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...

Hollywood Boulevard: What’s Worth Your Time (and What Isn’t) Honest assessment first: the boulevard between La Brea and Vine is grittier and more chaotic than first-time visitors expect. The Walk of Fame is a sidewalk through a dense commercial strip packed with costumed characters who work for tips. The souvenir shops sell the same merchandise found in any tourist district. None of...

Phang Nga Bay: Limestone Karsts, Floating Villages, and How to See It Phang Nga Bay is a 400-square-kilometre body of water between Phuket and the Malay Peninsula in southern Thailand. Around 40 limestone karst islands rise from shallow green water, some barely wider than the towers themselves, others large enough for fishing villages and national park forest. The bay is a marine national park (Ao...

Gamla Stan, Stockholm In 1520, the Danish king Christian II executed 80 to 90 Swedish nobles and clergy in Stortorget square over three days – an event known as the Stockholm Bloodbath. The executions followed a siege and were presented as a legal proceeding. The response was the Swedish independence movement that ended Danish control of Sweden and led, eventually, to the current Kingdom of...

Sedlec Ossuary, Kutná Hora František Rint, the woodcarver hired in 1870 to organise the Sedlec Ossuary’s accumulated bones, signed his name above the entrance, in bones. Whether this was professional pride, dark humour, or both is not recorded. What he created in the small Gothic chapel in Kutná Hora remains one of the more extraordinary objects in Central Europe: a chandelier containing at...

The Alhambra, Granada The Nasrid Palaces inside the Alhambra were built in the 14th century by rulers who knew their empire was in decline. The Reconquista had been pushing south for centuries; the Nasrid dynasty was the last remaining Moorish kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula. The result was a palace built not as a military statement but as the most sophisticated pleasure architecture in medieval...

Viaduc de Millau, France The tallest mast of the Millau Viaduct reaches 343 metres, which is 19 metres higher than the Eiffel Tower. For a road bridge to be taller than the most famous structure in France took until 2004, and even then it slipped through without much national controversy, possibly because the engineering is so obviously beautiful. Norman Foster designed it; Michel Virlogeux...

The Atomium: A Monument That Was Supposed to Be Temporary and Became Permanent Because Brussels Is Like That The Atomium was built for the 1958 World’s Fair as a demonstration piece: iron crystal structure magnified 165 billion times, nine steel spheres connected by tubes, 102 metres tall, meant to celebrate atomic-age science and be dismantled when the fair ended. Public sentiment prevented...

Sequoia National Park: The Trees Are Even Bigger Than You’ve Heard Giant sequoias are not the tallest trees on earth, that’s the coastal redwoods of Northern California. They’re not the widest, that’s the Montezuma cypress in Mexico. What they are is the largest living things on earth by volume, and the General Sherman Tree at 84 metres tall and 11 metres in diameter at the...

Thomas Becket was murdered inside Canterbury Cathedral on a December evening in 1170, and for the next 350 years it was one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in Europe Four knights killed the Archbishop of Canterbury in his own cathedral on the orders of Henry II, who had apparently said “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” as an expression of frustration rather than a...

Darwin, Northern Territory Darwin was bombed 64 times by Japanese forces between February 1942 and November 1943, more attacks than Pearl Harbor, though with somewhat lower casualties due to prior evacuation of civilians. The first raid on 19 February 1942 involved 188 aircraft and killed 235 people. This history was suppressed by the Australian government for decades to avoid affecting civilian...

Amboseli National Park, Kenya Amboseli is where you go to photograph elephants with Mount Kilimanjaro behind them. That combination – the largest land animal on earth framed against the highest free-standing mountain on the planet, the mountain’s snowy peak visible across an international border from Kenya – is one of the most recognisable wildlife images in the world and is...

Dubrovnik’s City Walls: Walk Them at Dawn or Don’t Bother The Dubrovnik city walls were designed to be intimidating. The Republic of Ragusa, which governed this city-state from 1358 to 1808, spent centuries and enormous sums building walls up to 6 metres thick and 25 metres high, with towers positioned to provide overlapping fields of fire. The walls were never actually breached by...

