The Soviet authorities bulldozed the Hill of Crosses three times, and every time it came back within days The Hill of Crosses in northern Lithuania is not dramatic in the landscape sense. It is a low mound, maybe ten metres high, in an open field 12 kilometres north of Siauliai. The extraordinary thing about it is density: over 200,000 crosses, crucifixes, rosaries, and religious figurines...

The Forbidden City: What to Know Before You Go The Forbidden City held 24 emperors across the Ming and Qing dynasties. Construction started in 1406 under the Yongle Emperor and took 14 years, using roughly a million workers and requiring around 100,000 artisans specifically for decorative work. The complex has 9,999 rooms, or so the tradition holds; actual archaeological surveys suggest the count...

The Quirimbas Archipelago, Mozambique: 32 Islands off the Northern Coast The silversmiths on Ibo Island still work the Portuguese filigree technique taught from father to son for generations, in workshops on a street of stone-and-coral buildings that were already old when Mozambique was a Portuguese colony. The island was a significant Swahili and then Portuguese trading post for centuries; the...

Vatnajökull Ice Cave Tours: What You Actually Enter, and When Vatnajökull sits on top of at least three active volcanoes, including Bárðarbunga and Grímsvötn, which erupted in 2011 with enough ash to close European airspace for several days. When subglacial volcanic eruptions occur under ice this thick, the result is a jökulhlaup, a catastrophic glacial outburst flood that can release billions of...

The Royal Mile, Edinburgh Mary Queen of Scots’ secretary David Rizzio was stabbed 56 times in the supper room at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in 1566, pulled away from the queen, who was six months pregnant, by a group of Protestant Scottish nobles led by her own husband. A brass plaque marks the spot. The Scottish Parliament building is a few minutes further down the street; the debates...

Plitvice Lakes: The Crowd Situation and How to Work Around It Plitvice Lakes National Park is real and it is genuinely extraordinary: 16 terraced lakes connected by 90 waterfalls, with water colours that shift from turquoise to emerald depending on the mineral content and the light. In July and August, it receives around 5,000 visitors per day and the wooden boardwalks become difficult to move...

Yangshuo: The Karst Town That Lives Up to Its Photographs The karst peaks around Yangshuo are on the 20-yuan renminbi note, the specific view from the Li River near Xingping that appears on the banknote has been photographed from the same spot for decades. The actual landscape is more extraordinary than a banknote reproduces: hundreds of limestone towers rising from flat rice paddies, their shapes...

Accra, Ghana Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence from colonial rule, in 1957, and Accra carries that history at every turn. Kwame Nkrumah’s mausoleum sits in a landscaped park opposite the parliament building; the Osu Castle on the seafront – a 17th-century Danish trading post where enslaved Africans were held before being shipped across the Atlantic...

Loch Lomond: Britain’s Biggest Loch Has a Parking Problem Worth Planning Around Loch Lomond is the largest freshwater lake in Britain, 39km long and up to 190 metres deep. On summer weekends, the car parks at Balmaha and Rowardennan fill before 9am and stay full until late afternoon, turning what should be a peaceful mountain walk into a logistical exercise. The solution is either to arrive...

Empire State Building: What Actually Happens When You Visit The Empire State Building was constructed in 14 months and opened in 1931, which remains one of the more extraordinary logistical achievements in the history of construction. At its peak, 3,400 workers were on site simultaneously, building at a rate of more than a floor per day. The building was up and renting space before its mortgage...

The Seychelles: 115 Islands and Surprisingly Few Easy Choices The Seychelles archipelago sits about 1,800 kilometres off the coast of East Africa, which means it takes real effort to reach. That effort is worth making, but only if you know which islands deserve your time and which ones you can skip. Mahé: Gateway, Not Destination Most visitors arrive at Mahé, stay one or two nights, and move on....

Walking the Jurassic Coast: 95 Miles of Geological Time, and Mary Anning’s Overlooked Legacy Mary Anning sold fossils to support her family from childhood, discovered the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton in 1823 at age 12, found the first plesiosaur skeleton recognised by science in 1823, and the first British pterosaur. She was a working-class woman in early 19th-century England and was...

