The Kaaba and Masjid al-Haram, Mecca Mecca is the holiest city in Islam and entry is restricted to Muslims. Non-Muslims are not permitted to enter the city limits, enforced at checkpoints on all approach roads. This is not a grey area and is not negotiable. Any guide to visiting Mecca and the Kaaba is therefore a guide for Muslim travellers, specifically those making Umrah (the lesser pilgrimage,...

Istanbul: Two Continents, One City, No Shortage of Opinions on Which Neighbourhood to Stay In Istanbul sits on two continents, with the Bosphorus running through the middle. The historic peninsula (Sultanahmet), where the Ottoman and Byzantine monuments cluster, is on the European side. Beyoglu, the 19th-century European-influenced district north of the Golden Horn, is also European. The Asian...

Monument Valley: Recognisable Before You Arrive You’ve seen the image: two sandstone buttes rising from a flat red plain, Forrest Gump jogging between them, John Wayne riding past them. Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park is the most photographed landscape in the American Southwest and one of the most photographed places on earth. It still impresses in person. The scale is different from what...

The Vasa Museum: A Ship That Sank After 20 Minutes and Became One of the World’s Best Museums The Vasa was a Swedish warship built for King Gustav II Adolf. It was the largest, most heavily armed, and most elaborately decorated warship in the Baltic when it launched in Stockholm on 10 August 1628. Twenty minutes and approximately 1,300 metres into its maiden voyage, it capsized and sank in...

Wawel Cathedral and Krakow: Poland’s Political and Spiritual Core Wawel Hill above the Vistula in central Krakow contains a cathedral and a royal castle on the same fortified outcrop, and together they function as the most historically loaded site in Poland. The cathedral has been the coronation and burial place of Polish monarchs since the 11th century. The castle was the seat of the Polish...

Mardi Gras in New Orleans: How It Actually Works Mardi Gras is not a single party on Bourbon Street. It’s a 12-day season of parades, balls, and events across the city, running from the Friday before Ash Wednesday through Fat Tuesday itself. Most first-time visitors show up for the final weekend and experience the most crowded, most expensive, and in some ways least interesting part of the...

The Jurassic Coast: Fossil Hunting Without the Fuss The Jurassic Coast runs 155km from Exmouth in Devon to Studland Bay in Dorset, and the whole thing is a geological textbook rendered in cliff faces. The eastern end near Charmouth and Lyme Regis exposes Jurassic shales stuffed with ammonites; the western Dorset end has Cretaceous chalk and the limestone arches. You can walk the length of it over...

Portmeirion: Clough Williams-Ellis’s Useful Folly Portmeirion is an Italianate village on the Dwyryd estuary in North Wales, built between 1925 and 1975 by architect Clough Williams-Ellis as a demonstration that a beautiful building development need not destroy its landscape. He bought the abandoned peninsula, salvaged architectural fragments from demolished buildings across Britain, and...

Cristo Redentor: Thirty Metres of Art Deco on Top of a Rainforest Mountain Christ the Redeemer stands at the summit of Corcovado mountain, 710 metres above Rio de Janeiro, with arms spread 28 metres wide. The statue is 30 metres tall on a base that adds another 8 metres. It is made of reinforced concrete covered in soapstone tiles; the tiles were chosen because they don’t crack in the...

Napa Valley: What to Do When You Can’t Get Into The French Laundry The French Laundry books out three months in advance and costs around $400 per person before wine. That’s fine. Napa has enough excellent eating and drinking that you don’t need Thomas Keller’s tasting menu to have a seriously good trip. The Wineries Napa has around 400 wineries and the quality gap between...

The Acropolis: Managing Expectations About Crowds Without Diminishing the Parthenon The Athenian Acropolis, a limestone outcrop 156 metres above sea level, has held temples since at least the 7th century BCE. The buildings you see today (principally the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, the Temple of Athena Nike, and the Propylaea gateway) were mostly built between 447 and 406 BCE under the programme...

The Panama Canal: Engineering That Still Impresses The Panama Canal opened in 1914, and the engineering logic behind it remains remarkable. Rather than cutting through at sea level (which the French had catastrophically attempted earlier), the American engineers built a series of locks to lift ships 26 metres up to the artificial Gatun Lake, cross the isthmus, then lower them down the other side....

