Marrakech: A City That Works Best When You Stop Following the Map Marrakech functions on disorientation. The medina (old walled city) was designed over centuries without a grid system, and the narrow lanes that connect the souks, riads, mosques, and fondouks follow logic that made sense to medieval merchants moving between specific craft quarters. Getting lost is not a failure of navigation; it is...

The Vasa warship sank in Stockholm harbour on its maiden voyage in 1628, roughly 1,300 metres from where it was launched. It keeled over in a light breeze about 20 minutes after departing. The ship had been built top-heavy to carry more cannons than the hull could properly balance. 333 years later, archaeologists found it in the harbour mud, largely intact, and raised it. The Vasa Museum on...

Chenonceau: The Most Visited Chateau in France After Versailles, Built and Fought Over by Women The Chateau de Chenonceau has been shaped by an unusual succession of women who owned or controlled it – Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henri II who received it as a gift in 1547 and built the bridge across the Cher River; Catherine de Medici, the queen who expelled Diane after Henri’s...

Arequipa, Peru Arequipa earned the nickname “White City” from its buildings of white sillar stone, a volcanic rock quarried from the flanks of El Misti, the 5,822-metre perfect-cone volcano that dominates the city’s skyline. The stone’s specific texture and colour – pale grey-white in shadow, almost luminous in direct light – gives the Historic Centre a...

Portofino: Small, Expensive, and Worth at Least an Afternoon Portofino is the kind of place that feels simultaneously overcrowded and worth visiting. The pastel-painted harbour houses, the yachts nodding at their moorings, the cypress-covered headland – the postcard image is entirely real, which is more than can be said for most famous Italian views. A coffee at a harbour-front table runs...

Monks began carving caves into a cliff face at the edge of the Gobi Desert in 366 CE. They continued for roughly a thousand years, through the Northern Wei, Sui, Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties. The result is 492 caves containing 45,000 square metres of painted murals and 2,400 painted sculptures, 25 kilometres southeast of Dunhuang in Gansu Province. The Tang dynasty caves (618 to 907 CE) are the...

Khongoryn Els, Mongolia The name translates loosely as Singing Sands. The sound comes from wind moving across dry quartz sand and producing a low rumble that carries some distance across the desert floor. You do not need to be told it is unusual; it announces itself. Khongoryn Els is the largest sand dune system in Mongolia: a ridge running roughly 185 kilometres along the edge of the Gobi Desert...

Petronas Twin Towers, Kuala Lumpur The Petronas Towers held the title of world’s tallest buildings from 1998 to 2004. What made them notable then and still makes them distinctive now is not the height but the design: Cesar Pelli drew from Islamic geometric patterns, specifically the eight-pointed star that forms the cross-section of both towers, which gives them a visual identity that most...

The eleven rock-hewn churches of Lalibela were not built upward. They were carved downward: the plateau was excavated to expose the volcanic tuff, and then the church forms were carved out of the exposed rock so that each building is a single piece of stone, detached on all sides from the parent cliff, rooted only at the base. King Lalibela commissioned them in the 12th and 13th centuries as a New...

When the Eiffel Tower was announced for the 1889 Paris Exposition, a group of French artists and writers published a protest letter calling it “this truly tragic street lamp,” “a hateful column of bolted sheet metal,” and “a black and gigantic factory chimney.” Gustave Eiffel responded by pointing out that the same people who considered it ugly had no objection...

The CN Tower was completed in 1976 at 553.3 metres, making it the world’s tallest free-standing structure for 34 years until Burj Khalifa opened in 2010. It lost the record. It is still the best observation point in Toronto and one of the more satisfying views available from any North American city on a clear day. The engineering is more interesting than the height competition it used to...

Kuala Lumpur: Better Than the Stopover Its Reputation Suggests The city’s name means “muddy confluence” in Malay, a reference to the two rivers where early tin-mining settlers built a trading post in the 1850s. That origin is more interesting than most travellers appreciate: KL grew from mining money, became a British colonial administrative centre, declared independence in 1957,...

New Orleans: How to Visit the City Most Tourists Get Slightly Wrong New Orleans is one of the genuinely singular American cities, with a food culture, music tradition, and architectural character that has no close parallel anywhere in the United States. It is also a city with a strong tourist infrastructure designed to channel visitors toward a relatively small slice of the full experience. Mardi...

