Oregon’s tourism conversation is really a conversation about three places: Portland, the Oregon Coast between Cannon Beach and Astoria, and Bend. All three deserve the attention, but that leaves most of the state’s actual geography — the Wallowa Mountains, the…
San Diego’s tourism marketing leans hard on beaches, Balboa Park, and the zoo — for good reason, they’re excellent. But the county’s geography is stranger and more varied than the postcards suggest: a desert park with wind-carved caves an hour…
California’s “best of” lists cycle through the same dozen places every year — Big Sur, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite Valley, the Napa tasting rooms. What they skip is a Delta town built entirely by Chinese immigrant labor, a Sierra valley Disney…
The Matterhorn gets photographed from the same three spots in Zermatt so often that MySwitzerland itself markets the country’s other landscapes as separate attractions, not footnotes to the Alps. Switzerland’s geology did most of the interesting work underground and inside…
Santorini and Mykonos post a combined 4.5 million international air arrivals a year. Most of the other 5,999 Greek islands post nowhere near that, and a handful of them post nothing at all — because they don’t have an airport…
Everyone’s Ireland itinerary looks the same: Dublin, then Kilkenny or Kinsale, then the Cliffs of Moher, then Galway. That’s not bad advice, but it skips a lot of the country. These five towns sit off that well-worn route, and each…
Spain’s most-photographed towns get that way for a reason, and nobody needs another list telling you Ronda and Toledo are beautiful. This one looks past them, to four towns that hold up just as well on their own terms but…
Most first-time Paris itineraries cover a surprisingly small footprint: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre-Dame, Montmartre, maybe a Seine cruise, all within a few kilometers of each other. That’s not a criticism — those sights earned their reputation. But it…
France’s tourism numbers are lopsided in a specific way: Paris alone accounts for a huge share of the country’s international visitors, and most “best of France” content built for a non-French audience narrows further still, to a handful of names…
Italy’s most-searched small towns follow a familiar circuit: the Cinque Terre, Positano, Alberobello, San Gimignano. All genuinely worth seeing, all now built for the volume of people who show up to see them. This guide is about four towns that…