The Eiger: A Mountain That Demands Attention The North Face The Eiger’s north face is 1,800 metres of limestone, ice, and loose rock, and its reputation was built on how many climbers it killed during the 1930s before anyone had climbed it. Two German climbers died on the face in 1935. In 1936, four climbers from two separate teams perished while the bodies were visible through telescopes...

You Cannot See the Great Wall from Space. Here Is What You Can Do Instead. The claim that the Great Wall of China is visible from the moon is a myth that National Geographic inadvertently popularised in 1923. China’s own first astronaut, Yang Liwei, admitted on his return from orbit that he could not see it. The wall is wide enough to be visible from low Earth orbit under specific lighting...

In 1933, construction workers at Rockefeller Center pooled their own money to buy a 20-foot balsam fir, draped it in handmade garlands, and stood it at the construction site as a symbol of perseverance during the Depression. John D. Rockefeller Jr. broke ground on the complex in 1931, when unemployment in New York City was above 25 percent. The project kept 75,000 people employed at its peak and...

Karlstejn Castle was built not to be defended but to be a vault. Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, began construction in 1348 specifically to house his collection of imperial relics and coronation regalia, and the most important pieces were stored in the Chapel of the Holy Cross at the top of the Great Tower, surrounded by over 2,000 semi-precious stones embedded in the walls and...

The Sermeq Kujalleq glacier, known outside Greenland as the Jakobshavn Glacier, moves at 40 to 50 metres per day, making it the fastest-moving glacier in the northern hemisphere. It drains a substantial section of the Greenland Ice Sheet and calves roughly 20 billion tonnes of icebergs into Ilulissat Icefjord annually. Some of those icebergs are the size of city blocks; a few are the size of small...

Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro Every tile on Christ the Redeemer was placed by hand, and some of the women who helped apply them wrote names on the back before pressing the soapstone into mesh, sealing the letters inside the statue. The outer shell contains close to six million of those triangular soapstone tiles, a material chosen because it does not expand or contract with temperature...

A Portuguese proverb once held that he who had seen Goa need not see Lisbon. At its peak between 1575 and 1625, Golden Goa, as it was known, was a port city of nearly 200,000 people, the administrative capital of the entire Portuguese empire east of the Cape of Good Hope, and home to more than 50 churches, chapels, monasteries, and convents. It was the most intensely ecclesiastical Christian...

The Okavango River rises in Angola, runs southeast for 1,600 kilometres, crosses into Botswana, and then does something rivers almost never do: it stops. Instead of reaching the sea, the Okavango fans out across the Kalahari sands and simply evaporates and absorbs into the earth, creating a permanent inland wetland the size of Switzerland. The flood pulse that drives this system is also...

Three bridges cross the Han River in central Da Nang within a few hundred metres of each other, and the Love Bridge (Cau Tinh Yeu) is not the most famous of them. The Dragon Bridge, 666 metres of fire-breathing dragon-shaped steel, holds that title. But the Love Bridge is the one couples walk slowly across at dusk, reading the names scratched into padlocks hanging from the railings, and it has...

Diocletian spent his reign persecuting Christians more systematically than almost any other Roman emperor. When he retired to the palace he built for himself on the Dalmatian coast in 305 AD, he was buried in a grand octagonal mausoleum at its centre. Within 350 years, that mausoleum had been converted into a cathedral. The irony is still visible: the Cathedral of Saint Domnius (named after one of...

The Great Wall is not a single continuous structure. It is a collection of walls, ramparts, beacon towers, and fortifications built across roughly 2,000 years by successive Chinese dynasties, covering in total somewhere around 13,000 miles of terrain. Most visitors see only the Ming Dynasty sections built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries near Beijing, which are the best-preserved and most...

The Stone Giants at the Edge of the World Three thousand seven hundred kilometres off the Chilean coast, a single runway connects Easter Island to the rest of humanity. LATAM Airlines operates roughly a dozen flights a week between Santiago and Mataveri International Airport, and they hold a monopoly. That reality shapes everything: airfares easily top US$1,000 return, and you cannot arrive on a...

