Every destination we cover

Ghana

Accra reads from independence onward.

Morocco

Agadir was destroyed by an earthquake in 1960 — fifteen thousand dead in fifteen seconds — and entirely rebuilt afterwards.

France

Ajaccio became French by an accident of timing: Napoleon was born here on 15 August 1769, a year after Genoa ceded Corsica.

Jordan

Amman is built on nineteen hills and reads from the highest.

Netherlands

Amsterdam is held together by its canals, dug in the 17th century as concentric half-rings and now a World Heritage site.

Türkiye

Antalya has two faces that do not resemble each other: a resort coast stretching for tens of kilometres, and a Roman old town held inside its walls.

Greece

Athens is looked at from below and understood from above.

New Zealand

Auckland is built on some fifty extinct volcanoes between two harbours, which is why water is visible from almost everywhere.

Indonesia

Bali is not a beach, it is an island with beaches.

Thailand

Bangkok reads in layers.

Spain

Barcelona is a Gaudí city laid over a medieval one, with a beach at the end of it.

China

Beijing is laid out on an eight-kilometre north-south axis, and everything that matters lines up along it.

Germany

Berlin wears its history on the surface, and that is what sets it apart from other European capitals.

France

Biarritz was a whaling village until Empress Eugénie had a villa built here in 1855; titled Europe followed, and the villa became the Hôtel du Palais.

Colombia

Bogotá stands at 2,640 metres on an Andean plateau with a mountain at its back.

France

Bordeaux spent the 2000s scrubbing itself clean: the pale eighteenth-century stone, blackened by two centuries of soot, was cleaned, the quays returned to pedestrians, and the whole city — the Port de la Lune — UNESCO…

United States

Boston is the most European of American cities: built before the car, and its centre shows it, with streets following old paths rather than a grid.

Belgium

Bruges prospered in the Middle Ages then fell asleep when its access to the sea silted up, which paradoxically saved it: the city was never modernised and its medieval centre is intact.

Belgium

Brussels does badly in a single day because it is more spread out than it looks.

Hungary

Budapest is two cities a river eventually joined: Buda on the hills of the western bank, with its castle and the Fisherman's Bastion, and flat Pest on the other side with the Parliament and the grand boulevards.

Argentina

Buenos Aires looks like a European capital that washed up in the southern hemisphere — Haussmann façades, domes, cavernous bookshops — with an energy entirely its own.

Egypt

Cairo is not so much visited as absorbed — twenty million people, permanent din, and at the end of an ordinary avenue, the Great Pyramid of Giza.

South Africa

Cape Town is wedged between a mountain and two oceans, and that constraint shapes everything.

Colombia

Cartagena was the port Spanish gold passed through, and it fortified accordingly: eleven kilometres of walls still enclose the old town, with its wooden-balconied houses and bougainvillea.

Thailand

Chiang Mai was the Lanna kingdom's capital and its old town still fits inside a square of moats a mile and a half across.

United States

Chicago burned in 1871 and rebuilt itself by inventing the skyscraper, which makes it the city where architecture is looked at rather than endured.

Denmark

Copenhagen is a city of canals, bicycles and design.

Peru

Cusco was the Inca capital, and the Spanish built their city on top without demolishing the foundations: the Qurikancha, the sun temple whose mortarless fitted stone has survived every earthquake, now carries the chur…

India

Delhi is really two cities stacked on each other: the Mughal old town and the capital the British laid out in the 1920s.

Tunisia

Djerba is a flat island of five hundred square kilometres, joined to the mainland by a Roman causeway still in use.

Qatar

Doha built itself in twenty years around a bay, and its museums carry the argument.

United Arab Emirates

Dubai owns its artifice, which is more interesting to look at than to sneer at.

Ireland

Dublin is a capital at human scale — you can cross it on foot in an hour.

Croatia

Dubrovnik was an independent merchant republic for four centuries, Venice's rival, and the Walls of Dubrovnik still run two kilometres above the roofs.

Scotland

Edinburgh is built on volcanic hills and the castle takes the steepest — a rock that commands the whole city.

Morocco

Fez holds the largest car-free medina in the world, a maze of nine thousand lanes where getting lost is inevitable and goods still move by donkey.

Italy

Florence is small and holds more art per square metre than any city in Europe.

Türkiye

Göreme is a village in the middle of Cappadocia, and the landscape is the monument.

