From submarine art hubs to cool bars and the best fish and chips, design chief Tiia Vihand delights in Estonia’s super-cool capital
Don’t miss Anno, near the cruise terminal, where a husband-and-wife team serves creative dishes made with Baltic ingredients. The tasting menu isn’t too expensive and Erno (the husband) suggests inventive wine pairings. In summer, try to get a seat in the beautiful backyard.
Continue reading...Dancer Pilar Gil on where to eat, dance and take a sunset stroll in one of Europe’s oldest cities
The Mercado Central de Abastos is the heart of Cádiz and where we locals go to buy our fresh fish, seafood, fruit and vegetables. It also has a lot of cafes where you can order anything from fried fish to an empanada. My favourites are Lady Papa’s, which serves traditional tapas dishes, and a vegan stall called Las Niñas Veganas – it’s not easy to find vegan or gluten-free food in Cádiz, so this is special.
Continue reading...From hiking the Highlands to vintage train journeys, our travel writers pick the breaks on their wishlists
Disconnect on the impeccably green island of Eigg
Continue reading...From atmospheric Berlin to Joyce’s Trieste, via Marseille’s markets and a wellbeing walk in Copenhagen, city strolls reward the curious rambler
The art of flâneur-ing might be French and its most famous practitioners Parisians, but other European cultures have walking traditions, from the Italian passeggiata and Spanish paseo – social promenades to take the air as dusk falls – to German wanderlust: hiking with desire. Nothing opens up a city like a long ramble on foot. It’s the only way to make a place your own and unearth discoveries not listed in guidebooks or apps.
Continue reading...Medieval plazas, fortresses like film sets and seafood straight out of the net feature in your pick of these lesser-known destinations
I stopped in Salamanca for lunch when driving from Madrid to Lisbon and ended up staying there for a week, caught up in the lovely atmosphere of the city. Its graceful red sandstone architecture, with two cathedrals and splendid university buildings dating from the 15th century, gives the city the quality of an alfresco cultural living room – where academics, students and locals live on a sort of dreamy, theatrical open-air film set. Street names are hand-painted in scarlet on signs and the youthful population creates a hedonistic vibe at night when darkness descends. By day, check out the Plaza Mayor and the lovely Doll Museum.
Yasmin Cox
With the five-day quarantine requirement for travellers from the UK now lifted, we pick gorgeous affordable hotels, villas and farm stays on the coast, mountains and islands
Continue reading...Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian take a spin down memory lane, from California’s Redwoods to Nepal via the mean streets of south London
Continue reading...While researching her latest novel the author spent weeks walking the canals and streets, and unearthing the Old Town’s hidden history
February and it’s not yet quite spring in Amsterdam. Soon, the buds in the rose garden in Vondelpark will start to blush pink and yellow; the leaves on the trees surrounding the lake will begin to shimmer with silver and green. Soon, at least in a normal year, people will gather again at the bandstand and the Blauwe Theehuis, the blue teahouse, in this elegant 19th-century park named after the poet Joost van den Vondel, and the diagonal paths that cross the museum quarter between the Rijksmuseum and the Concertgebouw – once a region of small farms and market gardens – will be filled with conversation and bicycles again.
But our focus lies not in the 19th-century city – nor the 20th century with the Anne Frank House beside the Westerkerk – but rather in the old medieval centre of Amsterdam. I should be there now, conducting a walking tour for English and Dutch readers around the canals and overlooked alleyways that inspired my latest adventure novel, The City of Tears. I should be explaining how, in the bloody aftermath of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in August 1572, my imaginary first family, the Jouberts, flee persecution to the city of tears itself, Amsterdam, to build a new life for themselves.
Continue reading...From Sheffield to Tokyo via New York and rural France, the DJ recalls his adventures with friends and family – and the music that accompanied them
We didn’t travel as kids, partly because my dad hated flying and also because it was festival season and his job meant our summer holidays were spent being dragged off to muddy fields. It sounds like I’m complaining. I am a bit. This was long before it was commonplace to see kids at festival: we got cold, and drunk people pointed at us. On the odd occasion we went on “holiday”, we were squashed into a car and driven around Europe with seemingly no real destination. We once drove all the way to Germany to see where our lawnmower was made. The only joy in these journeys were the mixtapes my dad would spend weeks painstakingly preparing for the journey. A few records for the kids and lots for him. Lonnie Donegan was one of the few tracks on there we all loved. Many years later we got to see him play the Glastonbury festival. I stood in awe. He did a weird amount of encores, double figures.
Continue reading...It’s there and back again for our writer, who takes in Hobbiton, the mill, the Old Forest and the author’s childhood home – all in the suburb of Sarehole
‘It was kind of a lost paradise,” JRR Tolkien told the Guardian in an interview in 1966. “There was an old mill that really did grind corn, with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill.”
Four miles south of central Birmingham in the Hall Green area lies the inspiration for Tolkien’s Shire – the former hamlet of Sarehole. Tolkien lived here from 1896, between the ages of four and eight. “I loved it [Sarehole] with an intense love,” he said. “I took the idea of the Hobbits from the village people and children.”
Continue reading...There are must-sees, of course, but to really get under the skin of Europe’s great cities go for our pick of less-touristy districts
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