British winters are not always grey. When frost etches the hedgerows and low sunlight turns the landscape golden, the gardens and nature reserves of the United Kingdom put on a show of their own. The Eden Project’s biomes glow with tropical warmth while rain streams down the outside. Kew Gardens’ Temperate House shelters rare plants […]
Categories: Nature, United Kingdom
The Adriatic Sea shimmers in shades of turquoise and sapphire along the Dalmatian coast, where the island of Brac rises from the water like a green jewel set in blue silk. White pebble beaches slope gently into crystalline water, the most famous being Zlatni Rat, a tongue of land that shifts shape with the currents […]
The Gardens of Ninfa (Giardino di Ninfa) are widely considered the most romantic garden in the world, a hauntingly beautiful English-style landscape garden created among the atmospheric ruins of a medieval ghost town in the Lazio countryside, just south of Rome. Declared a Natural Monument of the Italian Republic and described by The New York […]
Categories: Gardens, Italy, Nature, Nature, Virtual Travel
Ponta da Piedade is the most beautiful coastal landscape in the Algarve and one of the most photogenic headlands in Europe, a surreal collection of golden limestone sea stacks, arches, grottoes, and hidden beaches sculpted by the Atlantic Ocean over millions of years, clustered around a rocky point near Lagos that is at its most […]
Tomášovský výhľad (Tomášov View) is the most famous and photographed viewpoint in the Slovak Paradise National Park, a dramatic rocky outcrop at 680 metres offering a jaw-dropping panorama of the Hornád River canyon, the Biele Skaly limestone cliffs, and the forested ridges of one of Central Europe’s most spectacular hiking destinations. Accessible via a relatively […]
Categories: National Parks, Nature, Nature, Slovakia
The Laurisilva forest of Madeira is a living fossil, the largest surviving tract of laurel forest in the world, a UNESCO World heritage ecosystem that once covered much of southern Europe 15–40 million years ago but now survives almost exclusively on the Atlantic island of Madeira, where it cloaks the island’s mountainous interior in an […]
The mountain range rises 1,236 metres above the Catalan lowlands, 50 km northwest of Barcelona. Montserrat means “serrated mountain” and the shape is unmistakable: a jagged ridge of grey conglomerate rock that looks like a saw blade against the sky. The Benedictine monastery, Santa Maria de Montserrat, has been here since 1025. The mountain holds […]
Categories: Nature, Sights, Spain, Wellness, Relax & Sports
Transylvania occupies 100,293 square kilometres of central Romania, surrounded by the Carpathian Mountains on three sides. The name means “the land beyond the forest” and the forest is the first thing you notice: beech and oak in the lower valleys, spruce and fir on the higher slopes, covering 60 percent of the land. The region […]
The ferry from Doolin takes 40 minutes across Galway Bay. The Atlantic swell is constant. The Cliffs of Moher slide past on the left, 214 metres of vertical sandstone, and then the three islands appear: Inishmore, Inishmaan, and Inisheer. The Aran Islands spread across 47 square kilometres and contain the highest concentration of archaeological sites […]
A thousand years of rain and frost, and the glacier that once covered the Ritten plateau melted 10,000 years ago. What it left behind is a forest of earth pillars capped by boulders that look as though a giant dropped them from a great height. The pillars cluster in a ravine above the village of […]