The White House, Washington DC The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the US President, built between 1792 and 1800 and continuously occupied since John Adams in 1800. The building stands on 18 acres at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and is simultaneously the most security-restricted and the most symbolically accessible building in American government: millions of people...

The fundraising campaign that paid for the Statue of Liberty nearly failed on both sides of the Atlantic. The French sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi had the statue designed and partially built, but the American half (the pedestal) had raised almost no money by 1885. Joseph Pulitzer used his newspaper, The World, to shame wealthy New Yorkers by printing donor names and amounts and publishing pointed...

New Orleans French Quarter: Bourbon Street Is Not the Real Thing The French Quarter is where New Orleans started in 1718. It contains some of the finest Creole and Spanish colonial architecture in North America, one of the most serious food cultures in the United States, and music that has been developing here in specific forms since the 19th century. It also contains Bourbon Street, which is a...

Ollantaytambo, Peru Most people treat Ollantaytambo as a one-night logistics stop before the train to Machu Picchu. That’s a waste of a place. This town in the Sacred Valley, 72 kilometres northwest of Cusco along the Urubamba River, sits on the original Inca street grid, with irrigation channels still running through the residential lanes, and contains one of the most dramatic unfinished...

The Scottish Cafe in Lviv The Scottish Cafe at 3 Kopernyka Street occupies a building that most visitors enter for coffee without knowing they are sitting inside one of the more significant addresses in 20th-century mathematics. Before World War II, when Lviv was the Polish city of Lwow, the cafe was the regular gathering place for a group of Polish mathematicians that included Stefan Banach, Hugo...

Alexander the Great burned Persepolis in 330 BCE. Whether it was deliberate retribution for the Persian sack of Athens 150 years earlier, or an accident that got out of hand during a celebration, remains contested. The fire destroyed the timber roofs and burned the mud-brick fill between the stone columns, but it left the stone platform, the doorways, and the extraordinary bas-relief sculpture...

The Ifugao people have been carving rice terraces into the mountain slopes of northern Luzon for approximately 2,000 years, using knowledge of local hydrology, soil composition, and microclimate developed independently of any outside influence. The system covers roughly 20,000 square kilometres of mountainside, irrigated by a network of channels and small dams that distribute forest water with...

Chicago Chicago has a chip on its shoulder about New York and Los Angeles, and the chip produces better results than either coast might expect. The architecture is more consistently interesting than New York’s. The food is more varied and honest than the celebrity-chef showcase that LA can become. The music traditions – blues, house, jazz, gospel – are native in a way that cannot...

The Waterloo Battlefield, Belgium The Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815 ended Napoleon Bonaparte’s Hundred Days campaign, ended his career, and reshaped the political map of Europe. About 47,000 men were killed or wounded in a single day across a few square kilometres of Belgian farmland. The battlefield south of Brussels is remarkably well-preserved for a site this close to a major city...

Monteverde Cloud Forest: The Quakers Who Founded a Reserve and the Quetzal They Helped Save The Monteverde Cloud Forest has an origin story that most visitors miss. In 1951, a group of Alabama Quakers, conscientious objectors who refused to register for the US draft during the Korean War, relocated to Costa Rica. They settled at altitude on the Continental Divide in the Tilarán Mountains and,...

A practical note before anything else: since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, St Petersburg has been effectively closed to Western visitors. International flights are severely restricted, Western credit cards no longer function, and most Western governments advise against travel to Russia. This post documents the Winter Palace and Hermitage as they are, for when travel...

During the rainy season (December through March), a thin layer of water covers the Salar de Uyuni and the entire flat becomes a perfect mirror. The sky reflects at your feet; the horizon disappears; the landscape becomes spatially undifferentiated in a way that is nearly hallucinatory. This is why the rainy season is often the better time to visit, despite what the dry-season photography tours...

Eating Seafood in Bahia, Brazil Bahia is the state on Brazil’s northeastern coast that absorbed the largest proportion of the Atlantic slave trade, and its food reflects that history more directly than almost anywhere else in the country. The Afro-Brazilian culinary tradition here is anchored in dendê (red palm oil), coconut milk, and West African techniques that arrived with the enslaved...