Vietnam

Hanoi organises itself around Hoan Kiem lake, whose central islet holds the Turtle Tower and which The Huc Bridge, a red wooden walkway, joins to Ngoc Son Temple.

Cuba

Havana is visited like a city stopped in time: the façades of the historic centre have stood since the 18th century, sometimes barely, and restoration advances street by street.

Finland

Helsinki is a seaside city built across three hundred islands, and its centre reads as one piece.

Greece

Heraklion is visited for what lies five kilometres south: the Palace of Knossos, capital of Minoan civilisation three and a half thousand years ago, Europe's oldest palace.

Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh City, which everyone still calls Saigon, keeps a colonial-era centre you can walk.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong sits on very little flat ground, which is what makes it vertical: towers packed to the foot of hills that stayed green.

Egypt

Hurghada was a fishing village of five hundred people in the 1980s; it is now a resort of more than two hundred thousand, stretched along forty kilometres of coast.

Türkiye

Istanbul is the only major city straddling two continents, and that geography is not a footnote — it shapes your day.

India

Jaipur was drawn in one go in 1727, on a grid, which makes it India's first planned city — and the facades were painted pink in 1876 to receive the Prince of Wales, hence the Pink City.

Nepal

Kathmandu holds three royal cities in one valley, and the capital keeps its heart.

Poland

Krakow escaped the destruction of 1945 and its old town is intact — the largest medieval square in Europe, the Cloth Hall at its centre, and St Mary's Basilica, from which a trumpeter sounds every hour and breaks off…

Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur means "muddy confluence", and the city began exactly there: at the junction of two rivers, where the Jamek Mosque now stands.

Japan

Kyoto was Japan's capital for over a thousand years and was never bombed, which is why the temples here are counted in hundreds.

Peru

Lima turns its back on the desert and faces the Pacific along two hundred kilometres of cliff.

Portugal

Lisbon is built on seven hills and you will feel every one.

United Kingdom

London does not summarise.

United States

Los Angeles has no centre, and looking for one is the surest way to dislike it.

France

Lyon was Lugdunum, capital of the Gauls, and the Roman theatres on Fourvière hill are still used in summer.

Spain

Madrid has no sea and no single monument that sums it up, which is exactly what makes it pleasant: a city to live in rather than tick off.

Maldives

The Maldives are not visited like a normal destination: nearly 1,200 islands spread across atolls, and you will mostly see one — the island your accommodation sits on.

Philippines

Manila keeps behind its walls the only quarter that partly survived the battle of 1945: Intramuros, the Spanish city founded in 1571.

Morocco

Marrakech fits inside its medina, and the medina arranges itself around Jemaa el-Fna.

France

Marseille is twenty-six centuries old: Greeks from Phocaea founded it around 600 BC, making it France's oldest city.

Mauritius

Mauritius is sixty-five kilometres long, and what surprises on arrival is that the interior matches the coast.

Australia

Melbourne is found through its laneways rather than its avenues: the centre is a grid pierced by narrow passages covered in murals and full of cafés.

Mexico

Mexico City sits at 2,240 metres on a drained lake, and the first flight of stairs tells you so.

United States

Miami runs on two shores and they need treating separately.

Italy

Milan does badly with people looking for a postcard: it is a city of work, fashion and design more than monuments.

Uruguay

Montevideo holds to a peninsula and a promenade.

Canada

Montreal is an island, and the city organises itself around the hill that dominates it: Mount Royal, laid out as a park by Central Park's architect, its cross lit at night.

India

Mumbai is an island joined to the mainland by landfill, which explains its density and its orientation towards the sea.

Germany

Munich stands on Marienplatz, the central square framed by the neo-Gothic New Town Hall — whose carillon sends out its figures daily — and the older, quieter Old Town Hall.

Kenya

Nairobi is the only capital in the world bordered by a national park: Nairobi National Park begins seven kilometres from the business district, and rhinoceroses are photographed there with towers behind them.

Italy

Naples is not visited the way Rome or Florence are: it is loud, dense and alive, and that is what makes it unforgettable.

United States

New Orleans was French, then Spanish, then American, and never quite chose.

United States

New York runs on a grid, which makes it unexpectedly easy to read: avenues north-south, streets east-west, and you always know where you are.

France

Nice was Italian until 1860 and the old town still shows it: ochre fronts, washing at the windows, narrow lanes opening onto the Cours Saleya and its flower market.

Japan

Osaka is Japan's kitchen and makes no secret of it: the city has a word for ruining yourself through food, kuidaore, and owns it.