Lençóis Maranhenses is one of those places that feels like it shouldn’t exist: a field of white sand dunes in equatorial Brazil that fills every year with thousands of translucent blue and green lagoons. The dunes are pushed inland from the coast by trade winds. The rains come from January through June, collecting in the depressions between dunes where impermeable rock prevents drainage. By...

The Seine: Paris’s Organizing Principle The Seine runs 775km total, but the 13km through Paris is the city’s spine. Notre-Dame sits on the Ile de la Cite in the middle of the river; the Louvre faces the Right Bank; the Musee d’Orsay faces the Left Bank from a converted railway terminus. Everything relates to the water. Walking along the quais (embankments) from the eastern tip of...

The 9/11 Memorial and Museum, Lower Manhattan The World Trade Center site covers 16 acres in Lower Manhattan, about a 10-minute walk from the Wall Street subway stations. The two reflecting pools — occupying the exact footprints of the Twin Towers — are the Memorial. The museum is below ground, in the bedrock and foundation spaces where the towers stood. One World Trade Center, the tallest...

The Kremlin: Russia’s Power Centre, Open to Tourists on Three Sides The Moscow Kremlin is a working government complex and the official residence of the Russian president. The tours go around and into the historical and religious sections; the Senate and other government buildings visible from inside the walls are not accessible. This still leaves a substantial amount to see. The walls run...

The Gateway Arch, St. Louis: Engineering the West’s Symbol The Gateway Arch is 192 metres tall, which makes it taller than the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty. The engineering required to build it between 1963 and 1965 was genuinely difficult: the two legs had to be constructed simultaneously and meet precisely at the apex, which required calculations at the limits of what was...

Madrid: What to Do Beyond the Obvious Madrid rewards people who stay for a week rather than a weekend. The Prado alone deserves two full visits, the neighbourhoods are all different, and the city runs on a schedule that will fight your body clock for the first three days. Dinner before 9pm marks you as a tourist. Embrace it or resist it; either way, you’ll eventually adapt. The Art Triangle...

Paphos: Cyprus’s Archaeological West Coast Paphos sits on the southwestern corner of Cyprus, about 150km from Nicosia and a 40-minute drive from Limassol. It held the title of European Capital of Culture in 2017 and the resulting investment in museums and infrastructure has improved the visitor experience considerably. The main draw is the concentration of Roman and Hellenistic archaeology,...

The Library of Congress holds more than 170 million items, making it the largest library in the world by collection size. Most visitors come for the Thomas Jefferson Building, which is the one that deserves it: a late 19th-century Italian Renaissance structure whose Great Hall is among the most elaborate interiors in Washington. Entry is free. The Thomas Jefferson Building Completed in 1897 on...

Waitomo Caves: Glowworms Underground in the Waikato The Waitomo Caves on New Zealand’s North Island are a system of limestone caverns that have been forming over 30 million years. The main draw is the glowworm grotto: a chamber in the Waitomo Glowworm Caves where Arachnocampa luminosa, a bioluminescent fungus gnat larva found only in New Zealand, creates a ceiling that looks like a star...

The Great Wildebeest Migration: Planning a Trip That Actually Delivers About 1.5 million wildebeest, plus hundreds of thousands of zebras and gazelles, move in a rough clockwise circuit between the Serengeti in Tanzania and the Maasai Mara in Kenya throughout the year. It’s called the Great Migration, and the marketing around it tends to oversell the drama while underselling how much timing...

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 interchangeably; the state looks and feels entirely different in February than in October. Fall Foliage Mid-September to mid-October is when the sugar maple, birch, and beech canopy...

The Gold Museum, Bogotá: Better Than You Expect The Museo del Oro del Banco de la República (Gold Museum) holds the largest collection of pre-Hispanic gold work in the world: around 55,000 pieces, of which about 6,000 are on display at any time. The Muisca people of the eastern Colombian highlands were the primary producers — their goldwork, including the famous ceremonial raft that gave rise to...

Picos de Europa: Northern Spain’s Overlooked Mountain Range The Picos de Europa sit in the Cantabrian Mountains, straddling the borders of Asturias, Cantabria, and Castilla y León, about 20km from the Bay of Biscay coast. The name (“Peaks of Europe”) supposedly comes from returning Spanish sailors who spotted them on the horizon as the first European landmark visible from sea....

