Editorials

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Dakar Puts a Slave-Trade Memorial and a Contemporary Art Biennale Twenty Minutes Apart by Boat

Senegal's capital pairs Gorée Island's sobering colonial history with one of West Africa's liveliest contemporary art and music scenes, built around the biennial Dak'Art festival.

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Algiers Is the Mediterranean Capital Most Travellers Still Haven't Considered

Algiers pairs a UNESCO-listed Ottoman-era Casbah with wide French colonial boulevards and a hilltop basilica overlooking the bay, a combination that has kept the city off most Mediterranean itineraries.

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Gjirokastër Is What the Balkans Looked Like Before the Coach Tours Arrived

A UNESCO-listed hill town of tiered stone houses in southern Albania, Gjirokastër is drawing the kind of traveller who found Berat or Mostar a decade too late and doesn't want to repeat the mistake.

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Warsaw Rebuilt Its Old Town From Paintings, Then Kept the Skyscraper Nobody Asked For

Poland's capital lost most of its historic centre to deliberate demolition after the 1944 uprising, rebuilt it brick by brick from 18th-century paintings, and still can't quite decide what to do with the Soviet-era tower that dominates its skyline.

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Nicosia Is Europe's Last Divided Capital, and That's Exactly Why It's Worth the Detour

Split since 1974 between the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish-controlled north, Nicosia remains Europe's only capital with a UN buffer zone running through its old town, and walking across it says more about the continent's unfinished business than almost any other city break.

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Kutaisi Lost Its Cathedral's UNESCO Status in 2017, and Travellers Kept Coming Anyway

Georgia's third-largest city lost its best-known cathedral's UNESCO listing over a contested restoration in 2017, yet a budget-airline hub next door has quietly turned the old capital into one of the Caucasus's easiest entry points.

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Panama City Spent Decades as a Canal Stopover, and Casco Viejo Is Why That's Changing

For most travellers, Panama City has meant a transit stop before or after the Canal. A decades-long restoration of Casco Viejo, the colonial quarter built after pirates destroyed the original city, is giving it a reason to stay.

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Bogotá's Legalised Street Art and Tasting Menus Are Rewriting Its Old Reputation

Once treated mainly as a stopover before Cartagena or Medellín, Bogotá is building a case of its own around a legalised street art scene, a critically recognised restaurant culture and one of the world's largest recurring car-free Sunday programmes.

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Malé Is One of the Most Crowded Islands on Earth, and the Maldives Is Building Its Way Out

Behind the Maldives' postcard image of empty overwater villas sits Malé, its capital: a single island of well over a hundred thousand people packed into under six square kilometres, now spilling onto a reclaimed island next door.

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Windhoek Still Wears Its German Colonial Skin, and That's Precisely the Problem It Debates

Namibia's capital is dotted with German colonial buildings that predate independence by nearly a century, and the country is still working out what to do with that inheritance.

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Europe's Night Trains Are Booking Out Months Ahead, and the Timetable Still Can't Keep Up

New sleeper routes from ÖBB Nightjet and the private operator European Sleeper are drawing travellers back to overnight trains across Europe in 2026, even as older long-haul night routes quietly disappear from the map.

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Antananarivo Built Its Palace on a Hill It Made Taller, and Then Watched It Burn

Madagascar's capital spreads across a dozen hills around a royal palace that was deliberately built higher than its surroundings, burned down in 1995, and still hasn't been fully restored.