Hallstatt On peak summer days, up to 10,000 tourists pass through a village of about 700 residents. The locals have been lobbying the regional government for a daily visitor cap of around 5,500 for years. The Upper Austria state government has not acted. Coach buses now have regulated time slots, but anyone arriving by train, ferry, or car faces no restriction. This is the situation at Hallstatt...

Grand Bazaar, Istanbul The 2012 James Bond film Skyfall opens with a rooftop chase scene across the Grand Bazaar. Most people who visit never find those rooftops. That gap between what tourists see and what actually exists here is a useful way to think about the whole place. The Kapalıçarşı (Covered Market) has been operating continuously since 1461, when Sultan Mehmed II ordered the construction...

Griffith Observatory Griffith J. Griffith shot his wife in the eye in 1903. She survived; he went to prison for two years. When he got out, he tried to give the City of Los Angeles $700,000 to build a public observatory on the hill above his donated park. The city refused the money for years, too embarrassed to be associated with its disgraced benefactor. He died in 1919. The observatory was...

Fifteen years after the earthquakes that levelled its cathedral and killed 185 people, Christchurch is doing something genuinely unusual for a disaster-hit city: it is becoming more interesting than it was before. The rebuild forced a blank-slate rethink of how a city should work, and the result is a place that surprises visitors who arrive expecting ruin and leave talking about the food. The...

When Casa Milà was unveiled on Passeig de Gràcia in 1912, Barcelonans called it La Pedrera – the stone quarry – as a mockery. The undulating limestone facade, entirely lacking straight lines, with iron balconies that twisted outward like seaweed, looked to contemporaries like an unfinished rock face rising from the pavement. The name stuck. So did the building: a century later...

On December 12, approximately 10 million people visit the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in a single day. This figure is not an annual total – it is the crowd for the single feast day celebrating the Virgin of Guadalupe, the most important religious observance in Mexico. The surrounding neighbourhood becomes impassable; Metro Line A’s La Villa-Basilica station operates at maximum...

Dashashwamedh Ghat, Varanasi The Ganga Aarti at Dashashwamedh Ghat starts at 6:45pm in summer and 5:45pm in winter, runs for approximately 45 minutes, and draws crowd densities that, at peak times, can reach 700 to 860 people per 100 square metres of ghat steps. That number is not a deterrent – it is a description of what the ceremony is: an event so embedded in the fabric of a living city...

Tayrona National Park: Colombia’s Best Coastline, With Some Honest Caveats Tayrona occupies 150 square kilometres on Colombia’s Caribbean coast at the base of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the world’s highest coastal mountain range. The geography produces something that exists almost nowhere else: jungle-covered peaks descending sharply to the sea, with isolated beaches at...

Walt Disney World: A Practical Guide for First-Timers and Return Visitors Walt Disney World covers 27,000 acres in central Florida and has four theme parks, two water parks, a shopping and entertainment district, and over 30 resort hotels. A first visit without preparation is genuinely bewildering: too many options, significant walking distances, and a pricing structure that rewards advance...

Hay-on-Wye: The Town That Declared Itself a Kingdom to Sell More Books Richard Booth started buying and selling secondhand books in Hay-on-Wye in the 1960s. The Welsh market town on the Wye Valley border with England had no particular claim to cultural significance. Booth kept buying books and kept opening shops, and other booksellers followed, and by the 1970s the town had accumulated enough...

Over 60,000 people a year jump from Babadağ Mountain above Ölüdeniz, which puts the paragliding scene there in perspective: this is not a niche activity for adventure tourists, it’s an organised industry for anyone who wants to float above what has been voted one of Europe’s best beaches and look down at the improbable blue of the lagoon below. The tandem flights cost around 60-80...

Sagrada Familia: Construction Began in 1882, Completion Expected in the 2030s Antoni Gaudi spent the last 15 years of his life living in the Sagrada Familia basilica and working on almost nothing else. He was hit by a tram in 1926, was initially unidentified because of his dishevelled appearance, and died three days later from his injuries. The crypt and apse were largely complete; the rest of the...

Palawan: The Philippines’ Best Island, and How to Navigate It Palawan is a long, narrow island southwest of Manila, with limestone karst formations, clear water, and a wildlife corridor that has made it the environmental benchmark for the Philippines. It is also being developed aggressively. El Nido and Coron both have significant tourist infrastructure now; what you won’t get is...