Koyasan: Sleeping in a Temple and Why You Should Do It The monks at Okunoin cemetery deliver two meals per day to the mausoleum of Kukai (Kobo Daishi) at the end of a 2-kilometre path through old-growth cedar forest. This has happened every day without interruption since the 9th century. Kukai founded the Shingon Buddhist training complex on this 900-metre mountain in 816 AD; Shingon tradition...

Disney’s Animal Kingdom: The Park That Takes Itself Most Seriously Of the four Disney World parks, Animal Kingdom is the one that actually tries to mean something. The live animals are real, the conservation messaging is consistent, and the theming – particularly in Pandora and in the Africa section – is more immersive than anything else on the Disney World property. It is also...

Caernarfon Castle: Edward I’s Most Emphatic Statement in Stone The banded stonework on Caernarfon Castle’s towers was copied directly from the Byzantine city walls of Constantinople, a deliberate visual reference that Edward I expected the educated observers of 1283 to recognise. By invoking Constantinople’s imperial authority in stone, he was claiming that his conquest of Wales...

The Maritime Provinces: New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island In 1917, the Mont-Blanc, a French munitions ship, collided with the Norwegian vessel Imo in Halifax Harbour while the Mont-Blanc was carrying the largest cargo of wartime explosives transported by a single ship to that point. The explosion killed approximately 2,000 people, injured 9,000 more, and levelled two square...

Staying at a Japanese Ryokan The kaiseki dinner at a good ryokan takes two hours. Not because it needs to – the courses aren’t large – but because the pace is the point. Somewhere between the sashimi and the simmered dish, most Western guests stop expecting the next course to arrive quickly and start paying attention to what’s in front of them. This adjustment, from the...

Chartres Cathedral: The Best Gothic Cathedral in France That Most People Only Spend an Hour In The Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres was built largely between 1194 and 1220. The speed of construction is part of why it is so coherent: most Gothic cathedrals were built piecemeal over centuries and show it. Chartres was largely completed in a single generation. The structure stands at 37 metres...

The Lake District: Which Fell, Which Lake, and Where the Crowds Actually Go Wainwright’s seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, written by Alfred Wainwright between 1955 and 1966, catalogued 214 summits in meticulous hand-lettered illustrations and became the defining document for fell-walking in northern England. Wainwright was a Blackburn accountant who discovered the fells in...

Yellowstone: America’s First National Park and the Caldera Underneath It In July and August, the parking lot at Grand Prismatic Spring in the Midway Geyser Basin fills before 8am. Old Faithful’s boardwalk benches fill 30 minutes before each predicted eruption. Yellowstone receives 4 million visitors per year and they concentrate in two months and two dozen locations. The practical...

The Louvre: A Strategy for Not Wasting Your Day The Louvre holds around 550,000 objects, displays roughly 35,000 of them, and covers 72,735 square metres of exhibition space. If you spent one minute in front of every displayed work, you would need 10 full days. You probably have three hours. Here is how to use them without spending the first 90 minutes in the queue. Getting In Book tickets online...

Chapel Bridge burned in 1993 and was rebuilt so quickly that most visitors have no idea they’re walking across a replica of a 1333 original Kapellbrucke – the Chapel Bridge – in Lucerne caught fire in August 1993. A lit cigarette was the probable cause. By the time firefighters had it under control, roughly two-thirds of the 204-metre covered wooden bridge had burned, including...

Burning Man: What It Is, What It Costs, and Whether You Should Go Burning Man 2026 runs August 30 through September 7 in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. The theme this year is “Axis Mundi.” Tickets range from $675 to $3,000 plus taxes and fees, with a tiered pricing model where higher-priced tickets subsidise the lower tiers and art grants - all tickets grant identical access. The...

A Japanese Ryokan: The Thing Japan Does Better Than Anyone, and What You Actually Need to Know A ryokan is not a hotel with tatami floors. The distinction matters. When you check in, your room has been prepared with your futon neatly folded, a yukata (cotton robe) laid out for you to wear throughout the property, and seasonal flowers arranged in the tokonoma alcove. When you leave for dinner,...

The Matterhorn was first summited in 1865 and four of the seven climbers died on the descent – the guides and the wealthy clients all made different decisions about the rope The Alps stretch across eight countries and through 1,200 kilometres of mountain terrain, and they have been described so many times in so many forms of promotional material that the actual experience is difficult to...

