The Florence Cathedral (Santa Maria del Fiore) Brunelleschi solved a problem that had defeated European builders for 130 years: how to cover a 42-metre-wide octagonal crossing with a masonry dome without temporary wooden scaffolding to support the structure during construction. He built the dome between 1420 and 1436 using an interlocking herringbone brickwork pattern he invented and largely kept...

Alfred Wainwright’s first Lake District walk was up Orrest Head, in 1930, and the view of Windermere from the top changed the direction of his life Wainwright had come from Blackburn for a holiday, climbed the modest hill above Windermere town, and looked north to see the full length of the lake with the Langdale Pikes behind it. He described the experience as a revelation. He subsequently...

Callanish at Midsummer: Why Scotland’s Best Stone Circle Isn’t Stonehenge On the Isle of Lewis, the Callanish standing stones have been free to approach at any hour, in any weather, with no tickets and no barriers, for the five thousand years since people erected them. Stonehenge charges £30 entry and puts a rope around the stones. The argument that Stonehenge is the more significant...

The Amazon: What the Photographs Don’t Show The Amazon lost roughly 11,000 square kilometres of forest in 2023, one of the lower figures in the last decade after a peak of over 29,000 square kilometres per year in the early 2000s. The deforestation is mostly in the Brazilian arc of the Amazon, concentrated in Pará, Mato Grosso, and Amazonas states. This is worth knowing before visiting,...

Papua New Guinea: Not for Every Traveller, Ideal for the Right One Papua New Guinea has more languages than any other country, over 800 distinct languages, nearly a third of the world’s total, spoken across a population of about 9 million people. That linguistic diversity reflects the island’s geography: mountains and valleys and island chains that kept communities isolated from each...

Andringitra National Park, Madagascar: Getting There Is the First Challenge The Tsaranoro Valley in Andringitra National Park has granite walls up to 800 metres high that French climbers in the 1990s compared directly to Yosemite. That comparison, from serious technical climbers who had been to Yosemite, says something about the scale of what is here. Andringitra is the most scenically dramatic...

Belize’s Great Blue Hole: The Dive That Requires Honesty About What You’ll See The Great Blue Hole appears on Belize’s flag and is frequently listed among the world’s top dive sites. Jacques Cousteau brought his research vessel Calypso here in 1971, dropped into the blue circle from the air, and called it one of the finest dive sites on earth. That endorsement has driven...

Discover the Charms of Albert Dock: A Comprehensive Guide for Tourists Albert Dock, opened in 1846 as a revolutionary dock system designed by engineer Jesse Hartley, stands as Liverpool’s most iconic waterfront destination. This stunning complex of Georgian dock buildings and warehouses has been beautifully restored to their former glory, creating a vibrant hub of culture, entertainment, and...

Bucharest’s Old Town: Two Very Different Daytimes Centrul Vechi, Bucharest’s old town, occupies roughly 10 blocks south of Calea Victoriei. It is a compact area of 18th and 19th-century buildings, most of them now converted to restaurants, bars, and clubs. During the day it is a place of some architectural interest with relatively low visitor pressure; after 10pm on Thursday through...

Carnac, Brittany: 3,000 Standing Stones and Nobody Knows Why Nobody knows why the stones are there. This is the important thing about Carnac that the tourist materials tend to soften. The alignements at Carnac comprise over 3,000 standing stones arranged in parallel rows across more than 20 kilometres of Breton landscape, constructed between approximately 3000 and 2000 BCE. They are the largest...

Chobe National Park, Botswana Chobe has the highest concentration of African elephants on earth. Current estimates put the Chobe elephant population at over 120,000 – a number that has created its own conservation debate, since the elephants strip the riverfront woodland and reshape the landscape faster than it can recover. Watching 200 elephants move through the afternoon light to drink at...

Angkor, Cambodia: The Largest Pre-Industrial City on Earth At its peak in the 12th century, Angkor was the largest pre-industrial urban agglomeration on earth, housing an estimated one million people. The hydraulic infrastructure that sustained that population – a system of reservoirs, canals, and distribution channels covering hundreds of square kilometres – was more sophisticated...

Bora Bora The overwater bungalow was invented in French Polynesia. The first ones were built on Moorea in the late 1960s by a small hotel that was running out of land on which to build. The concept spread to Bora Bora, which had the lagoon for it: a sheltered turquoise expanse protected by a coral barrier reef, with a volcanic peak in the centre of the motus (islets) that ring the lagoon’s...

