhere is that it’s correct, and most visitors don’t...

Salar de Uyuni: The World’s Largest Mirror Has Practical Complications Salar de Uyuni covers 10,582 square kilometres of the Bolivian altiplano at 3,656 metres elevation. In the wet season (December through April), a thin layer of water covers the salt flat and it becomes the world’s largest natural mirror, reflecting the sky so accurately that the horizon disappears. In the dry season...

Guggenheim Bilbao: The Building Changed a City, and the Serra Inside Changes You Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim opened in Bilbao in 1997, and what happened to the city afterward is now studied in urban planning programmes as the “Bilbao Effect” - the argument that a single bold piece of public architecture can redirect the economic trajectory of a declining industrial city. Whether you...

Kinderdijk: Nineteen Windmills and What They Were Actually For The Kinderdijk windmill complex is in the Alblasserwaard polder southeast of Rotterdam, and the 19 stone and wooden mills built here between 1738 and 1740 are the densest concentration of historic windmills in the Netherlands. They’re UNESCO-listed and genuinely attractive, particularly in early morning light or when one of the...

Chester is one of the best-preserved Roman cities in Britain, and the Roman Gardens are simultaneously one of the most honest and one of the most underrated parts of it. The gardens don’t preserve an original Roman site – they assemble fragments recovered during excavations across the city into a single open-air collection, which is a different thing. The reconstruction of a hypocaust...

El Jem: The Third-Largest Amphitheatre in the Roman Empire, With Almost No Queue Pompeii and Colosseum days involve hours of queuing and thousands of other tourists. The Amphitheatre of El Jem in central Tunisia attracts a fraction of the visitors those Italian sites receive, and that disproportion is worth examining. The El Jem structure is the third-largest in the Roman Empire (after the...

The Cave of Crystals at Naica is flooded again. The giant crystal chamber – 300 metres underground, containing selenite beams up to 11 metres long and weighing up to 55 tonnes, discovered when miners drained it in 2000 – is once again submerged after Industrias Penoles scaled back pumping operations. This means the cave is inaccessible even under the conditions that permitted the...

Arthur’s Seat: The Volcano in the Middle of Edinburgh Arthur’s Seat is 251 metres above sea level, an extinct volcano in Holyrood Park, and about 30 minutes’ walk from the Royal Mile. The approach from the Holyrood Park gate at the foot of the Royal Mile follows a well-worn path with a steeper final section to the summit. On a clear day, the view covers the full city, the Firth...

Teotihuacan: The City Whose Builders Had No Name The Aztecs encountered Teotihuacan as ruins and called it “the place where the gods were created.” They did not know who built it. We still do not. At its peak around 400-500 AD, the city held an estimated 100,000-200,000 people, making it one of the largest cities on Earth. The people who organised this, who built the Pyramid of the Sun...

Colca Canyon: Not the Deepest in the World, But Close Enough to Argue The Colca Canyon in southern Peru is frequently described as the world’s deepest canyon. It isn’t - Cotahuasi Canyon, also in Peru, goes deeper. The more honest descriptor is that Colca is one of the deepest canyons on Earth, dropping more than 3,200 metres from the rim to the river below in certain sections, roughly...

Geirangerfjord and Nærøyfjord: Two Fjords, Two Very Different Experiences Both Geirangerfjord and Nærøyfjord are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Both are genuinely spectacular. They differ significantly in character and are about 200 kilometres apart, making them complementary rather than interchangeable. Geirangerfjord is the famous one: the waterfall walls, the cruise ships anchored below the...

Carthage: Where Rome Won and the Ruins Are Spread Across a Suburb Carthage was the most powerful city in the western Mediterranean for several centuries before Rome destroyed it in 146 BC. The general Scipio Aemilianus reportedly wept watching it burn, then ordered it burned more thoroughly. What the Romans then built on the ruins became a significant colonial capital. What you visit today is both...

Whistler Blackcomb: North America’s Largest Ski Resort and How to Navigate It The PEAK 2 PEAK Gondola connects the summits of Whistler and Blackcomb mountains at 422 metres above the valley floor, with a 3-kilometre free span that set a world record when it opened in 2008. Two of the 28 cabins have glass floors. Riding it on a clear day, with Wedge Mountain and the Fitzsimmons Creek valley...

