A Guide to Bora Bora Overwater bungalows in Bora Bora now start at around $900 a night for an entry-level option. That price point keeps out the casually curious. What’s left is a tiny island, a spectacularly clear lagoon, and the particular intimacy of a place where the most popular activity is staring into shallow water at reef sharks with your morning coffee. The hype, in this case, is...

Clough Williams-Ellis stole buildings from across Europe and reassembled them on a Welsh peninsula, and the result is one of Britain’s strangest places Portmeirion is an architect’s private joke that took fifty years to tell. Clough Williams-Ellis bought a headland on the Glaslyn estuary in 1925 and spent the rest of his life constructing a village on it from architectural salvage...

Bay of Fundy: The Highest Tides on Earth, and Why You Need to See Both The Bay of Fundy experiences tidal ranges of up to 16 metres between low and high tide – the highest in the world. This happens because the bay’s funnel shape amplifies Atlantic tidal energy, creating a resonance effect where each incoming tide reinforces the next. The cycle runs on about a 12-hour clock. At...

Alfama: The Lisbon Neighbourhood That Survived the 1755 Earthquake On 1 November 1755, an earthquake estimated at magnitude 8.5-9.0 struck Lisbon, followed by a tsunami and fires that together destroyed roughly 85% of the city. The Alfama district, built on solid rock rather than the unstable river sediment that covered the lower city, survived largely intact. It is the reason you can walk Alfama...

Loire Valley, France Leonardo da Vinci spent the last three years of his life in the Loire Valley, at the Château du Clos Lucé in Amboise, as a guest of Francis I. He brought three paintings with him from Italy, including the Mona Lisa, which he was still working on. He died at Clos Lucé in 1519; the Mona Lisa remained with the French royal collection. The connection between Leonardo and the...

The Bardo Museum: The World’s Greatest Roman Mosaic Collection Is in Tunis, and Almost Nobody Knows The Louvre gets five million visitors a year. The Bardo Museum in Tunis, which holds the largest and arguably finest collection of Roman mosaics on the planet, gets a fraction of that. The disparity says more about travel itineraries than about quality. Walk into the first major gallery and...

Cinque Terre: Five Villages, One Major Overcrowding Problem, and How to Deal With It The dry-stone walls that terrace the cliffs above Cinque Terre stretch for roughly 100 kilometres in total. They were built by hand over centuries to hold vineyards on slopes so steep that machinery cannot reach most of them. The harvest is done by hand, the grapes carried down in baskets. Maintaining those walls...

The National Mall: Two Miles of American Memory and How to Use Them The National Mall in Washington D.C. is a 2-mile (3.2-kilometre) open strip of parkland running from the Lincoln Memorial on the west to the United States Capitol Building on the east. It is not a shopping mall. The name derives from the British term for a promenade. It is the site of most of the major Smithsonian museums, all of...

Copan, Honduras The Hieroglyphic Stairway at Copan is 63 steps covered in more than 2,000 carved glyphs – the longest Maya hieroglyphic text known to exist. The stairway records the dynastic history of the Copan kingdom, and reading it gave archaeologists a key to understanding Copan’s political relationships with other Maya city-states in ways that changed the interpretation of the...

Verona’s Arena: A Roman Amphitheatre That Still Seats 15,000 for Opera The Arena di Verona was built around 30 CE during the Roman Empire and used for gladiatorial combat. It held approximately 30,000 spectators when complete. In the 12th century an earthquake destroyed most of the outer ring; what remains is the inner structure and two bays of the original facade. In 1913 the tenor Giovanni...

The British Museum: The Repatriation Argument and Why You Should Visit Anyway The Elgin Marbles debate is not going away. The carved panels from the Parthenon have been in the British Museum since Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, removed them between 1801 and 1812 with Ottoman permission that Greece now argues was legally invalid. The British government has consistently refused to return them;...

Cape Cod: The Glacial Peninsula That Tourism Hasn’t Entirely Consumed Cape Cod is a 70-mile sandy peninsula that was shaped by the retreat of glaciers 18,000 years ago. The glacier deposited the sand and gravel that forms the cape; since then, wave action has been steadily redistributing that material southward, extending the cape’s hook and eroding its outer beaches at a rate of...

