Thirty-six columns stolen from older buildings, now holding up the ceiling of a sixth-century reservoir Somewhere under Sultanahmet, past a flight of stone steps and through a door most tourists walk past without noticing, there is a room the size of a cathedral that has been filling slowly with water since the year 532. The Basilica Cistern – Yerebatan Sarnici in Turkish, meaning the Sunken...

Aswan: The Dam, the Temples, and the Nubian South Aswan is the southernmost major city in Egypt, 889km from Cairo by road and significantly different in character. The climate is drier and hotter; the Nile narrows here between granite boulders; the architecture shows Nubian influence; and the pace is slower than Cairo or Luxor. The Aswan High Dam is the reason many visitors come but it is the...

Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia The Museum of Anthropology holds the largest collection of Bill Reid’s work in the world. Reid was the Haida artist who almost single-handedly revived Northwest Coast Indigenous art in the mid-20th century, working in gold, silver, bronze, and cedar at a scale and quality that shifted the art world’s understanding of what...

Singapore: The City That Gets Cited as a Development Model and Is More Complicated Than That The only hawker stall in the world currently holding a Michelin star is Hill Street Tai Hwa Pork Noodle in Singapore, serving a bowl of bak chor mee (minced pork noodles) for a few dollars in a coffee shop. The story is worth thinking about: Singapore’s hawker centres – the open-air food courts...

Notre-Dame de Reims: The Coronation Cathedral of France Twenty-five kings of France were crowned at Reims, beginning with Louis the Pious in 816 and ending with Charles X in 1825. The cathedral that stands today – Gothic construction begun in 1211, towers completed in the 15th century – was therefore the site where French royal legitimacy was physically conferred for a millennium. The...

The Ultimate Guide to the Cheltenham Festival: Where to Visit, Eat, Stay, and More! Overview: The Premier National Hunt Racing Event Are you ready for the most iconic horse racing event in the UK? The Cheltenham Festival is just around the corner, and we can’t wait to share our ultimate guide with you! Held annually in March in Gloucestershire, England, this prestigious four-day National...

Dubrovnik: The City Walls, Minčeta Fortress, and Managing the Crowds Dubrovnik’s old city is encircled by 1.94km of medieval walls ranging from 4 to 6 metres thick, built and strengthened between the 13th and 17th centuries. The walls are the defining feature of the city. Within them, the limestone streets and red-tiled roofs of the old town are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Outside them,...

Norway’s Coast: Which Parts Are Worth the Logistics Bergen averages 237 days of rain per year, which makes it the rainiest city in Europe by most measures, and yet the Bryggen wharf in rain genuinely looks better than in sunshine. The reflected light in the puddles animates the 18th-century wooden facades in a way that flat sun doesn’t. Norway rewards visitors who don’t treat...

Varanasi: The City That Does Not Look Away Varanasi is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world - or one of them, depending on who you ask - and it has the confidence of something that does not need to justify itself. The Ganges runs wide and brown here. Pyres burn at Manikarnika Ghat around the clock. Men shave their heads for the dead and young priests swing oil lamps in rhythmic arcs...

The Taj Mahal: Visiting Without Being Overwhelmed Shah Jahan, the Mughal emperor who commissioned the Taj Mahal, was imprisoned in Agra Fort from 1658 until his death in 1666, deposed by his own son Aurangzeb, who considered his father’s spending excessive. From a window in the Musamman Burj tower, Shah Jahan could see the Taj Mahal across the river. Historians debate whether he found this...

Avignon and the Pont Saint-Bénézet: History with a Nursery Rhyme Attached The Pont d’Avignon, properly called the Pont Saint-Bénézet, is the ruined medieval bridge that sticks out into the Rhône and stops about halfway across. Most visitors know it from the French nursery rhyme “Sur le Pont d’Avignon,” which describes people dancing on it. In practice it was never wide...

Hue: Vietnam’s Most Overlooked City and Its Very Good Food Hue was the capital of Vietnam under the Nguyen Dynasty from 1802 to 1945. The Imperial Citadel on the north bank of the Perfume River is the central attraction, but the city’s actual claim is its cuisine: a distinct school of Vietnamese cooking that developed to satisfy an imperial court and that still dominates the local...

Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia The park occupies a compact area of Old City Philadelphia, a few blocks square between Market and Walnut Streets east of Broad Street. It protects the buildings and grounds where the Second Continental Congress met, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776, and where the Constitutional Convention produced the United States...

Rio de Janeiro: The Honest Version Rio has a complicated reputation that it has mostly earned on both counts. The positive side is genuine: the geography - granite mountains rising from ocean bays, Atlantic forest inside the city limits, two of the world’s most famous beaches - is as spectacular as claimed. The negative side is also genuine: crime in certain areas is serious, tourist scams...

Yakushima: Japan’s Oldest Forest and What It Takes to See It Properly The Jomon Sugi cedar is somewhere between 2,170 and 7,200 years old, and the wide uncertainty range is not carelessness – the inner rings have been dead too long to date accurately. What you can say with confidence is that this tree was already ancient when Rome was founded and was old enough to qualify as venerable...

York Minster: The Cathedral That Keeps Burning Down In 1984, lightning struck the south transept of York Minster at 2am, igniting the roof. The fire burned for four hours and destroyed the 13th-century timber ceiling and much of the medieval glass in the south transept. This was the third major fire in living memory; the previous two were in 1829 and 1840, both the work of arsonists. The current...

Charles Bridge Construction began at 5:31am on 9 July 1357. The date and time were chosen by Emperor Charles IV and his court astrologers because, read as a numerical sequence, 1-3-5-7-9-7-5-3-1, it formed a palindrome. The belief was that the symmetry of numbers would confer structural stability on the bridge. It has been standing for 670 years, so you could argue the approach worked. The more...

At its peak, Tikal had 60,000 to 90,000 people living in a city that is still mostly underground Tikal is the largest excavated Maya site in the Americas and simultaneously one of the most underexcavated – the core archaeological zone covers 16 square kilometres, but the full site beneath the jungle canopy extends considerably further. What has been cleared and consolidated represents a...

Guna Yala (San Blas Islands): Autonomous Territory, Pristine Caribbean, Complicated Access The San Blas Islands are an archipelago of 365 islands along the Caribbean coast of Panama, about 40 kilometres east of Colon. Most are uninhabited. The inhabited ones are home to the Guna people, who have maintained autonomous political control of their territory – now officially called Guna Yala...

Angkor Wat, Cambodia The central temple of Angkor Wat is the world’s largest religious monument – 402 acres of towers, causeways, moat, and gallery. Construction began under King Suryavarman II in the early 12th century. The temple was dedicated to Vishnu as a Hindu monument before transitioning to Buddhist use, a shift reflected in the sculpture throughout the complex. In 2025, nearly...

The Blue Lagoon: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Whether It’s Worth the Price The Blue Lagoon was discovered accidentally in 1976 when workers at the nearby Svartsengi geothermal power plant noticed that the water leaving the facility was turning the surrounding lava field white and that local people with psoriasis were bathing in it and experiencing improvement. The milky blue-white...

Discovering the Frozen Continent: A Traveler’s Guide to Antarctica Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911, using dog sleds, careful logistics, and a systematic approach to polar travel. Robert Falcon Scott arrived 34 days later and died on the return journey. The contrast between the two expeditions – one successful through preparation, one fatal through a...

The Canadian Maritimes: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world. At Hopewell Rocks in New Brunswick, the tidal range reaches 16 metres twice a day, which means you can walk on the ocean floor between the extraordinary flower-pot rock formations in the morning and those same formations are buried to their shoulders in water by...

Chester’s Roman amphitheatre is the largest exposed Roman amphitheatre in Britain and most visitors walk past it without stopping Chester was the Roman fortress of Deva Victrix, established around 79 CE as one of only three permanent legionary fortresses in Roman Britain (the others were at Eboracum – York – and Isca Augusta – Caerleon). The XX Valeria Victrix legion...

Delhi: Eight Cities in One, and How to Stop Treating It Like a Transit Hub Delhi has been continuously settled for over 3,000 years and has been the capital of at least eight successive empires and states. Each left a physical layer: Mughal tombs, British colonial avenues, pre-Mughal sultanate fortresses, and a contemporary megacity of 30 million people. The standard tourist itinerary of Red Fort,...

