Editorials

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Amman Doesn't Perform for Tourists, and That's Exactly the Point

Most itineraries treat Amman as a one-night stopover before Petra and Wadi Rum, but a city built across a string of hills, with a Roman theatre and an Iron Age citadel folded into its everyday street life, deserves more than a layover's worth of attention.

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La Paz Solved Its Traffic Problem With Cable Cars, and Turned Them Into the Best Way to See the City

La Paz, Bolivia's seat of government and one of the highest capitals in the world, has spent the last decade building Mi Teleférico, the largest urban cable car network on the planet, turning what began as a transit fix into the city's defining sightseeing route.

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Yangon Is Southeast Asia's Great Unvisited Colonial City, and That's Exactly the Point

While Bangkok, Hanoi and Kuala Lumpur absorb the bulk of Southeast Asia's travel boom, Yangon's gilded stupas and vast stock of decaying colonial architecture sit largely untouched by the region's tourism machine.

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San Miguel de Allende Keeps Winning "World's Best City" Polls and Still Isn't on Most Mexico Itineraries

San Miguel de Allende, a UNESCO-listed colonial town in Mexico's central highlands built into an art colony by mid-century expatriates, has spent over a decade topping international best-city surveys without becoming a standard stop on most first-time Mexico itineraries.

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Asunción Is South America's Capital Nobody Puts on the Itinerary, and That's Exactly Its Case

Asunción, one of South America's oldest cities and Paraguay's low-rise, unhurried capital on the Paraguay River, rarely appears on regional itineraries built around Buenos Aires, Rio and Santiago.

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Madeira Has Spent Decades Building Trails to Nowhere in Particular, and That's the Point

Madeira's network of centuries-old irrigation channels, now walked as the levada trails, and its tide-fed volcanic pools give this Portuguese island a case for attention that has little to do with beaches.

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Chișinău Is Making the Case for Europe's Least-Visited Capital

Moldova remains one of Europe's least-visited countries, but its capital's wide boulevards, wine-cellar culture and candid post-Soviet character make a stronger case for a stopover than its reputation suggests.

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Salta Is Where Argentina's Wine Country Stops Being About Mendoza

Argentina's northwest has its own high-altitude wine region and a colonial city built from pink sandstone, and it remains far less crowded than Mendoza despite arguably more dramatic scenery.

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Everyone Flies Past Zagreb to Reach the Coast. That's Exactly Why It's Worth the Stop

Croatia's capital sits inland from the Adriatic islands that dominate the country's tourism, which has left Zagreb to develop a café culture, museum scene and street life almost entirely on its own terms.

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Colombo's Fort District Still Reads as a Business Address, Not the Colonial Layer Cake It Is

Colombo's Fort district is usually treated as the city's financial core and little else, yet it carries visible Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial layers, from a 1681 Dutch hospital to a department store trading since 1844.

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Hanoi Is Still Treated as a Stopover, and Its Thousand-Year-Old Old Quarter Deserves Longer

Hanoi's Old Quarter has functioned as a working commercial district, organised street by street along old guild lines, since the eleventh century, yet most itineraries still give it only a night or two either side of Halong Bay.

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Belgrade Doesn't Polish Itself for Visitors the Way Prague or Budapest Do, and That's the Point

Serbia's capital, built at the meeting point of the Danube and Sava rivers and layered with more than two millennia of shifting rulers, has become one of the Balkans' most talked-about cities without smoothing itself into a tidy old-town postcard.