52 essays tagged “cities”.
Split, Croatia
I have left Split a hundred times in twenty years. Every single time the plane banks over the Brač channel on the way back, I tremble. This is the only city in the world I do that for. Here's what to do with mine.
May 20, 2026
Lisbon, Portugal
I came to Lisbon in 2008 for a long weekend, came back in 2011 for a month, and in 2019 stopped pretending and rented an apartment. Most of what is now said about the city — that it is hot, crowded, expensive, complicated — is true. None of it is the whole story. This is the rest of it.
February 14, 2025
Berlin, Germany
Berlin is the only major European capital that has been multiple cities within a single lifetime — divided, reunited, gentrified, bohemian, exhausted, reborn — and that experience of being remade is still, somehow, the city's most reliable trait.
November 8, 2024
Paris, France
Everyone arrives in Paris with a list. I did too, in 2004, and I crossed almost none of it off. What I learned instead was that Paris doesn't perform for tourists in the afternoon. It performs at 7 a.m., at 11 p.m., and on Mondays when half the city is closed and the other half has finally exhaled.
September 12, 2024
Kyoto, Japan
Kyoto has a famous-temples problem: there are too many famous temples in a small city, and the day-tripper bus from Osaka delivers tens of thousands of visitors to half a dozen of them daily. The other temples — and the famous ones at 6 a.m. — are still entirely yours.
August 23, 2024
Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo is large in a way that defeats the standard travel rhythm. It is not one city; it is twenty-three wards, each a small city, each with its own grammar. The right pace is to do less, daily, and to do it more carefully.
August 19, 2024
Copenhagen, Denmark
Copenhagen doesn't try to impress you. The city's pleasures are small and structural — a bike lane that works, a harbour you can swim in, a city built at human scale and against the temptation to grow taller. Most great visits start by hiring a bike on day one.
June 17, 2024
New York, United States
Most first-time visitors to New York spend three days running between the Empire State Building, Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, and a Broadway show. The better trip picks one neighbourhood per day and walks it until you have a coffee place by Thursday.
May 23, 2024
Singapore, Singapore
Singapore has, for two generations, been written off by travel writers as too clean, too efficient, too engineered. They were almost always passing through. Stay a week and you discover a small, dense, multi-ethnic city of profound urban design intelligence and one of the best hawker-food cultures on earth.
April 29, 2024
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona is a city that has been loved nearly to death and is, slowly, recovering. You can still have a beautiful week here. You just need to skip half of what the guidebooks insist on, and learn the names of three or four streets that aren't on the tourist map.
April 8, 2024
Seoul, South Korea
Seoul is most itself between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The bbq restaurants are at full smoke. The streets in Hongdae and Itaewon are full of office workers on a third bottle of soju. The 24-hour everything is open. The city that took ten years to be discovered by Western tourists became, almost overnight, the most influential cultural city in East Asia.
March 12, 2024
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Chiang Mai is what Bangkok was, possibly, before the expressways. A small grid of moated streets, three hundred temples within walking distance, the smell of charcoal and lemongrass in the evenings. It also has the best curry noodles in Thailand.
January 30, 2024
Bangkok, Thailand
Bangkok is, for most visitors, a transit city — a 48-hour stop on the way to a beach. Done at that speed, it is overwhelming and exhausting. Given a full week, it becomes one of the most rewarding urban experiences in Southeast Asia.
December 4, 2023
Mexico City, Mexico
Mexico City was, for a long time, written off by Western travellers as too big, too polluted, too dangerous. The decade since 2015 has rewritten that conversation. The city is now, by most measures, one of the best food capitals in the world.
November 30, 2023
Amsterdam, Netherlands
The Amsterdam tourists see is roughly a triangle: Dam Square, the Red Light District, the Anne Frank House. The Amsterdam the Dutch see is a calm, low-rise, water-laced city of seventy-five distinct neighbourhoods, half of them on islands, almost none of them on the postcard.
November 19, 2023
Melbourne, Australia
Melbourne is the second-largest Australian city and, by most metrics that matter to a traveller, the more rewarding one. The laneway coffee culture, the food, the small-bar scene, and the Australian Open in January make for a city that punches well above its harbour-less weight.
November 12, 2023
Sydney, Australia
Sydney is one of the most photogenically sited cities on earth — the harbour, the opera house, the bridge, the beaches at Manly and Bondi. The city becomes legible through its coastal walks, which connect the urban grid to the Pacific in a way few capitals can match.