Mendoza: Argentina’s Wine Capital Done Properly Mendoza sits at 750 metres elevation at the foot of the Andes, about 1,000km west of Buenos Aires. It produces roughly 70% of Argentina’s wine, mostly Malbec. Malbec is not an Argentine invention – it originated in France’s Cahors region – but Argentina took a grape that had largely fallen out of favour in its homeland...

Stewart Island (Rakiura), New Zealand The kiwi here do something unusual: they forage on beaches in daylight. The Southern Tokoeka, the subspecies native to Stewart Island, is larger than mainland kiwi and notably less strictly nocturnal. Walk a beach at dusk on Mason Bay and you can, with reasonable luck, watch one work the sand for invertebrates without a red torch, without a hide, and without...

Athens Beyond the Acropolis: The Ruins That Don’t Make the Headlines Most visitors come to Athens for the Acropolis. Having done the Acropolis, a significant number feel they’ve done Athens and leave. This misses the Ancient Agora, the Kerameikos cemetery, the National Archaeological Museum, and the Roman Agora, which are collectively as rewarding as the Acropolis and see a fraction of...

Kew Gardens: The Serious Botanical Collection Behind the Day-Out Experience The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew holds over 30,000 living species and eight million preserved specimens – the world’s largest plant collection – yet most visitors walk around taking pictures of the glasshouses and leave without realising the science going on beneath the surface. That is not a criticism;...

Birmingham: The Second City That’s Stopped Apologising The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery holds the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the world. Edward Burne-Jones was born in the city; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais all had connections to Birmingham patrons and collectors who bought their work when London was still uncertain about...

Mount Roraima, Venezuela/Brazil/Guyana Arthur Conan Doyle set his 1912 novel “The Lost World” on a South American plateau after learning about the tepuis from the explorer Everard Im Thurn, who made the first recorded ascent of Roraima in 1884. Im Thurn described a landscape of carnivorous plants, strange geology, and total isolation that Doyle turned into a habitat for dinosaurs. The...

Rwanda Gorilla Trekking: Volcanoes National Park The gorilla permit in Rwanda costs $1,500 per person. That price was introduced in 2017, has not changed, and covers one hour with a habituated mountain gorilla family in Volcanoes National Park. The park caps daily visitors at 96 – 12 habituated gorilla groups, 8 guests per group per day. You are paying for a scarce resource and a...

Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico The carved stone lid of Pakal the Great’s sarcophagus, created around 683 AD, was long misread by early 20th-century archaeologists as depicting an astronaut at the controls of a rocket – a misinterpretation that became a popular theory and sold many books. What it actually shows, as Maya epigraphy confirmed once the glyphic system was properly decoded in the...

St. Andrews: What Golfers Already Know and What Everyone Else Is Missing St. Andrews is a small university town on the east coast of Fife, facing the cold grey North Sea, with one of the oldest universities in the English-speaking world (founded 1413) and the most famous golf course on earth. Most visitors come for the golf. A significant number leave without realising that the cathedral ruins,...

The Basilica di San Francesco, Assisi: Giotto’s Frescoes and What Surrounds Them On September 26, 1997, an earthquake struck central Italy and part of the vault of the Upper Church collapsed. Two Franciscan friars and two restoration workers died in the rubble. The frescoes of Cimabue’s Four Doctors of the Church shattered into 300,000 fragments that took years to reassemble....

Rapa Nui (Easter Island): The Landscape of the Moai and Why It’s More Than Just Statues The quarry at Rano Raraku, on the slopes of an extinct volcanic crater in the island’s eastern sector, still contains about 400 moai in various states of completion, some buried to their shoulders in accumulated soil, others still attached to the bedrock from which they were carved. One moai, El...

Moulin Rouge, Paris The Moulin Rouge opened in 1889 – the same year as the Eiffel Tower – in the Pigalle neighbourhood at the foot of Montmartre. It invented the French cancan as a stage spectacle, drawing a mix of Parisian bourgeoisie and working artists (Toulouse-Lautrec, who documented the early performances in the lithographs that remain the most recognisable images associated with...

