Death Valley National Park Death Valley holds the verified world record for highest air temperature: 56.7 degrees Celsius recorded in July 1913 at Furnace Creek. It sits at the lowest point in North America (Badwater Basin, 86 metres below sea level). The park covers 13,600 square kilometres of desert, salt flat, and mountain range in eastern California and Nevada. People die here every summer...

Rio Carnival is not one event. It is at minimum three simultaneous events in the same city at the same time, serving different crowds at different price points, with different music and different densities of people. The mistake most first-time visitors make is treating it as a single thing and either spending most of their budget on Sambodrome tickets or wandering into the mega-blocos with their...

Burning Man, Black Rock Desert, Nevada Burning Man is not a festival in any conventional sense. It is a temporary city of 70,000-plus people built from scratch in a high-altitude desert playa in northern Nevada, governed by a set of principles (radical self-reliance, gifting, leaving no trace among the core ten) that make it function completely differently from any other mass gathering on earth....

Castle Combe, Wiltshire Castle Combe has been winning England’s prettiest village competitions since at least the 1960s, which means it wins them regularly and the judges have a point. The medieval wool-trade prosperity that built the Perpendicular Gothic church, the market cross, and the tight cluster of honey-coloured limestone cottages is still visible in the preservation. The village has...

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

Faneuil Hall is not primarily a shopping destination. The tourist literature tends to present it that way, but the brick meeting house built in 1742 is where Samuel Adams and James Otis gave speeches opposing British taxation in the years before the Revolution, where Frederick Douglass spoke against slavery in the 1850s, and where the hall has been in near-continuous use as a public meeting space...

The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg: A Different Approach to One of the World’s Largest Collections The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is the second-largest art museum in the world by collection size, and one of the most architecturally overwhelming. Unlike the Louvre, where the collection grew into a building that had existed for other purposes, the Hermitage’s core building...

Bali’s Rice Paddies: Which Ones Are Worth Your Time The Instagram economy has done something specific to Tegalalang: it has turned a genuinely beautiful rice terrace 8 kilometres north of Ubud into a destination where you pay separately to sit on a swing over the paddy for a photograph. The terraces are real, the landscape is real, and the experience involves several hundred other people and...

Bryce Canyon National Park Bryce Canyon sits at roughly 9,000 feet above sea level on the Paunsaugunt Plateau in southern Utah, which means two things: the air is thin enough that a short hike feels harder than expected, and the night sky is dark enough that the Milky Way shows up as a thick smear of light even to the naked eye. It was designated an International Dark Sky Park in 2019, and the...

Arthur Conan Doyle used Mount Roraima as the basis for The Lost World in 1912, imagining a plateau summit so isolated it had evolved its own prehistoric fauna. The biological isolation part was accurate. The summit ecosystem of Roraima has been cut off from the surrounding lowland jungle long enough that endemic species of bromeliads, carnivorous plants, frogs, and insects exist nowhere else on...

Phu Quoc Island, Vietnam Phu Quoc produces the fish sauce that much of Southeast Asian cooking depends on. The waters around this island in the Gulf of Thailand are anchovy-rich, and the fermentation process that turns those fish into nuoc mam has been practised here for centuries. Most visitors drive past the fish sauce factories on the road south from Duong Dong without stopping. They should...

Bran Castle, Transylvania Bram Stoker never visited Transylvania. He wrote his 1897 novel using research notes and secondary sources while on holiday in Whitby, England. Vlad the Impaler – the 15th-century Wallachian prince whose reputation for brutal execution inspired some aspects of the count’s character – had only the most tenuous documented connection to Bran Castle. The...

The Night Watch (1642) is not being restored in a back room while visitors see a replica in the gallery. Since 2019, Operation Night Watch has been conducted in full public view inside the Gallery of Honour, with a glass conservation studio built around the painting so that visitors can watch conservators working on it from a few metres away. The restoration is ongoing and the painting is there,...

Bratislava Castle The castle sits on a hill above the Danube with four corner towers and white rendered walls, and when you approach Bratislava from Vienna by train, which takes 1 hour and costs about EUR 15, it is the first thing you see through the window. This positioning is deliberate: the hill was a strategic control point over the Danube crossing and the Great Moravian empire and then the...