Clovelly: The Devon Village That Charges Admission and Is Worth It Clovelly has been privately owned for centuries, currently by the Asquiths, descendants of the Hamlyn Williams family who have managed the estate since the 18th century. Every resident in the village is a tenant of the estate. The entry fee (around £9 for adults at current rates) covers access to the single steep cobbled street...

The Seychelles The inner granite islands of the Seychelles – Mahe, Praslin, La Digue, and a handful of others – are remnants of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana. They didn’t form through volcanic activity. They broke off. This is why they look different from every other tropical island group in the Indian Ocean: the rock is old granite, sculpted by 150 million years of...

Shibuya Crossing: The World’s Busiest Pedestrian Junction Shibuya Crossing sees around 3,000 people cross simultaneously on a busy cycle, and for about 45 seconds every 90 seconds or so, this intersection becomes one of the most photographed spots on earth. The scramble, where traffic stops in all directions and pedestrians pour from six approach paths simultaneously, looks more chaotic in...

Kronborg Castle, Helsingør: Where Denmark Made Its Money At its 16th-century peak, the Sound Toll collected by Denmark at Kronborg accounted for as much as two-thirds of the Danish crown’s total revenue. Every merchant ship passing between the North Sea and the Baltic had to stop here and pay, typically one percent of the cargo value. For 400 years, from 1429 to 1857, this was simply the...

The Colosseum, Rome The Flavian Amphitheatre was completed in 80 AD and could seat between 50,000 and 80,000 spectators. The engineers who built it worked out a system of numbered entrances, corridors (vomitoria), and tiered seating that could fill and empty the entire structure in minutes – a logistical achievement that modern sports stadiums still reference. Spectators’ social rank...

St Andrews, Scotland There is a document from 1552 giving locals permission to play golf on the links at St Andrews. That makes this the earliest written record of the game being played on this particular strip of ground, and golfers have been treating it as sacred ever since. The Old Course is the most recognisable golf layout on the planet, and the seven courses now managed by the Links Trust...

Timgad: Rome Frozen in the Algerian Mountains Most people outside Algeria have never heard of Timgad. That’s genuinely their loss. Founded by Emperor Trajan in 100 AD and abandoned around the 7th century, the city sat buried under sand for a thousand years, which is precisely why it survived in such extraordinary condition. When French archaeologists began excavating in the late 19th...

Trevi Fountain, Rome The Trevi Fountain collects over €1 million in coins per year from visitors who throw with their right hand over their left shoulder to ensure a return to Rome. The money is donated to a Catholic charity called Caritas that provides food for the city’s poor. This arrangement, tourists throwing money into a decorative pool because of a 1954 film (Three Coins in the...

The Brandenburg Gate: Every Era Left Its Mark The Brandenburg Gate was completed in 1791 as a city gate and symbol of peace, the name “Friedenstor,” peace gate, was part of its original designation. Napoleon marched through it in 1806 after defeating Prussia and had the Quadriga (the four-horse chariot sculpture on top) removed and shipped to Paris as a trophy. Prussia recovered it in...

Coast Redwoods: The Location of Hyperion Is Secret for a Good Reason The tallest known living tree on earth, a coast redwood called Hyperion at 115.7 metres, was discovered in 2006 somewhere in Redwood National and State Parks in Humboldt County, California. The National Park Service has declined to publish the exact location. This is not bureaucratic withholding but a conservation decision: the...

Chernobyl: Accessible Again, and More Complicated Than Dark Tourism Russian forces occupied the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in February 2022 during the invasion of Ukraine, using the site as a staging area for about a month before withdrawing in late March 2022. Radiation monitoring equipment was damaged or taken; some radioactive material may have been disturbed. The Ukrainian government declared...

Loch Ness: The Real Thing, Not the Monster Loch Ness is the most famous lake in the world and also one of the most misunderstood. The monster story dominates the marketing and most of the souvenir shops, but it’s the actual loch that repays attention. It is 37 kilometres long, 2.7 kilometres wide at its widest, and 230 metres at its deepest. It holds more fresh water than all the lakes in...

Pompeii The thermopolia, Roman fast-food counters with ceramic serving vessels set into marble countertops and colourful frescoes on the walls, have been excavating slowly over decades, and recent work has recovered intact ones with food traces still visible: duck, pork, snails, fish. The menu of a Roman street-food counter from 79 CE, preserved by volcanic ash, is now readable. That specific...

