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...

Haad Rin, Ko Pha Ngan: The Full Moon Beach and What Surrounds It The Full Moon Party has been running at Haad Rin Beach on Ko Pha Ngan since the mid-1980s, when a small group of backpackers held a spontaneous beach celebration and the format repeated itself the following month. Attendance grew from a few dozen to a few hundred to thousands; current events draw 10,000 to 30,000 people per night.

Dresden’s Zwinger: One of Europe’s Great Baroque Complexes Raphael’s Sistine Madonna hangs in the Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister inside the Zwinger, and most people who know it know only the two small bored angels in the lower foreground that have appeared on tote bags, posters, and coffee mugs for decades. The painting is very large. Seeing it at full scale, the Madonna and Child...

Þingvellir: Where Two Continents Pull Apart at 2 Centimetres Per Year The ground at Þingvellir is splitting. The Eurasian and North American tectonic plates diverge here at roughly 2 centimetres per year, and the Almannagjá gorge you walk through – a rift valley with 30-metre basalt walls on each side – is the visible surface record of that process. The fissures continue below the...

Andros: The Cycladic Island That Greek Shipping Families Built and Kept for Themselves The Museum of Contemporary Art in Andros Town holds a serious international collection, Picasso, Chagall, Miro, and major Greek 20th-century artists, in a purpose-built museum in a small island town of a few thousand people. This doesn’t happen without specific money and specific intent. The shipping...

Arashiyama: Kyoto’s Western District and Why You Should Arrive Before 8am The Sagano Bamboo Forest at 7am is one of the genuinely quiet places in tourist Kyoto. The path is empty, the stalks are still damp, and the low hollow sound the wind makes in the canopy, which the Ministry of Environment has officially listed among Japan’s hundred best soundscapes, is audible rather than drowned...

Quirimbas Archipelago: Mozambique’s Least Visited Indian Ocean Islands The Quirimbas Archipelago consists of 32 islands off the northern coast of Mozambique, roughly 2,400 km north of Maputo. The distances are real: getting here involves flying to Pemba (the provincial capital), then connecting by small plane or boat. That distance is the main reason the Quirimbas remain genuinely uncrowded...

St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland: What the International Version Gets Wrong The global version of St. Patrick’s Day, green beer, shamrock hats, “Kiss Me I’m Irish”, was largely invented by Irish-Americans in the 19th century as an expression of immigrant identity. In Ireland, the holiday was until relatively recently a quieter, more religious occasion; pubs were legally...

Amber Fort’s Sheesh Mahal was designed so that a single candle would fill the chamber with reflected light – a 16th-century special effect that still works The Sheesh Mahal (Hall of Mirrors) in Amber Fort, just outside Jaipur, is one of the more remarkable interior spaces in Rajasthan. The walls and ceiling are covered with convex mirror fragments and semi-precious stone inlays in...

Torre de Belém, Lisbon Under the northwest corner turret of the Belem Tower, carved into the stone where the wall meets the water, there is a rhinoceros head. It is thought to be the first rhinoceros sculpture in European architecture. The basis for it was a live specimen named Ganda that arrived in Lisbon from India in 1515 as a diplomatic gift from the Sultan of Gujarat to King Manuel I.

Ko Tao: The Cheapest Place in the World to Learn to Dive, and What Else Is There Ko Tao produces more PADI certified divers than anywhere else on earth. The PADI Open Water certification costs 10,000-13,000 baht (around USD 270-350) for a 3-4 day course that includes classroom sessions, confined water training, and four open water dives. The same certification costs USD 400-700 in most Western...

Borobudur, Central Java, Indonesia Borobudur was built during the Sailendra dynasty in the 9th century, abandoned around the 10th century for reasons that remain uncertain (volcanic eruption, political upheaval, religious shift), and covered by volcanic ash and jungle for roughly nine centuries. It was “rediscovered” and documented by a Dutch colonial commission in 1814 under Thomas...

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Tallinn The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral sits at the top of Toompea Hill, directly opposite the entrance to the Estonian Parliament, and it was designed to be seen from everywhere in the lower city. Built between 1894 and 1900 by the Russian Imperial authorities, it was an explicit statement of Russian cultural and political dominance over Estonia at a time when...

Osaka Castle: The Original Was Better, but This One Is Still Worth Your Morning Toyotomi Hideyoshi built the original Osaka Castle in 1583 as a deliberate architectural statement of unification, the largest castle in Japan, on the largest stone base, surrounded by the widest moats. The castle changed hands and was rebuilt several times before the current tower was constructed in 1931 using...