Villa del Balbianello was used as the outdoor filming location for parts of Star Wars: Episode II, where it doubled as Naboo. It also served as James Bond’s Swiss clinic in Casino Royale. Both productions chose it because it photographs as a fantasy even though it is entirely real: an 18th-century loggia on a promontory headland above Lake Como, with terraced gardens stepping down in tiers...

Every hour from 9am to 11pm, a crowd of two hundred tourists assembles below the Astronomical Clock to watch a 45-second procession of mechanical figures: twelve apostles, a skeleton ringing a bell, and three allegorical figures representing vanity, greed, and worldly distraction. After a major restoration completed in 2018, the clock runs on a mechanism from the 1860s, replacing the electric one...

The Jungfrau Region The Jungfraujoch train ticket is one of the most expensive single 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 almost entirely on the weather. On a clear day, the panorama from the Top of Europe terrace, with the 23-kilometre Aletsch Glacier below and the Italian Alps on the horizon,...

St Mark’s Basilica, Venice St Mark’s Basilica is not a typical church. Built to house the relics of St Mark – stolen from Alexandria in 828 AD (wrapped in pork and cabbage to pass Muslim customs officials, according to legend) – it served as the private chapel of the Doge of Venice for nearly a thousand years before becoming the city’s cathedral. The exterior is a...

Erdene Zuu: Mongolia’s Oldest Monastery, Built on the Rubble of an Empire In 1586, a Mongolian noble named Abtai Sain Khan built a monastery on the site of Karakorum, the 13th-century capital of the Mongol Empire. The old capital had already been destroyed and rebuilt multiple times; its stones were recycled as building material for the monastery walls. This repurposing of imperial rubble...

Phnom Penh and the Khmer Rouge Memorial Sites: Visiting With the Seriousness They Require Fewer than 10 people survived S-21. That is not an estimate – researchers have verified the names. Around 17,000 passed through the prison between 1975 and 1979, and the regime kept photographic records of nearly all of them. Those photographs, rows of faces taken with the systematic detachment of a...

The aurora borealis photographed by a modern phone camera and the aurora borealis seen with your own eyes are not the same experience. Cameras pick up colour that dark-adapted human eyes often cannot register at lower activity levels; at high activity levels, the green and occasionally red curtains moving across the sky are something the camera undersells. Either way, you need dark skies, at least...

Hill of Crosses, Lithuania: Soviet Bulldozers Flattened It Three Times. Lithuanians Rebuilt It Each Time. The Soviet authorities demolished the Hill of Crosses in 1961, 1973, and 1975. Each time, Lithuanians came back and rebuilt it. The third demolition happened after the site had already been rebuilt twice; the defiance by then had its own momentum, and the crosses that replaced the bulldozed...

Taipei has roughly twenty night markets of varying size and focus. The question is not which one to visit but which one first, because they are genuinely different and the better Taipei food experience involves spreading the visits across two or three evenings rather than doing Shilin once and calling it done. The Night Markets Shilin is the largest and most famous, opening around 5pm. Oyster...

Doubtful Sound, Fiordland Captain Cook named it Doubtful Harbour in 1770 because he doubted his ability to sail in against the prevailing winds and get back out. He never entered it. The name stuck after later surveyors refined it to Doubtful Sound – technically a misnomer, since it is a fiord (formed by glacial erosion and flooded by seawater) rather than a sound, but no one has moved to...

Festung Hohensalzburg: The Fortress That Never Fell Hohensalzburg is one of the largest and best-preserved medieval fortresses in Europe, and almost uniquely among large Central European castles, it was never conquered by siege. Construction began in 1077 by Archbishop Gebhard von Helffenstein during the Investiture Controversy between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. Subsequent archbishops...

Cape Cod Cape Cod is a 65-mile peninsula curling into the Atlantic off southeastern Massachusetts – the arm-shaped hook visible on any map of New England. It draws nearly five million visitors in summer and very few in winter, which means the shoulder seasons (late May, early June, and September through October) are when the Cape is worth visiting: the water is warm enough, the crowds are...