Yangtze River: The Gorges Are Still There, But Not as They Were The Three Gorges Dam was completed in 2003. The reservoir behind it raised water levels by 80-175 metres in the gorge sections, submerging the lower cliff faces, the old river towns that had operated since the Han dynasty, and over 1,300 archaeological sites. Some of the famous hanging coffins wedged in cliff faces above the waterline...

Delphi: The Centre of the Ancient World The ancient Greeks called Delphi the omphalos - the navel of the world. A conical stone, the omphalos stone itself, was kept in the sanctuary as physical proof. For a period spanning roughly the 8th to 4th centuries BC, this rocky hillside on the southern slope of Mount Parnassos was the most important religious site in the Greek world. Kings, generals, and...

Pol-e Khaju: The Safavid Bridge That Doubles as a Teahouse In the lower arched chambers of Pol-e Khaju, old men play backgammon in the afternoons and families gather in the evenings. Tea costs almost nothing. The bridge was built for social use as much as for crossing water, and it still performs both functions 370 years after Shah Abbas II commissioned it. Pol-e Khaju was constructed around 1650...

Important note before planning: Travel to Myanmar requires current research on safety conditions and visa requirements. The country has been under military rule since the 2021 coup and the security situation has changed substantially since then. Check your government’s current foreign travel advice (UK FCDO, US State Department) before making any bookings. What follows describes the...

The Royal Observatory Greenwich: Where the World Agreed to Start Counting The problem of longitude at sea killed sailors for centuries. Without a reliable way to calculate east-west position, ships ran onto rocks in the dark, and entire fleets were lost. Charles II founded the Royal Observatory in 1675 with a specific practical brief: improve the astronomical tables well enough that British...

Segovia: The Roman Aqueduct, the Roast Pig, and Why You Should Stay Overnight Segovia is only 90 kilometres from Madrid and only 28 minutes on the high-speed train from Chamartín station, which makes it the most popular day trip from the capital and also the most crowded between 11am and 4pm on weekends. Arriving by the first fast train and staying overnight fixes both problems. The day-trippers...

Jacques Cousteau filmed the Great Blue Hole in 1971 and called it one of the world’s top ten dive sites. That declaration turned a geographic obscurity – a submarine sinkhole 70 kilometres from the Belizean coast – into a bucket-list destination. The influence of Cousteau’s list-making on dive tourism is arguably his most durable legacy, and the Blue Hole is the clearest...

Edinburgh: The Old Town, the Festival, and What to Do the Rest of the Year Edinburgh in the off-season is a better city than Edinburgh in August, and that is saying something because August is extraordinary. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe and International Festival generate three weeks of programming that brings 900,000-plus visitors to a city of 500,000, fills every venue, and turns the Royal Mile...

Vermont: Four Seasons, One Pattern Vermont’s tourism has a clear logic: skiing in winter, leaves in autumn, and hiking and farm experiences in between. Each season is genuinely good. The mistake is treating them as interchangeable; the state looks and feels entirely different in February than in October, and planning a Vermont trip without knowing which version you’re arriving for is...

Uluru: What the Rock Actually Is The numbers are 348 metres high and 9.4km in circumference, and they tell you almost nothing useful. The thing that makes Uluru genuinely astonishing is that it extends another 2.5 kilometres underground. What you see rising from the completely flat red scrubland is the exposed tip of a much larger sandstone monolith, and the way it sits in that landscape,...

The Zambezi River: Four Countries, One Journey Victoria Falls is the world’s largest waterfall by total sheet area – 1,708 metres wide and 108 metres high at maximum. By comparison, Niagara is 57 metres high. The comparison matters not to diminish Niagara but to make clear what scale of water movement the Zambezi produces at this point on its run from Zambia’s northwestern corner...

Sri Lanka: How to Structure a Two-Week Trip Sigiriya is not just a rock. It’s a 5th-century palace and fortress complex built by King Kashyapa on a 200-metre granite outcrop rising from flat jungle, constructed in 14 years between 477 and 495 CE, abandoned after Kashyapa’s death and preserved by its remoteness for 1,500 years. Halfway up, a sheltered gallery holds the Sigiriya Frescoes...

