Castle Howard: The House That Started Without an Architect Castle Howard was the first building that John Vanbrugh ever designed. He had no architectural training. He was a playwright and a soldier, and in 1699 the third Earl of Carlisle asked him to design a house to replace the one at Henderskelfe that had burned down. What emerged over the following decade, with Nicholas Hawksmoor doing the...

Windsor Castle has been continuously occupied since 1070, which means it has been someone’s home for roughly twice as long as the United States has existed William the Conqueror built the first castle here as part of a ring of defensive fortresses around London. Forty monarchs have lived in it since then – remodelling, expanding, rebuilding after fires, and adding state apartments that...

Shwedagon Pagoda: Rangoon’s Gold Mountain and What You Need to Know The Shwedagon Pagoda sits on Singuttara Hill in Yangon, rises to 98 metres, and is covered in real gold. Not gold paint, not gold leaf applied for effect: 27 metric tonnes of gold tiles encasing the structure, with a jewelled hti (crown) at the tip containing thousands of diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. At sunset, when the...

The Dead Sea The water level has dropped more than 50 metres since 1930. By 2025 the surface sat at roughly 439 metres below sea level, and it falls at about one metre per year. Old photographs show shorelines that are now several hundred metres inland. Sinkholes have opened along sections of beach that were accessible a decade ago. The Dead Sea is the most visited body of water in the Middle East...

Belfast Belfast has done something that most post-conflict cities fail to do: turned its difficult history into a genuine tourist asset without sanitising it. The murals on the Falls Road and Shankill Road – painted during the Troubles, added to since, still being created – are among the most politically charged public art anywhere in the world. The black cab tours that take visitors...

The Edinburgh Fringe started in 1947 as eight uninvited companies performing outside the International Festival and is now the largest arts festival on earth The official story of the Edinburgh International Festival begins with Rudolf Bing in 1947, who founded it as a postwar cultural renewal – a deliberate act of civilisation after years of destruction. The more interesting story begins at...

Drottningholm Palace: Sweden’s Royal Residence, Open to Visitors The Drottningholm Court Theatre, completed in 1766, is one of the most perfectly preserved 18th-century theatres in the world, the original stage machinery, painted backdrops, and backstage areas with wigs, costumes, and props still in place. While other European courts stripped and rebuilt their theatres in the 19th century to...

Amazon Rainforest: How to Actually Visit, Not Just Photograph The Amazon covers approximately 5.5 million square kilometres across nine countries. That number is so large it becomes meaningless. What it means practically is that there is no single “Amazon experience”, the forest along the Rio Negro near Manaus is different from the upper Peruvian Amazon near Iquitos, which is different...

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico Every evening from late May through October, around 400,000 Brazilian free-tailed bats leave the natural entrance of Carlsbad Cavern in a spiral column that takes two to three hours to clear. They fly north, consuming around three tons of insects per night before returning before dawn. You can watch from the amphitheater at no charge beyond the park...

Big Sur, California The Bixby Creek Bridge is one of the most photographed bridges in the world. It was completed in 1932, spans 260 feet across a coastal canyon at a height of 260 feet above the creek, and appears in so many images that visitors sometimes arrive expecting a viewpoint that doesn’t actually exist in the spot the photograph was taken from. The best angle is from a turnout on...

Rye: East Sussex’s Most Photographed Hill Town Rye sits on a sandstone hill above the flat Romney Marsh, looks almost exactly as it would have looked in 1650, and has been quietly hosting English visitors who think they’ve discovered something hidden for the last hundred years. The medieval street grid is intact. The timber-framed houses are intact. The cobblestones on Mermaid Street...

Atacama Desert: The Driest Non-Polar Place on Earth, Where It Hasn’t Rained in 400 Years Parts of the Atacama Desert have no recorded rainfall for longer than any other place on earth. The area around the Yungay weather station in the Chilean Atacama is estimated not to have received measurable precipitation in 400 years. This is not poetry, it’s a geological fact that produces a...

Hong Kong: A City That Rewards Walking Over Planning The classic Hong Kong skyline shot, taken from the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade at night with Kowloon behind you and the towers of Hong Kong Island lit up across the water, is one of the most photographed urban views on earth and also one of the few where the reality exceeds the image. The harbour framing, the density, the scale: you feel it properly...