Skara Brae, Orkney Skara Brae is older than Stonehenge. Older than the Egyptian pyramids. This stone-built Neolithic village on Orkney’s west coast was occupied from around 3100 BCE to 2500 BCE and was concealed under a sand dune until a severe storm revealed it in 1850. A second storm in 1925 prompted the first serious excavation and led to the protective seawall visible today. Standing at...

The Tongariro Alpine Crossing is a 19.4-kilometre one-way trail across the central plateau’s active volcanic landscape: emerald lakes, lava fields, steam vents, and the silhouette of Ngauruhoe (used as Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings films) in the distance. It takes six to eight hours and is the most walked one-day tramp in New Zealand. In summer, the car parks at either end are booked...

At 7am in Old Delhi, Chandni Chowk is already working. The wholesale spice sellers at Khari Baoli are loading sacks. The paratha makers on Paranthe Wali Gali are frying the first stuffed parathas. The cycle rickshaws are threading through the narrowest lanes with an accuracy that looks mechanical. By 10am, the place is something else entirely: denser, noisier, and harder to move through. The right...

Glacier National Park, Montana Glacier National Park sits in the northern Rocky Mountains on the US-Canada border. When the park was established in 1910 it contained approximately 150 named glaciers; by 2026 fewer than 25 active glaciers remain, most significantly smaller than their historical extent. The landscape records this loss in newly exposed rock and moraines that were covered by ice...

Monte Fitz Roy and El Chalten, Patagonia Monte Fitz Roy is almost always in cloud. The granite towers that make up the massif – Fitz Roy, Poincenot, Mermoz, Saint-Exupery – are shrouded in their own weather system for most of the year, and clear views are rare enough that trekkers plan multiple-day stays to improve the odds of seeing the summit at all. When the cloud lifts – for...

At Gal Vihara, four Buddha figures are carved directly into a single massive granite outcrop, the largest over 14 metres long. The sculptors worked the stone from 1070 CE under King Parakramabahu the Great, creating the reclining Buddha’s serene face, the standing figure’s precise proportions, and the seated meditating figure with its closed eyes and absolute stillness. You can get...

Tallinn Old Town A town hall pharmacy that has been dispensing medicines on the same corner since at least 1422 – possibly since the late 14th century – tells you something about how Tallinn treats continuity. Raeapteek, at the base of the Gothic town hall on Town Hall Square, may be the oldest continuously operating pharmacy in Europe. It is still a pharmacy. You can walk in, look at...

Carcassonne: The Medieval City That Was Almost Demolished By the mid-19th century, Carcassonne’s double-walled citadel had fallen so far into disrepair that the French government seriously considered demolishing it for building materials. The architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc intervened in 1844 and spent decades restoring it, a project that attracted controversy then and still divides...

Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico City On December 12 in a normal year, somewhere between six and thirteen million people visit this site over a 12-day festival period. That figure is not a typo. The feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe draws the largest annual religious gathering in the Western Hemisphere, with pilgrims walking for days across Mexico and Latin America to reach a low hill in...

Queenstown: The Adventure Tourism Capital Built on One Jump off a Bridge The first commercial bungy jump happened here on 12 November 1988, when AJ Hackett and Henry van Asch made the first paying-customer leap from the 43-metre Kawarau Bridge above the gorge. The founding act of a global industry cost $75 NZD at the time. The same bridge, the same operator, the same jump continues today. The city...

Moraine Lake is not accessible by private car for most of the summer. Parks Canada banned personal vehicles from the lake access road after the parking situation became unmanageable, replaced by mandatory shuttle bookings from Lake Louise village. This is worth knowing before you plan a day around a spontaneous visit. The shuttle system works; the lake is worth it. The ten peaks reflected in the...

The Forbidden City (Palace Museum), Beijing The Forbidden City is the most visited museum in the world, routinely receiving 14 million people annually. That fact determines almost everything about the practical experience of going there. Daily visitors are capped at 80,000, and online booking is required; on peak days, the entry queue involves showing your booking confirmation and a Chinese ID or...

The Cuillin Hills, Skye: The Sharpest Mountains in Britain The Black Cuillin on the Isle of Skye are the only mountains in Britain that require technical rock climbing skills to reach all of their summits. The main ridge runs 12 kilometres and connects 11 Munros (peaks above 3,000 feet); the traverse of the complete ridge in a single push is one of the most serious mountaineering objectives in the...

