Golden Gate National Recreation Area: The Urban Park That Keeps Getting Bigger An Unusual National Park Golden Gate National Recreation Area does not look like a national park on a map. It is not one contiguous wilderness but a scatter of sites around San Francisco, Marin County, and the San Mateo coast, totalling over 80,000 acres. It contains a decommissioned federal prison, a redwood forest,...

When James Clark Ross sailed south into the ice in January 1841, he expected to reach the open polar sea that cartographers of the era assumed must exist at high southern latitudes. Instead, on 28 January, he encountered something no one had prepared him for: a wall of ice stretching across the entire horizon, rising fifty to sixty metres above the water, absolutely vertical, running for hundreds...

The Great Barrier Reef experienced its sixth mass bleaching event since 2016 in 2025, and Australia submitted a formal conservation report to UNESCO in February 2026 to defend the reef’s World Heritage status against a potential “In Danger” listing. The UNESCO World Heritage Committee is scheduled to consider that report at its 48th session in July 2026. Knowing this context...

Mount Etna erupted on Christmas Eve 2025, sending lava flows from the Southeast Crater across the Valle del Bove and triggering a significant eruption cycle that ran through early January 2026. This is not alarming news for visitors: Etna is the most active volcano in Europe and has been erupting, in one form or another, for at least 2,700 years of recorded history. The point is that it erupts...

The first thing the dunes do is make noise. Not a whisper, a low, resonant moan that rises out of nowhere as the sand slides down the face in a small avalanche. You look around expecting a distant engine or some trick of wind. There is nothing. Just 180 kilometres of sand, humming at you from the edge of the Gobi. That sound is the whole reason Khongoryn Els is called Duut Mankhan in Mongolian:...

Hoi An’s Japanese Covered Bridge, built in the 1590s, crosses a narrow tributary of the Thu Bon River that no longer separates the two communities it was designed to connect. The Japanese merchants who commissioned it had largely disappeared within a generation of its completion: in 1635 the Tokugawa shogunate’s Sakoku edict ended official Japanese trade voyages, cutting off the flow...

Ishak Pasha Palace sits on a rocky spur at 2,100 metres above sea level near Dogubayazit, with Mount Ararat filling the horizon to the north. The palace was not built by Ottomans in any straightforward sense. Construction started in 1685 under Colak Abdi Pasha, a hereditary Kurdish chieftain of the Ciidirogullari clan, and was completed in 1784 or 1785 by his descendant Ishak Pasha. The craftsmen...

Cloud Forests of Monteverde, Costa Rica In 1951, eleven Quaker families from Alabama loaded onto trucks and drove to Costa Rica, partly because several of the younger men had been jailed for refusing to serve in the Korean War, and partly because Costa Rica had just become one of the only countries in the world to abolish its military entirely. They bought 1,500 hectares of land in the central...

At 5,897 metres, Cotopaxi is the second highest mountain in Ecuador, one of the highest active volcanoes on Earth, and one of the few serious technical climbs on the planet that a fit, well-acclimatized person with no prior mountaineering experience can reasonably attempt, with a guide. It sits 55 kilometres south of Quito in the Avenue of the Volcanoes, a corridor of snow-capped peaks that...

Karnak, Egypt Archaeologists working beneath the floor of Karnak’s southern precincts in late 2024 found gold rings, amulets, and a small triad statue of Amun, Mut, and Khonsu, tucked inside a foundation deposit that had gone unnoticed for over three millennia. A separate team then published geoarchaeological data showing that the entire complex was originally an island surrounded by...

The tide at Mont Saint-Michel rises at the speed of a galloping horse. That is not a figure of speech borrowed from a tourism brochure; it is a genuine physical phenomenon explained by the shape of the bay, which acts as a funnel amplifying tidal flow. The difference between high and low tide can exceed 14 metres. When the spring tides come in around the equinoxes, with coefficients above 110, the...

There is no landmass between the west coast of Vancouver Island and Japan. That open stretch of the North Pacific is what drives the weather at Pacific Rim National Park Reserve: swells that have travelled thousands of kilometres arriving with undiluted force against a rainforest coastline. Winter storms here can produce waves exceeding 26 feet and drop 19 inches of rain in a single day. Most...