Marrakech: What to Expect When You Actually Arrive Marrakech is an excellent city to visit and a genuinely difficult one for first-timers who haven’t prepared. The medina is a working city, not a heritage museum, and it operates on its own logic: narrow alleys that are also motorcycle corridors, commercial transactions where the first price is always an opening position, and a social...

St Paul’s Cathedral: The Dome Built Despite the Objections The church authorities wanted a spire. Christopher Wren was given the official warrant to build a cathedral with a spire. He built a dome anyway. The warrant had a clause allowing for “ornamental rather than essential” changes during construction; Wren interpreted this to cover replacing the entire structural form of the...

Royal Ascot 2026 runs June 16 through June 20, and the dress code argument will be happening in approximately every newspaper’s fashion section for the preceding three weeks. This is a feature, not a bug: the spectacle of hats, morning dress, and elaborately coordinated outfits is as much the point as the horses, and anyone who arrives at the Royal Enclosure in a lounge suit will be politely...

The sunrise at Borobudur is a legitimate bucket-list experience and an industry. Operators from Yogyakarta offer early morning pickups that deliver you to the temple for dawn, the moment when mist rolls across the Kedu Plain and the volcano profiles of Merapi and Merbabu appear behind the stupa crowns. Photographs of this scene circulate widely enough to create specific expectations. The reality,...

Sigiriya: The Rock That King Kashyapa Built His Palace On Sigiriya is a 200-metre volcanic rock plug rising from the Sri Lankan jungle in the North Central Province. Between roughly 477 and 495 AD, King Kashyapa built his palace on the summit, surrounded the base with water gardens and boulder gardens, painted the cliff face with frescoes, and enclosed the whole complex with a series of defensive...

The Grand Canyon: South Rim vs North Rim, and What Actually Matters The Grand Canyon is 446 kilometres long, up to 29 kilometres wide, and up to 1,857 metres deep. The Colorado River has been cutting it for 5-6 million years, exposing rock layers up to 1.8 billion years old at the bottom. These statistics are accurate and insufficient. The visual experience of standing at the rim for the first...

Oxford: The University Is the City, and Vice Versa Oxford University is not a single institution with a campus. It is a federation of 38 colleges distributed across a city, and that distinction matters enormously when visiting. There is no main gate, no central visitor centre with a single ticket. What you can visit, and when, and for what cost, varies by college, by term time versus vacation, and...

Hagia Sophia: 1,500 Years of Reinvention in One Building Hagia Sophia has been a cathedral, a mosque, a museum, and since 2020, a working mosque again. None of those descriptions fully captures what the building is. Completed under Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in 537 AD, it held the record for the world’s largest dome for nearly a thousand years. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople...

Foteviken Viking Reserve: The Living Museum That Takes It Seriously Foteviken Viking Reserve is not on Gotland (as one might assume from a quick read). It is on the mainland Scanian coast of southern Sweden, at the edge of a bay called Foteviken about 30 kilometres south of Malmö. The reserve was established in 1995 and is unusual in the Viking heritage world for being a working community rather...

The Kalahari: Not Quite What “Desert” Usually Means The Kalahari is technically not a true desert. Annual rainfall across most of the region (200-500mm per year) exceeds the scientific threshold for desert classification. It is a fossil desert: an ancient sandy environment from a much drier period millions of years ago that retains characteristic red sand dunes and sparse vegetation...

Istanbul: Planning a Visit That Goes Beyond Sultanahmet Take the Bosphorus public ferry rather than the tourist cruise boats. The Sehir Hatlari service departs Eminonu, takes two hours to reach Anadolu Kavagi at the Black Sea entrance, passes under both Bosphorus suspension bridges, and travels past Ottoman-era waterfront mansions (yali) and the Rumeli Hisari fortress. The ticket costs 50-80...

Rapa Nui (Easter Island) sits 3,700 kilometres off the Chilean coast and is one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth. The flight from Santiago takes about 5 hours on LATAM Airlines, which operates the only regular service. Round-trip fares from Santiago run CLP 300,000-600,000 depending on season and advance booking. All visitors pay a USD 80 national park fee on arrival, granting access...