Brighton Pier: Seaside Kitsch Done Correctly Brighton Palace Pier is 525 metres of deliberately unreconstructed British seaside entertainment stretching into the Channel: arcade machines, ghost train, fairground rides, fish and chips in a styrofoam tray, and a wind that always arrives from a direction you were not expecting. The pier opened in 1899, which means it has been providing this...

Discover the Natural Wonder: Cave of Crystals Introduction Deep beneath the Chihuahuan Desert in northern Mexico lies one of geology’s most remarkable discoveries: the Cave of Crystals, known in Spanish as the Cueva de los Cristales, part of the larger Sistema de Cavernas de Naica. Discovered in 2000 by miners drilling for lead and zinc ore, the cave sits roughly 300 metres below the surface...

Bucovina: The Painted Monasteries of Northeast Romania In the 15th and 16th centuries, the rulers of Moldavia commissioned a series of monasteries in what is now northeast Romania with exterior walls covered in frescoes. Not interior frescoes, which is what church patrons typically wanted, but exterior, every wall of every building painted with biblical scenes, saints’ calendars, and...

Choquequirao: The Inca Citadel Nobody Gets To Choquequirao is an Inca archaeological site comparable in scale to Machu Picchu, set on a ridge at 3,033 metres above the Apurímac River canyon in southern Peru. It sees around 30 visitors per day. Machu Picchu sees 4,000-5,000. The difference is entirely explained by access, there is currently no road to Choquequirao. A cable car project has been...

Great Smoky Mountains: The Most Visited National Park in America, For Good Reason More people visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park each year than any other national park in the United States, around 12 million in a typical year. The reasons are partly logistical (it’s within a day’s drive of a third of the US population) and partly that the park delivers: 522,000 acres of...

Lavena Coastal Walk, Taveuni, Fiji The entry fee for the Lavena Coastal Walk is around FJ$30 per person, which goes directly to the landowning community of Lavena village whose land the trail crosses. This is one of those cases where the payment mechanism reflects the entire premise of the experience: community tourism in the Pacific done properly, with the financial benefit going to the people...

Kizhi Pogost: The Best Argument for Going Somewhere Difficult The Church of the Transfiguration at Kizhi Pogost has 22 wooden domes of different sizes stacked and arranged over a cruciform structure in a way that looks like it was designed by someone who had never heard of the word “possible.” Built in 1714 by Karelian craftsmen using traditional log construction techniques, it stands...

Lake Malawi National Park: Freshwater Snorkelling and Africa’s Forgotten Lake Lake Malawi contains more species of fish than any other lake on Earth. Over 1,000 species of cichlid fish have been identified here, accounting for roughly 15% of the world’s freshwater fish species, the majority found nowhere else. That statistic is why the lake was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in...

Buenos Aires: The City That Runs on Beef and Late Evenings Buenos Aires restaurants start filling around 9pm. The theatre curtain goes up at 10pm. The milonga (tango hall) doesn’t warm up until midnight. If you fight this schedule you will eat in an empty restaurant at 7:30pm, feel profoundly alone, and wonder what you’re missing. If you accept it, you discover a city that treats the...

Trinity College Dublin: The Book of Kells and Everything Around It The Long Room is better than the Book of Kells. That’s a genuinely controversial opinion to hold while standing in the queue at Trinity College, but the 65-metre barrel-vaulted library hall with its 200,000 leather-bound volumes in dark oak shelves and the smell of centuries of paper is a more immersive experience than two...

Karnak Temple: The Largest Religious Complex Ever Built Karnak is not a single temple. It is a city of temples, chapels, pylons, obelisks, and sacred lakes accumulated over roughly 2,000 years of pharaonic competition, each ruler compelled to outbuild predecessors and assert their relationship with the god Amun. The main precinct of Amun covers approximately 100 hectares. Ancient Rome could fit...

Mykonos: What It Costs and What It’s Worth No amount of preparation quite prepares you for the bill at a Mykonos beach club. You can rationalize €18 for a cocktail once. You rationalize it less well when the sun lounger you are lying on costs €100 per day and the seafood taverna you eat at for dinner charges €45 for a main course that would be €15 on Naxos, an island 30 minutes away by...