The first person confirmed to have climbed Sugarloaf Mountain was a British nanny named Henrietta Carstairs, who reached the summit in 1817 and planted a British flag at the top. Today the rock has over 270 climbing routes and is considered one of the world’s great urban climbing areas. Most visitors skip that particular ambition and take the cable car instead, which is also fine. The cable...

Kruger National Park was proclaimed in 1898 by President Paul Kruger primarily to protect dwindling game populations from hunting, not because of any particular reverence for wilderness. The forced removal of indigenous San, Makuleke, and Tsonga communities who had lived in the region for generations was considered a necessary condition of the park’s creation. That history sits alongside the...

Every year, just before the rains arrive, the entire population of Djenne turns out to replaster the Great Mosque. The banco, a mixture of clay, water, and plant fibres, has been mixed in pits for days, left to ferment until it reaches the right consistency. Then it begins: a race to see who brings the first bowl of mud to the mosque walls, followed by the whole community climbing the toron (the...

When the first warriors were excavated after 1974, they were not the colour you see today. Every figure in the pits was originally coated in vibrant lacquer paint: vermilion, deep green, sky blue, ochre, black, pinkish-purple, light red, and orange, applied in multiple layers over a white base coat. Within 15 seconds of air contact, the ancient pigments began peeling from the clay. By the time...

Angkor Wat, Cambodia The guide at the gate tells you they face west. Almost every Hindu temple in Asia faces east, toward the rising sun and the realm of the living. Angkor Wat faces west, toward the setting sun, the direction Hindu cosmology associates with death. Scholars have argued for a century about what that means. The most convincing reading is that King Suryavarman II, who began...

Arc De Triomphe Napoleon never stood under his own arch. He commissioned it in 1806, on the morning after Austerlitz, in a flush of imperial confidence. He died in 1821 on Saint Helena. The arch was not completed until 1836, fifteen years after his death, by a monarchy that had replaced the empire he built. Then, in December 1840, his remains came home from Saint Helena in a chariot drawn by...

Four Times the Grand Canyon, Almost No One There Copper Canyon is not one canyon. It is a system of six interconnected gorges in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental that together cover a greater surface area and reach greater depth than the Grand Canyon. The deepest point, above the Urique River, drops around 1,870 metres from rim to valley floor. Americans in particular tend to be surprised by...

Burj Khalifa The name on the building was not always Khalifa. For most of its construction, the tower rising over Downtown Dubai was called Burj Dubai, and the day it opened in January 2010, it was renamed on the spot. Abu Dhabi had just lent Dubai tens of billions of dollars to service its debts. The renamed tower was, among other things, a thank-you note. That detail does not appear on the...

For the first few months of construction in 1998, it rained every day at the Bodelva china clay pit near St Austell. Forty-three million litres of water poured into a 60-metre-deep hole in the ground that had been mined for over 160 years and was sitting 15 metres below the water table. The engineering team improvised a drainage system and kept building. When Eden Project opened in 2001, it had...

Notting Hill Carnival did not begin as a Caribbean street party in West London. It began on a winter evening in January 1959 at St Pancras Town Hall in Camden, indoors, in direct response to the 1958 Notting Hill race riots. Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian activist and newspaper editor who had been deported from the United States and settled in London, organised what she called a Caribbean Carnival...

The loudspeakers at Choeung Ek were there for a reason. The Khmer Rouge hung them from the trees surrounding the execution site and played revolutionary music at high volume to cover the sounds of what was happening inside. That detail, recovered from survivor testimony and guard confessions, sits with you long after you leave. Choeung Ek was chosen as an execution site partly because it was...

Hans Christian Andersen lived at three separate addresses along this canal over the course of his life: numbers 18, 20, and 67. He spent the longest stretch at No. 67, from 1848 to 1865. At No. 20, he was writing in 1834 and 1835, producing the first booklet of fairy tales, which contained The Tinderbox, The Princess and the Pea, Little Claus and Big Claus, and Little Ida’s Flowers. The...

On August 8, 2023, a wind-driven wildfire destroyed most of Lahaina in under six hours. More than 100 people died. Lahaina had been the historic capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the most culturally significant town in the Hawaiian Islands, and the centre of West Maui’s visitor economy. What replaced it was a burnt grid of foundations and debris that is still, as of 2026, being cleared and...

