Old towns, islands, museums and city breaks, from Lisbon to Baku
In the middle of Antwerp's main square a bronze hero stands on a pile of rocks and throws a severed hand. Water pours from the wrist. Tourists climb the rocks for photos. That's the Brabo Fountain, and it tells you, in one gesture, the story Antwerp likes to tell about its own…
Baku calls itself the Land of Fire, after the gas seeps that have burned on the Absheron Peninsula since antiquity. In 2012 the city built its own…
You can cross most of central Bologna in the rain without an umbrella. The city is lined with porticoes, covered arcades along the front of its…
The Miroir d'Eau is two centimetres of water on a granite slab. That's all it is. And on a still evening at blue hour it turns the Place de la Bourse…
Most day-trippers to Bruges spend their time in the Markt, the big square under the belfry. The Burg is two minutes away and better. It's smaller…
Everyone walks Charles Bridge. Fewer people look at it. The bridge is far better seen from the river than from on top of it, where you spend most of…
Koh Nang Yuan is three small islands joined by sandbars, off the northwest tip of Koh Tao in the Gulf of Thailand. From the viewpoint on top you see…
At the northern tip of Manhattan, in a wooded park above the Hudson, there's a medieval monastery that was never a monastery. The Met Cloisters is…
Mont-Saint-Michel had about 2.8 million visitors in 2025, and on a summer afternoon it feels like all of them came at once. The abbey on the rock is…
Lisbon sells custard tarts on every corner, and most of them are fine. A few are extraordinary. The gap between the two is bigger than the price…