Atlanta, Georgia: What to Actually Prioritise Atlanta was burned to the ground in November 1864 during Sherman’s March to the Sea and rebuilt within a decade. That capacity for reinvention defines the city: the same railway infrastructure that made it a Union target became the foundation for a 20th-century corporate headquarters boom that brought Coca-Cola, Delta, CNN, and UPS to the same...

Castle Urquhart: The Best Ruin on Loch Ness, and Why That’s Not Faint Praise Castle Urquhart stands on a rocky promontory on the western shore of Loch Ness, its ruined towers and curtain walls above one of Scotland’s most iconic stretches of water. The castle has changed hands continuously over seven centuries, Scottish kings, English garrisons, powerful Highland clans, before being...

Bazaruto Archipelago: The Indian Ocean’s Last Dugong Stronghold The dugong - a marine mammal related to the manatee, feeding on seagrass beds in shallow tropical water - exists in viable populations in very few places on Earth. The Bazaruto Archipelago off the coast of Mozambique holds one of the last significant East African populations, estimated at around 250-300 individuals in the...

Bran Castle: Romania’s Most Visited Monument Has Almost Nothing to Do With Dracula Let’s settle this first: Vlad III (Vlad Tepeș, Vlad the Impaler), the 15th-century Wallachian prince who is sometimes cited as the inspiration for Dracula, almost certainly never lived at Bran Castle. He may have been held there briefly as a prisoner. The castle’s association with Dracula comes...

Anne Frank House: Book Before You Think You Need To The Anne Frank House on Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam’s Jordaan neighbourhood is one of the most visited museums in the Netherlands and sells out weeks, sometimes months ahead in peak season. You cannot buy tickets at the door. You cannot queue and hope. The only way in is a pre-booked timed ticket through annefrank.org. If you’re...

According to Porto’s tourism board, the Dom Luis I Bridge is the most geotagged location in the city on Instagram, which is either a recommendation or a warning depending on what you’re looking for. The bridge is genuinely remarkable – a double-deck iron structure completed in 1886 that rises 60 metres above the Douro at its upper deck, designed by Théophile Seyrig (a former...

The Uffizi Gallery: A Focused Guide to Getting the Most Out of It Botticelli’s Primavera is substantially larger than most people expect. The figures are nearly life-size, and standing in front of it you can see what the reproduction photographs never convey: approximately 500 identifiable plant species painted in the meadow, each botanically precise, each serving a symbolic function in the...

Borobudur: The World’s Largest Buddhist Monument, and Its New Photography Rules There is something you need to know before you arrive at Borobudur with your phone ready: personal photography has been prohibited inside the temple complex since 2025. Smartphones, cameras, GoPros, none of it is permitted. The policy is enforced. This has generated predictable controversy, and it is also,...

The indri call is audible from 2 kilometres away. You will hear it before you see the animal: a wailing territorial advertisement that builds in overlapping harmonics between family members, somewhere between whale song and something you can’t categorise. Indri are the largest living lemur, weighing up to 9 kilograms, black and white, with round yellow eyes and almost no tail. Hearing them...

Balboa Park: 1,200 Acres of Museums, Gardens, and Spanish Colonial Architecture Balboa Park contains the San Diego Zoo and 17 museums, which would be enough on its own, but the 1,200-acre park also functions as the most significant example of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture in the United States - almost all of it built for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition that was itself a demonstration...

Portland, Oregon: What’s Worth Your Time Portland has been written about so much in terms of its self-conscious weirdness that the actual city sometimes gets obscured by the mythology. It’s a mid-sized American city with exceptional food, good public transit, easy access to remarkable nature, and real urban problems that would be dishonest to skip over. Powell’s Books is still...

Birmingham: The City That Built Britain and Never Got Enough Credit For It Birmingham made the industrial revolution. The city’s workshops and factories produced the metalwork, the guns, the steam engines, and the cheap manufactured goods that changed the world between roughly 1750 and 1900. Its Jewellery Quarter alone still produces approximately 40% of British jewellery today. The canal...

