31 essays tagged “history”.
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
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
Oaxaca, Mexico
Oaxaca is the small colonial-era capital of the Mexican state of the same name, and the centre of one of the deepest regional food cultures on earth. The seven moles, the day-old corn tortillas, the dozens of indigenous languages, the mezcal — Oaxaca rewards a long, slow week.
February 9, 2024
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
Hoi An, Vietnam
Hoi An's central trading town, the old port on the Thu Bon river, is one of the most architecturally preserved towns in Southeast Asia. It is also, on lantern-festival nights, a crowded selfie corridor. The trick is the early morning, the rainy afternoons, and the bicycle to the beach.
October 22, 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
Antigua, Guatemala
Antigua Guatemala was the colonial capital of Central America from 1543 until earthquakes destroyed much of it in 1773. The surviving stone façades, the ruined convents, and the cobblestone streets are some of the most architecturally complete colonial set pieces in the Americas.
August 25, 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
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
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
Stone Town, Tanzania
Zanzibar splits cleanly in two: Stone Town, the densely woven Swahili-Arab-Indian trading city, and the white-sand beaches and spice plantations of the rest of the island. Most safari travellers tack on three nights on the beach. The better trip gives Stone Town three nights of its own.
July 19, 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
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
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
Bruges, Belgium
Bruges has, for fifteen years, been a kind of cautionary tale about overtourism — a town of 20,000 in the old centre that absorbs 8 million visitors a year. In November, all but a few thousand of those visitors are elsewhere. Bruges in November is one of the most beautiful walking weeks in Europe.
November 8, 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
Petra, Jordan
The Treasury at Petra is the iconic photograph; the city itself is much larger and much weirder than the photograph suggests. The Nabataean Empire carved an entire capital out of the sandstone cliffs of southern Jordan, and most visitors see less than a quarter of it.
September 22, 2021
Lalibela, Ethiopia
Lalibela's churches are not built. They are carved, downward, out of solid volcanic rock — eleven monolithic structures connected by underground tunnels, hewn over a century beginning in the 12th. They are also still in active liturgical use, 800 years on.
June 30, 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