Pokhara, Nepal Pokhara sits at 827 metres elevation in the Gandaki Province of western Nepal, roughly 200 kilometres west of Kathmandu. The Annapurna massif rises directly above the city to the north, and on a clear morning, Machhapuchhare (Fishtail Mountain) and Annapurna South reflect in Phewa Lake in the kind of scene that looks like it has been heavily filtered even when you are standing in it...

Santorini, Greece Santorini is built on the caldera rim of a collapsed volcanic cone, and the setting is genuinely spectacular: white-washed buildings stacked on dark cliffs dropping to the deep blue of the submerged caldera, with the active volcanic islands visible in the water below. The photographs you’ve seen are accurate. The crowds in July and August, less often photographed, are also...

Old Tbilisi, Georgia Tbilisi has been the capital of Georgia for 1,500 years, and the old city – Dzveli Tbilisi – preserves a complex urban fabric that reflects successive layers of Persian, Ottoman, Russian Imperial, and Soviet influence overlaid on the original Kartvelian settlement. The defining visual features are the carved wooden balconies that hang over the narrow streets of the...

Glacier National Park, Montana Glacier National Park sits in the northern Rocky Mountains on the US-Canada border in Montana. The park covers about 4,000 square kilometres of peaks, valleys, and more than 700 lakes. When the park was established in 1910 it contained approximately 150 named glaciers; by 2024 fewer than 25 active glaciers remained, most significantly smaller than their historical...

Rio de Janeiro Rio sits between mountains and sea in a way that few cities can match on pure geography. The Tijuca massif rises above the city in one direction; the Atlantic opens in the other; between them, 6 million people occupy valleys, hillsides, and a narrow coastal strip that includes Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon. The famous postcard view from Corcovado, looking down over the Christ the...

Vatnajokull Glacier Caves, Iceland Vatnajokull is Europe’s largest ice cap by volume, covering roughly 8,100 square kilometres of southeast Iceland and containing around ten per cent of the country’s landmass under ice up to 1,000 metres thick. The glacier’s outlet tongues extend down from the main ice cap to lower elevations; it is these outlet glaciers, particularly...

Lhasa, Tibet Getting to Lhasa takes effort, and not just logistically. The city sits at 3,650 metres above sea level, and the altitude hits most visitors hard regardless of fitness level. Plan at least two rest days at the start of your trip before pushing any further up into the plateau. Headaches, breathlessness, and fatigue are normal. Diamox helps some people; ask a doctor before you go. The...

Salzwelten: Salt Mines in the Austrian Alps Salzwelten operates three salt mine visitor experiences in Austria: at Hallstatt, Altaussee, and Hallein/Bad Dürrnberg. The mines have been in continuous operation for thousands of years. The Hallein mine on the Dürrnberg plateau above the town of Hallein has been mined since the Bronze Age; there’s evidence of Celtic salt production going back...

The Korean DMZ The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is a 250 km-long, 4 km-wide strip of land running across the Korean Peninsula along the Military Demarcation Line established by the 1953 Armistice Agreement. It is the most heavily fortified border in the world, with land mines, watchtowers, and military installations on both sides. Because the DMZ has been largely undisturbed since 1953, it has...

The Panama Canal The Panama Canal took 34 years from first serious attempt (the French company under Ferdinand de Lesseps, which failed after spending $287 million and losing 22,000 workers to disease and accidents) to successful completion (the Americans, who finished it in 1914 after 10 years and spending $375 million). The engineering required the largest earth-moving operation in history to...

Conwy Castle, North Wales Conwy Castle is the most complete of Edward I’s Welsh fortresses and one of the most impressive medieval castles in Britain. Built between 1283 and 1289 following the Conquest of Wales, it forms part of a fortified town plan that still largely survives: the castle and the town walls were constructed together, and you can walk most of the wall circuit today. The...

Luxor Temple, Egypt Luxor Temple stands on the east bank of the Nile in the centre of modern Luxor, where it has stood since around 1400 BCE. Unlike the nearby Karnak temple complex, which served primarily as a religious centre, Luxor Temple was associated with the annual Opet Festival – the celebration in which the cult statues of Amun, Mut, and Khonsu were carried in procession from Karnak...