Capitol Hill, Washington D.C.: The Civic Architecture Worth a Day The Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, completed in 1897, has one of the most extraordinary interiors in Washington. The main reading room, a 160-foot octagonal domed hall with elaborate mosaics, stained glass, and gilded ironwork, was built at a moment when the United States wanted its national library to announce that...

The Eiffel Tower: Managing the Visit Properly Gustave Eiffel built the tower for the 1889 World’s Fair as a demonstration of what could be done with iron. It was supposed to be temporary. Parisians loathed it at first. Then the radio antenna at the top proved militarily useful in World War I, and it stayed. Today it is the most visited paid monument in the world at roughly 7 million visitors...

Milan’s Duomo: Europe’s Third-Largest Cathedral and a Rooftop You Can Walk Construction of the Milan Cathedral began in 1386 and continued for nearly 600 years; the last bronze doors were installed in 1965. That slow accumulation shows in the architecture: Gothic spires and flying buttresses mix with Renaissance and Baroque additions in a way that shouldn’t work but does. The...

Iguazu Falls, Argentina and Brazil Eleanor Roosevelt, on seeing Iguazu for the first time, reportedly said “Poor Niagara.” The comparison is accurate. At peak flow in March and April, around 12,750 cubic metres per second pass over a horseshoe-shaped cliff 2.7 kilometres wide. Niagara’s flow at peak is about 5,700 cubic metres per second across a much narrower crest. Iguazu is...

Dublin Four Nobel Prizes in literature from a city of half a million people – that statistic is either remarkable or, if you’ve spent time in Dublin’s pub culture, entirely predictable. Conversation is the city’s art form, the pub is its performance space, and the line between storytelling and actual lying is considered more of a stylistic choice than a moral question. You...

Giza: The Pyramids Were Built by Paid Workers, Not Slaves, and Other Things Worth Knowing The Great Pyramid of Khufu was the world’s tallest structure for 3,800 consecutive years. It is built from approximately 2.3 million stone blocks averaging 2.5 tonnes each, and the base’s four sides differ by less than 20cm in length. These facts are widely reproduced, but standing at the base...

The Grand Bazaar, Istanbul The Grand Bazaar has over 4,000 shops, 61 covered streets, and receives an estimated 250,000 to 400,000 visitors on a busy day. It opened in the 1460s under Sultan Mehmed II, four years after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, as a central trading hub for the new capital. Over five centuries, it grew from a pair of bedestens (covered market buildings for valuable...

On a single day in 1907, 11,747 people were processed through one building in New York Harbor The Great Hall at Ellis Island is 56 metres long, 28 metres wide, and has a vaulted tile ceiling that took years to restore after the building sat abandoned and deteriorating from 1954 until the 1980s. When you stand in it now, largely empty of people, it is easy to imagine the scale wrong.

Wawel Cathedral: Poland’s National Sanctuary, and What Makes It Different from Other Cathedrals Wawel Cathedral is the burial site of Polish kings, queens, and national heroes. The crypt contains 37 sarcophagi, and the names on them trace Polish history from the 14th to the 20th century: Casimir III, Jan III Sobieski (who defeated the Ottoman army at Vienna in 1683), poet Adam Mickiewicz,...

Cloud Gate and the Rest of Millennium Park: Two Hours Well Spent Anish Kapoor was awarded the commission for Cloud Gate in 1999 and completed it in 2006, which anyone who knows Kapoor’s relationship with deadlines will recognise as a relatively prompt delivery. The sculpture weighs 110 tonnes and is made from 168 stainless steel plates, welded and polished to seamless mirror quality. No...

The Danube Delta: Europe’s Largest Wetland and Why It’s Harder Than It Looks to Visit Well Where the Danube meets the Black Sea in eastern Romania, it splits into three main channels and spreads across 3,450 square kilometres of channels, lakes, reed beds, and forest. This is the Danube Delta, Europe’s second-largest river delta after the Volga and one of the continent’s...

Delphi: The Oracle’s Site and How to Visit It Properly Geological studies published in 2001 found evidence of ethylene gas seeping through the fault lines directly below the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Ethylene at low concentrations produces a light-headed, dissociative state; at higher concentrations, it causes tremors and the inability to speak clearly. The Pythia, the priestess who...