The Blue Mosque, Istanbul The Blue Mosque (Sultan Ahmet Camii) has six minarets, which caused a diplomatic incident when it was completed in 1616. The Kaaba in Mecca had six minarets. Sultan Ahmed I had either failed to specify the number clearly to his architect or – depending on which version of the story you prefer – the architect heard “altin” (gold) and built...

On any peak-season evening, the Byzantine castle ruins at the western end of Oia village fill with 2,000 to 3,000 people waiting for the sunset photograph. The sunset is beautiful. The experience of taking it surrounded by thousands of other people with phones is not. Managing Oia well is primarily a question of timing. The Sunset Problem The castle viewpoint was manageable before Santorini became...

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam The Van Gogh Museum holds 200 paintings, 500 drawings, and around 700 personal letters by Vincent van Gogh. The collection came primarily from Vincent’s brother Theo and then Theo’s widow Jo Bonger, who spent decades organising and promoting the work after Vincent’s death in 1890. The letters – to Theo, to Émile Bernard, to Paul Gauguin –...

The Trans-Siberian Railway The train that runs from Moscow to Vladivostok covers 9,289 kilometres, crosses seven time zones, and takes approximately six days and two hours on the flagship Rossiya service. The railway was 25 years in construction, completed in 1916, and changed the economic and political geography of Russia’s east more fundamentally than any other single infrastructure...

The Nazca Lines, Peru The practical problem with the Nazca Lines is that they are only properly visible from the air. From ground level, the scale defeats the eye; you see line segments but not the complete forms. The observation tower on the Pan-American highway gives you a view of three small figures. The overflight gives you the hummingbird with its 66-metre wingspan, the spider 46 metres wide,...

Alhambra de Granada The most important practical information about visiting the Alhambra is this: the daily admission to the Nasrid Palaces is capped, tickets sell out weeks or months before the date online, and if you arrive without one you will spend the day in the gardens and fortress while everyone else goes inside the palace. Book at tickets.alhambra-patronato.es at least a month ahead,...

The Grand Bazaar (Kapalıçarşı) was first established in 1455, two years after Mehmed II conquered Constantinople. The spatial disorientation visitors experience inside its 61 streets and 4,000 shops is not a design flaw; covered bazaar architecture was deliberately built to be labyrinthine, slowing movement through the market and maximising exposure to goods. Getting lost is near-inevitable and...

Loch Lomond contains more water than all the lakes in England and Wales combined. It sits on the Highland Boundary Fault, the geological divide between the Scottish Lowlands and the Highlands, which gives the loch two distinct characters: the southern end is broad, island-dotted, and relatively gentle; the northern end is narrow, deep, and surrounded by steep mountains that close in from both...

Suva, Fiji Suva is not the Fiji most visitors come for. The beaches and resorts that define Fiji’s international reputation are concentrated on the Coral Coast and the Mamanuca and Yasawa island groups, well to the west. Suva is the capital and the country’s largest city: urban, rainy relative to the resort side of the island, relatively affordable, and genuinely interesting in a way...

Le Mont Saint-Michel: Stay at Least One Night Mont Saint-Michel receives 3.5 million visitors per year. Almost all of them arrive between 10am and 5pm and leave before evening. After 6pm, the day visitors are gone, the light on the bay turns gold, and the island returns to something closer to what it was when its population was a few hundred monks and tradespeople. Staying at least one night is...

Grand Canyon, Arizona The Grand Canyon is 446 kilometres long, up to 29 kilometres wide, and 1,800 metres deep in its deepest sections. The Colorado River carved it over roughly 5 to 6 million years, though the rock exposed at the bottom is nearly 2 billion years old. These facts do not fully prepare you for seeing it. The scale defeats comprehension from the rim: what appears to be a small river...

The earthquake and tsunami of 1755 destroyed most of Lisbon in under six minutes. The Marquis of Pombal’s response was to rebuild the Baixa district in a grid that still structures the city’s centre today, with wide streets and pre-fabricated building components delivered by ship. The speed of the reconstruction was remarkable; much of the Pombaline downtown was complete within a...