Pamukkale: The Travertine Terraces That Require Footwear Rules Pamukkale means “Cotton Castle” in Turkish, which describes what the calcium carbonate terraces look like from a distance: white formations cascading down a hillside like frozen waterfalls. The terraces are formed by water from 17 thermal springs flowing at 35°C and depositing calcium bicarbonate as it cools. They’ve...

Art Deco South Beach, Miami The South Beach Art Deco Historic District was not always considered worth saving. By the early 1970s, many of the 1930s and 1940s hotels along Ocean Drive were deteriorating, occupied by elderly residents on fixed incomes, and eyed by developers for demolition. It was Barbara Baer Capitman who organised the Miami Design Preservation League in 1976 and spent the...

The Matterhorn: What Makes It Different and What to Expect in Zermatt The Matterhorn at 4,478 metres is not the highest peak in the Alps (that’s Mont Blanc at 4,808 metres), not the most difficult to climb (there are more technical routes elsewhere), and not the most remote. What makes it recognisable worldwide is its shape: a near-perfect four-sided pyramid that stands in isolation above...

Altun Ha, Belize The largest carved jade object ever found in the Maya world was discovered at this site in 1968 by archaeologist David Pendergast. The head of Kinich Ahau, the Maya sun god, weighs 4.4 kilograms and stands 14.9 centimetres tall. It was found in a tomb inside the Temple of the Masonry Altars, wrapped in textiles, alongside jade and obsidian ornaments. The head now lives in the...

The Blue Mosque, Istanbul The Sultan Ahmed Mosque was completed in 1616, and it was audacious from the beginning. Sultan Ahmed I, who commissioned it when he was 19, gave it six minarets – a number that until then had only been used at the mosque in Mecca. The resulting scandal required the construction of a seventh minaret in Mecca to restore that mosque’s uniqueness. The Blue...

Queenstown: Where the Views Are Free and Everything Else Isn’t Queenstown sits at the edge of Lake Wakatipu surrounded by the Remarkables mountain range, and the scenery is genuinely extraordinary. The town has built a robust tourism industry around that scenery, which means prices are high for New Zealand, services are excellent, and the place can feel theme-park-ish in peak summer...

Neuschwanstein: The Mad King’s Unfinished Fantasy The Walt Disney Company used Neuschwanstein as the direct model for the Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland – which is fine, except that Neuschwanstein itself was a fantasy castle built by a real king to recreate an imaginary medieval world, making the Disney castle a copy of a copy. King Ludwig II of Bavaria began construction in...

Leeds Castle: The One That Actually Looks Like a Postcard Leeds Castle has nothing to do with Leeds. It’s in Kent, about 7 kilometres from Maidstone, and the name comes from Led, a 9th-century chief who built the first fortification here. The castle sits on two islands in a lake fed by the River Len, and the combination of medieval stone rising from the water with a parkland backdrop is one...

Carcassonne Most of what you see when you approach the Cite de Carcassonne – the double walls, the pointed towers, the uniform grey stone – is a 19th-century restoration by Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, the architect who renovated it between 1853 and 1879. Viollet-le-Duc’s work is controversial among medieval historians because his vision of what a medieval fortress should look like was...

Victoria Falls: Zimbabwe, Zambia, and the Practical Decisions Between Them Victoria Falls is the largest waterfall in the world by the combined measure of width and height: 1,708 metres wide and up to 108 metres tall. The Zambezi River, which forms the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia, drops over the basalt cliff in a curtain that produces a permanent mist cloud visible from 50 kilometres away....

Wat Phra Kaew (Temple of the Emerald Buddha), Bangkok The Emerald Buddha is not emerald – it is carved from a single block of jade, approximately 66cm tall, and nobody agrees on exactly when it was made. The most credible scholarly estimates suggest the 14th or 15th century. What is documented is that the statue was discovered in Chiang Rai in 1434, moved several times during periods of...

Discover the Magic of the Carpathian Forest Tucked away in Eastern Europe, the Carpathian Forest is a hidden gem waiting to be explored. Stretching across Romania, Ukraine, Poland, and Slovakia, this majestic range offers a unique blend of natural beauty, rich culture, and adventure opportunities. Home to the largest primeval beech forests in Europe and a thriving population of iconic European...

The Australian Outback: Red Dirt, Sacred Country, and What You Actually Need to Know Since October 2019, you cannot climb Uluru. The ban is permanent, voted unanimously by the national park management board in 2017, and it reflects something the Anangu traditional owners had been asking for since tourism to the rock started decades before that. The climbing track left a visible scar on the...

