Gaspé Peninsula: 900 Kilometres of Coastline in Francophone Quebec The Gaspé Peninsula (Péninsule de la Gaspésie) juts into the Gulf of St. Lawrence from eastern Quebec, bounded by the St. Lawrence River to the north and Baie des Chaleurs to the south. The peninsula is about 250 kilometres long and 100 kilometres wide at its widest point. The coastline road (Route 132) circles the entire peninsula...

Le Mont Saint-Michel: Tides, Crowds, and Why You Should Stay the Night Le Mont Saint-Michel receives about 3.5 million visitors a year, making it France’s second most visited site after Versailles. Almost all of them arrive between 10am and 5pm and leave before evening. This creates a specific situation: during the day the island is genuinely overcrowded, the main street (Grande Rue) is...

The Pantheon: Still Standing, Now Charging EUR 5 The Pantheon was built in 125 CE by the emperor Hadrian on the site of an earlier temple from 27 BCE. The inscription on the portico still reads M AGRIPPA L F COS TERTIUM FECIT - Agrippa’s claim of credit for the original structure. The dome’s oculus, an 8.8-metre circular opening in the roof, remains the only source of light inside the...

Phnom Penh: A Capital That Has Rebuilt Itself Phnom Penh’s history over the last fifty years is one of the most dramatic of any city in the world. Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge evacuated the entire population of the capital - then around 2 million people - on the first day of their seizure of power. The city was left empty. What followed was four years of genocide in which...

Salar de Uyuni: The World’s Largest Salt Flat, and Why the Rainy Season Is the Right Time to Visit At 10,582 square kilometres and an elevation of 3,656 metres, the Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat on earth by a substantial margin. The salar was formed by the drying of several prehistoric lakes, and the salt crust is between 2 and 10 metres thick, sitting on a brine lake that holds an...

Tsukiji: The Outer Market Still Exists, the Inner Market Moved The most important thing to know about Tsukiji in 2024 is that the famous wholesale tuna auction moved to the new Toyosu Market in 2018. If you are specifically hoping to watch the early-morning tuna auction, you need to go to Toyosu in Koto ward, not Tsukiji. Toyosu allows a limited number of visitors per day (60 at the time of...

Punakha Dzong: Bhutan’s Most Beautiful Fortress, at the Confluence of Two Rivers Bhutan has 20 dzongs - fortress-monasteries that serve simultaneously as administrative centres, religious institutions, and architectural statements of temporal and spiritual authority. Punakha Dzong is the oldest complete dzong in the country, founded in 1637 by Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal (the Tibetan monk who...

Exploring Bamburgh Castle: A Guide to Northumberland’s Finest Fortress Bamburgh Castle rises from a basalt outcrop on the Northumberland coast, its red sandstone walls commanding views across the North Sea to the Farne Islands and south toward Holy Island. The site has been fortified since at least the 6th century, when it served as a royal seat of the Kingdom of Northumbria. The Normans...

Monteverde Cloud Forest: What a Cloud Forest Actually Is, and Why the Quetzal Matters Monteverde sits on the Continental Divide in the Tilarán Mountain Range at an elevation of about 1,500 metres. The Pacific trade winds hit the mountains here and push clouds up the western slope; the cloud forest exists because the vegetation is bathed in mist and rain almost continuously. The result is a forest...

Leshan Giant Buddha: The Largest Stone Buddha in the World, and Why a Monk Built It The Leshan Giant Buddha (Dafo) was carved into a cliff face of red sandstone between 713 and 803 CE. The monk Haitong initiated the project with a specific practical purpose: the confluence of the Min, Dadu, and Qingyi rivers at the base of the cliff created dangerous currents that sank boats. Haitong believed a...

Milan’s Duomo: Six Centuries of Building, One Genuinely Good Rooftop The Duomo di Milano is the third-largest cathedral in the world and took nearly 600 years to complete (construction started in 1386, final details were finished under Napoleon in 1805). The facade has 135 spires and around 3,400 statues, the largest of which, the Madonnina, stands gold-plated at the very top at 108 metres....

Piazza San Marco: The Drawing Room of Europe, and Why You Should Leave It Napoleon reportedly called Piazza San Marco the drawing room of Europe, which is accurate and slightly dismissive in equal measure. It is magnificent - the Basilica, the Doge’s Palace, the two columns with their columns of the Lion of Saint Mark and Saint Theodore of Amasea, the Campanile, the Procuratie arcades...