Auschwitz: What You Need to Know Before You Go Between January and May 1945, as Soviet forces advanced westward, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz. Around 60,000 surviving prisoners were forced on death marches toward camps in Germany. Thousands died on the roads. On 27 January 1945, Soviet troops entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex and found approximately 7,500 survivors too sick to walk. They...

Tortuguero: Costa Rica’s Caribbean Canal System and Its Sea Turtles Tortuguero National Park occupies the northern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, a 35,000-hectare system of rivers, lagoons, swamps, and beaches that has almost no road access. The village of Tortuguero, on a narrow strip of land between the ocean and the main canal, is reached exclusively by boat or small plane. This...

Sedona: Red Rock Country With a Wellness Industry Growing Around It The popular trailheads around Sedona now close their parking lots on busy spring and autumn weekends before 7am, which should tell you something about how to plan your day here. The city and the Coconino National Forest introduced a free shuttle system running Thursday through Sunday from around 7am to 5:30pm to Cathedral Rock,...

Kolkata, West Bengal Durga Puja transforms Kolkata every October into something that has no equivalent anywhere else in India. For four days, the city installs thousands of elaborately constructed pandals, temporary structures housing hand-made clay idols of the goddess Durga, each commissioned to an architectural or artistic theme chosen by the neighbourhood committee. The pandals range from...

Mir Castle: Belarus’s Best Medieval Monument and Why It’s Worth the Detour Mir Castle (Myrski Zamak) stands in the small town of Mir, about 100 kilometres south-west of Minsk in the Grodno region of Belarus. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, built between the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and is among the finest examples of fortified castle architecture in Eastern Europe. If...

Abu Dhabi Desert Safari: The Rub’ al Khali and the Liwa Oasis The Empty Quarter (Rub’ al Khali) is the largest continuous sand desert in the world: 650,000 square kilometres across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and Yemen. Its northwestern edge reaches into Abu Dhabi emirate, where the Liwa Oasis sits on the edge of the sand sea. The dunes here are among the largest in the world: Moreeb...

Brandenburg Gate: The 233-Year-Old Structure That Changed Meaning Three Times The Brandenburg Gate was completed in 1791, a neoclassical triumphal arch at the western end of Unter den Linden, designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans after the Propylaea gateway of the Athenian Acropolis. The Quadriga copper horse-and-chariot on top arrived in 1793. Napoleon had it removed to Paris in 1806 after his...

Castle Urquhart, Loch Ness Urquhart Castle was largely destroyed in 1692 by Jacobite forces retreating before government troops to prevent it being used as a government stronghold. Before that, it had changed hands between Scottish kings, English invaders, the Bruce and Balliol factions, clan disputes, and the Grants for three centuries. Its strategic position on a rocky peninsula jutting into...

Aoraki / Mount Cook A suspension bridge spans the Hooker River at 189 metres, scheduled to open late July or August 2026 – until then, the upper section of the Hooker Valley Track remains closed beyond the Mount Sefton Lookout due to flood damage from April 2025. The lower section, about one hour return from the carpark, is still accessible and still very good. This is relevant upfront...

Giverny: Monet’s Garden and Why Timing Is Everything Giverny is a village in Normandy, 80 kilometres west of Paris, that Claude Monet moved to in 1883 and never really left. He spent the last 43 years of his life here, creating the garden that became both his primary source of subjects and one of the most deliberate works of art of the late 19th century. The water garden with its...

Grand Bazaar, Istanbul The Grand Bazaar has been trading since 1461, when Mehmed II ordered its construction shortly after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. The current structure covers around 30,000 square metres across 61 covered streets, with somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 shops depending on who’s counting. It sees around 40 million visitors per year, which tells you everything...

Aiguille du Midi: The Cable Car to 3,842 Metres The cable car from Chamonix to the Aiguille du Midi summit station climbs 2,807 vertical metres in about 20 minutes. That is one of the largest single cable car elevation gains in the world. At the top you are at 3,842 metres, above most of the visible clouds, with the full mass of Mont Blanc – at 4,808 metres the highest peak in the Alps...

The Burj Al Arab: What “Seven Stars” Actually Costs, and Whether You Need to Stay The Burj Al Arab invented the phrase “seven-star hotel” as a marketing category that applies exclusively to itself. No official hotel rating system has ever awarded seven stars; the Jumeirah Group simply decided that the five-star scale didn’t capture what they were attempting. You can...

Halong Bay: Choosing the Right Cruise Over the Wrong One The 1,969 limestone karst towers rising from the water at Halong Bay were formed over 500 million years by tectonic uplift, erosion, and the dissolution of carbonate rock. Local legend gives a different explanation: a dragon sent from heaven breathed fire and jewels into the sea, the jewels hardened into islands, and the dragon’s tail...