In October 2019, a visitor pushed a cigarette butt into a geiko’s collar while trying to photograph her. Another had part of her kimono torn. These incidents led to photography bans on private alleys in Gion, then to outright tourist exclusion zones with legally binding fines of ¥10,000 for entering certain side streets. If you are planning to visit in 2026 and your main goal is...

Hollywood Studios in 2026 Is a Substantially Different Park Than It Was Two Years Ago The Aerosmith coaster is gone. Muppet*Vision 3D closed permanently in June 2025. A new land has opened where Animation Courtyard used to be. If you are working from a 2023 or 2024 guide, some of what you have read about Hollywood Studios is already out of date. The most significant change: Rock ’n’...

Mount Fuji last erupted in 1707. The event, triggered by a major earthquake 49 days earlier, rained ash on Edo (present-day Tokyo) for two weeks, blanketed the Kanto plain, and buried nearby villages under meters of volcanic debris. The mountain has been seismically quiet ever since, rated Level 1 (normal activity) on Japan’s volcanic alert scale, monitored continuously by seismometers, GPS...

Forty gardeners spend the autumn months from October to early December planting seven million bulbs at Keukenhof. They follow plans drawn up the previous spring, working from detailed maps that specify the exact colour sequence across each bed. By the time the gates open in late March, that labour is invisible. What visitors see is a finished explosion of colour, as if the tulips simply decided to...

Lake Malawi contains more freshwater fish species than the entire continent of Europe combined. That single fact explains why UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site in 1984, describing the lake’s cichlid fish as being of equal value to science as Darwin’s Galapagos finches. Over 1,000 cichlid species live in these waters, the majority found nowhere else on earth. Lake Malawi...

Catherine the Great did not set out to build one of the world’s great museums. In 1764 she accepted a collection of 225 paintings from a Berlin merchant named Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, who had originally been buying them for Frederick the Great of Prussia. Frederick’s losses in the Seven Years’ War forced him to abandon the purchase, and Gotzkowsky, owed money by the Russian...

Devils Tower, Wyoming: America’s First National Monument What You Are Looking At The first view of Devils Tower from the road is disorienting. It looks like something placed there rather than something that grew from the surrounding landscape. A column of hexagonal rock, 386 metres tall from base to summit and roughly 300 metres in diameter at the base, rising from forested hills in...

Four major rivers begin near here: the Indus, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra, and the Karnali. Ancient Vedic geographers placed the source of all earthly water at this spot, at a lake 4,590 metres above sea level in the far west of Tibet, ringed by snowfields and close enough to Mount Kailash to see its pyramid summit across the water on a clear morning. They were not being poetic. They were trying...

The Great Buddha of Kamakura: A Bronze Statue That Outlasted Its Temple The Statue Itself The Great Buddha at Kotoku-in temple in Kamakura stands 11.3 metres to the top of its head (13.35 metres including the base) and weighs approximately 93 tonnes. It was cast in bronze beginning around 1252 and completed over several years, representing Amida Nyorai, the Buddha of Infinite Light, in the...

The David Gareja Monastery Complex sits at the edge of a semi-desert on the Georgian-Azerbaijani border, and part of it is currently inaccessible because the two countries have been arguing about who owns the hillside it sits on since 2019. In July 2024, Georgian Orthodox pilgrims and activists attempted to return icons to caves on the disputed slope and were confronted by Azerbaijani border...

Times Square was not originally named Times Square. Until 1904 it was Longacre Square, named for London’s carriage district, because the block was dominated by the stables, blacksmiths, and carriage-makers that serviced Manhattan’s horse-drawn vehicle trade. The New York Times, having built its new headquarters at 42nd and Broadway, lobbied the mayor to rename the area after the paper,...

The World’s Best Museum Nobody Expected to Be in Tasmania David Walsh is a professional gambler who turned a winning streak into a private art collection, then carved that collection three storeys into a sandstone cliff above the Derwent River. The result, MONA (Museum of Old and New Art), opened in 2011 and promptly made Hobart a destination city for the first time in its history. That...

Until 2010, fewer than 800 people a year made it to Trolltunga. Now the figure is above 80,000. That explosion of interest has changed this hike fundamentally, and how you plan your visit should reflect that reality, not the quiet wilderness mystique that still dominates travel writing about it. Trolltunga is a horizontal slab of rock jutting roughly 10 meters out from a cliff face, 700 meters...