The Whitsundays: 74 Islands, One Exceptional Beach, and How to Use Your Time There The Whitsunday Islands are 74 continental islands sitting within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, approximately 1,000 kilometres north of Brisbane off the central Queensland coast. They are not coral atolls; they are drowned hills from a time when sea levels were lower, which means they have forested interiors,...

Stonehenge: Smaller Than You Think, More Interesting Than You Expect Stonehenge was built in multiple phases between roughly 3000 and 1500 BCE. The famous stone circle - the sarsen stones up to seven metres tall, and the smaller bluestones - was assembled around 2500 BCE. The bluestones came from the Preseli Hills in Wales, 250 kilometres away; how they were moved remains debated. The sarsen...

Kerala’s Backwaters: The Houseboat Question, Answered Honestly The Kerala backwaters cover about 1,900 kilometres of interconnected rivers, canals, lagoons, and lakes between Kollam in the south and Kasaragod in the north. The star of the tourist version of this landscape is Vembanad Lake, which stretches 96 kilometres and connects Alappuzha (Alleppey) to Kumarakom. The houseboat industry...

Headlands International Dark Sky Park: 600 Acres of Genuine Darkness on Lake Michigan Dark sky designations are given by the International Dark-Sky Association to places that actively protect night sky quality through light pollution reduction policies. The Headlands, a 600-acre property on the Lake Michigan shore near Mackinaw City in northern Michigan, was one of the first dark sky parks in the...

The Jungfrau Region: How to Spend Your Money Less Badly on Switzerland’s Most Expensive Train The Jungfraujoch train ticket is one of the most expensive single train journeys in the world for its distance: around CHF 230 return from Interlaken to the saddle at 3,454 metres. Whether it is worth it depends on two things: the weather and your expectations. On a clear day, the panorama from the...

The Acropolis: One of the Genuinely Overrun Sites Worth Visiting Anyway The Acropolis of Athens gets around 10,000 visitors on a typical summer day, all of them funnelled up a single path through the Propylaea to the 2,500-year-old limestone plateau at the top. It is crowded, the stone is hot underfoot, and the Parthenon is surrounded by scaffolding that has been there for decades. None of this...

Salisbury Cathedral: Built in 38 Years, Which Is Why It Looks Like One Building Most medieval English cathedrals were constructed over centuries, with different sections reflecting different architectural periods. Salisbury Cathedral is unusual: the main nave, choir, transepts, and east end were built in a single sustained campaign between 1220 and 1258. The result is a building with an unusual...

Faneuil Hall and the Freedom Trail: The Correct Way to Do Boston’s Historic Core Faneuil Hall is a brick meeting house built in 1742 by Peter Faneuil, a Boston merchant, and donated to the city. It is not primarily a shopping destination, though the tourist literature tends to present it that way. The hall on the upper floor is where Samuel Adams and James Otis gave speeches opposing British...

The Blue Lagoon: What It Actually Is and Whether You Should Go The Blue Lagoon is not a natural lake. It is the overflow from the Svartsengi geothermal power plant, built in 1976, where seawater is pumped from the ground and used to generate electricity and heat. The warm, mineral-rich water discharged from the plant collected in the surrounding lava field and turned a vivid milky blue from the...

Lake Titicaca: At 3,812 Metres, the World’s Highest Large Lake, and How to See It Properly Lake Titicaca straddles the Peru-Bolivia border at an altitude of 3,812 metres on the Altiplano, the high plateau that stretches between the western and eastern branches of the Andes. The lake covers 8,372 square kilometres and is 180 kilometres long. The altitude has a specific effect: the sky is...

Chicago: Architecture, Food, and the Best Lake in Any City Chicago sits on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, its skyline reflected in water that stretches to the horizon. The city has more architecturally significant buildings than almost anywhere outside Manhattan, a food scene that routinely outranks its East Coast rivals, and a grid street system that makes navigation straightforward...

Windsor Castle: Still Working, Still Worth the Trip Windsor Castle is not a ruin or a museum in the conventional sense. It is the oldest and largest occupied castle in the world, and the Royal Family uses it regularly, which creates a planning headache visitors often underestimate. The State Apartments close when the King is in residence, which happens without much advance notice. Check the...

Discover the Bay of Islands, New Zealand The Bay of Islands sits in the Northland region of New Zealand, roughly three hours north of Auckland by road. It is a collection of 144 islands scattered across a deep harbour, where warm subtropical waters, dense coastal forest, and a long history of Maori and European settlement combine to make it one of the country’s most rewarding destinations....