The sand on Whitehaven Beach is 98 percent silica, which means it stays cool underfoot even in tropical midday heat and has a texture close to talcum powder. It does not heat up the way dark sand does, which is one of the few practical advantages of visiting a beach famous enough to be genuinely crowded on peak summer days. The key fact about the Whitsundays is that you experience them on the...

Three Gorges Dam: China’s Most Contested Engineering Achievement The numbers are hard to absorb: 2,335 metres wide, 185 metres tall, a reservoir stretching nearly 600 kilometres upstream into Chongqing municipality. Construction took 17 years and displaced roughly 1.3 million people from towns and villages that were simply flooded out of existence. The dam generates around 100 billion...

The Art Institute of Chicago: How to Actually Use It Most people spend their visit to the Art Institute walking too fast through too many galleries, stopping for thirty seconds in front of famous paintings, and leaving with a vague impression of overwhelming scale. The better approach is to pick two or three areas and spend real time in them. This is one of the world’s great encyclopedic...

Tokugawa Ieyasu unified Japan after a century of civil war and died in 1616. The following year, his grandson commissioned a shrine on a scale specifically designed to project the permanence of Tokugawa rule: 55 buildings, every surface carved and lacquered, every detail communicating that this dynasty would last as long as the sun and moon. The dynasty lasted 250 years. The shrine has been...

The Acropolis, Athens The Parthenon was never white. The gleaming marble that the popular imagination associates with classical Greece was originally painted in vivid colours: the carved reliefs and pediment figures were blue, red, and gold, the interior walls were covered with painted decoration. We know this because traces of the original pigments survived on protected surfaces and have been...

Trinidad: Caribbean Carnival, Bird Life, and the Sharpest Food in the Region Trinidad is the larger of the two islands forming the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, separated from Venezuela’s northeastern coast by just 11 kilometres. The island is culturally unlike any other place in the Caribbean: its oil economy, dense multi-ethnic population (Indo-Trinidadian, Afro-Trinidadian, Chinese,...

Dublin: Two Days Covers the Highlights, Four Days Covers the City Dublin is small enough that most central attractions are walkable from each other, which makes it easy to think you have seen it after a weekend. You have seen the highlights, which is not the same thing. The actual city is in the residential neighbourhoods between the monuments: Portobello, Stoneybatter, Phibsborough, and the...

Copper Canyon: Bigger Than the Grand Canyon The Barrancas del Cobre system in Chihuahua state covers around 65,000 square kilometres. It comprises six interconnected canyons, four of which are deeper than the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is deeper at its maximum; the Copper Canyon system covers about four times the area. The comparison is usually made in favour of the Grand Canyon because the...

Kiyomizu-dera: The Temple That Has Survived Fire Sixteen Times Kiyomizu-dera has been rebuilt after burning down repeatedly over its 1,200-year history, most recently in 1633. The current main hall is that Edo-period reconstruction – a massive wooden structure built without a single nail, cantilevered out over the slope of Mount Otowa on 139 wooden pillars. The platform extends 13 metres...

Newgrange, County Meath, Ireland Newgrange is older than the Giza pyramids by about 600 years and older than Stonehenge by 1,000. Built around 3200 BCE, it is a passage tomb in the Boyne Valley roughly 50 kilometres north of Dublin: a circular mound about 85 metres in diameter and 13 metres high, covering a stone-lined passage leading to a cruciform burial chamber at its centre. The engineering...

Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom) Kaiser Wilhelm II reportedly wanted a cathedral that would surpass St Peter’s in Rome. The Berliner Dom does not surpass St Peter’s. But the ambition – and the budget – produced an impressively large Protestant church, completed in 1905 in neo-baroque style on Museum Island, with a central dome rising to 114 metres. The building functions...

Amritsar: The Golden Temple Serves 100,000 Free Meals a Day That number is worth sitting with. The langar at Harmandir Sahib, the Sikh community kitchen operating inside the Golden Temple complex, feeds approximately 100,000 people every day without charge, regardless of religion, nationality, or social position. Volunteers wash, peel, cook, and serve in continuous rotating shifts around the...