Notre-Dame de Reims, France The Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Reims served as the coronation church of the French monarchy for over 1,000 years. Between 987 and 1825, 25 French kings were crowned here, including Charles VII in 1429 with Joan of Arc present. The current building dates primarily from the 13th century; construction began in 1211 and the main structure was complete by around 1275. The...

Stockholm, Sweden Stockholm is built across 14 islands where Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic Sea, and the water is genuinely present wherever you are in the city. It shapes the neighbourhoods: Gamla Stan sits on its own island, Djurgården is a largely forested park island, and Södermalm (Söder) is a plateau island connected by several bridges. The sense of space this creates, combined with a skyline...

Pelourinho, Salvador, Bahia Pelourinho is the historic centre of Salvador, the capital of Bahia state in northeast Brazil. The name refers to the public pillory (pelourinho) that once stood in the main square, where enslaved Africans were punished. The neighbourhood was built largely on the labour of enslaved people brought from West Africa; the architecture, the religion, the food, and the music...

Jungfraujoch, Switzerland Jungfraujoch sits at 3,454 metres in the Bernese Alps, on the saddle between the Monch and Jungfrau peaks, and is reached by a rack railway that has been running since 1912. The Jungfrau Railway bores through the Eiger’s north face for the upper portion of the climb, with a brief stop at the Eigerwand station where windows in the rock give an odd sideways view of...

Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania The Ngorongoro Crater is the world’s largest intact volcanic caldera, approximately 260 square kilometres of enclosed grassland, forest, and wetland with walls rising 500-600 metres on all sides. About 25,000 large animals live permanently within the crater – the high concentration relative to the enclosed area makes this one of the most productive...

Old Cartagena, Colombia The old walled city is the main reason people go to Cartagena, and it earns the attention. The Spanish colonial fortifications, completed in the 17th and 18th centuries after repeated pirate raids, enclose a compact grid of colourful buildings, flower-draped balconies, and plazas that manage to feel genuinely alive rather than preserved for tourism. People live inside the...

Monte Carlo Casino: More Interesting to Visit Than to Gamble In The Casino de Monte-Carlo was designed by Charles Garnier in 1878, the same architect responsible for the Paris Opéra. The building is the point. Atrium entrance in cream marble, chandeliers, Belle Époque decorative excess. Entry to the public gaming rooms requires €17 admission and proof of age; the European Rooms (roulette,...

Hoover Dam Hoover Dam is one of the most impressive pieces of infrastructure ever built, and it is worth understanding what you are looking at before you arrive. Completed in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression, it took five years to build, employed over 21,000 workers, and required pouring enough concrete to pave a two-lane road from San Francisco to New York. The dam holds back Lake Mead,...

Lake Bled, Slovenia Lake Bled is a glacial lake in the Julian Alps of northwestern Slovenia, about 55 km from Ljubljana. The combination of the lake, the small island with its baroque church, and the medieval castle on the cliff above has made it one of the most recognisable landscapes in Central Europe. The image is real; the scene in person is as good as the photographs suggest. The lake is 2.

Belém Tower (Torre de Belém), Lisbon The Torre de Belém stands in the Tagus estuary at the western edge of Lisbon’s Belém district, a 16th-century fortified tower that served as a ceremonial entry point to the city and a defensive watchtower. It was built between 1516 and 1521 in the Manueline style: late Portuguese Gothic decorated with maritime motifs, including armillary spheres (the...

Luxor, Egypt Modern Luxor occupies the site of the ancient city of Thebes, which served as the capital of Egypt during the New Kingdom period (1550-1070 BC). The concentration of surviving monuments is extraordinary: Karnak Temple alone covers 100 hectares and was under continuous construction and expansion for over a thousand years. On the west bank of the Nile, the Valley of the Kings contains...

Svalbard, Norway Svalbard sits halfway between northern Norway and the North Pole, at about 78 degrees north latitude. There are more polar bears on the archipelago than people. That sentence alone explains why most visitors go. Longyearbyen is the main settlement, with a permanent population of around 2,500 and the infrastructure to support tourism year-round. The town is small, walkable in 20...

