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 […]
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 […]
Filicudi is the third smallest of the seven Aeolian Islands and the least visited after Alicudi. The permanent population hovers around 250 people. There is one bank, one pharmacy, one school with a single teacher, and a handful of restaurants that close for lunch. The island has no airport, no ferry from the mainland, and […]
Mount Etna is the largest active volcano in Europe and the most frequently erupting volcano on Earth. It has been erupting for at least 500,000 years. In 2021 alone it erupted more than 50 times. The locals call it Mungibeddu in Sicilian, and they have learned to live with a mountain that could, at any […]
Categories: Islands, Italy, Nature, Nature, Sicily, Volcanoes
The Diros Caves are a network of limestone caverns on the western coast of the Mani Peninsula in the Peloponnese, and they contain one of the longest underground rivers in Europe. The caves were formed over millions of years by water dissolving the limestone bedrock. They extend for at least 14 km, of which roughly […]