Happy accidents are the gold standard of tourist experiences. You walk somewhere in the town centre of your destination, take a turn off the main street, then another turn and yet another, and before you know what is happening, you find yourself in a part of the city that looks dramatically different from the pictures…
Porto, Portugal’s second city, is a relatively recent arrival on the list of Favoured European Travel Destinations. Over the past 20 years, it has made the leap from amateur status to the Premier League of tourist destinations, powered by double-digit annual growth rates of visitor numbers for over a decade. It now counts over 2.5…
There are quite a few things to say about the political scene in the south of France, not all of them complimentary. If you want to get a flavour of how things are done around here, a good place to start is the story of Jacques Médecin, the mayor or Nice from 1966 to 1990…
Let’s say you have spent a few days in Edinburgh, seen everything that you wanted to see and find that you have a day to spare – and, rather than going to a museum or walking up and down the same city streets again, feel like venturing out of town for a day trip: what…
I know it may hard to believe for dedicated easy hikers, but thousands of visitors pass through Edinburgh every year without setting foot on either the Water of Leith Walkway or Arthur’s Seat, preferring to spend their days in and around the Old Town and its neighbouring districts. They surely are missing something, but so…
Göttingen is no longer famous, but it should be. The story of this town in the heart of Germany is a metaphor as poignant as the tales of Easter Island or Dunwich, the mightiest medieval city on England’s east coast until it was flushed into the North Sea by a series of landslides and violent…
For a daytrip outside Bristol, we recommend a hike around the Clifton Suspension Bridge, easy-to-reach via city bus line no. 8, … … or an urban walk through Bath, one of Britain’s foremost tourist attractions and the only place on earth that has been listed twice as a UNESCO World Heritage Site: once in its…
For centuries, Bristol and Liverpool were the two main hubs of Britain’s highly lucrative Atlantic trade, but when this trade collapsed after the end of WWII (mainly because Britain lost its empire of colonies), the tales of these two cities took sharply different turns. Liverpool entered a steep decline, losing nearly half of its population…
The word Bavaria will, for most people, bring to mind images of alpine idylls, of women in dirndls and of men in lederhosen. But there exists another Bavaria beyond that: a world of twisted shapes, contorted bodies, and garish colours. This is the world of the Bavarian Baroque, a unique variety of the style which…
The idea was to explore one of Central Europe’s largest urban parks, a park which is roughly the size of a small country (all right: the country I am thinking of is Monaco) and which also doubles up as the main exhibition space for the world’s most famous exhibition of contemporary art. The idea was…
