Elemaki 

When it comes to tourism in Central America’s largest country, the city that tends to get most of the…

   Visit Puerto Vallarta





In many ways, I’ve always felt that for holidaymakers, this Pacific-Coast city of 203,000 and its environs – one of Mexico’s original resort meccas – may well be the closest thing this country has to offer to “the complete package”, from the…

Big news in the archaeology world recently, and it has to do with this legendary site tucked into the sandstone canyons of a valley running from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba – one of those places, in fact, you could almost believe was invented as a set for an…

            Medellín Convention and Visitors Bureau

As the diverse South American country of Colombia as a whole has pulled off an impressive comeback from…

A seemingly endless source of fascination and pleasure for visitors, Portugal‘s most popular area with sun-seeking vacationers has for generations been its southernmost region, the 1,930-square-mile (4,997-square-kilometer) wedge known as the Algarve.…

Luis Echeverri Urea

Not all that long ago, Colombia’s second…

             balipadma

Hey, can you by any chance name a Danish city outside of…

              Boris Stroujko, 

This week (June 15-18), the international art world is once again beating its way to the door…

          kelifamily

Of the key developments that have altered Western (and world) civilisation, it could be argued that the Protestant Reformation of…

To truly understand Brazil, it seems to me, you of course should visit inimitable Rio de Janeiro, but you also really must come to this city of 3 million (metro area 4 million) up on the coast of the country’s northeastern state of Bahia. Founded in 1549 as the first capital…

Perhaps best known as the venue of the annual Nobel Peace Prize (awarded each December 10), this gracious, attractive city (pop. 942,000/metro 1.7 million) has been voted one of the world’s most “liveable”, with a marvelous menu of historic/cultural sites, dining, and more. But today’s…

During my first visit to Madrid way back in 1978, strolling out near my family’s hotel near Plaza de España, I was gobsmacked to suddenly spy, of all things, an ancient Egyptian temple – right on downtown Calle Ferraz, on a platform in a reflecting pool of…

As a Westerner, this country at the western end of North Africa remains one of the most memorable I have ever visited, due in no small part to its “Imperial Cities” – …

Heady days in Cuba! Now that after all these decades the dam has finally broken – relations between Cuba and the USA nearly normalized, travel restrictions relaxed, and a flood of new air routes, hotels, and other Cuban…

“I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure of another century, this enormous, luxurious, baroque hotel…”

That line, from French director Alain Resnais’ 1961 film…

Latvia has quite the roller-coaster history, controlled by powers including Lithuania, Sweden, and Russia,  until the birth of a new republic in 1918. Then of course it fell back under Soviet Russian subjugation until the rebirth of a new independent republic in 1991.

I first visited…

Rio de Janeiro famously boasts one of the most spectacular natural settings of any major world city, a charismatic interplay of ocean with dramatic plunging hills (the most dramatic and reknowned, of course, being Sugarloaf and Corcovado). And though much of Rio has a prosperous…

Highly coveted as far back as ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the mushrooms known as black truffles remain a major object of desire of foodies and gourmets across the globe. But while many think of them as typical of Italy and France, most of the world’s supply of the…

Back in the 1960s and 70s, a famous and persistent Spanish tourism tag line proclaimed: “Spain is different.” And one of the things that does indeed make this country different in a key way from the rest of Europe is the fact that only the Iberia…

While Rio de Janeiro understandably attracts and enchants millions visitors from abroad, this ginormous country – nearly the size of all of Europe – overflows with other remarkable regions and cities. And its ninth largest – sometimes dubbed “the Venice of Brazil”…