Amalfi Coast: How to Actually Manage the Traffic, the Buses, and the Cost The Amalfi Coast road (SS163) is a single carriageway road cut into a limestone cliff above the sea, with sharp switchbacks, buses that occupy the full width of the road on corners, and no passing opportunities for several kilometres at a stretch. In July and August, this road backs up for hours. Driving it yourself in a...

Boston: History, Baseball, and Lobster Rolls Fenway Park opened in 1912, making it the oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball still in continuous operation. The Green Monster, the 37-foot left-field wall whose distinctly short distance from home plate was originally a workaround for the cramped urban footprint, has become the park’s defining feature. Every other ballpark built since has...

Christ the Redeemer: The Cloud Problem and How to Work Around It Christ the Redeemer stands at 710 metres on the Corcovado peak, and the problem with that altitude in a humid coastal city is cloud. On roughly half of all visits, the statue’s head is inside cloud when you arrive at the summit. The solution is to book your visit early in the morning, trains begin at 8am, and to monitor the...

Choquequirao: The Machu Picchu That Hasn’t Been Ruined Yet The proposal to build a cable car to Choquequirao has been discussed in Peru since the early 2000s. If it goes ahead, the site, which currently receives 30 to 50 visitors per day and requires a 4-5 day round-trip hike to access, would receive tens of thousands per year. The Peru government and various development interests argue the...

Andorra: The Constitutional Co-Principality That Has Survived Because Nobody Wanted It Enough to Take It Andorra has been jointly ruled since 1278 by the Bishop of Urgell (in Spain) and the Count of Foix (a title that eventually passed to the French head of state). This arrangement was designed to prevent either Spain or France from absorbing the small mountain territory, and it has worked:...

Angel Falls: The Waterfall Named After an American Adventurer, Not a Divine Being Jimmie Angel was an American aviator from Missouri who first flew over the falls in 1933 while searching for gold deposits in the Venezuelan jungle. He returned in 1937 to land on the tepui, the flat-topped mountain from which the falls drop, and his plane got stuck in the boggy ground. Angel, his wife, and two...

Svalbard, Norway Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago in the High Arctic, roughly halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. About 60% of the land area is glacier. Polar bears outnumber humans – around 3,000 bears to 2,600 residents. You are not allowed to leave Longyearbyen, the main settlement, without a rifle or the company of an armed guide. This is not a rule for effect; it is...

Etosha has the world’s largest remaining population of black rhino, and you are more likely to see one there than almost anywhere else on earth The strategy at Etosha is the opposite of the long-game drive you do on the Serengeti. You find a waterhole, stop, and wait. The animals come to you because the pan – 4,731 square kilometres of blinding white salt flat – supports almost...

Qufu: Confucius’s Hometown Is Bigger and Stranger Than Expected Confucius was born in Qufu in 551 BC, which means this small city in Shandong Province has had 2,500 years to turn that fact into a comprehensive tourism infrastructure. The result is a UNESCO World Heritage Site covering three separate areas: the Kong Miao (Temple of Confucius), the Kong Fu (Kong Family Mansion), and the Kong...

Cartagena: The Colonial City That Was Built on Slave Labour and Is Honest About It The walled city of Cartagena de Indias was the primary port through which enslaved Africans entered South America during the Spanish colonial period. An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people were brought through Cartagena’s slave market between 1533 and 1810. The Jesuit priest Pedro Claver spent his life at the...

Casino de Monte-Carlo: The Building Is Better Than the Gambling In 1856, the Principality of Monaco was facing bankruptcy. Prince Charles III opened the casino in 1863 as a revenue source to save the state, designed by Charles Garnier, who was simultaneously designing the Paris Opera House. The casino worked: within two decades, Monaco had abolished income tax, and it hasn’t had one since....

Ollantaytambo, Peru In 1536, Manco Inca chose Ollantaytambo as his base for military resistance against the Spanish conquistadors. When Hernando Pizarro led an expedition to capture him, Manco’s forces flooded the valley below the fortress by diverting the Patacancha River, making cavalry charges impossible, and drove the Spaniards off with rocks, arrows, and captured artillery. It was one...