Fiji Has 330 Islands. The Difference Between a Good Trip and a Great One Is Knowing Which to Pick. Most people arrive at Nadi International Airport, transfer to a resort on one of the Mamanuca Islands, and leave extremely happy. That is a fine holiday. But Fiji’s real variety lies in understanding what the Mamanuca and Yasawa groups actually offer and why the same resort price will buy you...

Mayreau has a permanent population of around 270 people, one road, no cars, and no airport. It covers less than half a square mile and sits 3 kilometres west of the Tobago Cays Marine Park. These facts are the point. The smallest inhabited island in the Grenadines chain is worth the effort of getting to precisely because that effort filters out the kind of tourist infrastructure that has...

Only about a quarter of the Sahara is sand. The rest is rock: bare limestone plateaus called hammada, gravel plains called reg, mountain ranges reaching over 3,000 meters, salt flats, and ancient river valleys that have not seen water in thousands of years. The iconic rolling dunes that fill every photograph represent a minority of a desert that stretches 9.2 million square kilometers across 11...

The stalactites hanging in the darkness 40 metres below the surface of the Great Blue Hole are still there because they formed in open air. Around 15,000 years ago, this was a dry limestone cave. When sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age, the cave flooded, the roof eventually collapsed, and what remained was a circular sinkhole 318 metres wide and 124 metres deep in the middle of the...

Death Valley In July 2024, the weather station at Furnace Creek recorded nine consecutive days above 125 degrees Fahrenheit (51.7 Celsius), and the overnight low temperature on those days never dropped below 100 Fahrenheit. Park rangers dealt with multiple heat-related medical emergencies and two fatalities where heat was a contributing factor. The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record at Death...

The glass of water that arrives with every coffee in a Viennese Kaffeehaus is not an afterthought. After the city opened its high-pressure spring pipeline in 1873, Vienna’s coffeehouses began serving their coffee with high-quality spring water as a deliberate status signal, proof that the establishment was using only the best water to brew. The practice became a social convention and has...

Bagan At four in the morning, the plain is perfectly dark and perfectly quiet. You ride an e-bike without lights through sandy tracks between temples you cannot see, trusting memory and the occasional lit phone screen of another early riser doing the same thing. Then the sky begins to lighten, and over the course of about twenty minutes, more than two thousand ancient structures emerge from the...

If you visited the Egyptian Museum in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2024 expecting Tutankhamun’s golden mask to still be there, you would have left disappointed. The mask, along with all 5,398 objects from the boy king’s tomb, has now moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum on the Giza plateau, which opened formally in November 2025. For visitors planning a trip in 2026, this changes the...

Golden Gate National Recreation Area: The Urban Park That Keeps Getting Bigger An Unusual National Park Golden Gate National Recreation Area does not look like a national park on a map. It is not one contiguous wilderness but a scatter of sites around San Francisco, Marin County, and the San Mateo coast, totalling over 80,000 acres. It contains a decommissioned federal prison, a redwood forest,...

When James Clark Ross sailed south into the ice in January 1841, he expected to reach the open polar sea that cartographers of the era assumed must exist at high southern latitudes. Instead, on 28 January, he encountered something no one had prepared him for: a wall of ice stretching across the entire horizon, rising fifty to sixty metres above the water, absolutely vertical, running for hundreds...

The Great Barrier Reef experienced its sixth mass bleaching event since 2016 in 2025, and Australia submitted a formal conservation report to UNESCO in February 2026 to defend the reef’s World Heritage status against a potential “In Danger” listing. The UNESCO World Heritage Committee is scheduled to consider that report at its 48th session in July 2026. Knowing this context...

Mount Etna erupted on Christmas Eve 2025, sending lava flows from the Southeast Crater across the Valle del Bove and triggering a significant eruption cycle that ran through early January 2026. This is not alarming news for visitors: Etna is the most active volcano in Europe and has been erupting, in one form or another, for at least 2,700 years of recorded history. The point is that it erupts...

The first thing the dunes do is make noise. Not a whisper, a low, resonant moan that rises out of nowhere as the sand slides down the face in a small avalanche. You look around expecting a distant engine or some trick of wind. There is nothing. Just 180 kilometres of sand, humming at you from the edge of the Gobi. That sound is the whole reason Khongoryn Els is called Duut Mankhan in Mongolian:...