Icehotel Jukkasjärvi: What It’s Actually Like to Sleep at -5°C The Icehotel is 200km north of the Arctic Circle, 17km from Kiruna in Swedish Lapland. It’s rebuilt every November from around 5,000 tonnes of ice harvested from the Torne River. By April, when temperatures rise, it melts back into the water. The 2012 addition of Icehotel 365 means part of the complex now stays open...

Preikestolen (Pulpit Rock): What the Hike Is Actually Like Preikestolen is a flat-topped cliff rising 604 metres above Lysefjord in Rogaland, Norway. The name translates as Pulpit Rock, for the roughly rectangular platform at the summit — about 25 by 25 metres of flat stone with a 604-metre sheer drop on three sides and no barrier or railing of any kind. Around 300,000 people hike to it each year,...

Ruta de las Flores: El Salvador’s Coffee Highlands Route The Ruta de las Flores is a 36km stretch of highway (CA-8) through the western Apaneca-Ilamatepec mountain range, connecting the towns of Nahuizalco, Salcoatitán, Juayúa, Apaneca, and Ataco. The altitude here sits between 1,000 and 2,000 metres above sea level, which means cool temperatures, coffee plantations, and the profusion of...

Millau Viaduct: The Tallest Bridge in the World, In the Right Valley The Millau Viaduct opened in December 2004 and still holds the record for the world’s tallest bridge: the tallest mast rises 343 metres above the ground, 19 metres higher than the Eiffel Tower. The deck spans 2,460 metres across the Tarn valley. Norman Foster designed it; the construction took three years. Driving across it...

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...

Walt Disney World: The Logistics Are the Product Walt Disney World covers 27,000 acres southwest of Orlando — roughly twice the area of Manhattan. Four theme parks, two water parks, four golf courses, 30+ hotels, and more restaurants than many mid-sized cities. Disney’s operational model depends on extracting money from guests continuously while making them feel they’re getting...

Kerala: India’s Most Tourist-Friendly State, and Still Worth It Kerala has been doing responsible tourism longer than almost anywhere in India. The state is compact (560km north to south, averaging 35km wide), literate, and has public transport that actually functions. It is also, objectively, very beautiful. The backwaters, the hill stations, the coast, and the food alone justify the trip....

The Windy City: A Traveler’s Guide to Chicago Chicago, the third-largest city in the United States, is a world-class destination that offers something for everyone. From its striking lakefront architecture to its deep cultural heritage, there is no shortage of things to see, eat, and do in this remarkable midwestern city. Where to Visit Millennium Park: Opened in 2004 on the former site of...

Etosha: Self-Drive Safari on a Salt Pan Etosha National Park is 22,270 square kilometres of semi-arid savannah and thornbush in northern Namibia, anchored by the Etosha Pan — a vast salt flat that was once a shallow lake and is now white, flat, and mostly empty except after the rainy season. The park holds lion, leopard, cheetah, black rhinoceros, elephant, giraffe, zebra, several antelope...

Kolmanskop, Namibia: Where the Desert Swallowed a Diamond Town Kolmanskop is a German colonial settlement that was abandoned in the 1950s, after the diamond deposits that sustained it ran out. The Namib Desert has been reclaiming it ever since. Walking through the houses now, you find drifts of fine sand up to window height in some rooms, filling hallways and pressing against interior walls. The...

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-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...

Studley Royal Park and Fountains Abbey, North Yorkshire Fountains Abbey is the largest and most complete ruined abbey in England. That’s not a small claim. Founded by Cistercian monks in 1132 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539, the sandstone complex covers several acres of the Skell valley. What makes it unusual is that the ruins are embedded within a formal 18th-century water garden —...

Mount Rushmore: Sixty-Foot Presidents in the Black Hills The four presidential faces carved into the granite of the Black Hills, Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln, each stand around 18 metres tall. Gutzon Borglum began dynamiting the mountain in 1927 and the project ran until 1941, the year he died. His son Lincoln finished it. The carving used about 450,000 tons of blasted rock. The...

