An independent guide
Small towns. Quiet corners. Unexpected stays.
Not a list of the world’s most instagrammed destinations. An editorial guide to the places that reward the traveller who looks slightly further — past the famous, past the obvious, into the places that have been quietly magnificent for centuries and will still be there long after the crowds move on.
17 destinations — Europe
The places worth going to are rarely the ones everyone has already been. They are the places that require a little more effort, a little more curiosity, a little more willingness to be somewhere that hasn’t been packaged for you.
Every destination in this guide was chosen because it has something genuinely extraordinary about it — a piece of history, a food culture, a landscape, a hotel — that most visitors to its country never find. Not because it is obscure for its own sake. Because it is better.
01
Where the Adriatic meets the Alps, and the wine has no equal.
02
The silent city. Three hundred residents inside walls that kept the Ottomans out.
03
Finland’s second city. Between two lakes, with saunas and the best food in the country.
04
The medieval city that Marrakech used to be before everyone found out about Marrakech.
05
The island that heals. Habsburg air cure resort. Dolphins in the bay.
06
You need a reservation to come ashore. Pink granite. Turquoise water. Forty residents.
07
More Michelin stars per capita than Stockholm. An archipelago on the doorstep.
08
Vast cork plains, white hilltop villages, and the finest olive oil in Europe.
09
Hope the voyage is a long one. Odysseus’s island, quietly magnificent.
10
Northern Italy that looks like Austria, eats like neither, and has eight Michelin stars.
11
Three hundred people. Seventeen churches. Two miraculous islands in the bay.
12
The last genuinely wild corner of Europe. Bears in the forests. Rivers of glacial turquoise.
13
The birthplace of Portugal. Vinho verde, Roman bridges, solares in the Lima Valley.
14
Belle Époque spa resort. A waterfall through the town. Three grand hotels just reopened.
15
Austria’s last valley. UNESCO sourdough bread. The wood for Venice’s gondolas grows here.
16
Pythagoras. Aristarchus. Epicurus. Aesop. The island of four geniuses.
17
The other Spain. Celtic, green, and home to the finest seafood in Europe.
The list grows when somewhere earns its place.