A year ago, on a day-trip from Costa Brava, I stopped by a couple of interesting churches in order to add Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France to my collection of visited World Heritage sites. One of the biggest serial sites on the list, this property includes 78 different…
Our next entrant on the list of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France was Limeuil, which occupies strategic heights at the juncture of Dordogne and Vézère rivers. The best view of the village is from the bridge over Dordogne. Limestone deposits and silt give Vézère waters their yellow color, while…
Monpazier was probably our favorite village of all that we visited in Dordogne. There is something about a neat bastide (a fortified village) that we find especially attractive. They are always colorful and pleasing to the eye, even under the rainy skies. The grid plan of the bastide means that there…
It is probably obvious to anyone by now that our Dordogne itinerary was heavily influenced by the list of the Prettiest Villages in France. Dordogne department has 10 of them, the most of all departments in the country. I admittedly subscribe to the notion that existence of a formal recognition…
In between exploring prehistoric caves, we made a lunchtime stop in Saint-Léon-sur-Vézère, another of the Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. The little village has about the same population as La Roque-Gageac, but its more “huddled together” topology makes it feel smaller. Its highlights are the 12th-century Romanesque church, a…
River Vézère is a tributary of the Dordogne. In the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, a large number of caves with well-preserved prehistoric art have been discovered in the Vézère Valley, which lays basis for its sometime claim as “the cradle of the European civilization”.…
Domme is the quintessential hilltop village, sitting 250 meters above the river Dordogne. Its elevation gives it a sometime moniker of the Acropolis of Périgord (the latter being the natural region roughly corresponding to the present Dordogne department, so the two names can be almost used interchangeably). A bigger village…
We have already had glimpses of La Roque-Gageac in a couple of recent posts. The small village nestling under imposing rocks along the bank of Dordogne river has got to be considered picturesque even by the elevated standards of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. Here is another look at…
Château de Marqueyssac is likely part of the quintet that gives “the valley of five castles” its moniker – it has a commanding position on top of a hill overlooking the river Dordogne. But the castle itself is not the main event on its own grounds. In fact, almost no…
Driving along the banks of river Dordogne, it is impossible to miss Château de Beynac. From its perch atop one of the highest hills in the area it presides over the stretch known as “the valley of the five castles”. Here is the main road approach view. And a longer…
We started our exploration of Dordogne with one of the larger destinations in the area, Sarlat-la-Canéda, or simply Sarlat. Its charming medieval core is a maze of honey-colored buildings, narrow streets and passages, and hidden squares. The most photogenic views, as is frequently the case, are found on the few…
For me, Vernazza is the most beautiful of the five villages that comprise the incomparable Cinque Terre. It could be because Vernazza was our base when we explored the coast and, subsequently, we got acquainted with it to a larger degree than with any of the other villages. Or it…
This is one of my favorite pictures from the simpler times when I traveled with a pocket-size point-and-shoot camera. The setting is the banks of the river Limmat near the mouth of Lake Zurich, with the twin towers of Grossmünster providing a recognizable point of reference. Zurich is a nice enough…
I have come to the end of my photo-notes from the recent trip to Scotland. For those interested, a cross-section of the best photos is now also available in my Flickr photostream.
While criss-crossing parts of Scotland in search of not yet tasted whisky, we occasionally stopped to admire the surroundings. Here is a collection of glimpses. The first shot can be filed in “in the middle of nowhere” category, but I can very definitively place it in the hamlet of Carbeth,…
The Forth Bridge, which had the longest spans of any railway bridge when it opened in 1890, and was the earliest great multispan cantilever bridge, was inscribed on the World Heritage list a few months after my previous visit to Scotland. I must have glimpsed it from a distance while…
A day set aside for exploring Edinburgh offered me a chance to see sights that I did not manage to see three years ago, and just to walk around town. On-and-off wet snowfall conspired to make the walk challenging, but I can nonetheless share a few highlights captured in between…
Our trip to Scotland was structured around whisky, but we did not completely neglect the country’s history and culture. Among our non-drinking stops was the majestic Stirling Castle. The storied castle was a main royal center at various points in history, and nowadays offers plethora of educational exhibits on the…
If you start with a middling photographer who is still learning the finer aspects of a new camera, deliberately mix it with scotch, and garnish that with intermittent cold rain, your concoction will not be a tremendous photographic portfolio. I duly tried my hand in capturing the sights of the…
Let us take a few more glimpses of various distilleries visited on the recent trip to Scotland. First, let’s clarify my frequently used “Friends of the Malts” moniker. If you visit any of the 12 distilleries owned by Diageo, you can sign up for being a “friend” of their entire…