Lake Atitlán: The Caldera Lake That Aldous Huxley Called the Most Beautiful in the World Aldous Huxley visited Lake Atitlán in 1934 and wrote that it was “too much of a good thing,” exceeding what he’d been led to expect from Como and Maggiore. That comparison stands. The lake sits at 1,560 metres in a volcanic caldera in Guatemala’s western highlands; three volcanoes...

Grand Central Terminal: A Building That Refuses to Be Just a Train Station Grand Central was nearly demolished in the 1960s. Penn Station was torn down in 1963 to build Madison Square Garden, and the same fate was planned for Grand Central. Jackie Kennedy led the preservation effort; the building was designated a landmark in 1967 and the Supreme Court upheld the designation in 1978. The city had...

British Virgin Islands The mooring balls at The Baths, the famous boulder field at the southern tip of Virgin Gorda, fill by 9am on calm-weather days in high season. There are roughly 15 day-use balls in the National Parks Trust mooring field; they are first-come, first-served; anchoring in the park area is prohibited to protect the seagrass. If you arrive by chartered yacht at 11am in February...

Rome: The Colosseum Queue Is Not Optional, and the Trevi Fountain Now Costs Money Rome is 2,800 years of continuous occupation compressed into a city of 3 million. Every neighbourhood has something extraordinary in it, and the challenge is deciding what to spend time on while accepting that the Colosseum, Sistine Chapel, and Vatican Museums require pre-booking or you will lose half a day to queues...

Tikal: Waking Up in the Oldest Maya City in the Forest Temple IV at Tikal is 70 metres tall, the tallest pre-Columbian structure in the Americas that visitors can climb. When George Lucas filmed the establishing shot of the Rebel Alliance base in Star Wars in 1976, he shot it from the top of Temple IV looking over the jungle canopy. The temples visible in that shot are real. The film came out...

Lima: The Food Capital Peru Built Almost by Accident Lima is grey. The garúa, a coastal fog that sits over the city for most of the year, gives the sky a flat white quality that photographs badly and discourages people from appreciating what is actually one of the most rewarding cities in South America. The food alone justifies the flight. Central, run by Virgilio Martínez, has regularly appeared...

Tubbataha Reef: The Philippines’ Remote UNESCO Dive Site and What It Takes to Get There Tubbataha Reef was one of the first marine protected areas established in the Philippines, protected since 1988. In 2013, the USS Guardian, a US Navy minesweeper, ran aground on the reef and destroyed approximately 4,000 square metres of coral. The US government agreed to pay approximately USD 1.4 million...

The Vasa Museum: A Warship That Sank 20 Minutes Into Its Maiden Voyage A stability test was conducted on the Vasa before it left Stockholm harbour. Sailors ran back and forth across the deck to test how the ship responded; it rocked so dramatically that the test was stopped before completion. The naval commander at the scene knew the ship was dangerously unstable but also knew that telling King...

The Little Mermaid Statue, Copenhagen: Managing Your Expectations The Little Mermaid (Den Lille Havfrue) is a bronze sculpture 80 cm tall, sitting on a rock at the Langelinie promenade in Copenhagen. She has been vandalised, decapitated twice (1964 and 1998), had her right arm sawn off (1984), and has been repeatedly painted by activists. She was commissioned in 1909 by Carl Jacobsen of the...

Picasso spent the autumn of 1946 in a Grimaldi castle above the sea and left behind 23 paintings, 44 drawings, and 2 tapestries in three months There is a version of the French Riviera that has been sold to tourists since the Victorian era – the azure water, the parasol pines, the oyster lunches on a terrace – and Antibes has all of that. But it also has something more specific: it was...

Yellowstone: How to See the Park in Four Days Without Doing It Wrong Yellowstone sits over a supervolcano caldera covering 3,468 square miles across Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. It contains half the world’s geothermal features, the largest concentration of geysers on earth, and one of the best places in North America to see wolves, grizzly bears, and bison in the wild. It also gets 4-5...

Ipanema: The Beach Has Postcodes and the Postcodes Have Social Meaning “The Girl from Ipanema” was written in 1962 about a real person: Heloisa Pinheiro, then 17, who walked past the Bar Veloso on Rua Montenegro each morning on her way to the beach. Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes were regulars and wrote the song from observation. The bar is now called Garota de Ipanema, after the...