Siena Cathedral: Go Early, Stay Long The Duomo di Siena is one of the most extravagant Gothic buildings in Italy, and unlike Rome or Florence, you can often have it nearly to yourself. Siena gets far fewer tourists than it deserves, which is good news for everyone who shows up. The cathedral sits at the top of the city’s main hill, visible from most of the Campo below. Inside the Cathedral...

Sagrada Família: Still Under Construction After 140 Years Antoni Gaudí took over the design of the Sagrada Família in 1883 and worked on it until his death in 1926, when he was hit by a tram. He’s buried in the crypt below. At that point the building was perhaps 25% complete. Work has continued since, guided by Gaudí’s models and drawings (many destroyed in the Spanish Civil War,...

Murchison Falls, Uganda: The Nile Through a Narrow Gap Uganda’s largest national park covers about 3,840 square kilometres across the Albertine rift valley, and the centrepiece is the falls themselves: the entire volume of the White Nile forced through a 7-metre gap in the rocks before dropping 43 metres. The noise and spray hit you before you see it. Ernest Hemingway survived a plane crash...

David Gareja sits about 110km southeast of Tbilisi on the edge of the Gareja Desert, a semi-arid plateau that spills into Azerbaijan. Getting there takes roughly 2 hours by car on roads that are fine until the last stretch, which is dirt track. There is no public transport that goes all the way; shared taxis from Tbilisi’s Isani or Samgori metro stations serve nearby villages, but...

Iguazu Falls: Argentina vs Brazil, and Which Side is Better Iguazu Falls straddles the border between Argentina and Misiones province and the Brazilian state of Parana. Both sides offer access; they are genuinely different experiences and the honest answer is that you should do both if you have two days. The Argentine side has more walking. The circuit system runs along the upper and lower...

Luang Prabang: UNESCO Town on the Mekong Luang Prabang sits where the Nam Khan meets the Mekong, about 300km north of Vientiane, and is probably the most liveable small city in Southeast Asia. The peninsula is compact enough to walk across in 20 minutes, dense with French colonial shophouses and Buddhist temples, and the surrounding mountains keep the temperature a few degrees cooler than the...

Green Park: The Royal Park That Doesn’t Try Too Hard Green Park is the simplest of the central London Royal Parks and the better for it. No lake, no formal gardens, no cafe in the middle. Forty hectares of grass, mature plane and lime trees, and deck chairs for hire in summer. The absence of spectacle is the point. Between Westminster and Mayfair, it functions as a corridor and breathing...

Sacre-Coeur and Montmartre: Managing One of Paris’s Most Overrun Hills Sacre-Coeur sits at the top of Montmartre and is free to enter. The dome is worth the climb for views across Paris; on a clear day you can see 30-40km. The queues for the interior are usually 20-30 minutes in high season; arrive before 09:30 or after 17:00 to reduce that. The exterior is more impressive than the interior...

Mount Fuji: Climbing Japan’s Most Famous Volcano Honestly Mount Fuji stands 3,776 metres above sea level on Honshu, roughly equidistant between Tokyo and Nagoya. It is a stratovolcano, last erupted in 1707, and is considered active. It is the highest mountain in Japan, a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site, and the most climbed significant peak in the world by annual ascent numbers (around...

Meiji Jingu, Tokyo: Quiet in the Middle of Everything Meiji Jingu is a Shinto shrine dedicated to the deified spirits of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken, completed in 1920. It sits in the middle of roughly 70 hectares of forested parkland in Shibuya-ku, minutes from Harajuku station — which means it’s surrounded by one of the most frenetic retail districts in the world. The contrast is the...

The Zocalo: Mexico City’s Civic Centre and How to Use It The Zocalo (Plaza de la Constitucion) is one of the largest public squares in the world, 240 by 240 metres, and sits at the heart of the Centro Historico. It was the centre of Aztec Tenochtitlan and has remained the political and ceremonial core of the city through Spanish colonialism and into the present republic. Massive national...

Delhi: The City That Overwhelms, Then Rewards Delhi is the capital, the largest metropolitan area in India, and for many travellers the first point of entry into the subcontinent. It’s genuinely chaotic, absorbing, and full of extraordinary things. It also has terrible traffic, poor air quality for much of the year, and a scale that makes navigation confusing unless you use the metro. Once...