Temppeliaukio Church (Church in the Rock), Helsinki The architects Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen won the design competition for Temppeliaukio Church in 1961, but construction did not begin until 1968 and the church opened in 1969. The design had been rejected twice before it was finally accepted; Helsinki city authorities were uncertain about whether to accept a church carved into a solid granite...

The Mamayev Kurgan: Volgograd’s Memorial to the Battle of Stalingrad After the Battle of Stalingrad ended in February 1943, the soil on Mamayev Kurgan contained an estimated 500 to 1,250 metal fragments per square metre – the highest concentration of shell casings, grenade fragments, and bullets in any battlefield on earth. The grass grew back colourless for years. The battle lasted...

Meenakshi Amman Temple, Madurai The Meenakshi Amman Temple is one of the largest functioning temple complexes in India, covering 6 hectares in the centre of Madurai. It has been in continuous use for at least 2,500 years in some form – historical records mention it as a major centre of Tamil culture and scholarship. Most of what you see today, including the fourteen gopurams (gateway towers)...

Meteora: Sixth-Century Monasteries on Top of Impossible Rock Pillars The monks who established the earliest Meteora hermitages in the 9th century reached the top of the rock pillars by climbing up removable wooden ladders and pegs. When the rope-and-basket system eventually replaced the ladders, the ropes were changed when they appeared to be fraying, which, according to accounts, was when God...

Polaria in Tromsø: A Compact Arctic Museum Worth Your Time Tromsø calls itself the “Gateway to the Arctic” and this is accurate in a functional sense, Roald Amundsen’s expedition to the South Pole in 1910-1912 departed from here, and the city has been a polar expedition base since the 19th century. Polaria, the waterfront museum, preserves this context in exhibits on polar...

The Blue Grotto (Grotta Azzurra), Capri The physics of the Blue Grotto is worth understanding before you go. Sunlight enters through an underwater opening about 1.5 metres wide and refracts through the water column, reflecting off the white limestone floor. The cave itself is dark; the water is lit from below. The result is an intense, luminescent blue that is not ambient light but light coming up...

Buenos Aires: The City That Eats at Midnight and Dances Until Dawn In April 2025, Argentina’s Milei government lifted most currency controls, backed by a $20 billion IMF agreement, and the parallel peso market that had defined the traveller experience for years largely collapsed. The blue dollar, MEP rate, and official rate converged to within a few percent of each other – around...

The height of Everest was revised in 2020 – 8,849 metres, not the 8,848 that appeared in every textbook for seventy years A joint Nepal-China survey published in December 2020 established a new official height for Everest: 8,849.86 metres. The previous figure of 8,848 metres had been in use since 1954. The difference is less than two metres, attributable to GPS precision and a more accurate...

Ostrog Monastery: Montenegro’s Cliff-Face Orthodox Pilgrimage Site The Monastery of Ostrog receives visitors from every religious tradition, Orthodox Christians as pilgrims, Catholics and Protestants out of interest, Muslims who venerate Saint Vasilije as a healer, non-believers drawn by the visual drama of white-plastered buildings embedded in a vertical cliff face. This unusual ecumenism...

Guggenheim Bilbao: The Building, the Art, and the City Around It The Guggenheim Bilbao opened in 1997 and is credited with a level of urban economic transformation that has its own term: the Bilbao Effect. Frank Gehry’s building – 33,000 titanium panels, flowing curves, glass, and limestone on the bank of the Nervion river – changed the trajectory of a city that had been defined...

Greek Islands: Which One You Pick Matters More Than People Admit Greece imposed a daily visitor cap at Akrotiri on Santorini starting in 2024, 8,000 people per day at the famous blue-dome churches and caldera viewpoint, down from the 17,000 who were arriving in peak periods. The change was driven by resident complaints and genuine infrastructure strain. This is not the first Greek island to face...

Petronas Twin Towers: Taller Than Expected, Cheaper Than You Think The Petronas Twin Towers were designed by César Pelli to incorporate Islamic geometric patterns at the structural level, the floor plan is based on two interlocking squares rotated 45 degrees, creating the 8-pointed star form that appears on each level. This wasn’t a cosmetic decision but a fundamental structural one, which...