Canadian Rockies: The Icefields Parkway Has One Gas Station in 232 Kilometres That’s not a problem if you know it; it’s a serious problem if you don’t. Fill up in Lake Louise or Jasper before you drive the Icefields Parkway. Cell service is sparse for most of the route. Services are available only June through September. The parkway itself – 232 kilometres linking Banff...

The Black Forest (Schwarzwald) Baden-Baden was where Napoleon III took the waters, where Brahms and Dostoyevsky came to write, and where Kaiser Wilhelm I maintained a summer residence. The thermal springs that created the town’s reputation were discovered by Roman soldiers from the local garrison around 75 CE, and the Romans named the place Aquae Aureliae. The spa culture here is...

World’s End, Horton Plains, Sri Lanka World’s End is a sheer escarpment in Horton Plains National Park in Sri Lanka’s central highlands, dropping roughly 880 metres to the lowland plains below. On a clear morning, with the mist below the ridge, the view extends to the south coast. On most mornings after about 09:30, the cloud has rolled in from the sea and covered everything....

Jungfraujoch, Switzerland At 3,454 metres, Jungfraujoch holds the highest railway station in Europe. The Jungfrau Railway, built between 1896 and 1912, drills through the Eiger and Mönch in a 9km rack-railway tunnel and emerges at the col between the two peaks. The construction took 16 years, cost the lives of dozens of workers, and was considered impossible until it was done. The view from the...

Cheddar Gorge: Britain’s Largest Gorge and the Bones Beneath It The oldest complete human skeleton found in Britain was discovered in Gough’s Cave in 1903. Cheddar Man, as he was named, died around 9,000 years ago and his remains, now held at the Natural History Museum, were DNA-tested in 2018: he had dark skin, blue or green eyes, and dark curly hair. He also had a living descendant...

Chateau de Chenonceau The gallery bridge that spans the Cher River at Chenonceau was not built for the same woman who designed the garden below it. Diane de Poitiers, mistress of King Henry II, received the chateau as a gift and built the bridge piers into the river between 1556 and 1559. She never got to build the gallery across them. When Henry died, his widow Catherine de Medici forced Diane to...

Timbuktu, Mali: The City That Exists and the One You Imagined The name Timbuktu has spent centuries operating as shorthand for the ends of the earth. The actual city is somewhere rather different: a dusty, flat, deeply historic town in the Saharan fringe of northern Mali, with a population of around 55,000, temperatures that push 45°C in summer, and a reputation for scholarship that the phrase...

Sigiriya: 200 Metres Straight Up and Worth Every Step King Kashyapa built his palace on top of a 200-metre granite rock in the 5th century AD. Why he chose a near-vertical outcrop rising from flat jungle in the Matale District as his royal residence is one of those historical questions that admits competing theories – strategic defence, conspicuous power, the paranoid logic of someone who...

Tivoli Gardens: Copenhagen’s 180-Year-Old Amusement Park Tivoli opened on 15 August 1843. Walt Disney visited in 1951 and later credited it as an influence on Disneyland. H.C. Andersen was a regular visitor. The park survived the German occupation of Copenhagen (1940-1945) intact. It covers 8.3 hectares in the city centre, a 5-minute walk from Copenhagen Central Station, and is currently one...

Discover the Natural Wonders of Banaue Rice Terraces Carved into the Cordillera mountains of Luzon over 2,000 years ago, the Banaue Rice Terraces remain one of the most extraordinary agricultural landscapes on earth. The Ifugao people built these terraces entirely by hand, shaping the steep mountain slopes into a series of stepped paddies that rise up to 1,500 metres above sea level. The...

Discovering the Ancient Charm of Ayutthaya, Thailand Located just 80 kilometers north of Bangkok, Ayutthaya is a city steeped in history and culture. This ancient capital of Siam served as the political and commercial heart of the kingdom for over 400 years, from its founding in 1350 until its destruction by Burmese forces in 1767. Today it draws travelers who want to walk among the ruins of that...

Discovering the Hidden Gems of Yap’s Outer Islands, Micronesia Located in the western Pacific Ocean, Yap State is one of the four states that make up the Federated States of Micronesia. While many tourists flock to the main island of Yap, the outer islands offer a more secluded and untouched experience. In this blog post, we’ll explore the best places to visit, eat, stay, and...