Giant’s Causeway: 40,000 Hexagonal Columns and the Mythology That Makes More Sense Than the Geology The geology explanation is solid: 50 to 60 million years ago, lava flows cooled and contracted, cracking into hexagonal columns. The myth explanation is better: the Irish giant Fionn Mac Cumhaill built a causeway across the North Channel to fight his Scottish rival Benandonner, then disguised...

Kerala: One State, Several Completely Different Landscapes Kerala runs 580 kilometres along the southwest coast of India and covers everything from the Arabian Sea backwaters at sea level to the Cardamom Hills at 2,695 metres. The climate at the coast and the climate in Munnar are nothing alike. Most visitors spend their entire trip in two of these zones; the interesting choice is which two. Kochi...

Vieux-Québec: The Only Fortified City North of Mexico, on a Cliff Above the St. Lawrence Old Quebec (Vieux-Québec) sits on a headland of Cap Diamant, where the St. Lawrence River narrows enough to be effectively defensible. Samuel de Champlain understood this in 1608 when he established the French settlement here; the British understood it when they built the fortification walls that still stand;...

South Luangwa: Where the Walking Safari Was Invented South Luangwa National Park covers 9,050 square kilometres of the Luangwa Valley in eastern Zambia, bounded on the east by the Luangwa River, which forms a natural barrier and a permanent water source. The park has one of the highest concentrations of wildlife in Africa and is widely regarded as one of the best safari destinations on the...

Beijing: How to Plan Your Time Around Three Thousand Years of Continuous History Beijing has been a major city since the 3rd century BCE and the capital of China for most of the past 700 years. The density of significant sites is extraordinary: you can walk from the Forbidden City to Tiananmen Square to the Temple of Heaven to the Lama Temple in a single day and still have the Summer Palace, the...

The Smithsonian: 19 Museums, All Free, and Most People See Only Three The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum complex: 19 museums, 21 libraries, 9 research centres, and the National Zoo. Total holdings are around 155 million objects. Annual visitors number around 28 million. Everything on the National Mall is free. The question is not whether to go but which museums to...

Otago Peninsula: The Royal Albatross, the Yellow-Eyed Penguin, and a Genuinely Victorian Castle The Otago Peninsula is a long, hilly tongue of land extending 25 kilometres into the Pacific southeast of Dunedin, enclosing Otago Harbour on its northern side. The harbour makes Dunedin one of the few New Zealand cities where a significant body of water is landlocked rather than open coast, and the...

Berlin: A City That Has Been Rebuilt From Almost Nothing Three Times in 80 Years Berlin was bombed to rubble in World War Two, rebuilt as two separate cities divided by a wall from 1961 to 1989, then merged and rebuilt again after reunification. The consequence of this layered destruction and reconstruction is a city with almost no intact pre-war streetscape but an extraordinary density of...

Whakarewarewa Forest: Giant Californian Redwoods in the Middle of New Zealand The redwoods at Whakarewarewa were planted in 1901 as a forestry trial by the government of the day. The experiment was to see which imported species would grow fastest for timber use. The Californian coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) are now over 70 metres tall, and the forest around them is one of the best mountain...

Mosteiro dos Jerónimos: Lisbon’s Manueline Masterpiece in Belém The monastery took a century to build and was paid for almost entirely with the proceeds of the spice trade. That context matters when you stand in front of it: Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to India in 1498, and within a few years the Portuguese crown was rich enough to commission one of the most elaborate stone buildings...

Mostar’s Old Bridge: Built in 1566, Destroyed in 1993, Rebuilt in 2004 Stari Most (the Old Bridge) crossed the Neretva River in Mostar for 427 years until 9 November 1993, when Croatian Defence Council artillery deliberately destroyed it during the Bosnian War. The reconstruction, completed in July 2004 using the original Ottoman technique and stone from the same quarry in Tenelija, is now a...

Mont-Saint-Michel and the Normandy Coast: One Visit, Two Very Different Histories Mont-Saint-Michel sits at the boundary between Normandy and Brittany, which puts it in an interesting position for any trip to northern France. The medieval abbey on its tidal rock is one thing. The D-Day landing beaches 120 kilometres to the east are another. A week’s drive taking in both covers the two most...

Palawan: Two Very Different Islands, One Province Palawan is a province of the Philippines consisting of a long main island and several hundred smaller ones. The name covers a geography that is too large to experience in a single trip; visitors have to choose between the two main destinations - El Nido in the north and Coron in the northeast - and they are significantly different from each other....