Bwindi: About Half the World’s Mountain Gorillas Live Here The entire mountain gorilla population is approximately 1,000 animals. About 460 of them live in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in southwestern Uganda. This concentration – half the species’ global population in a single park – is what makes the journey worthwhile. Mountain gorillas cannot survive in captivity....

Monte Carlo Casino The Casino de Monte-Carlo was designed by Charles Garnier in 1878 – the same architect who completed the Paris Opéra in 1875. If you have been to the Paris Opéra, you will recognise the idiom immediately: cream marble, bronze chandeliers, decorative plasterwork in the Belle Époque mode, a facade that announces wealth before you have walked through the door. The building is...

Pompeii: Two Million Visitors a Year, Still Worth Every Minute Pompeii was buried under four to six metres of volcanic ash and pumice on 24 August 79 CE. The eruption of Vesuvius lasted eighteen hours. Around 2,000 bodies have been found in the ruins, though the pre-eruption population was around 11,000 – most escaped. The site covers 44 hectares, making it the largest excavated Roman city...

World’s End, Sri Lanka: The Cliff That Drops 870 Metres Into the Lowlands World’s End is a sheer escarpment in the Horton Plains National Park where the plateau edge drops approximately 870 metres in a near-vertical cliff to the southern lowland jungles below. On clear mornings, the view stretches past tea plantations and hill country forests to the Indian Ocean. On a normal morning...

Every year, about 50 people win the lottery for the Newgrange winter solstice viewing: they enter the 19-metre passage tomb before dawn on the shortest day of December, stand in the small chamber at the end, and watch a shaft of sunlight travel through the roof box and illuminate the back wall for about 17 minutes. The rest of the 30,000 annual applicants don’t get in. The alignment was...

Halong Bay, Vietnam About 2,000 limestone islands and karst formations rise from the Gulf of Tonkin northeast of Hanoi, and the standard overnight cruise takes you through the most dramatic section of them. Halong Bay is one of the most photographed places in Vietnam for obvious reasons: mist-covered limestone pillars, green water, fishing villages on stilts, and the particular quality of light...

Temppeliaukio: Helsinki’s Church in the Rock In 1968, architects Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen won a design competition to build a Lutheran church in a Helsinki neighbourhood already crowded with architecture. Their solution was to build downward: a circular chamber blasted and carved from natural bedrock, topped with a copper dome whose skylights filter natural light down onto walls of raw...

Waikiki at the height of summer is expensive, crowded, and exactly what it is: a resort strip optimised for decades to deliver a specific experience. The beach is genuinely beautiful, the water is calm and warm, and the experience of swimming in the Pacific in front of Diamond Head is specific enough to be worth doing. It is also not all of Oahu, and visitors who treat it as the whole island miss...

Llao Llao and Bariloche: Patagonia’s Alpine Lake District, Without the Alpine Crowds San Carlos de Bariloche sits at the eastern edge of the Andes, 1,600 kilometres south of Buenos Aires, surrounded by Nahuel Huapi National Park. The park covers 710,000 hectares of the Argentine Patagonian Andes, built around a lake system of extraordinary scale: Nahuel Huapi itself is 557 square kilometres,...

Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance is consistently rated among the best theme park attractions in the world by people who measure these things, and it lives at Hollywood Studios. The ride uses a combination of screen technology, physical sets, practical effects, and live actors in a multi-phase experience that runs about 18 minutes. The queue regularly exceeds 120 minutes at peak hours. The correct...

Mount Roraima: A Place That Looks Like a Lost World Because It Essentially Is One Mount Roraima rises from the Guiana Highlands as a table mountain with vertical sandstone walls 400 metres high and a flat summit plateau of 31 square kilometres. It sits at the convergence of Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana at 2,810 metres. The summit is a different world: permanently misted, host to carnivorous...

Cinque Terre: Five Villages That Instagram Made Overrun, and the One Worth Staying In The Cinque Terre – Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore – are five fishing villages on the Ligurian cliffside, connected by centuries of terraced vineyards, a coastal railway, and now by more day-trippers than the villages can reasonably absorb. The Italian government has...