Europe

There is a forest on the border between Poland and Belarus that has been there for 12,000 years. It predates both countries and the entire concept of the nation-state. It is the last remaining fragment of the vast primeval lowland forest that once covered most of Europe. Ancient trees up to 600 years old stand…

Vidocq was a real person, born in 1775 in northern France, who spent the first half of his adult life either in prison or escaping from prison. He then offered to become a police informant, talked the French government into letting him run a plainclothes investigation unit, built it into what became France’s national detective…

Every city with a castle has a founding legend. Most of them involve a king or a warrior or a divine sign. Kraków’s involves a cobbler’s apprentice, a lamb stuffed with sulfur, and a dragon that drank itself to death from the Vistula River. I have a soft spot for founding legends where the hero…

There is a village in Andalusia, southern Spain, where people have been living inside a river gorge for at least 5,000 years, and the houses use the cliff face as their back wall and the overhang of the rock as their roof. You walk down the main street and instead of sky above you, there…

There is a particular kind of traveller who arrives in Greece with a list. Six islands in ten days, perhaps, each one a stamp to be collected, a sunset to be photographed, a beach to be filed away under a name that will later blur with the others. The list is a defence against the…

There is a particular kind of coastal terrain that does not reward the rushed traveller, and the eastern Adriatic is one of the clearest examples of it. The walking here is not organised around long-distance trails or named summits. It is scattered — a half-day ridge above a bay, a switchback path between two villages,…

The Via Flaminia is the road from Rome to the Adriatic coast that Roman legions marched north on in 220 BCE, that Julius Caesar used to march his army south toward Rome to start a civil war, that Napoleon later used to invade Italy, and that you can currently drive down in a rental car…

I came across this story while reading about post-war German reconstruction. It is about a building. But it is also about what a city decides to do when it loses something it cannot replace, and about the specific human impulse to rebuild not because the result will be original, but because the absence is unbearable.…

The Vatican is one of those places where you can spend an entire day staring at the most famous things and still miss what makes it genuinely extraordinary. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Raphael Rooms. These are all real and worth your time. But there is a whole other Vatican running parallel…

Most people who visit Rome do what Rome tells them to do. The Colosseum. The Vatican. The Trevi Fountain. The Spanish Steps. And honestly, that itinerary is not wrong, those things are extraordinary. But there is a church about a ten-minute walk from the Colosseum that most people just walk straight past. The Basilica of…

There is a man whose entire job, every single day, is to make sure six ravens do not leave the Tower of London. He wakes up at first light and lets them out of their enclosures. Next, he cleans up after them and feeds them raw meat and blood-soaked biscuits. Throughout the day, he spends…

The headline is technically a slight exaggeration and I want to be upfront about that. Norwegian law requires anyone leaving the settlements of Svalbard to carry “suitable means to scare off polar bears.” The Governor of Svalbard strongly recommends a rifle specifically, and in practice almost everyone carries one. But the law says bear deterrent,…

There is a small hill in northern Lithuania, about the width of a football field and not very tall, that holds over 100,000 crosses. They cover every inch of it. Wooden crosses, metal crosses, tiny crosses made of wire, enormous carved crosses standing ten feet high, rosaries draped everywhere, statues of the Virgin Mary tucked…

Italy is one of the most visited countries in the world, which means most people see roughly the same ten percent of it. The other ninety percent rewards curiosity in ways that the well-worn trail rarely manages. Let’s discuss the Italian trips that reward curiosity. The majority of first-time visitors to Italy follow a well-established…

Some places give you everything in the first day. Others take their time revealing themselves — and those tend to be the ones worth going back to, or simply never leaving in the first place. Let’s talk about the European destinations that get better the longer you stay. The Austrian Alps Austria is a country…

Ordinary life is very small. Not in a bad way — the details of it matter enormously — but in a spatial sense, the world most people move through day to day is narrow and low and bounded. The mountains fix this, providing a sense of scale, and they fix it faster than you expect.…

Every seasoned traveler has a list of places that stopped them in their tracks — not because they were on any itinerary, but because they turned out to be better than anywhere they had been before. These are some of those places in Europe. Slovenia Slovenia is the European destination that produces more genuine surprise…

For a long time, travel was organised around places. You went to Paris, to Bali, to New York. Lately something has shifted. More people are starting with what they want to do, and letting that decide where they go. The Checklist Era Is Fading There was a period when travel seemed to be primarily about…

Most destinations are visited once, remembered fondly, and replaced on the list by somewhere new. The Alps work differently. The people who go once tend to go again — and again — and most of them can tell you exactly why. A Walk Around a Mountain, Not Up One The Tour du Mont Blanc is…

Travel in Europe has a reputation for being expensive, and in some places that reputation is definitely deserved. However, Europe is a big place. The truth is that some of its most rewarding destinations are also the ones that remain surprisingly affordable. In many cases, these places feel more authentic, too. So, if you’re planning…

Southern Europe has no shortage of famous places. Cities like Rome, Barcelona, and Athens attract millions of visitors every year, and for good reason. But because so many travelers follow the same routes, a lot of equally beautiful places tend to fly under the radar. Small coastal towns, historic cities, and entire regions sometimes get…

Living in Bosnia my whole life, I’ve spent a lot of time looking out at the landscape and realizing that most people’s perception of this country is stuck in a 1990s news cycle. But in 2026, Bosnia is less about the “history of conflict.” Instead, it is more about a raw, high-contrast beauty that you…

Scandinavia is gorgeous, we all know that. But if you strip away the sleek Stockholm lofts and the Copenhagen bike lanes, you’re left with a landscape that is aggressively, almost violently beautiful. What makes it so special is that Scandinavia’s nature refuses to be curated. It’s a land of jagged granite, turquoise glacial melt, and…

When people talk about national parks in Europe, the same places usually come up. The Alps. Iceland. Maybe the Dolomites. What doesn’t get mentioned as often is how many other national parks exist across the continent. Europe has hundreds of them, and a lot are just as beautiful. Some protect huge mountain ranges, others cover…

If you travel around Germany long enough, you start noticing a pattern. A river curves through a valley, vineyards climb the hillsides, and somewhere above the rooftops, there’s a castle watching over everything. Underneath it, there’s usually a small town that has been there for centuries. Many of those towns began for practical reasons. Living…