Chitwan’s one-horned rhinoceros population has recovered from fewer than 100 animals in the 1960s to over 700 today – one of the more successful conservation stories in Asia The greater one-horned rhinoceros in Nepal was hunted almost to extinction by the mid-20th century, partly for sport, partly for the horn’s supposed medicinal properties. Chitwan National Park was established...

The Aleutian Islands: The Chain That Made WWII’s Pacific Theater Geography In June 1942, Japanese forces occupied the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska, the only occupation of American soil during World War II. The subsequent US campaign to retake them involved nearly 35,000 troops, brutal weather, and the Battle of Attu in May 1943, which cost over 500 American lives and killed more than...

Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica National Geographic once called Corcovado National Park the most biologically intense place on earth. The figure that gives weight to that description: approximately 2.5% of the world’s biodiversity exists in this 40,000-hectare reserve occupying about 40% of the Osa Peninsula. That concentration – 140 mammal species, 400 bird species, 117 reptile species, and...

Riga Cathedral: Latvia’s Most Important Building and the City Around It The organ installed in Riga Cathedral in 1884 had 6,768 pipes, which made it the largest pipe organ in the world at the time. It no longer holds that record, but it still fills the stone nave with a sound that the building was essentially designed for. Evening organ concerts here are among the better inexpensive...

The Space Needle: What Seattle Built for Its 1962 World’s Fair The Space Needle is 184 metres tall (605 feet), weighs 9,550 tons, and was built in 13 months for the 1962 Century 21 Exposition World’s Fair. The design was sketched on a napkin by Edward Carlson, the exposition’s chairman, who wanted something that looked like a flying saucer with a tower. The architect John Graham...

Ometepe Island: Two Volcanoes in a Lake Ometepe appears in the pre-Columbian mythology of the region as a sacred island, a place where the Nahuatl-speaking Nicarao people carved petroglyphs into the volcanic rock, some of which are still visible on the Maderas flank. The island was a destination before it was a tourism destination, which is a distinction worth holding onto when you arrive. It is...

Redwoods Whakarewarewa Forest: Rotorua’s Most Underrated Attraction The California coastal redwoods at Whakarewarewa Forest were planted as a forestry trial in 1901 to assess which tree species might work commercially in New Zealand’s North Island. The trial was eventually abandoned as uneconomic, the trees grew well but the harvest wasn’t practical at scale. What the forestry...

The Houses of Parliament, London The building you see on the London skyline along the Thames was designed in the 1840s by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin after a fire destroyed most of the medieval palace in 1834. What replaced it was Gothic Revival on a monumental scale: the long riverside facade, the Victoria Tower at the south end, and Elizabeth Tower at the north containing Big Ben –...

Aitutaki: The Lagoon That Justifies the Journey Most people who visit Aitutaki have already been to Fiji, Bora Bora, or the Maldives. They visit Aitutaki and say it’s better. The lagoon, 45 square kilometres of shallow turquoise water enclosed by a coral reef, is genuinely extraordinary, and the island has none of the resort-industrial infrastructure that has smoothed Bora Bora’s...

The Angel of the North: 208 Tonnes of Weathering Steel Above a Former Coalfield You see it from the train before anything else. The East Coast Main Line passes within a few hundred metres of the Angel of the North as it runs south into Gateshead, and the sight of a 20-metre steel figure with 54-metre wings appearing suddenly out of the embankment has been startling passengers since February 1998....

Stirling: The Crossroads of Scotland and Why That Matters In 1297, William Wallace positioned his army at Stirling Bridge with about 5,000 men facing an English force of perhaps 15,000, professional soldiers, cavalry, archers. Wallace waited until roughly half the English army had crossed the narrow wooden bridge, then attacked. The English cavalry on the Scottish bank had no room to manoeuvre;...

Centre Pompidou: The Inside-Out Building and Its Collection When the Centre Pompidou opened in 1977, the Parisian establishment was appalled. Newspapers called it a “gas refinery” and a “catastrophe.” The Académie des Beaux-Arts issued formal protests. The architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, both in their late 30s, had won the international competition with a design...

Uluru (Ayers Rock): What You’re Actually Looking At Uluru extends about 2.5 kilometres underground. What you see above the desert floor – a 348-metre sandstone monolith rising from the flat plain of the Northern Territory – is only a fraction of the total formation, which continues deep into the earth as a single connected mass of arkosic sandstone about 550 million years old....