Butrint: The Most Undervisited UNESCO Site in Europe Butrint has been continuously inhabited since at least the 7th century BC and contains layered archaeological remains from Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Venetian periods, all in a single site enclosed within an Albanian national park. A Greek theatre from the 3rd century BC sits 50 metres from a Roman forum, which is 100 metres from a Byzantine...

The Eiger: Viewing It vs. Climbing It By 1938, the Eiger’s north face had claimed the lives of eight climbers across a series of failed attempts, including a notorious four-man German-Austrian team who died in 1936 and whose bodies were visible from Kleine Scheidegg for days through spectators’ telescopes. The press called it the Mordwand – Murder Wall, a play on Nordwand (North...

Caracol: The Maya City That Defeated Tikal, Hidden in the Belize Jungle In 562 AD, Caracol went to war with Tikal, at the time the most powerful city in the Maya world, and won. The inscriptions at Caracol celebrate the “Star War” that subjugated Tikal and led to the looting of its treasures. For the next 120 years, Caracol was the dominant political power in the western Maya lowlands,...

The Eiffel Tower: Built in 1889 to Last 20 Years, Still Standing When Gustave Eiffel won the competition for the 1889 World’s Fair centrepiece, the Paris arts establishment called the design monstrous. Critics signed a petition describing it as “a gigantic black factory chimney” and “a hateful column of bolted metal.” The tower was contractually scheduled for...

Central Park: What Most Visitors Miss The most used park in the United States receives about 42 million visits annually. Most of those visits concentrate in roughly a quarter of the park: the Bethesda Fountain, the Sheep Meadow, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir path, and the area around 72nd Street. The rest of the 843 acres is consistently quieter, and some of it is genuinely excellent....

Cappadocia: The Balloons Are Real, and So Is Everything Under the Ground On any clear morning from October through April, dozens of hot air balloons float above the fairy chimney landscape of Cappadocia in central Turkey, catching the first light above the Göreme valley. The photographs of this have circulated so widely that some visitors arrive expecting a staged spectacle. The balloons are...

Perth: Australia’s Most Isolated Capital and Why That’s Actually Its Strength Perth is closer to Singapore than it is to Sydney. The nearest Australian capital, Adelaide, is 2,700 kilometres away. This geographic isolation is the thing most commonly cited as a drawback of the city, but it’s also the thing that shaped its character: slower-paced, more outdoor-focused, genuinely...

Cathedral of Seville: The Largest Gothic Cathedral in the World The canons of Seville who decided in 1401 to build a cathedral on the site of the old Almohad mosque reportedly said: “Let us build a church so large that those who see it finished will think we were mad.” They were right on at least one count. The Cathedral of Santa Maria de la Sede is the largest Gothic cathedral in the...

Reykjavik: Small City, Enormous Surroundings Reykjavik has about 130,000 people and ranks among the smallest national capitals in the world. The city is entirely walkable in its centre; most of the main attractions are within 15 minutes of each other on foot. The city itself is pleasant and worth a day or two. But the main argument for visiting Reykjavik is that it sits at the edge of one of the...

Church of the Holy Sepulchre: Christianity’s Most Contested Building A neutral Muslim family has held the keys to Christianity’s holiest church since Saladin assigned them the duty in the twelfth century. The Joudeh family keeps the keys; a second family, the Nuseibeh, have traditionally served as doorkeepers, physically opening and closing the church each day. This arrangement, which...

The British Virgin Islands: The Sailing Capital of the Caribbean The BVI is not for everyone - it’s essentially a sailors’ destination that also happens to work for land-based visitors. The 40-odd islands, cays, and rocks spread around Sir Francis Drake Channel create a protected body of water with consistent 15-20 knot trade winds and sheltered anchorages every few miles. Experienced...

Bath: The Roman Hot Springs That Turned a City Warm The hot springs at Bath have been flowing at a constant temperature of 45°C for the entire recorded history of human settlement here, and the Romans figured out what to do with that in the 1st century CE. They built a bath house and temple complex around the sacred spring at what they called Aquae Sulis, draining a Celtic shrine that had occupied...

Boundary Waters: One Million Acres of Interconnected Wilderness The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness shares its southern border with Ely, Minnesota and its northern edge with Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park. Together they form about two million acres of boreal lake country where you travel entirely by canoe and portage, where motorboats are either prohibited or heavily restricted, and...