The name is technically a lie. Blackpool Sands, named England’s best beach by Conde Nast Traveller in 2024, contains almost no sand at all. The beach is smooth shingle, and its owners cheerfully acknowledge the “misnomer”, pointing out that Slapton Sands, Beesands, and Hallsands nearby are all shingle too. The reason the water here looks so improbably clear is precisely because...

On February 20, 2026, a worker fixed the final cross onto the Tower of Jesus Christ and the Sagrada Familia was structurally complete for the first time in 144 years. All 18 towers were standing exactly as Antoni Gaudi had drawn them in the 1880s. Fourteen years after Gaudi’s death, construction had begun. A century after that, Pope Leo XIV came to Barcelona and said mass beneath the...

Christchurch, New Zealand: A City Still Writing Its Own Story In 2011, a 6.3-magnitude earthquake killed 185 people and gutted Christchurch’s city centre. Fifteen years on, that catastrophe turned out to be the most radical urban redesign experiment in the Southern Hemisphere. The result is a city that feels genuinely new, partly unfinished, and more interesting than any tidily restored...

In January 2026, more than a million people competed for fewer than 70 daily entry permits to one of the most sought-after wilderness areas in North America. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota is only a million acres, but the fight to get in, and to keep it protected, has lasted over a century. The BWCAW covers roughly 1.1 million acres straddling the...

The Library of Celsus looks best at around 8:15 in the morning, when low light catches the facade columns and the tour buses from Kusadasi have not yet arrived. By 10:00, the same spot is a photo queue of two hundred people. That gap of ninety minutes is the most important piece of practical information about visiting Ephesus, and most travel writing buries it or skips it entirely. Ephesus sits 3...

Brooklyn Bridge Six days after the Brooklyn Bridge opened to the public, a woman tripped on a stairway, another woman screamed, and twelve people died in the resulting stampede. The bridge had survived its engineers. It very nearly did not survive its admirers. That was Memorial Day, May 30, 1883. The crowd that had flooded onto the promenade that afternoon had come because the bridge was new and...

Between 1906 and 1911, a deep sea diver named William Walker worked six hours a day in complete darkness beneath Winchester Cathedral, laying bags of concrete and bricks by touch to stabilise foundations that were dissolving into the waterlogged ground. He worked alone in a heavy brass helmet and rubber suit, in water so murky he could see nothing, for five years. When the work was finished, the...

Seven Days in Rwanda: A Country That Keeps Surprising You Most people who go to Rwanda go for the gorillas. That is fair. A gorilla trek in Volcanoes National Park is one of the genuinely exceptional wildlife experiences available anywhere in the world, and the 99% sighting success rate is real. But Rwanda in seven days is not just about one morning in the forest. The country is small enough that...

Acropolis The Venetians fired a mortar from Philopappos Hill on September 26, 1687, and accidentally destroyed one of the most perfect buildings ever constructed. The Ottomans were storing gunpowder inside the Parthenon. The resulting explosion killed around 300 people, blew out the temple’s long flanks, and left the building in the state you will find it today. The Venetian commander,...

The Drakensberg Contains 40,000 Rock Paintings and Almost Nobody Goes to See Them The uKhahlamba-Drakensberg is a UNESCO World Heritage site listed under both natural and cultural criteria, which is an unusual double. The natural case is obvious: a 200-kilometre escarpment rising to 3,482 metres (Thabana Ntlenyana across the border in Lesotho), forming the highest peaks in southern Africa. The...

The first American Mardi Gras took place on March 3, 1699, when French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville landed near present-day New Orleans and held a small celebration at a spot his crew named Point du Mardi Gras. By 1857, the celebrations had grown so chaotic that city officials were seriously considering abolishing them. That same year, a secret society of local businessmen called the...

The world’s first iron bridge went over budget by a third, nearly bankrupted the man who built it, and was opened to traffic on New Year’s Day 1781, eighteen months after it first spanned the River Severn. Abraham Darby III absorbed the cost overruns personally; the original estimate was around 4,000 pounds, the final bill closer to 6,000. He died in 1789, aged thirty-nine, having...