Norway

Oslo sits at the head of a fjord, surrounded by forest, and it is the European capital where nature starts soonest.

Panama

Panama City holds three cities in one, strung along fifteen kilometres of coast.

French Polynesia

Papeete is not the postcard — that starts offshore.

France

Paris punishes people who rush it.

Portugal

Porto is a vertical city set on the Douro, and you descend it more than you stroll it.

Czechia

Prague came through the 20th century without being bombed, and it shows: the centre is Gothic, Baroque and Art Nouveau, intact.

Dominican Republic

Punta Cana is not a town: it is the name given to some fifty kilometres of coast at the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic, covered in all-inclusive hotels and coconut palms.

Canada

Quebec City is the only walled city in North America north of Mexico, and the ramparts still stand.

Ecuador

Quito runs fifty kilometres long and two wide, wedged between volcanoes at two thousand eight hundred and fifty metres.

Iceland

Reykjavik is the northernmost capital in the world and holds fewer people than a Paris arrondissement, which makes it walkable end to end.

Brazil

Rio is built between mountain and ocean, and the two contest every metre.

Italy

Rome is not a city you visit so much as one you walk through, and at every junction there are two thousand years stacked on top of each other.

Brazil

Salvador was Brazil's first capital and the first slave port of the Americas, and the city that came out of it is the most African on the continent.

United States

San Francisco fits on a peninsula seven miles across, which makes it one of the few American cities you can walk — if you accept the hills.

Chile

Santiago is wedged between the Andes and the coastal range, and the snow peaks are visible from downtown on clear days.

Greece

Santorini is the rim of a collapsed volcano, and the caldera explains the postcard: the white villages cling to the cliff because there is nowhere else to put them.

United States

Seattle sits between a sound and a lake, under a volcano visible on clear days.

South Korea

Seoul was flattened during the Korean War and rebuilt in a generation, which gives a city where a glass tower stands behind a 14th-century palace and nobody finds it odd.

Spain

Seville packs three World Heritage monuments into one block: the cathedral, the largest Gothic church in the world; the Alcázar, whose Mudéjar palaces are still a royal residence; and the Archivo General de Indias, wh…

China

Shanghai reads as two facing riverbanks that contradict each other.

Egypt

Sharm el-Sheikh sits on the southern tip of Sinai, between desert and one of the richest seas in the world.

Cambodia

Siem Reap is only the doorway: what people come for starts seven kilometres north.

Singapore

Singapore fits on an island under fifty kilometres wide and runs like a demonstration: everything works, everything is clean, and the greenery was replanted with as much method as the towers.

Sweden

Stockholm is built on fourteen islands and the water is everywhere, to the point that bridges orient you better than streets.

France

Strasbourg sits on an island.

Australia

Sydney is organised around its harbour, and it is from the water that it makes sense.

Taiwan

Taipei sits in a basin ringed by mountains, which is why you can go from neon to hiking trail in twenty minutes.

Estonia

Tallinn keeps one of the best-preserved medieval old towns in Europe, and it stands on two levels.

Spain

Tenerife is not a beach with a volcano behind it: it is a 3,715-metre volcano with an island around it.

Japan

Tokyo has no centre.

Canada

Toronto is the most diverse city in North America — half its residents were born elsewhere — and that reads neighbourhood by neighbourhood rather than in its monuments.

France

Toulouse is pink because it is built of brique foraine, fired from Garonne clay, and evening light makes that obvious.

Tunisia

Tunis reads as two cities side by side.

Spain

Valencia diverted its river after the 1957 flood and turned the empty bed into a nine-kilometre park running through the city — the Jardí del Túria is the most successful piece of urbanism in Spain.

Canada

Vancouver sits between ocean and mountains, and both are visible from almost anywhere — you can ski in the morning and walk a beach in the afternoon without hurrying.

Italy

Venice is built on a hundred and eighteen islands and has not one car.

Austria

Vienna was the capital of an empire and kept the scale.

United States

Washington was drawn before it was built, and it shows: the National Mall lines up its monuments over three kilometres, from the United States Capitol in the east to the Lincoln Memorial in the west, with the Washingt…

New Zealand

Wellington is the southernmost capital in the world and sits in an amphitheatre of hills around its harbour.

Tanzania

Stone Town is a maze of lanes you will inevitably get lost in, and that is the right way to see it.

Switzerland

Zurich sits between a river, a lake and two hills, and the city reads from its three medieval churches.