Komodo Island, Indonesia The park ranger carries a forked stick. This is not theatre. Komodo dragons are the largest living lizards on earth – adults reach 3 metres, weigh up to 70 kilograms, have venom glands that prevent blood clotting in prey, and are capable of killing deer, pigs, and occasionally adult water buffalo. They are also fast over short distances. The forked stick is how...

In 1908, a worker named Zacharias Lewala found a diamond in the sand near Lüderitz on Namibia’s Atlantic coast. Within two years, the German colonial authorities had built a town at Kolmanskop with a hospital, theatre, bowling alley, and an ice factory. The ice factory is worth pausing on: delivering ice to a desert town in the early 20th century was a substantial engineering commitment and...

Mumbai: The City That Makes Most Other Cities Feel Insufficiently Serious Mumbai does not ease you in. Twenty million people, a narrow strip of reclaimed land seven kilometres wide at its broadest, Victorian Gothic buildings standing directly next to glass towers, some of the most expensive residential real estate on earth sitting one kilometre from Dharavi. The sea is always somewhere in your...

Fiji Fiji operates two completely separate tourism economies and most first-time visitors only find one of them. The resort enclaves on Denarau Island near Nadi, the private island retreats, the all-inclusive operations where guests rarely leave the property: these are expensive, beautiful, and designed to function without reference to anything outside their perimeter fence. The other Fiji, the...

On July 3, 1863, Confederate infantry crossed three-quarters of a mile of open Pennsylvania farmland toward the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. The assault, known as Pickett’s Charge, was ordered by Robert E. Lee despite the objections of his corps commander James Longstreet, who believed it could not succeed. Approximately 12,000 men began the crossing; roughly half were killed, wounded, or...

The Bonaventure Island gannet colony is one of the largest in the world with about 110,000 birds. When you reach the viewing platform at the cliff edge, the noise hits before the sight does: a wall of sound that the biologists on site tell you carries for several kilometres offshore. The birds land, dispute territory, feed their chicks, and launch off the cliff face at close range. It is one of...

The Florence Duomo: What You Actually Need to Know Before You Queue Filippo Brunelleschi won the commission to dome the Florence Cathedral in 1418 without having any idea how he would do it. The cathedral had been under construction for over a century with the drum and walls complete, and the space at the top had been open to the sky for decades because no architect could figure out how to span...

Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park, New Zealand Aoraki – “Cloud Piercer” in Ngai Tahu Maori – is the highest point in New Zealand at 3,724 metres. In Ngai Tahu mythology, Aoraki and his brothers became the South Island itself after their canoe ran aground and turned to stone; the peaks are the most sacred ancestors of the iwi. Sir Edmund Hillary, who later became the first...

Teotihuacan: The City That Predates the Aztecs by a Thousand Years, and Nobody Knows Who Built It The Aztecs found Teotihuacan already abandoned when they arrived in the Valley of Mexico around 1250 CE. The city had been empty for roughly 600 years. They named it “place where men become gods” and built it into their mythology as the site where the gods created the current sun. Who...

Waikiki: What the Two Miles of Beach Actually Offers Waikiki is a mature resort district doing what it does reliably well. The question is not whether it is touristy (it is, obviously) but whether it suits what you actually want from a Hawaiian holiday. For families or first-timers wanting easy beach access, consistent surf conditions, and every service within walking distance, Waikiki is an...

Mount Fuji, Japan Fuji-san stands 3,776 metres and on a clear day is visible from Tokyo, 100 kilometres away. On a clear day. The mountain generates its own weather and sits under cloud cover more often than its postcard reputation suggests. The views from the Five Lakes district at dawn with the reflection in Lake Kawaguchiko are the photos you’ve seen; they require luck and an early start....

Banff National Park Moraine Lake Road is closed to private vehicles year-round. This is the fact that catches most first-time Banff visitors unprepared. To reach one of the most photographed lakes in Canada – the one that was on the old $20 bill, the one that appears in roughly 40% of Banff Instagram content – you must take a shuttle bus. The Parks Canada shuttle runs from June 1...

Punakha Dzong: Bhutan’s Most Beautiful Fortress Bhutan’s Punakha Dzong sits on a narrow tongue of land where two rivers meet, and twice a year the Pho Chhu (Father River) floods and the dzong becomes an island. The monks who live there from November to May, when the warmer valley climate makes Punakha the preferred winter base over the capital Thimphu, have seen this enough times to...

Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh Arthur’s Seat is an extinct volcanic crag sitting 251 metres above sea level in the middle of Edinburgh, a 15-minute walk from the Royal Mile. It looks like a proper Highland hill, and in most weather it behaves like one. Bringing the hill with you into a trip to Edinburgh is the most underrated thing you can do – the view from the summit over the city,...

In July 1950, a novice monk named Hayashi Yoken burned Kinkaku-ji to the ground. He survived, was arrested at the scene, and told investigators he had wanted to destroy something that he believed was too perfect to exist. Mishima Yukio fictionalised the event in his 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which turned the arson from a criminal case into a philosophical meditation on beauty...

Trail Ridge Road crosses Rocky Mountain National Park from east to west, rising to 12,183 feet at its highest point. For more than 11 continuous miles the road runs above the treeline through tundra ecosystem: the same terrain found in the High Arctic and the Himalayas, accessible in a standard passenger car. The high-tundra wildflowers in July are extraordinary and the views extend hundreds of...

Mexico City: The Most Underestimated Capital in the Americas Mexico City is the most populous city in North America at around 22 million people in the greater metro area, and it is consistently underestimated by travellers who associate Mexico primarily with beach resorts. The altitude (2,240 metres), the sheer scale, the traffic, and the food reputation that has only recently reached global...

Beijing was China’s imperial capital for most of the past 700 years. The density of significant sites is extraordinary: the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, Temple of Heaven, Lama Temple, Summer Palace, and several Great Wall sections are all within a reasonable day-trip radius of each other. The city is also 21 million people, severe traffic, and summer air quality that can vary from clear...

Las Vegas Las Vegas has spent the last decade becoming one of the better eating cities in the United States, which is not the reputation it cultivated for itself during the all-you-can-eat buffet era. The buffet is largely dead. In its place: outposts of serious restaurants from world-calibre chefs who discovered that a city of 42 million annual visitors is an excellent market for expensive food....

Pol-e Khaju: Isfahan’s Most Useful Bridge On a warm evening, the lower gallery of Pol-e Khaju is doing several things at once. Families have spread out on the stone steps. University students are working through homework. An old man is playing a stringed instrument in one of the alcoves, not performing exactly, just playing. Someone else has set up a portable speaker. The tea rooms built...

Grand Teton sits immediately south of Yellowstone, which means most visitors treat it as a secondary stop or drive-through on their way north. This is a mistake. The Teton Range rises 7,000 feet above the flat floor of Jackson Hole without any foothills as transition, one of the most abrupt mountain profiles in North America, and unlike Yellowstone the park has genuinely walkable high-country...

American aviator Jimmie Angel was searching for gold ore deposits when he first flew over the waterfall in 1933. He returned in 1937, attempted to land on the Auyantepui plateau, and crashed his plane in the boggy summit terrain. He and his crew walked out through jungle for eleven days. The waterfall that bears his name is 979 metres high, which means it is roughly the height of two Empire State...

Delhi: Seven Cities in One, and the Eighth Is Being Built Right Now At least seven separate cities have risen on the banks of the Yamuna over the last millennium. Delhi is the accumulation of all of them: a Sultanate-era stepwell sits next to a glass office tower, a Mughal tomb garden fronts a Metro interchange, a 14th-century reservoir is surrounded by rooftop bars. Most visitors arrive expecting...

Altamira: The Cave Art That the 19th Century Refused to Believe Was Real When Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola described the paintings at Altamira in 1879, the scientific establishment dismissed them. The polychrome bison on the ceiling of the main chamber, painted in ochre, charcoal, and manganese oxide, were too accomplished and too naturalistic for what scholars imagined prehistoric humans could...

The geology explanation for the Giant’s Causeway is solid: 50 to 60 million years ago, lava flows cooled and contracted, cracking into hexagonal columns. The myth is better: the Irish giant Fionn Mac Cumhaill built a causeway across the North Channel to fight his Scottish rival Benandonner, then disguised himself as a baby when Benandonner arrived and turned out to be even larger....