501 Places

Have you ever stood and watched people fixed in a spiritual trance (however you define one) and wondered just who it is who is missing something? Is it they who are feeling something magical about the place you’re visiting, a mysterious power, an energy; and you just haven’t got what it takes to feel it [...]

I recently spent four days in Austria as part of a wider project for Austrian National Tourist Office (ANTO) to explore the country’s ‘Hidden Treasures’. It was a pleasure to return to somewhere I hadn’t visited for 16 years, especially as the memories of my previous visits were happy ones. I was left to find [...]

Zaragoza has a tough time getting itself noticed. Almost halfway between Madrid and Barcelona, thousands of people on the high speed AVE trains pass through Zaragoza every day as they make their way between the two Spanish giants. Yet this city of 700,000 people registers on only a few tourists’ radars as they that pass [...]

Merida was intended as little more than an overnight stop. We were travelling eastwards from Lisbon; it was Easter Sunday and the transport connections, poor at the best of times between Portugal and Spain, could not be trusted to take us beyond Merida in a single day. Being such a major holiday we also decided [...]

There’s something magical about an approaching storm. Of course, you may not feel this way if you’re stuck out in the open without shelter and about to get soaked. Wandering as we were through the lovely historic city of Evora in Portugal’s Alentejo region, we could admire the increasing menace of the blackening sky against [...]

It was entirely my fault. I had looked for a place to stop a few hours east of the Portuguese border. Ciudad Real immediately jumped out of the map at me. “Royal City”: it sounded promising. I further compounded my mistake with a quick search on Google images: a grand looking plaza, a few fine [...]

Portugal was a country that in my world had long stood alone. For many years it had been the only gap on my western European travel map. It may be because it’s out on a limb; you don’t go through Portugal to get to anywhere. So it was a long overdue moment when we touched down [...]

Oviedo had barely registered on my radar before my recent visit to the city. As a football anorak I did recall it being a venue during the 1982 World Cup in Spain. Beyond that I knew little about it. So when I was invited on a recent trip to Oviedo to attend the Turismo.as conference [...]

While Prague receives many accolades for its beautiful architecture and cheap beer its residents have developed a reputation as some of the least welcoming people in Europe. I’d come across this stereotype both in accounts from several friends who’d been there and in articles I’d read. Stories of miserable faces, a hatred of tourists and the [...]

Narrow cobbled streets, a world-famous bridge, an architecturally splendid castle complex and a higher concentration of eye-catching classic buildings than perhaps any of its illustrious rivals. Is Prague the perfect European city? Well, it’s certainly not flawless, but it is perhaps as near to a perfect example as you’re likely to find of what appeals [...]