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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...