Bourbon Street and the French Quarter, New Orleans Bourbon Street is America’s most famous party street, and it is also somewhat less than its reputation. The neon, the plastic cups of Hurricanes (rum, passion fruit syrup, grenadine; strong; sold from every doorway), the balconies draped with beads, and the brass band music spilling out of open doors onto the pavement – it is genuine...

Trafalgar Square: Free Art, Excellent Pigeons, and One Column Trafalgar Square is one of the few genuinely public spaces in central London where you can sit for an hour without being asked to buy anything. The fountains, the steps, the bronze lions at the base of Nelson’s Column: all free, all accessible, and all perpetually occupied by a mixture of tourists, office workers eating lunch, and...

Bath: Where the Romans Left the Plumbing Running The hot springs at Bath have been producing geothermal water at 45°C continuously since before the Romans arrived in 43 AD. The Romans built a temple and bathing complex over the spring, dedicated to the goddess Sulis Minerva - a fusion of the local Celtic deity and the Roman one - and people have been taking the waters here ever since. The...

Lalibela: Eleven Churches Carved from Solid Rock, Still in Use Lalibela is a small town in the Amhara highlands of northern Ethiopia, at around 2,600 metres altitude. It contains eleven churches carved directly from volcanic tuff bedrock, built primarily in the 12th and 13th centuries under the reign of King Gebre Mesqel Lalibela. Every church is still an active place of worship in the Ethiopian...

Checkpoint Charlie: The Most Romanticised Crossing Point in Cold War History On October 27, 1961, US and Soviet tanks faced each other for sixteen hours at Checkpoint Charlie, the Allied crossing point between East and West Berlin. Neither side fired. Both sides eventually withdrew. The standoff was the closest the superpowers came to direct military confrontation in Berlin, and it happened at a...

Sydney Harbour Bridge is the widest long-span bridge in the world, which is not the first thing anyone says about it but is the fact that most surprised its construction team The bridge opened on 19 March 1932 after eight years of construction. At 49 metres wide, it carries eight traffic lanes, two rail lines, a dedicated cycling path, and a pedestrian walkway – a loading configuration that...

Newcastle, NSW: The Bathers Way and the Harbour Precinct Australia’s second-oldest city is also one of its most underestimated. Newcastle spent decades defined by steel and coal; when the steelworks closed in 1999, the city spent the next 20 years gradually rediscovering its extraordinary position between a working harbour and a chain of ocean beaches. What it has now is a waterfront and...

Manneken Pis: The 61cm Bronze Boy and a City That Genuinely Finds This Funny Manneken Pis is 61 centimetres tall and has been urinating in public in central Brussels since 1619. Thieves have stolen it three times. It has over 1,000 registered costumes, donated by governments, organisations, and clubs from around the world, and is dressed in them for approximately 130 days per year on a formal...

Beyond Tortola: The BVI Islands Worth the Extra Sail The Painkiller cocktail – rum, cream of coconut, orange juice, pineapple juice, grated nutmeg on top – was invented at Soggy Dollar Bar on Jost Van Dyke in the 1970s. The bar is named for the soggy dollar bills you peel from your swimsuit after swimming ashore from your moored boat, because there’s no dock. This tells you...

The Great Pyramids: What to Know Before You Go The Pyramids of Giza are 4,500 years old, the only surviving structure from the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and they sit on the outskirts of Cairo with a Pizza Hut visible from certain angles. This is the honest situation. It doesn’t make them less extraordinary. The scale is simply impossible to prepare for: Khufu’s pyramid is 138...

The Royal Palace of Madrid: What’s Actually Worth Your Time The Palacio Real de Madrid is the official residence of the Spanish royal family, though the current king and queen choose to live at the considerably smaller Palacio de La Zarzuela in the suburbs and only use the Palacio Real for state functions. This means visitors have access to a working palace rather than a preserved relic,...

Inle Lake: Myanmar’s Most Accessible Landscape and the Political Context You Need to Know The Intha people of Inle Lake have developed a fishing technique found almost nowhere else in the world: they stand at the stern of their narrow wooden boats and wrap one leg around the oar to row, freeing both hands for managing fishing nets and traps. It is adapted to the shallow, weed-filled lake...