Polonnaruwa: Sri Lanka’s Best Archaeological Site, and the One Fewer People Visit King Parakramabahu I, who ruled Polonnaruwa from 1153 to 1186, is credited with building a reservoir so large, the Parakrama Samudra, covering over 6,000 hectares, that he declared “not a single drop of rain water that falls on this island should be allowed to flow into the sea without first being made...

Dartmoor, Devon Dartmoor Letterboxing started in 1854 when a naturalist named James Perrott placed a jar with a visiting card at Cranmere Pool, a remote bog at the northern edge of the moor, and invited visitors to leave their own cards. The practice has evolved over 170 years into a form of orienteering-scavenger-hunt specific to Dartmoor: there are now tens of thousands of...

Torres del Paine: Planning the W Trek Without the Amateur Mistakes Walk-up entry to Torres del Paine is no longer possible. CONAF moved to mandatory advance purchase for all visitors in 2024, and by the 2025-2026 season the rules had tightened further. Daily capacity limits on the most popular sectors fill weeks ahead during December through February. Book before you book flights, or you...

Arles: The City Where Van Gogh Painted 300 Works in Fifteen Months and Then Cut Off His Ear Van Gogh arrived in Arles in February 1888 and left in May 1889, involuntarily. In the intervening fifteen months, despite the breakdown that led to the famous December ear incident and his voluntary admission to a psychiatric facility in nearby Saint-Rémy, he produced over 300 paintings and drawings. The...

The Acropolis of Athens: A Second Entry for the Same Site, With More Context The Acropolis hill was a religious and political centre of Athens for over a thousand years before the Parthenon was built. The site had Bronze Age Mycenaean fortifications, archaic temples, and votive deposits going back to the 7th century BCE. What you see now, the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erechtheion, the Temple...

John Wayne’s office, as the Navajo never called it The most recognizable landscape in American cinema has a problem: everyone arrives thinking they know it already. John Ford shot six westerns in Monument Valley starting with Stagecoach in 1939, and those frames burrowed so deep into collective memory that the West Mitten, East Mitten, and Merrick Butte now feel like sets rather than the...

Pooh Bridge, Ashdown Forest: What It Is and What to Actually Do There Let’s be clear upfront: Pooh Bridge is a small wooden footbridge over a small stream in a large heathland in East Sussex. It is not a theme park, not a grand monument, and not a full day out on its own. It is, however, genuinely charming, surprisingly moving if you grew up with A.A. Milne’s stories, and well worth...

Tibidabo: Barcelona’s Hilltop Amusement Park and What Surrounds It The Museu d’Autòmats at Tibidabo’s lower terrace contains one of the best collections of antique mechanical arcade machines in Europe, 19th and early 20th century coin-operated figures and games, most still working on old-format coins dispensed at the entrance. It sits quietly at the edge of the park and most...

Madidi National Park, Bolivia A 2018 scientific survey counted over 1,000 bird species within Madidi National Park’s boundaries, more than in any comparable area anywhere on earth, and more bird species than exist in the entire continental United States. The park’s exceptional diversity comes from its altitudinal range: it descends from Andean snowfields at 5,000 metres through cloud...

Arthur’s Seat: The Volcano in Edinburgh That Helped Invent Geology Arthur’s Seat is a 350-million-year-old extinct volcanic plug rising 251 metres above Edinburgh in Holyrood Park, 10 minutes’ walk from the Royal Mile. It is also, in a specific historical sense, where the scientific understanding of geology was born. In 1788, James Hutton stood on the Salisbury Crags below...

Lake Wakatipu: 80km of Glacial Water Surrounded by Serrated Peaks Lake Wakatipu has a documented oscillation, rising and falling 8 to 10 centimetres roughly every five minutes due to atmospheric pressure changes. The Maori explanation is more interesting: the lake is the heartbeat of a sleeping giant named Matau, whose body is curled below the water. This explanation works on the evidence –...

Samarkand and Bukhara: The Silk Road Cities That Actually Deserve the Description In 1220, Genghis Khan arrived at Bukhara, then one of the wealthiest cities in the Islamic world. He rode his horse into the main mosque, declared it a stable, and used the Quran cases as feed troughs. The city was sacked, burned, and its population scattered or enslaved. An estimated three-quarters of the urban...

