City guides
Our own travel guides: neighbourhoods, a first itinerary, what to eat and how to get around — next to each city's ranking.
📖 Tokyo
Tokyo is less one city than thirty of them stitched together by trains that run to the minute. Each hub has its own tempo — neon and tiny bars in Shinjuku, teenage fashion in Harajuku, old wooden lanes in Yanaka, salarymen and department stores in Ginza — and the way to enjoy it is to stop trying to see everything and pick two or three neighbourhoods a day.
→📖 Kyoto
Kyoto was the imperial capital for more than a thousand years and still holds around 1,600 temples and hundreds of shrines, gardens and wooden townhouses. The secret is timing: the famous places are magical at opening hour and overwhelming at noon, and the quiet lanes between them are often the best part.
→📖 Osaka
Osaka calls itself the nation's kitchen, and its motto might as well be kuidaore — eat until you drop. It is louder, friendlier and less formal than Tokyo, with street food on every corner, a castle at its heart and Kyoto, Nara and Kobe all within an hour.
→📖 Nagoya
Nagoya is the city most travellers skip between Tokyo and Kyoto, which is exactly why it is worth a stop. It is the industrial heart of Japan — Toyota was born nearby — with a samurai past, one of the country's most important shrines and a food culture so distinct it has its own name: Nagoya meshi.
→📖 Sapporo
Sapporo is a young city by Japanese standards — planned on a grid in the late 19th century as the capital of Hokkaido — and it feels open, relaxed and generous with space. It is a winter city of snow festivals and ski slopes, and a summer city of beer gardens and cool evenings, with some of the best seafood and ramen in the country.
→📖 Fukuoka
Fukuoka is the big Japanese city that feels small: compact, coastal, closer to Seoul than to Tokyo, and famous for eating outdoors at night. The airport is a few subway stops from the centre, the beach is a bus ride away, and the open-air food stalls along the river are the best introduction to how the city likes to live.
→📖 Paris
Paris rewards walking more than any checklist. The great museums and monuments are worth every queue, but the city's real pleasure is the in-between: a café terrace at the right hour, a covered passage you stumble into, a market street on a Sunday morning, the river at dusk.
→📖 New York
New York is five boroughs and hundreds of neighbourhoods, but most first visits live in Manhattan, a long grid where the numbered streets make it almost impossible to get lost. The skyline, the museums and the parks are as big as their reputations; the city's charm, though, is in its blocks — a deli, a stoop, a bar that has been open for a century.
→📖 Rome
Rome layers almost three thousand years on top of itself: ancient ruins under baroque churches, Renaissance palaces beside trattorias that have served the same dishes for generations. You will not see it all — nobody does — so pick a few great sights, book them, and let the piazzas and fountains fill the rest of the day.
→📖 London
London is enormous, but it is a city of neighbourhoods — royal and grand in Westminster, cobbled and creative in the East End, leafy in the west — tied together by the river and the Underground. Many of its greatest museums are free, which makes it one of the few big capitals where you can wander into world-class collections on a whim.
→📖 Barcelona
Barcelona has it all within reach: Gaudí's improbable buildings, a medieval Gothic Quarter, a city beach, and hills with views over all of it. It is a Catalan city first — the language is on every sign — and it lives late: lunch around two, dinner after nine, and the streets busy long after that.
→📖 Rio De Janeiro
Few cities have a setting like Rio's: granite peaks rising straight out of the rainforest, a bay dotted with islands, and long beaches running along the city's edge. Life happens outdoors here — on the sand, on the promenade, at a corner bar — and the music, from samba to bossa nova, is never far away.
→📖 Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires feels like a European capital that kept its own rhythm: broad avenues and grand cafés, neighbourhoods each with a strong identity, and nights that start late and end later. It is a city of steak and wine, bookshops and theatres, and tango that still lives in its dance halls (milongas), not only on stage.
→📖 Mexico City
Mexico City was built on the ruins of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, and it still sits on the old lakebed at 2,240 metres. It is one of the largest cities in the Americas and one of its great food and art capitals — a place of tree-lined avenues, world-class museums, colonial churches and street stalls that would be famous anywhere else.
→📖 Dubai
Dubai grew in a single generation from a trading creek into a skyline of record-breaking towers, artificial islands and mega-malls. The superlatives are real and fun, but the city has another side worth finding: the old creek with its wooden abras and souks, the desert at dusk, and food from every corner of the Indian Ocean.
→📖 Istanbul
Istanbul straddles two continents on the Bosphorus and wears fifteen centuries of empire — Byzantine domes, Ottoman mosques and palaces, grand bazaars — while being one of the most energetic modern cities on earth. Its rhythm is set by the call to prayer, the ferries criss-crossing the water and the endless glasses of tea.
→📖 Bangkok
Bangkok is a sensory overload in the best sense: gilded temples beside glass towers, canals and river ferries beneath elevated trains, and street food at every hour. It is hot, busy and sprawling, but it rewards anyone who slows down — an early-morning temple, a long lunch at a market, a sunset from a rooftop.
→📖 Seoul
Seoul packs six centuries of royal palaces, mountain trails and one of the world's most wired cities into a single valley around the Han River. It runs at full speed — late-night markets, cafés on every floor, neon-lit streets — yet you can reach a forested peak by subway and be eating in a temple-quiet hanok courtyard within the hour.
→📖 Sydney
Sydney is built around one of the world's great harbours, and it shows the city at its best: ferries gliding past the Opera House, coastal walks between beaches, and a relaxed outdoor life that spills into every café and park. The city sprawls far, but the essentials sit within easy reach of the water.
→📖 Amsterdam
Amsterdam is small enough to cross on foot and built around water: a horseshoe of 17th-century canals lined with tall, leaning merchants' houses, now a UNESCO site. The great museums are world-class, but the city is at its best at bicycle speed — and its most memorable hours are often spent in a brown café doing very little.
→📖 Prague
Prague survived the 20th century almost intact, so its centre is a near-perfect sequence of Gothic, Renaissance and baroque — a castle on the hill, a stone bridge lined with statues, an Old Town square with an astronomical clock. Get up early to have it to yourself, and walk ten minutes beyond any landmark to find the city locals use.
→📖 Lisbon
Lisbon spreads over seven hills above the wide Tagus estuary, a city of tiled façades, steep cobbled lanes and viewpoints (miradouros) at every turn. It is sunny, relaxed and still affordable by Western European standards, with fado drifting out of small bars in the old neighbourhoods at night.
→📖 Yokohama
Yokohama was a fishing village until its port opened to foreign trade in 1859, and that history still shapes it: Japan's largest Chinatown, Western-style houses on the bluff, and a waterfront that feels more spacious than anything in Tokyo — which is only half an hour away.
→📖 Kobe
Kobe is squeezed between the Rokko mountains and the sea, so nearly every street slopes toward the harbour. A treaty port with a long foreign community, it has a cosmopolitan ease — European houses, a Chinatown, jazz clubs and bakeries — and its most famous export is only the beginning of what it eats.
→📖 Hiroshima
Hiroshima is a city that chose to remember and then to live: the Peace Memorial Park and the skeletal A-Bomb Dome are among the most moving places in Japan, yet the city around them is green, relaxed and proud of its food. Give the memorial the time it deserves, then let the streetcars and the okonomiyaki show you the rest.
→📖 Porto
Porto tumbles down a granite hillside to the Douro River, its houses stacked in colour above the water and the port-wine cellars facing them across the river in Gaia. It is grittier and more intimate than Lisbon, with some of Portugal's best food, and the Douro Valley's vineyards begin just upstream.
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