I have always held that every town, no matter how frumpy and dull it may appear, can give you one day of good entertainment. After that, the metropolitan wheat is divided from the Palookaville chaff, but for a single day, day trippers should not struggle too hard to find what they are looking for: a…
Some countries do city tourism well, others badly or not at all. At one end of the scale, you have France, Spain and Italy. Their great cities are firm fixtures on the global tourism itinerary, and most of these countries’ regional capitals have become popular destinations in their own right. Toulouse and Strasbourg, Seville and…
Visitors who come to the UK from abroad may think that all of modern London has been cast from the same expensive mould: and up to a point, they would be right. In the centre of London, it is rare indeed to find even a small flat for under one million pounds, while houses fetch…
Every major city in the world has iconic street furniture – Paris has the riverbank boxes of the bouqinistes, Berlin its Litfasssäule advertising columns, Venice the splashback pissotte that are designed to prevent men from urinating in street corners – … … but no city in the world is as blessed in this respect as…
Malaga has one of the busiest airports in Spain – outclassed only by Madrid and Barcelona – but Malaga airport was not primarily built to serve visitors of the city. In fact, most people who get off the plane are heading straight for the resorts on the near-by Costa del Sol, and the airport will…
For many years, Malaga was something like the Ugly Duckling among Western Europe’s large cities with a Mediterranean coastline: while places like Barcelona, Naples and Palermo became popular hotspots on the international tourism itinerary, Malaga on the southern tip of Andalusia – despite its attractive jumble of harbour vibes, grand fin-de-siècle architecture and subtropical fauna…
Turin has two sides, we told you last week, and if that was news to you, you may be as surprised to hear that this binary character is also reflected in the city’s topography. Two rivers are crossing Turin, one is wide and luminous, an integral part of the townscape – it passes Piazza Veneto…
If Rome is the heart of Italy and Naples the country’s soul, then Turin is its head. The capital of Italian coffee, cars and cocktails (the home of Lavazza, FIAT and Martini) is also the most rational and most transparently structured city in the land, a place so square that it is not only the…
Just as the Alhambra is more than a mere cluster of palaces, Granada is more than the Alhambra. In fact, Granada downright spoils its visitors with a host of attractions: for starters, it has not one but two historic Old Towns, one – called the Albaicin – that was established under Islamic rule … ……
Tourism is the world’s largest industry. It generates an annual turnover of 11 trillion dollars and employs 350 million people (10 per cent of the global workforce) but stands on feet of clay. Tourism does not fulfil an immediate and vital need (unlike, say, agriculture): humans have lived for thousands of years without spending some…