November 4, 2023
Hanoi, Vietnam
Hanoi is a city of small plastic stools. They are on every pavement. They appear at dawn, around the noodle carts, and disappear at midnight, after the last beer. They are how you eat in this city. They are how you watch the city. Get comfortable on them.
October 15, 2023
Istanbul, Turkey
Istanbul cannot be done in a long weekend. The city is fifteen million people, two continents, two thousand years of capital-city memory, and a Bosphorus that runs straight through the middle of all of it. Plan for a week. Plan, also, for the ferries.
September 4, 2023
Vancouver, Canada
Vancouver is a small, wet, west-coast Canadian city with a serious mountain range starting two kilometres north of downtown. The city's gift is the immediate access — you can be in old-growth rainforest within twenty minutes of a downtown apartment.
August 8, 2023
Beijing, China
Beijing is a city of axes — the great north-south central axis from the Bell Tower through the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven — and of pockets. The pockets are the hutongs, the grey-brick alley neighbourhoods, and they remain, in the surviving sections, one of the most distinctive urban textures on earth.
July 7, 2023
Shanghai, China
The Shanghai of the headlines — Pudong, the LED-skinned skyline, the supertall towers — is real and worth seeing once. The Shanghai of the *longtang* lane houses, the morning markets, and the plane-tree-lined French Concession streets is where the city actually lives.
June 30, 2023
Cartagena, Colombia
Cartagena's old walled city is one of the most architecturally complete colonial-era Spanish ports in the Americas. The Caribbean climate, the food, and the post-conflict tourism boom have made it a Latin American travel staple.
June 4, 2023
Yerevan, Armenia
Yerevan is, in some lights, simply a small Soviet-modernist capital in the South Caucasus. In other lights, it is the cultural heart of one of the world's oldest continuous Christian civilisations and a country still working through the unresolved memory of 1915.
May 30, 2023
Rome, Italy
Rome is a city that asks you to surrender, and the surrender takes about three days. On day one you fight it. On day two you photograph it. On day three you eat too much. On day four, if you're lucky, you simply walk in it. This piece is for day four.
May 22, 2023
San Francisco, United States
San Francisco is geographically tiny — 7 miles by 7 miles — and topographically intense. The city's gift is that almost every walk involves climbing a hill, and almost every hill ends at a view.
April 20, 2023
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Hong Kong's verticality is famous. What's less famous is how walkable it remains. The Mid-Levels escalator alone covers 800 metres of climb. The city is layered — street level, podium level, rooftop level — and the trick is to keep moving between them.
April 4, 2023
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Dubai is the most engineered city of the modern era — built almost entirely since the 1990s, from a small Trucial Coast pearl-trading port into a 3-million-person globally connected emirate. The city is best read as the architectural laboratory it is.
March 24, 2023
Budapest, Hungary
Budapest's two best institutions are its thermal baths and its ruin pubs — both unique to this city, both essential, both best understood by trying them yourself. The river is the city's spine and the baths are its lungs.
March 19, 2023
Edinburgh, Scotland
I love Edinburgh in February. I know nobody is supposed to, but the festivals have packed up, the Christmas markets are gone, the tour buses are dormant, and the city — built of dark stone on top of an extinct volcano — looks like itself again.
February 19, 2023
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Buenos Aires runs on a particular timetable: lunch at two, drinks at nine, dinner at eleven, the milonga at one in the morning, breakfast back at the apartment as the sun comes up over the Río de la Plata. Adjust your sleep schedule before you arrive.
January 18, 2023
Varanasi, India
Varanasi is not for everyone, and it does not pretend to be. The city is dense, intense, ancient, and dedicated to a kind of religious practice that does not soften itself for visitors. The morning river, at dawn, is the experience that justifies the journey.
December 18, 2022
Jaipur, India
Jaipur is the rare planned 18th-century Indian city — Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II laid it out in 1727 on the Hindu Shilpa Shastra principles, with the famously rose-pink colour washed onto every building inside the old walls for an imperial visit in 1876 and never washed off.
November 25, 2022
Prague, Czechia
I first saw Prague in 2003, when the post-communist hangover was real and the beer cost almost nothing. The city has changed more than any European capital I know. The trick now is to find the version of it that survived.