Yosemite National Park: What the Crowds Don’t Tell You Alex Honnold’s free solo ascent of El Capitan’s Freerider route in June 2017 took 3 hours 56 minutes. He climbed 900 metres of vertical granite without a rope, a harness, or any protection. The previous fastest time with ropes was around 2 hours; Honnold’s ropeless ascent was 27 minutes slower than that record,...

Bhaktapur Durbar Square: Better Than Kathmandu, More Honest About It Bhaktapur gets overlooked because it sits 13km east of Kathmandu and takes 45 minutes by bus or taxi to reach. That inconvenience is exactly what makes it better. The medieval city’s Durbar Square survived the 2015 earthquake better than Kathmandu’s own, and the reconstruction here has been more careful and less...

The Burgess Shale was discovered by accident in 1909, and the animals it contains are so strange that some early researchers thought they were reconstructing them upside down Charles Walcott, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, stumbled on the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, British Columbia, in August 1909, reportedly when his horse slipped on loose rock near Burgess...

Provence, France Van Gogh was committed to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in May 1889, voluntarily, after the incident in which he cut off part of his own ear in Arles. He spent a year there, producing over 150 paintings including The Starry Night and several versions of The Wheat Field with Cypresses. The asylum is now both a working psychiatric facility and a tourist...

Lake Bled: The Church on the Island and How to Avoid the Worst of the Crowds Bled is Slovenia’s most photographed destination, which means it has a genuine crowd management problem at the main viewpoints on summer weekends. The church on the island, the Assumption of Mary Pilgrimage Church, dating from the 17th century but on a site of Slavic worship going back to the Bronze Age, is reached...

El Jem: The Roman Amphitheatre That Survived Because It Was Too Useful to Demolish The Amphitheatre of El Jem, built around 238 CE in what is now Tunisia, is the third-largest surviving Roman amphitheatre in the world and arguably the best-preserved outside Rome itself. It is also less visited than it deserves. Most tourists who make it to Tunisia head for Tunis, Carthage, or the coast, and El...

Kjeragbolten, Rogaland, Norway Kjeragbolten has been photographed thousands of times from the same angle since a Norwegian nature photographer named Per Arne Trana got the first widely published image of someone standing on it in 1994. In that original photograph, you can see both the void below and the climber’s composure. The image works because of the combination of scale (the drop is...

Capri: The Island That Charges More Than It’s Worth and Remains Worth Going In summer, Capri processes tens of thousands of day-trippers from the mainland each day. The Piazzetta, the small square at the island’s centre, becomes essentially impassable by 11am. The Blue Grotto boat queue can run two hours. A simple lunch costs what a decent dinner costs in Naples. The island is aware of...

Kalemegdan Fortress, Belgrade Kalemegdan is where Belgrade began. The fortress sits on a high promontory above the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, and the strategic logic is obvious from the ramparts: you can see for miles in every direction across the flat Pannonian plain. Celts, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, and Austro-Hungarians all held this ground at various points over roughly two...

Cliffs of Moher, County Clare The best view of the Cliffs of Moher is not from the cliffs. It is from the water, looking back up. The full eight-kilometre extent of the cliff face – rising to 214 metres at Hag’s Head in the south and at the O’Brien’s Tower section further north – reads as a single formation from a boat or kayak on the Atlantic below. From the viewing...

Glacier Bay: 3.3 Million Acres, Almost No Roads, One Small Lodge When Captain George Vancouver sailed past Glacier Bay in 1794, the entire bay was covered by a single glacier 1,200 metres thick. By 1879, when John Muir visited, the ice had retreated 80 kilometres and the bay was open water. In the two and a half centuries since Vancouver’s chart was drawn, one of the most remarkable glacial...

The world’s first underwater sculpture park was sunk in Grenada in 2006, and two decades of coral growth have made it something the original artist didn’t design Jason deCaires Taylor made the Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park what it is; twenty years of coral, sponge, and marine growth made it something else. The park was created in Molinere Bay, three miles north of Grenada’s...

The Arc de Triomphe, Paris Napoleon commissioned the Arc de Triomphe in 1806, following his victory at Austerlitz, to honour the soldiers of France. He never saw it finished – he died in 1821, and the arch wasn’t completed until 1836 under King Louis-Philippe. That gap of 30 years in the construction is not just a historical footnote: it means the monument that was meant to celebrate...