Luxembourg: The Country Where All Public Transport Is Free Since March 2020, every bus, tram, and train in Luxembourg costs nothing to ride. Not discounted, not for residents only: free, for everyone, including tourists, including day visitors, including people who drove in from Trier for the afternoon. Luxembourg became the first country in the world to do this, and it materially changes how you...

The Colosseum, Rome The Colosseum is the largest amphitheatre ever built, capable of holding an estimated 50,000-80,000 spectators, and it was completed in 80 CE – a feat of engineering that modern construction science still finds instructive. For 400 years it hosted gladiatorial contests, animal hunts (the Romans imported over a million animals from across three continents in the process,...

Moulin Rouge, Paris In May 2024, the Moulin Rouge’s iconic red windmill blades collapsed. They fell into the street at 6am and the venue was closed for several months. The blades have been replaced and the venue is operating again, but the incident was a reminder that the building on Boulevard de Clichy is a working entertainment venue in an old building rather than a museum piece. The show...

Hallstatt, Austria Hallstatt is one of those places that looks almost too perfect to be real, and it has paid a price for that. A replica was built in China. Influencer content has been produced at industrial scale. On a summer weekend, the village of around 750 residents receives up to 10,000 visitors in a single day. Local leaders have been vocally unhappy about this and are actively proposing a...

The Twelve Apostles: Only Eight Left and Worth Every Kilometre of the Great Ocean Road The Twelve Apostles is one of the most misleading place names in Australia. The rock stacks off the Port Campbell coast in Victoria were originally called “The Sow and Piglets” – less photogenic for tourism – and renamed in the 1960s. They were never twelve in number; the count was eight...

Go to both sides. The falls straddle Argentina and Brazil, and visiting only one is a mistake you will regret once you are back home looking at other people’s photographs. They show completely different things. Argentina The Argentine side is the more immersive experience. A network of park walkways takes you to the edge at multiple levels. The Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat)...

Houses of Parliament, London The original medieval palace burned down on the night of 16 October 1834, observed by crowds including William Turner, who sketched the fire and later produced two paintings from it. The current building, designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin in Perpendicular Gothic style, replaced it between 1840 and 1876 and is arguably a more theatrically satisfying structure...

Bay of Kotor, Montenegro The Bay of Kotor is not technically a fjord. A fjord requires glacial carving; the bay was formed by flooding of a river canyon – an inlet known as a “ria” in geological classification. It looks exactly like a fjord anyway, with limestone mountains rising almost vertically from the water and the narrow inner bay so enclosed by rock that you cannot see the...

Blackpool Sands, South Devon Not the Blackpool most people think of. This Blackpool Sands is a privately owned shingle-and-sand cove 5 kilometres south of Dartmouth on the South Devon coast. No funfair, no illuminations, no amusement arcades. Instead: clear turquoise water, a wooded hillside directly behind the beach, and some of the cleanest bathing conditions in England. It holds Blue Flag...

At 3,842 metres, the Aiguille du Midi cable car station is the highest in France and gives you access to a view that most people don’t see until they’re well into alpine mountaineering. Chamonix sits at 1,035 metres in the valley below; the cable car covers the elevation difference in about 20 minutes. People arrive in t-shirts from the valley on warm July days and step off into wind,...

Constantino Brumidi spent 25 years decorating the interior of the United States Capitol and died in 1879 after falling from scaffolding while working on the dome friezes. The Apotheosis of Washington, the fresco on the ceiling of the Rotunda depicting George Washington ascending to heaven surrounded by Roman deities, is his most famous work. The degree to which this secular/religious conflation...

Hanoi: The City That Warms Up Before Dawn At 5:30am on a weekday morning, the lakeshore at Hoan Kiem is already full: tai chi groups, couples doing ballroom exercises, a woman practising fan dancing alone on the Huc Bridge, several dozen people in matching tracksuits doing synchronised aerobics to a portable speaker. This is not a tourist display. It is Hanoi’s daily warm-up, happening rain...