Hoi An’s Japanese Covered Bridge, built in the 1590s, crosses a narrow tributary of the Thu Bon River that no longer separates the two communities it was designed to connect. The Japanese merchants who commissioned it had largely disappeared within a generation of its completion: in 1635 the Tokugawa shogunate’s Sakoku edict ended official Japanese trade voyages, cutting off the flow...

Ishak Pasha Palace sits on a rocky spur at 2,100 metres above sea level near Dogubayazit, with Mount Ararat filling the horizon to the north. The palace was not built by Ottomans in any straightforward sense. Construction started in 1685 under Colak Abdi Pasha, a hereditary Kurdish chieftain of the Ciidirogullari clan, and was completed in 1784 or 1785 by his descendant Ishak Pasha. The craftsmen...

Cloud Forests of Monteverde, Costa Rica In 1951, eleven Quaker families from Alabama loaded onto trucks and drove to Costa Rica, partly because several of the younger men had been jailed for refusing to serve in the Korean War, and partly because Costa Rica had just become one of the only countries in the world to abolish its military entirely. They bought 1,500 hectares of land in the central...

Disneyland Paris opened its second park on 29 March 2026 under a new name, Disney Adventure World, anchored by the World of Frozen land. If you visited Walt Disney Studios Park in the past and found it underwhelming compared to the original Disneyland Park, it is worth revisiting. The expansion changes the equation considerably. What was previously the weaker half of the resort is now its most...

At 5,897 metres, Cotopaxi is the second highest mountain in Ecuador, one of the highest active volcanoes on Earth, and one of the few serious technical climbs on the planet that a fit, well-acclimatized person with no prior mountaineering experience can reasonably attempt, with a guide. It sits 55 kilometres south of Quito in the Avenue of the Volcanoes, a corridor of snow-capped peaks that...

Karnak, Egypt Archaeologists working beneath the floor of Karnak’s southern precincts in late 2024 found gold rings, amulets, and a small triad statue of Amun, Mut, and Khonsu, tucked inside a foundation deposit that had gone unnoticed for over three millennia. A separate team then published geoarchaeological data showing that the entire complex was originally an island surrounded by...

The tide at Mont Saint-Michel rises at the speed of a galloping horse. That is not a figure of speech borrowed from a tourism brochure; it is a genuine physical phenomenon explained by the shape of the bay, which acts as a funnel amplifying tidal flow. The difference between high and low tide can exceed 14 metres. When the spring tides come in around the equinoxes, with coefficients above 110, the...

There is no landmass between the west coast of Vancouver Island and Japan. That open stretch of the North Pacific is what drives the weather at Pacific Rim National Park Reserve: swells that have travelled thousands of kilometres arriving with undiluted force against a rainforest coastline. Winter storms here can produce waves exceeding 26 feet and drop 19 inches of rain in a single day. Most...

In October 2019, a visitor pushed a cigarette butt into a geiko’s collar while trying to photograph her. Another had part of her kimono torn. These incidents led to photography bans on private alleys in Gion, then to outright tourist exclusion zones with legally binding fines of ¥10,000 for entering certain side streets. If you are planning to visit in 2026 and your main goal is...

Hollywood Studios in 2026 Is a Substantially Different Park Than It Was Two Years Ago The Aerosmith coaster is gone. Muppet*Vision 3D closed permanently in June 2025. A new land has opened where Animation Courtyard used to be. If you are working from a 2023 or 2024 guide, some of what you have read about Hollywood Studios is already out of date. The most significant change: Rock ’n’...

Mount Fuji last erupted in 1707. The event, triggered by a major earthquake 49 days earlier, rained ash on Edo (present-day Tokyo) for two weeks, blanketed the Kanto plain, and buried nearby villages under meters of volcanic debris. The mountain has been seismically quiet ever since, rated Level 1 (normal activity) on Japan’s volcanic alert scale, monitored continuously by seismometers, GPS...

Forty gardeners spend the autumn months from October to early December planting seven million bulbs at Keukenhof. They follow plans drawn up the previous spring, working from detailed maps that specify the exact colour sequence across each bed. By the time the gates open in late March, that labour is invisible. What visitors see is a finished explosion of colour, as if the tulips simply decided to...