Denali: Getting Close to North America’s Highest Point Denali, officially renamed from Mt. McKinley in 2015, stands at 6,190 metres and is the tallest peak on the North American continent. It dominates central Alaska in a way that photographs consistently fail to convey - the mountain creates its own weather systems and is visible from Anchorage on clear days, 240 kilometres away. The...

Ningaloo: Australia’s Reef That You Can Walk Into from the Beach The Great Barrier Reef is the most famous coral system in Australia and the one you need a boat, a 45-minute to 2-hour journey, and a tour operator to access. Ningaloo is the other one: 260 kilometres of fringing coral reef along the mid-coast of Western Australia, where the reef runs to within 200 metres of the beach in places...

Bay of Islands, New Zealand The Treaty of Waitangi was signed here in February 1840 – a document between Maori chiefs and British Crown representatives that is formally New Zealand’s founding document and remains among the most contested pieces of paper in the country’s history. The Treaty Grounds at Waitangi, on a headland above the Waitangi River, hold Te Whare Runanga (a...

Oriental Pearl Tower: Old Skyline King in a Changed City When the Oriental Pearl Tower opened in 1994, its two spheres at 259m and 350m made it the tallest structure in China and a symbol of Shanghai’s ambitions. Those ambitions have since been exceeded several times over. The Shanghai Tower beside it is now 632 metres. The Pearl is no longer the dominant presence in Pudong’s skyline,...

Bhutan: The Country That Charges You to Visit and Is Correct to Do So Bhutan’s Sustainable Development Fee (SDF) was restructured in 2022 from a daily all-inclusive rate of USD 250 to a daily fee of USD 100, separate from accommodation and tour costs. This has made independent-style travel more accessible in theory, though you still need to book through a licensed Bhutanese operator and the...

Great Geysir: The Original (and Its More Reliable Neighbour) The English word “geyser” comes from Geysir, the Icelandic hot spring in the Haukadalur valley that was known across Europe by the 18th century as the world’s most famous intermittent fountain. Geysir was documented in European scientific literature as early as 1647 and drew visitors from across the continent before any...

Galapagos Islands, Ecuador The entry fee to the Galapagos National Park was increased to $200 per person in 2024, up from $100, and the debate about whether this is appropriate is genuinely interesting. Critics argue it prices out lower-income travellers and creates a two-tier conservation site. The counterargument is that the islands receive 330,000 visitors per year and that high-cost,...

Versailles: Don’t Miss the Queen’s Hamlet The Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I was signed in the Hall of Mirrors in 1919. The same room where Louis XIV held his court from 1682, where Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed the first German Emperor in 1871 after the defeat of France, the French chose it for the 1919 signing specifically because of that 1871 humiliation. History...

Encontro das Águas: Two Rivers, One Strange Sight About 6 kilometres downstream from Manaus, the dark water of the Rio Negro runs alongside the pale, sandy-brown water of the Solimões for several kilometres without mixing. The boundary between the two rivers on a clear day is sharp enough to look drawn with a ruler. The dark colour comes from decomposed plant material leaching out of the Rio...

The Alps The Mer de Glace glacier above Chamonix, which Romantic-era painters visited as a pilgrimage to nature’s sublime power, has retreated 2.5km since 1820 and lost around 150 metres of thickness. The steps leading down to the ice surface have been extended repeatedly as the glacier descends further, the markers at each step show the ice level in 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020, each one...

Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda The mountain gorilla population has grown from around 620 individuals in the 1980s to over 1,000 today. Conservation funding was the decisive factor – ranger salaries, anti-poaching operations, community programmes that gave local residents a financial stake in the gorillas’ survival rather than against it. The permit system that prices out...

Siena Cathedral was in the middle of an expansion that would have made it the largest Gothic church in the world when the Black Death killed half the city in 1348 and stopped everything The unfinished nave of that expansion still stands as an open-air shell on the north side of the existing building – three walls and no roof, never completed, now called the Facciatone. You can climb it and...

Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska In 1750, the entirety of Glacier Bay was covered by a single glacier up to 1,200 metres thick. By 1880, when naturalist John Muir first visited, the bay had retreated 75km and was open water. Today, that retreat has extended to over 100km from the original glacier face. Glacier Bay is perhaps the most dramatic visible evidence of post-Ice Age climate dynamics...