easy hiking trails in Europe
The small town of Sintra north of Lisbon is the home of two royal palaces. The contrast between those two buildings could hardly be bigger. The National Palace near the town centre was built 1000 years ago for the Moorish rulers of the Taifa Kingdom of Lisbon (after the Cordoba Caliphate had broken up into…
Uptown and downtown Lisbon are two different worlds, and your strategy of experiencing the two unequal halves of the Portuguese capital should reflect this. For your uptown walk on the slopes of the city we suggested last week, you should pick a starting point and an end point on opposite ends of the old town…
One of the rules of “adventurous” travel is that you should not read too much in advance about a place you are going to visit, because otherwise, your trip is in danger of becoming a mere ticking-off-exercise of seeing things “in the flesh” that you have already studied in great detail on the Internet. Give…
We began our brief series of Roman walks where the city’s history began: on its legendary “seven hills”. Today, we will finish there as well, returning to the starting point of our journey but focusing on what has always been the odd one out of Rome’s seven hills The Aventino on the Eternal City’s southern…
Here is a quiz question for you. What is the only European country that has never possessed any kind of a railway network? Hands up everybody who said “the Vatican”. Wrong! (The correct answer is Andorra.) Don’t feel downhearted if you could not get it right, as the New York Times comforts those of its…
Our latest trip to Rome was the 4th time we visited the city. We went first in the mid-1980s when the world was a different place: the Iron Age of the modern world. Many things have changed since then, but the Eternal City is not one of them. Which, after all, is why it bears…
When you are in Rome for the first time, you should do what everybody else is doing: walk past the Roman ruins, visit the Vatican museums, jump into the Fontana Trevi. For the second time, rather than doing all of that again, you should try something else. Like jump into another fountain, so-to-speak. Extend your…
Last week, we took you on a day trip away from busy and noisy Madrid to the tranquility of Aranjuez. But peace and quiet are not the only things that you will struggle to find in Madrid. The city’s history, too, is short of a register or two. Madrid overflows with the Baroque glory of…
Madrid is big and lively, but after a few days of holidaying in the Spanish capital, even people who actually like big and lively may yearn for a day of calm and tranquility. For these visitors of the Spanish capital, the Aranjuez Gardens are just the ticket. But hey, I hear some of you say,…
For this week’s post, we stay within Burgundy but move from a stopover town on the circuit – Auxerre – to a destination near the top of the charts. With the possible exception of Dijon, the region’s capital, no town in Burgundy attracts as many visitors as Beaune. Most of these visitors come here to…