The Leaning Tower of Pisa: The Field of Miracles and What Else to See Most people who visit the Leaning Tower of Pisa spend 90 minutes, take the pushing photo, climb the tower, and leave without seeing the rest of the Piazza dei Miracoli (Field of Miracles). The other buildings in the square are the reason the site is UNESCO-listed, and they receive far less attention than they deserve. The Piazza...

Ben Nevis had a weather observatory at its summit from 1883 to 1904, and the data it collected about Scottish mountain weather was so extreme that scientists initially doubted it Ben Nevis is 1,345 metres, the highest point in Britain and Ireland, and it is in the West Highlands above Fort William. The summit is below the cloud line for roughly 80% of the year. The observatory that operated there...

Etna: Europe’s Most Active Volcano and the Wines Grown on Its Slopes Mount Etna changes altitude after every major eruption, the figure of 3,329 metres on most maps is typically 10-30 metres out of date. The summit’s shape shifts as the central craters collapse or fill with new lava. In 2021, a series of paroxysmal eruptions sent ash 10km into the atmosphere and deposited lava on the...

Attend a Cherry Blossom Festival in Japan: A Guide for Tourists The rowboat queue at Chidorigafuchi moat in Tokyo starts forming before 7am during peak bloom. By 9am, the wait for a boat is over an hour. This is because the experience of drifting through the fallen petals with the Imperial Palace walls on one side and cherry trees arching overhead is worth the queue, and everyone who has been told...

Cristo Redentor: The Queue, the Cloud, and Why 7am Works Cristo Redentor stands on the summit of Corcovado, a 710-metre granite peak in the Tijuca Forest above Rio de Janeiro. The statue itself is 30 metres tall, made from reinforced concrete with an exterior of soapstone tiles, and was completed in 1931. It is visible from most of coastal Rio on clear days. The arms span 28 metres. These facts...

Registan Square, Samarkand The Sher-Dor Madrasah has tigers on its portal arch. This is unusual for an Islamic building: traditional Islamic iconography avoids human and animal representations, and the 1636 building’s architect included them anyway – tigers pursuing deer, with a sun-face rising behind each tiger. The name means “bearing lions” in Persian. The reason for...

Mogao Caves: 1,600 Years of Buddhist Art in the Gobi Desert In 1900, a Taoist monk named Wang Yuanlu was clearing sand from a cave at Mogao when he found a bricked-up chamber he had not known was there. Behind the wall were approximately 40,000 documents and textiles, stacked floor to ceiling, sealed since around 1,000 CE. Among them was a printed scroll of the Diamond Sutra dated 868 CE, the...

Bilbao’s Guggenheim: The Building Is the Exhibit The “Bilbao effect” has been attempted by dozens of cities since 1997, each commissioning a landmark building and hoping it will trigger the same urban transformation. Most failed. The Bilbao Guggenheim worked not just because of the Frank Gehry building but because the Basque regional government simultaneously invested in...

Atlanta: The City That Burned Itself Down and Then Built Something Different General Sherman’s March to the Sea in November 1864 destroyed much of Atlanta, estimates suggest 4,500 of the city’s 5,000 buildings burned. The city was rebuilt by 1868, largely erasing its antebellum architecture. This explains why Atlanta looks modern among Southern cities: its history is not in its...

Cañon del Colca: Get to Cruz del Condor Before the Tour Buses Do The condors at Cruz del Condor viewpoint don’t perform on a schedule, but they’re most reliably visible between 8am and 10am when thermal currents off the canyon walls lift them to soaring height. The tour buses from Arequipa (a 3-hour drive) arrive around 9-10am, at which point the viewpoint fills with several hundred...

Ulaanbaatar: Mongolia’s Capital and Starting Point The Gandan Monastery’s 26-metre copper Migjid Janraisig statue was dismantled in 1938 under Stalin’s orders and shipped to the Soviet Union. The official reason given was war materials; the statue was melted for ammunition or repurposed. Hundreds of monks were executed in the same purge; most of Mongolia’s 700-plus...

Hoover Dam: What It Is, Why It Was Built, and What You Actually See At peak construction in 1934, 5,000 workers were employed at the Hoover Dam site simultaneously. The project ran from 1931 to 1936, during the Great Depression, and provided employment when little else did. Ninety-six workers died in industrial accidents during construction. The persistent myth that workers were accidentally...