Kailash Kher: The Music and the Places That Shaped It Kailash Kher isn’t a destination you visit on a map. He’s a Delhi-born singer-songwriter whose music pulls from Sufi devotional traditions, Rajasthani folk, and early Bollywood. His breakthrough song “Allah Ke Bande” from 2006 made him famous across South Asia. If you want to understand what his music is actually about,...

Seattle, Washington Seattle sits on a narrow strip of land between Puget Sound to the west and Lake Washington to the east, with Mount Rainier visible to the south on clear days and the Olympic Mountains across the sound. The city has been the headquarters of Boeing since the 1910s and Amazon and Microsoft from the 1990s; the tech industry has shaped the current character of the city as thoroughly...

Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom) The Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral) stands on Museum Island in central Berlin, a large Protestant cathedral completed in 1905 under Kaiser Wilhelm II. The building is neo-baroque in style, with a prominent central dome rising to 114 metres. It functions simultaneously as a working church, a major tourist sight, and a burial site for about 90 members of the...

The Terracotta Army, Xi’an, China The Terracotta Army was discovered in 1974 by farmers digging a well near Xi’an. What they found turned out to be one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the 20th century: around 8,000 life-sized terracotta soldiers, horses, and chariots buried in underground pits beside the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of unified...

Medina of Fez, Morocco Fes el-Bali, the old walled medina of Fez, is one of the largest car-free urban areas in the world and has been continuously inhabited since the 9th century. The street plan is largely medieval: thousands of alleyways, some barely a shoulder’s width, connect residential quarters, souks, mosques, madrasas, and workshops in a layout that resists both GPS navigation and...

Mesa Verde, Colorado Mesa Verde National Park sits in the southwestern corner of Colorado, about 35 miles west of Durango. It protects the most concentrated collection of Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings in the United States, roughly 4,300 documented sites built into the sandstone alcoves of the mesa between around 600 and 1300 CE. The site received UNESCO World Heritage status in 1978. The park...

Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence The dome is the thing. Filippo Brunelleschi spent 16 years working out how to vault a 44-metre-wide opening without the flying buttresses that Gothic builders would have used, and without the wooden framework that was the conventional technique. He invented new tools, trained workers in unfamiliar methods, and produced a dome that sits atop the Florence Cathedral 91...

Glover’s Reef, Belize Glover’s Reef is an atoll about 45 kilometres offshore from southern Belize. It’s one of the largest atolls in the Western Hemisphere and, more relevantly for divers, one of the best-preserved coral reef systems in the Caribbean. The UNESCO World Heritage designation it shares with the Belize Barrier Reef hasn’t done the marine life any harm. Getting...

Nice, French Riviera Nice is a Mediterranean city of about 340,000 people that operates simultaneously as a French regional capital, an Italian cultural relic (it was part of the Kingdom of Sardinia until 1860), and a resort town that draws several million visitors annually. The beach is the central social fact. The Promenade des Anglais runs for 7 kilometres along the Bay of Angels, and the...

Tu Sua Ocean Trench, Samoa Tu Sua is a natural swimming hole on the south coast of Upolu Island, formed by a collapsed lava tube connecting to the ocean below. The main pool is roughly 30 metres deep, clear, and tidal: the colour shifts from turquoise to near-black depending on cloud cover and the angle of the sun. A long wooden ladder descends the rock wall to the water. There is no other way in.

Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area, Tanzania Ngorongoro is a caldera: the collapsed remnant of a volcano that erupted around 2.5 million years ago, leaving a bowl-shaped depression roughly 20 kilometres across and 600 metres deep. The crater floor covers about 260 square kilometres and holds a self-contained ecosystem of grassland, forest, and an alkaline lake, entirely enclosed by the crater...

St Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow The Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat – universally known as St Basil’s Cathedral – was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible to commemorate the capture of Kazan from the Khanate in 1552. It was completed in 1561. The architect is unknown; a later tradition attributed the building to a master named Postnik...

Three Gorges Dam, China The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River is the largest hydroelectric power station ever built, and the numbers are hard to absorb: 2,335 metres wide, 185 metres tall, with a reservoir stretching nearly 600 kilometres upstream into Chongqing municipality. Construction took 17 years, displaced roughly 1.3 million people, and flooded dozens of towns and hundreds of...

