Old towns, islands, museums and city breaks, from Lisbon to Baku
Lyon makes more sense from the water. On foot, the city arrives in fragments: an old-town alley, a bridge, a steep glimpse of Fourvière, a modern building glimpsed between traffic lights. A riverboat joins those fragments into a continuous waterfront. The Saône is particularly…
Taormina has a remarkable talent for making an ordinary summer afternoon feel like a theatrical performance. There is no need for a festival, a…
The Cathedral of Syracuse, standing in Piazza Duomo on the island of Ortigia, is one of those buildings that makes you wonder whether architecture…
Vienna has a remarkable talent for making history feel physically enormous. Walk into Maria-Theresien-Platz, the broad square between the city's two…
Ask anyone in Baku for the national dish and you'll get an argument: plov, says one; dolma, says the next. Dolma has the paperwork. In 2017 UNESCO…
The Torre de Belém is the most photographed building in Lisbon and, for most of a year, you couldn't go inside it. The tower closed for a restoration…
You see the Big Buddha before you land. The statue sits on a small islet on the northeast coast of Koh Samui, a few kilometres from the airport, and…
Most people pass through Burgos. Pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago walk through it on the way west, drivers stop for lunch on the road between…
King Herod had no natural harbour on this stretch of coast, so he built one. Between about 22 and 10 BC his engineers sank huge blocks of hydraulic…