The rainforest at Khao Sok is older than the Amazon. Scientists estimate the forest at around 160 million years old, a figure that stays with you as you stand at the water’s edge of Cheow Lan Lake watching limestone karst towers rise vertically out of still green water. Thailand remained close to the equator throughout the ice ages, receiving enough rainfall when other regions were drying...

The only Munro in Scotland that requires a rope to summit sits in the Cuillin of Skye. The Inaccessible Pinnacle is a blade of gabbro on the summit of Sgurr Dearg, and reaching the top demands a short but genuine rock climb: Moderate standard on the East Ridge, which is the route used in around 95 percent of ascents. On a dry day with a qualified guide, it is achievable by people with no prior...

The wine terraces lining the north shore of Lake Geneva between Lausanne and Montreux have been cultivated continuously since the eleventh century, when Cistercian monks began carving the hillside into what is now 450 kilometers of interlocking stone walls. The system earns its UNESCO World Heritage status not just for age but for ingenuity: the walls trap daytime heat and release it overnight,...

Antelope Canyon The photograph you’ve seen ten thousand times, the one with a single column of light cutting through a swirling amber corridor, was almost certainly taken at a specific two-hour window on a cloudless summer morning. The canyon itself is real, the light genuinely does that, and you can stand inside it yourself. What the photograph does not prepare you for is the crowd standing...

The northern lights look nothing like they do in photographs. In person, with moderate activity, what you see is a pale green shimmer that you might initially mistake for thin cloud. The camera, set to ISO 3200 with a 10-second exposure, picks up saturated green columns and faint pink fringing that your eyes, with their limited sensitivity in low light, largely cannot detect. Most first-time...

Norway has around 1,200 fjords, but almost everyone ends up at the same three. That concentration is understandable: Sognefjord, Geirangerfjord, and Nærøyfjord are genuinely exceptional. It does mean, however, that a large portion of visitors to western Norway spend considerable time in places that look spectacular but feel crowded, while quieter fjords an hour away see almost no traffic. This...

Statue of Liberty The torch at the top of the Statue of Liberty has been locked shut since July 30, 1916. That night, German saboteurs detonated a munitions depot on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor. The shockwave was equivalent to a 5.5-magnitude earthquake. Shrapnel tore into the statue’s right side, and the blast pushed the arm against the crown, damaging the internal framework. The...

Ayers Rock: The Heart of Australia’s Red Center The Anangu have a word, Tjukurpa, that refers to the law, creation stories, and spiritual framework that governs their relationship with the land. You cannot understand Uluru without it. Rising 348 meters above the surrounding plain and measuring more than 9 kilometers at its base, the sandstone monolith that most of the world still calls Ayers...

The Everglades is not a swamp. This correction matters more than it might seem, because the word “swamp” implies stagnant water and rot, and the Everglades is something closer to the opposite: a slow-moving river, barely two feet deep and up to 60 miles wide, flowing south from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. Marjory Stoneman Douglas named it the River of Grass in 1947, and her phrase...

Charles Bridge At 5:31 on the morning of 9 July 1357, somebody with a hammer and a chisel lowered the foundation stone of a new bridge into the Vltava. The time was not chosen for practical reasons. Emperor Charles IV and his court astrologers had calculated that the moment formed a numerical palindrome: 1-3-5-7-9-7-5-3-1, reading identically forwards and backwards. They believed the symmetry...

St. Lucia has been ranked the best place to visit in the Caribbean by U.S. News and World Report for 2026, and for the third consecutive year it topped the same publication’s honeymoon destination rankings. That kind of recognition tends to accelerate the very overcrowding it rewards, which is worth knowing before you decide how and where to position yourself on the island. The honest answer...

The Street Names in Hanoi’s Old Quarter Are Not History. They Are a Working Trade Directory from the 15th Century. Most of the 70-plus streets that make up Hanoi’s Old Quarter take their names from the goods sold or crafted on them. Hang Tre means bamboo wares. Hang Dong means copper wares. Hang Bac (silver wares) is where the Dong Cac guild of jewellers settled during the Le dynasty...

Big Sur, California Before you drive Highway 1 through Big Sur, check the Caltrans road conditions site. This is not optional advice: as of mid-2026, the highway is closed to all traffic south of Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park due to the Regents Slide, with no anticipated reopening date. This follows a separate three-year closure that only ended in January 2026. Big Sur is one of the most...