Sydney Opera House: The Building That Changed What Architecture Could Be The Sydney Opera House was completed in 1973 after 16 years of construction, a political crisis, the resignation of its Danish architect, and a final cost that was 1,457 percent over the original budget. The architect, Jørn Utzon, left the project in 1966 and never returned to see the building. He received the Pritzker Prize...

Antarctica: What the Brochures Get Right and What They Leave Out The Drake Passage between South America and Antarctica is 600 miles of open Southern Ocean with no land mass to break the waves. On a bad crossing, the ship rolls 20-30 degrees. People who haven’t been seasick before discover they can be. The crossing takes 48 hours each way, which means 4 of your 10-12 days at sea in the...

Boudhanath: The Stupa That Was Rebuilt After an Earthquake and Became More Significant The 2015 Gorkha earthquake killed nearly 9,000 people in Nepal and damaged the Boudhanath Stupa significantly, the spire tilted, the upper structure cracked, and sections of the whitewashed dome surface fell away. The reconstruction was completed in 2016, funded largely through donations from Tibetan Buddhist...

Berlin Museum Island Museum Island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the middle of the Spree River in central Berlin, holding five major museums in 19th and early 20th-century buildings. No other square kilometre of real estate in Germany contains a comparable concentration of ancient world artefacts. The combination of Prussian imperial ambition and the 19th-century passion for collecting...

The D-Day Beaches: What Visiting Actually Requires The Normandy landings on June 6, 1944 covered 80km of coastline and five beaches. The full circuit, including the major memorials and museums, requires two days minimum. Most people give it one and leave having seen Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery while missing everything at Pointe du Hoc, Utah Beach, and the British and Canadian sites....

Spanish Steps, Rome The Spanish Steps are named for the Spanish Embassy, funded by a French diplomat, and owned by France, which makes them arguably the most nationally ambiguous landmark in Rome. All 138 steps were restored between 2015 and 2016 using private funding from Bulgari (the jeweller has its flagship store two minutes away on Via Condotti), which seems appropriate for a staircase in the...

Topkapi Palace: What You’ll See, What You’ll Miss, and What to Prioritise The Topkapi Dagger was never delivered. Intended as a diplomatic gift from Sultan Mahmud I to the Persian Shah Nadir in 1747, the delegation was still travelling when news arrived that Nadir had been assassinated. The dagger came home to Istanbul and went into the treasury, where it has sat for nearly three...

San Diego Zoo: Bigger Than You Think, Better Than You Expect San Diego Zoo gets mentioned alongside “family attraction” so often that adults without children sometimes skip it. That’s a mistake. The zoo covers 100 acres of Balboa Park canyon terrain, houses over 3,500 animals from 650-plus species, and has led serious conservation breeding programs for decades. It’s one of...

Bodiam Castle, East Sussex Bodiam is the castle you picture when you picture a castle. It has towers at each corner, a square moat filled with water, a portcullis that still works, and a gatehouse that looks exactly like the cover of a children’s history book. It was built in 1385 by Sir Edward Dalyngrigge, ostensibly as a defence against French raids along the River Rother valley during the...

Schonbrunn: Vienna’s Most Visited Attraction and Actually Worth It Schonbrunn Palace receives over 4 million visitors a year, which sounds like an argument to skip it. It isn’t. Unlike Versailles, where the queue for the main building extends 90 minutes on summer weekends and the rooms disappoint after the wait, Schonbrunn is structured to distribute visitors. The gardens are free, the...

The Twelve Apostles: A Great Ocean Road Icon and the Facts About It The Twelve Apostles are a set of limestone sea stacks off the Port Campbell coastline in Victoria, Australia, about 230 kilometres west of Melbourne on the Great Ocean Road. They were formed by erosion over millions of years, the same process that continues to reduce them now. There were never actually twelve. At most eight stacks...

Table Mountain, Cape Town The mountain is there when you land. It’s there when you check into your hotel. It frames the end of every street in the City Bowl. Table Mountain doesn’t creep up on you – it dominates the skyline at 1,086 metres and the flat summit is unmistakable from miles out. That’s the first thing about this place: the icon actually lives up to itself....

Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland The Aletsch Glacier is retreating at about 60 metres per year, and that rate has been accelerating. The dark medial moraines running the glacier’s length like lanes on a highway are deposits of accumulated rock where tributary glaciers merged with the main flow, laid down over centuries. They function as a geological record: the distance between moraine lines...