October 30, 2022
Florence, Italy
Florence is the Renaissance city: small enough to walk across in twenty minutes, dense with paintings and buildings that changed Western art forever, and now reliably packed by mid-morning. The trick is to be up earlier than anyone else.
August 22, 2022
Tbilisi, Georgia
Tbilisi is the rare capital that feels genuinely undiscovered for its quality. The old town has the sulphur baths and the wooden balconies; the wine culture is one of the oldest on earth; the country beyond the city is dramatic and almost empty.
July 28, 2022
Cusco, Peru
Cusco is where the Spanish built their colonial churches and palaces directly on top of Inca stone foundations — sometimes literally using the same walls. The city at 3400 m is the gateway to Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley, but it deserves three or four days on its own merits.
June 8, 2022
Samarkand, Uzbekistan
Samarkand is the great Timurid capital, with the most extraordinary 14th- and 15th-century Islamic architecture in Central Asia. Uzbekistan has, since 2018, dramatically liberalised tourist access; the country is now one of the most rewarding regions in the world to visit.
May 15, 2022
Muscat, Oman
Oman has chosen, deliberately, a different path from its glittering Gulf neighbours. The buildings are low-rise. The architecture is regulated to traditional Omani style. The tourism numbers are smaller. The country is, in every meaningful sense, the antidote to Dubai.
April 26, 2022
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Dubrovnik is the most besieged old town in the Mediterranean — first by armies for a thousand years, now by cruise ships for ten. The trick is timing. Off-season Dubrovnik is one of the most beautiful weeks in Europe.
April 11, 2022
New Orleans, United States
New Orleans is the rare American city that is structurally not American. The Creole, French, Spanish, African, and Caribbean inheritances combine into a culture — and a cuisine, and a music — that exists nowhere else on the continent. Skip the French Quarter early in the day; the city is bigger than its postcard.
March 26, 2022
Kathmandu, Nepal
Kathmandu is two cities — the dusty, traffic-choked, modern capital, and the medieval Newari city of pagoda temples, hidden courtyards, and 1500-year-old shrines. The second city is the one to come for.
March 12, 2022
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Rio is one of the most dramatically sited cities on earth — granite peaks rising from the sea, beaches that stretch across the city's southern edge, forest-clad hills that run almost to the centre. The city's energy is famous and real; the trick is to find the slower-walking version of it.
February 26, 2022
Cairo, Egypt
Cairo is 22 million people, dust, traffic, and a continuous Islamic-and-pharaonic history that no other city on earth can match. Plan a week. Plan, also, for the noise.
February 8, 2022
Vienna, Austria
Vienna is a city that doesn't want to be done quickly, and it's surprisingly good at outlasting visitors who try. The Viennese take their afternoons in coffee houses for a reason. Sit down. Order. Stay.
January 15, 2022
Cape Town, South Africa
Cape Town has a Table Mountain at one end and an ocean at the other. The city in between has the most varied food, wine, and walking on the African continent — and a daily set of contradictions you cannot honestly ignore.
December 12, 2021
Marrakech, Morocco
Marrakech is a city built for confusion. The medina was designed in the 11th century as a fortified labyrinth, and the design has held. The riad — the inward-facing courtyard house — is built around a small fountain and a fragment of sky. The streets are narrow on purpose. Surrender to it.
November 30, 2021
Havana, Cuba
Havana is a city of crumbling baroque facades, 1950s American cars, the most particular post-Soviet political economy in the world, and a daily life that does not, despite the photo-tourism economy, perform for the camera. A short guide to the city's depths.
October 19, 2021
Seville, Spain
Seville is a city where the afternoon doesn't really happen — it's too hot — and the evening doesn't really begin until 9. Plan accordingly. The four hours between then and midnight are when everything that matters in this city actually happens.
April 22, 2021
Jerusalem, Israel
Jerusalem is, for the visitor, two things at once: an extraordinary historical city of stone and light, and a place of unresolved political conflict that no honest writer can ignore. A guide that tries to do both.
March 8, 2021
Quebec City, Canada
Quebec City is the only walled city north of Mexico, the oldest continuous French settlement in North America (founded 1608), and one of the rare places where you can spend a week speaking French without anyone switching to English on you. The deep winter is the right time.
January 25, 2021
Reykjavik, Iceland
Reykjavik in November has four hours of usable daylight, average temperatures hovering around freezing, and a small-town feel that disguises its position as the cultural capital of the North Atlantic. Pack for it; show up anyway.
December 15, 2020