Private vehicles have not been permitted at Moraine Lake in peak season since 2023. The parking lot was so overwhelmed in prior years that the access road was essentially non-functional, and Parks Canada replaced it with a shuttle system from the Lake Louise Ski Area parking lot. Tickets are CAD 8 return per adult, purchased at reservation.pc.gc.ca, and sell out days to weeks ahead. Book as soon...

Flanders Fields, Belgium At 20:00 every evening, local fire brigade buglers walk beneath the Menin Gate in Ypres and play the Last Post. They have done this every single day since 1928, interrupted only during the four years of German occupation in the Second World War, when they continued the ceremony in Brookwood, England. No other act of remembrance in Europe comes close to this for consistency...

Cloud Gate and Chicago The polished stainless steel sculpture in Millennium Park is called Cloud Gate but nobody calls it that. It is The Bean. Anish Kapoor unveiled it in 2006, and whatever its official name, the 110-tonne sculpture became the defining visual of contemporary Chicago within a few years of installation. It reflects the lakefront and skyline in a continuous distorted panorama, and...

The D-Day Beaches and American Cemetery On June 6, 1944, Allied forces landed on five beaches along 80 kilometres of the Normandy coast. The American landings at Omaha and Utah beaches, the British at Gold and Sword, and the Canadian at Juno beach established a bridgehead that ultimately led to the liberation of Western Europe. The physical landscape of that operation is substantially preserved,...

Patagonia covers the southern cone of South America across Chile and Argentina, roughly 1,000 kilometres from the Lake District near Bariloche to Cape Horn. The scale is the first thing to accept: it’s enormous, the infrastructure is thin, and the distances between key sites are large. The two main draws are Torres del Paine in Chile and the Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina. Both are...

Phnom Penh and the Khmer Rouge Memorial Sites: Visiting With the Seriousness They Require The Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng (S-21) are not attractions in the usual sense. They are preserved sites of crimes against humanity, and visiting them requires a different mental preparation from a temple or a food market. That said, they are among the most important places to visit in Southeast Asia...

The Headlands Dark Sky Park in northern Michigan was one of the first places in the United States to receive International Dark-Sky Association certification in 2011. The 600-acre property on the Lake Michigan shore near Mackinaw City is run by Emmet County and admission is free. On a clear moonless night, the Milky Way is visible as a band of distinguishable structure overhead, dark-adapted eyes...

Cliffs of Moher, County Clare The Cliffs of Moher run 8 kilometres along the Atlantic coast of County Clare in western Ireland, rising 214 metres at their highest point. That height, combined with the angle of the cliff face – nearly vertical, with the Atlantic directly below – produces an exposure that photographs regularly understate. It is windy in ways that make you reassess your...

Andringitra National Park, Madagascar At about 2,000 metres above sea level, the sub-alpine zone of Andringitra has ericaceous heathland that looks like Scottish moorland. This is not a comparison that typically applies to Madagascar. The disorientation is part of what makes the park worth the considerable effort to reach it: the second-highest peak in Madagascar (Pic Boby, 2,658 metres), natural...

Matsumoto Castle, Japan The stairs inside Matsumoto Castle were deliberately built at an angle steep enough to impede an attacker carrying a weapon. Going up is awkward; coming down is harder. This is a castle that has never been burned, never been rebuilt, and never had its wartime architecture softened for visitor convenience, which means you experience the building as a piece of military...

After dark, the exterior of Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque is illuminated by a lighting system that tracks the lunar calendar. At the full moon the building is bright white; in the days approaching new moon the tone shifts to silver-blue. The system was designed by Pinnacle Lighting Group; on the right night, walking around the reflecting pools at 10pm, the effect is extraordinary. Most visitor guides...

Torres del Paine, Chile The three granite towers that give this park its name are in cloud most of the time. This is Patagonia, not Tuscany. On the three or four days per year when they are simultaneously cloud-free and backlit at sunrise, they are transcendent; on the other days, they are atmospheric shapes in mist, which is also beautiful in its way but not what ends up in photographs. The...