Lascaux: Why You Cannot See the Real Thing, and Why You Should Go Anyway The original Lascaux cave was discovered in September 1940 by four teenagers following their dog through a hole in the ground near Montignac in the Dordogne. The paintings inside - 600 figures including horses, bulls, deer, and a rhinoceros - are 17,000 years old. By 1963, the carbon dioxide from 1,200 daily visitors had...

Yellowstone: A Supervolcano With Geysers and Very Assertive Bison Yellowstone was established as a national park in 1872, the first in the world. It sits mostly in Wyoming, with edges in Montana and Idaho, and covers 9,000 square kilometres of active geothermal landscape sitting above one of the largest volcanic hotspots on earth. The last major eruption was 640,000 years ago. The geothermal...

Gettysburg: Three Days in 1863 That Changed the United States, and How to See the Ground The Battle of Gettysburg, fought July 1 to 3, 1863, produced the highest casualty total of any engagement in the American Civil War: approximately 23,000 Union casualties and 28,000 Confederate casualties across three days of fighting. The Army of the Potomac’s successful defence of the high ground south...

Murchison Falls: Where the Nile Gets Compressed Into Seven Metres Murchison Falls National Park is Uganda’s largest at 3,840 square kilometres, divided by the Victoria Nile which cuts through the centre from east to west. The falls themselves occur where the entire volume of the Nile - carrying around 300 cubic metres of water per second in the wet season - is forced through a seven-metre...

Tower of London: More Than Ravens and Crown Jewels The Tower of London has been a royal palace, fortress, prison, mint, menagerie, and execution site across its 950-year history. William the Conqueror started the White Tower in 1078. Two queens (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard) were beheaded here. Rudolf Hess was its last prisoner, in 1941. The Crown Jewels have been stored here since the 13th...

Glacier Bay: Where the Ice Has Retreated 120 Kilometres in 250 Years In 1750, Glacier Bay was a single massive glacier filling the entire inlet. By 1794 when George Vancouver charted the coastline, the ice had retreated about 8 kilometres. By 1916, it had retreated 105 kilometres. Today the main bay is open water reaching 65 kilometres into the mountains, with glacier arms branching off into side...

Waitomo Caves: What the Glowworms Actually Are, and What You Do in the Dark The glowworm grotto at Waitomo is one of the most replicated photographs in New Zealand tourism: a boat moving silently through an underground river while thousands of blue-green lights reflect in the black water above. The photographs are accurate. What they do not convey is the context, which is worth knowing before you...

Córdoba: What Remains of the Most Sophisticated City in Medieval Europe In the 10th century, Córdoba was the largest city in western Europe, possibly the most sophisticated city in the world at that moment. The Caliphate of Córdoba at its height had a population of around 500,000, a library of 400,000 volumes, street lighting, public baths, and a court that functioned as a centre of astronomy,...

Meiji Jingu: 70 Hectares of Forest in the Middle of Tokyo Meiji Jingu was completed in 1920, twelve years after the death of Emperor Meiji, whose reign (1868-1912) oversaw Japan’s transformation from feudal isolationism to industrialised world power. The shrine is dedicated to the spirits of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken. It was destroyed in the air raids of 1945 and rebuilt in 1958 to...

Lalibela: Eleven Churches Carved Downward into Rock, Still in Use The 11 rock-hewn churches of Lalibela were carved from living volcanic tuff in the 12th and 13th centuries during the reign of King Lalibela, who reigned roughly 1185 to 1225. The structures were not built upward from the ground; they were carved downward - excavating into the plateau to expose the rock, then carving the church...

Blackpool Tower: The North’s Most Improbable Landmark, and What’s Inside It Blackpool Tower opened in 1894, inspired by the Eiffel Tower which had been built five years earlier. At 158 metres it is significantly shorter than its Parisian counterpart, but the design principle is similar: a wrought iron lattice tower on a wide base, with viewing platforms and a revolving restaurant near...

Copper Canyon: Bigger Than the Grand Canyon, Seen by Far Fewer People The Barrancas del Cobre system in the Sierra Madre Occidental covers around 65,000 square kilometres and comprises six interconnected canyons, four of which are deeper than the Grand Canyon. The canyon walls are streaked with green and copper-coloured minerals in wet season - hence the name. The Rarámuri (Tarahumara) people have...