Our itinerary in Portugal was structured around two “hub-and-spokes” legs in Porto and Lisbon. There are roughly 300 kilometers of driving from one to another, with quite a few interesting sights in between. Seeing more than a couple of them requires more than one day. One solution to that would…
Why did we go to Turin in the first place? If you guessed that in addition to visiting a city that we have not been to before it gave me a chance to add to my roster of visited World Heritage sites, you would be entirely correct. Over a dozen…
The city of Bergamo as a whole (covering both the Upper and the Lower City) has been on the tentative World Heritage list for over a dozen years. Although I have already seen a couple of inscribed places less deserving the recognition, in my humble estimation, it feels about right…
The church of Santa Maria delle Grazie is a curious specimen on the World Heritage list. It is not altogether unremarkable, but also not in any sense surpassing to warrant special recognition. And although its name is fully spelled out on the entry to the list, the inscription is entirely…
The last ruins that we visited in Greece was Mycenae, the center of the Late Bronze Age civilization that was the main precursor to the classical Ancient Greek culture. Mycenaeans’ period of domination over the Mediterranean came around the time when the Minoan civilization – which we encountered on Crete…
Delphi was the sacred center of the world for the Ancient Greeks and undoubtedly a remarkable achievement of purposeful architecture, a sanctuary built into the challenging landscape to inspire awe and worship. Unfortunately, very little is left of its former glory, and the visual impact is fairly muted. After experiencing…
Three geographically dispersed monasteries in Greece are inscribed together on the World Heritage list as the great examples of the golden age of Byzantine art. We could only fit one into our itinerary, and our choice fell on Hosios Loukas, the largest and likely the oldest of the three. The…
I always find myself awed by grandiose edifices. Beholding the Parthenon up close, unfailingly grandiose despite its ruined state blended with a construction site, made the visit to Acropolis instantly worthwhile. Built in the 5th century BC to honor goddess Athena, the patron of the city, the temple survived rise…
For all of the obvious associations between Greece and the ancient cultures, it has a surprisingly modest number of recognized World Heritage sites: 18 properties spread across 37 individual locations. There are none on either Crete, Santorini, or Naxos, so my first chance to improve my visited count came well…
My opportunistic attitude towards visiting World Heritage sites was on full display on our last day in France. The town of Poissy is situated roughly half-way between Giverny and Paris, so on the way back to the capital after having thoroughly enjoyed Monet Gardens, we made a brief detour to…
One of my favorite movie quotes comes from Woody Allen’s ode to the French capital: That Paris exists and anyone could choose to live anywhere else in the world will always be a mystery to me. Which is a bit ironic, because as much as we love Paris, we happen…
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…
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”.…
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…
We lately allow only a single day in Barcelona for our stays at Costa Brava – the distance between our base and the city makes more frequent visits a bit impractical. Last year, if you recall, we specifically targeted touring Palau de la Musica Catalana, and I also managed to…
Canal du Midi is a feat of civil engineering, all the more remarkable for the fact that it predates the Industrial Revolution. It is hundreds of kilometers in length (240 if you consider the canal proper, or closer to 400 if you add the connecting Canal de Garonne to arrive…
One of the twelve apostles and the patron saint of Spaniards, Saint James the Great lends his name to three separate entries on the World Heritage list. One of them is the town of Santiago de Compostela, which grew around a shrine to St James (Santiago in Spanish). Two others…
Albi, in the southern France region of Occitanie, is hailed on the World Heritage list as a complete ensemble of urban development dating from the Middle Ages. The height of town’s prosperity and importance falls on the later part of the 13th century, when a powerful local bishop built Palais…
The tiny walled town of Villefranche-de-Conflent dates from the 11th century and, owing to its strategic position in the Catalan region of Conflent, changed hands between France and Spain a number of times in its long history. In the second half of the 17th century, French Marshal Sébastien Le Prestre…