Santorini: The Honest Version The photographs of Santorini are real. The white-washed buildings, blue-domed churches, and caldera views are exactly what the images suggest. It is also genuinely overcrowded in summer, genuinely expensive, and genuinely difficult to navigate from one famous viewpoint to another without either a vehicle or considerable time. Oia: Go Early or Skip the Sunset Oia is on...

The Serengeti: The Migration Is Continuous, Not an Event Most visitors who book a Serengeti safari talk about seeing “the migration” as though it is a concert with a fixed date and venue. It isn’t. The Great Migration is a continuous year-round circular movement of approximately 1.5 million wildebeest, 250,000 zebra, and 500,000 gazelle driven by rainfall patterns and grass...

Registan Square: Samarkand’s Three-Faced Architectural Statement The Registan in Samarkand was the ceremonial centre of the Timurid empire and remains one of the most coherent examples of Islamic monumental architecture anywhere. Three madrasas (Islamic schools) face inward onto a square courtyard: the Ulugh Beg Madrasa (completed 1420), the Sher-Dor Madrasa (1636), and the Tilla-Kari...

Independence National Historical Park: The Rooms Where the Arguments Actually Happened The Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia covers about 45 acres in the old city and contains the most significant concentration of early American political history in the country. Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, Carpenters’ Hall, Congress Hall - all within a few blocks, mostly free,...

Waitomo Caves: Glowworms Underground in the Waikato The boat through the Waitomo glowworm grotto is silent, and the guide kills the headlamps when you enter the chamber. Overhead, thousands of bioluminescent larva – Arachnocampa luminosa, a fungus gnat that exists only in New Zealand – produce a ceiling that looks exactly like a star field seen through perfectly still water. The...

Moraine Lake: What Actually Getting There Requires From late May through October, private vehicles are no longer permitted to drive to Moraine Lake. Parks Canada banned private car access in 2023 due to unsustainable congestion and has maintained the restriction. This is the most important practical fact about visiting Moraine Lake, and it needs to lead any planning. The photograph – the...

Novgorod Kremlin: Russia’s Oldest Medieval City, and the Republic Moscow Erased Veliky Novgorod predates Moscow by several centuries and produced something historically rare: a medieval Russian city governed as a merchant republic. The Novgorod Republic, which ran from the 12th through the 15th centuries, operated with an elected prince, a popular assembly called the veche, and extensive...

Andorra is a co-principality jointly ruled since 1278 by the Bishop of Urgell and the Count of Foix – a medieval political arrangement that has survived into the 21st century intact, making it the only country in the world governed by two foreign heads of state simultaneously. The current Co-Princes are the Bishop of Urgell (Spain) and the President of France. This constitutional quirk is...

The cliffs are white because the chalk they’re made from was laid down in a warm shallow Cretaceous sea about 80 million years ago. They stretch for 8 kilometres along the Kent coast between Dover and St Margaret’s at Cliffe, reaching up to 107 metres at their highest. On the clearest days – roughly 80 per year in favourable conditions – you can see the French coast from...

Sossusvlei: The Dunes, the Light, and the Practical Details The dunes at Sossusvlei are not the colour you expect from a desert. They are deep orange and red, stained by iron oxide that has been oxidising for an estimated 5 million years, and they shift from near-white at midday to vivid burnt sienna at sunrise and a deeper red at dusk. The colour change is not subtle. Standing at Dead Vlei in the...

Yosemite: The Reservation System, the Crowds, and Why It’s Still Worth It Yosemite Valley is one of the most beautiful places in North America and one of the most logistically challenging national parks to visit. Four million people visit annually, the majority in July and August, and almost all of them go to the same 7-mile valley floor. The waterfalls, El Capitan, Half Dome, and the mirror...

Tokyo DisneySea: Why It’s Considered the Best Disney Park in the World Serious Disney park enthusiasts who have visited all 12 parks in the portfolio frequently argue that Tokyo DisneySea is the best of them. The argument is coherent: the park has a physical coherence that other Disney parks lack (a constructed harbour, an active volcano as centrepiece, seven themed areas with architectural...

Petronas Twin Towers: The Building, the Sky Bridge, and Kuala Lumpur Around It The Petronas Twin Towers were the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004, when they were surpassed by Taipei 101. At 452 metres (with spires), they remain the tallest twin towers in the world. Argentine architect Cesar Pelli designed them for the Malaysian national oil company Petronas; the Islamic geometric...