Africa is of course a huge continent (despite the belief of a surprising number of Americans that it is a single country), but in all its vastness I can’t think of any other city that serves visitors anything like the heady cocktail that is Cape Town, South Africa: a vibrant,…

I love all of the Balearic islands for overlapping but different reasons, and there’s no question that the third-largest is definitely a change of pace from Majorca and certainly Ibiza. Not that there isn’t nightlife, as well as luxury and touches of glam here and there.…

We travel writers, as you can imagine, regularly get questions from people going on holiday. But when someone referred to me by a dear friend asked what she should not miss when she goes to Italy's capital for all of one weekend, I wanted to ask her – “ma sei pazza??”  (Are you nuts?) You could spend every…

No doubt about it - as you read this, Maryland's largest city, Baltimore, is going through its most wrenching moment in decades. But while like every single large U.S. city, it has its problems, the current difficulties are centered in West Baltimore, home to a fraction of the city's 622,000-plus residents - and caused by a thuggish…

Java hounds sniffing after both a copacetic cuppa and the chance to experience key aspects of history, culture, and ecology relating to coffee in several Latin American countries have the opportunity to have it all in a number of regions which have facilities that receive visitors, from small organic farms all…

In Spain as in much of Europe, church attendance may have waned of late and society modernized in many of its attitudes, but culturally it's still one of Europe’s most Catholic countries — perhaps never more so than during Easter week, a bigger deal here since the Middle Ages than in almost any other place in the world…  …

A grandiose claim, I know. But please bear with me a moment. Caught up in the excitement of New York City, many overseas visitors never venture up the Hudson River to discover a verdant, gently rolling valley full of historic mansions, woodlands, fine cultural…

As a lifelong lover of Spain, few cities are as deeply intertwined in my image of this singular country as this singular city at the foot of Andalusia’s Sierra Nevada mountains, an hour from the Costa del Sol. That…

Visitors to Los Angeles curious to join locals on one of their favourite weekend getaways will find this famous resort city in the desert a two-hour drive south (actually the best known of a cluster of several cities). Palm Springs’ beginnings as a…

In honor of el día de San Valentín (Valentine’s Day), of course! But as you might imagine, in a country crammed with crenelated castles, Arabian Nights palaces, and dreamy beaches, it’s a tall order indeed to zero in on the “most” romantic. It’s true, too, that one way to enhance the romance of almost any…

In 2014, Spain's capital marked another cultural high point when the National Archaeological Museum reopened after a six-year, €65-million renovation. It’s still housed in the same handsome 19th-century…

Central America’s largest country was, not so many years ago, a staple of world headlines pretty much weekly for war and geopolitical intrigue. Yet despite its very flawed ruling régime …

It’s hardly a shocker that in a recent Tripadvisor survey of the world’s most expensive cities for travellers, London came in the top 10 (number 7, to be precise); it has been thus for some years now. But of course there’s…

Spain's mix of the modern and the traditional is second to none, in my opinion, but around the holidays, tradition naturally comes to the fore – and nowhere more in the case of Christmas than in the nativity scenes that pop up all over the country, in public and private.



Montar el belén, literally “setting up the Bethlehem,”…

There are various good reasons to consider a visit to the tiny country of Honduras in Central America, especially if you’re a fan of diving,…

Recently tthis month, even as we head toward the end of the year marking the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, I found myself visiting America's oldest continuously occupied city, St. Augustine, for the first time since a long-ago trip with my family as a kid. I expected to find some of the same things - the massive old…

I'm something of a language geek, and I'm particularly fascinated by the linguistic patchwork of Europe. I mean, many of us know about Spain's regional languages like Catalan, Basque, and Galician. But when it comes to, say, Germany, Italy, or France, I've found many people tend to assume everybody speaks…

Oh yes, it's that time of year again - when a region already one of America's loveliest kicks it up a few Dix Notches and rolls out the flaming reds, yellows, and oranges. Whether it's Indian summer or crisply autumnal, there's nothing more delightful than a ramble through New England's countryside in its glowing glory, the…

When it comes to the pre-Columbian past of Peru, most of us automatically and understandably think of the Incas. But there were many other cultures and civilizations in these lands, some of them much older than the Incas. Several of these elder civilizations originate in what is now desert regions up and down the country's coast north and south of its present-day capital, Lima. One example you've heard about is the Nazca people, because of their…