Dartmoor, Devon Dartmoor is a granite plateau in the middle of Devon, reaching 621 metres at High Willhays, the highest point in southern England. Most of the National Park is open moorland: heather and bilberry, bog cotton, ancient stone crosses marking medieval track routes, and the distinctive rocky outcrops called tors that punctuate the skyline. The weather changes quickly and fog can reduce...

Tortuguero National Park, Costa Rica No roads reach Tortuguero. That fact alone tells you what kind of place this is. The only ways in are by small plane from San José or by a combination of bus and boat through the canals from the Caribbean lowlands. The boat journey takes around two hours and is worth doing at least one way, even if you fly the other. The park sits on Costa Rica’s...

Doubtful Sound, Fiordland Doubtful Sound is three times the length of the more famous Milford Sound and sees a fraction of the visitor numbers. It is also harder to reach, and that is partly the point. There is no road to the fiord itself; getting there requires a boat across Lake Manapouri, a coach over the Wilmot Pass through temperate rainforest, and then a second boat into the sound. The...

Piazza dei Miracoli and the Leaning Tower of Pisa The Piazza dei Miracoli (Square of Miracles) is a large walled enclosure in northern Pisa containing four white marble structures: the cathedral (Duomo), the baptistery, the campanile (bell tower, universally known as the Leaning Tower), and the monumental cemetery (Camposanto). The tower began construction in 1173 and took until 1372 to complete...

Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Minnesota The BWCAW covers over 1 million acres of lake and forest along the Minnesota-Canada border, with more than 1,200 lakes connected by a maze of canoe routes and portage trails. No motorboats are permitted in most of the area. No roads lead to the interior. Entry requires a permit. That’s the appeal: genuine wilderness that takes actual effort to...

Siena Cathedral (Duomo di Siena) Siena Cathedral is one of the most ambitious Gothic buildings in Italy, and its story involves an even more ambitious project that was never finished. The current building, consecrated in 1348, was originally conceived as merely the transept of a vastly larger cathedral that would have dwarfed every church in Tuscany. Construction of the new nave began in the 1330s...

Sydney New Year’s Eve Fireworks Sydney NYE is genuinely one of the best fireworks displays in the world. The harbour setting, with the Bridge and Opera House as backdrop, is hard to beat, and the midnight show runs for around 12 minutes of serious effort. That said, the logistics require planning well in advance, and “just showing up” will land you in a mediocre spot with a lot...

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,...

Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem The Dome of the Rock is an Islamic shrine completed in 691 CE on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City – the oldest surviving Islamic monument in the world. It was built by Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik over the Foundation Stone, a natural outcrop of bedrock held sacred in Judaism as the site where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac, and in Islamic...

The Needles, Isle of Wight The Needles are three chalk stacks rising from the sea at the westernmost point of the Isle of Wight. The chalk continues the line of the island’s ridge and the stacks are essentially a continuation of the Tennyson Down escarpment that has been severed by erosion. A fourth, taller stack collapsed in 1764; the current outermost stack had its peak removed in the same...

Norfolk Broads National Park The Norfolk Broads were created not by glaciers or river action but by medieval peat-digging. Between the 12th and 14th centuries, the region’s population dug out enormous volumes of peat for fuel, and the resulting pits gradually flooded as sea levels rose. The result is a network of shallow lakes (the broads themselves), slow-moving rivers, and interconnected...

Luskentyre Beach, Isle of Harris Luskentyre is on the southwest coast of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, about 15 kilometres south of Tarbert by the single-track road that runs down the west coast of the island. It is a tidal estuary beach: at low tide the sand extends for several kilometres across the flat, white shell-sand of the machair, and the water in the shallows turns a luminous turquoise...

Windermere, Lake District Windermere is England’s largest natural lake, 10.5 miles long and about a mile wide at its broadest point. The town of Windermere sits on the hill above, connected by a short road to Bowness-on-Windermere on the shoreline. Most visitors end up in Bowness, which has the piers, the ferry terminals, and the lakeside restaurants. The Lake District became a UNESCO World...