Destination guides

Honest guides to places worth flying for — what they are, when to go, and what to know before you book.

Popular routes

• Azerbaijan

  Baku

  Three cities share one skyline in Baku: a walled medieval trading post, a boulevard of oil-boom mansions, and a waterfront of glass and flame. Few places let you walk between centuries this quickly.

• Georgia

  Tbilisi

  Tbilisi is built around warm springs — the name comes from the Old Georgian word for "warm" — and it has been rebuilt around them for fifteen centuries. Persian balconies, Orthodox domes and Soviet concrete stand within one view.

• Bosnia and Herzegovina

  Sarajevo

  Few cities carry as many layers in a single street. Sarajevo holds an Ottoman bazaar, the corner where the First World War began, and a modern capital that rebuilt itself — all within a short walk.

• Tanzania

  Zanzibar

  Carved doors, coral-stone walls and alleys too narrow for cars: Stone Town is what a thousand years of Indian Ocean trade left behind, and the beaches are twenty minutes away.

• Türkiye

  Istanbul

  Istanbul is the only major city built across two continents, and the strait that divides it is the reason it has mattered for two thousand years. You can cross from Europe to Asia on a commuter ferry for the price of a coffee.

• Egypt

  Cairo

  Cairo is the only city where the last standing wonder of the ancient world sits at the edge of the suburbs. Four and a half thousand years of building are stacked within an hour of each other here.

• Indonesia

  Bali

  Bali stayed Hindu while the islands around it turned to Islam, and eight centuries later that single fact still shapes the calendar, the architecture and the smell of every doorway in the morning.

• Thailand

  Bangkok

  Bangkok was never colonised, and it shows. The temple architecture and the rituals around the monarchy survived intact into a city that then grew a skyline around them in a single generation.

• Malaysia

  Kuala Lumpur

  Kuala Lumpur means muddy confluence, which is exactly what it was: a tin-mining camp at the meeting of two rivers in 1857. Nothing about it was planned to become a capital.

• Spain

  Malaga

  Malaga is one of the oldest cities in Europe, founded by Phoenician traders around 2,800 years ago. Its most visible layer, though, is the one that arrived much later and stayed for nearly eight centuries.

• Greece

  Santorini

  The crescent shape everyone photographs is a scar. Santorini is what remained after one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history blew the middle out of a circular island.

• Czech Republic

  Prague

  Prague looks medieval because it is. It largely escaped the bombing that flattened other European capitals, so what stands there now is the original rather than a reconstruction.

• Austria

  Vienna

  For six centuries Vienna was the seat of the Habsburgs, and the city was built to make that obvious. Schönbrunn alone has 1,441 rooms.

• Maldives

  Maldives

  A country of more than a thousand coral islands scattered across twenty-six atolls, almost none of which rises more than a couple of metres above the sea. Geography is the whole product here.

• United Kingdom

  London

  London runs from a Roman trading post founded around 47 CE to the capital of the largest empire in history, and the city has kept the physical evidence of nearly every stage in between.

• Oman

  Muscat

  Muscat is the Gulf capital that decided not to build upwards. Its skyline is white, low and hemmed in by bare mountains, and the effect is a city that feels much older than its neighbours.

• Qatar

  Doha

  Doha was a pearling port until the trade collapsed in the 1930s. Almost everything a visitor sees today was built after gas was found offshore in 1971 — which makes the restraint of the old souq more surprising, not less.

• Armenia

  Yerevan

  Yerevan is older than Rome. It was founded in 782 BCE as the fortress of Erebuni, and it has been lived in continuously ever since — though almost nothing you see was built before the 1920s.

• Jordan

  Amman

  Amman has been lived in for seven thousand years and was a town of a few thousand people a century ago. It became a capital in 1921 and has been climbing its hills ever since.

• Lebanon

  Beirut

  Beirut has been inhabited for more than five thousand years and sits on a Mediterranean coastline that shaped everything about it — the trade, the food, and the mix of languages you hear in a single café.

• Morocco

  Marrakech

  Marrakech gave the country its name — Morocco comes from Marrakech by way of European transliteration — and it has been the reference point for the whole region since the Almoravids founded it around 1070.

• Netherlands

  Amsterdam

  Amsterdam's canal ring was dug in the seventeenth century, when the city was the centre of world trade and finance. It is now a UNESCO site, and it is still the reason the place works on foot.

• Italy

  Rome

  Rome stacks nearly three thousand years into a centre you can cross on foot. The unusual part is not the age of any one monument but how little distance there is between them.

• Switzerland

  Zurich

  Zurich is a summer escape that requires almost no planning. The mountains are two hours away by a train that leaves when it says it will, which is more of the appeal than it sounds.

• Iceland

  Reykjavik

  Iceland was one of the last large landmasses on earth that people settled, and it still feels like it. The landscape is the entire reason to come, and the capital is mostly a base for reaching it.

• Japan

  Tokyo

  Tokyo was a fishing village called Edo until 1603. By 1720 it had more than a million people — decades before London or Paris reached that size — and it has rebuilt itself twice since.

• South Korea

  Seoul

  Seoul has been Korea's capital for more than six hundred years, and it rebuilt itself so completely in the second half of the last century that the transformation has its own name: the Miracle on the Han River.

• Singapore

  Singapore

  Singapore went from a modest port town to one of Asia's wealthiest nations inside a single generation. The city you land in is barely sixty years old as a country, and it shows in how deliberately everything works.

• Thailand

  Phuket

  Phuket was a tin island long before it was a beach one. The pastel shophouses of its old town were built on mining money, and they are the part of the island most visitors never see.

• South Africa

  Cape Town

  Cape Town sits where two oceans' currents meet, under a flat-topped mountain visible from almost everywhere in the city. Very few cities are this dominated by a single piece of geography.