Barcelona has a way of making everything feel a little more romantic than it probably needed to be — Gaudí’s buildings look like they’re melting in the golden hour light, the tapas bars spill out onto tiny streets, and the sea is a metro ride from the old town. Whether it’s a honeymoon, an anniversary,…
Rome will surprise you with what it costs — usually in both directions. The iconic sights that feel like they should be free aren’t, and the moments you’ll remember most (the espresso at a corner bar for €1.30, the trattoria two streets off the tourist strip, the hour you spend watching the light change over…
Rome is a compact city, but where you stay makes a real difference. Base yourself near the Pantheon and you’ll be wandering ancient piazzas before breakfast; choose Trastevere and your evenings will feel like a film. The great news: Rome’s historic neighborhoods are close enough that no location puts you far from anything — but…
Rome rewards two kinds of traveler: the one who wants to stand inside 2,000 years of history at the Colosseum and the Vatican, and the one who’d rather find the quiet keyhole on a hill that frames St. Peter’s dome perfectly, or the church with three cities stacked beneath it. The good news is you…
Zakynthos rewards everyone who comes — whether you have three days or a full week. I went to Zakynthos in June, rented a car the day we arrived, and spent every day trying to see as much of the island as possible. I was pregnant at the time — which sounds like an odd detail…
Montserrat is the day trip we’d tell anyone with a spare day in Barcelona to take. An hour from the city, a jagged wall of rounded rock pinnacles rises straight out of the Catalan countryside — the “serrated mountain” that gives the place its name — and tucked into a ledge halfway up sits a…
There’s no single “best” time to visit the Azores — it depends on what you want from the trip. These nine green islands sit in the middle of the Atlantic, where the weather is mild all year but can change in an hour, and each season has a different draw: whales in spring, hydrangeas and…
The Azores sit alone in the middle of the North Atlantic, surrounded by deep, plankton-rich water that draws an extraordinary number of whales and dolphins — more than two dozen cetacean species have been recorded around the islands. That makes this little Portuguese archipelago one of the Atlantic’s best-known whale-watching destinations, and one of the…
São Miguel doesn’t look like the rest of Europe — and that’s exactly the point. The largest island in the Azores sits alone in the middle of the Atlantic, a thousand miles from Lisbon, and it’s built almost entirely of volcanoes: green craters filled with twin lakes, valleys that steam and bubble, waterfalls in subtropical…
Athens caught us off guard. We arrived expecting a day of ruins before catching a ferry, and ended up wishing we’d given it longer. The city is louder, grittier, and far more alive than its postcard image suggests — a place where a 2,500-year-old temple sits above a neighborhood of rooftop bars, street art, and…