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The picture most people carry into a ski booking is thirty years out of date. A wooden chalet, a host who cooks dinner six nights a week and leaves cake out at four, a group of strangers around one table. That holiday still exists, but it has become a specialist product rather than the default. … Read more

January in most of Europe is a coat, a grey sky and a four o’clock sunset. Four hours south, off the African coast, the Canaries are doing 21 or 22 degrees with dinner outside. This is the only corner of Europe where winter sun is a plan rather than a gamble, which is exactly why … Read more

On a phone screen, every Christmas market in Europe looks the same: brown stalls under yellow lights, and a mitten holding a mug of something hot and red. Stand in the middle of one and the differences get obvious fast. Nuremberg is a food pilgrimage with four centuries of rules behind it. Strasbourg hands its … Read more

Porto is a small city with strong opinions about geography. It climbs steeply up from the Douro river in a stack of tiled townhouses, and the neighborhood you sleep in shapes the whole trip more than the hotel itself does. Pick well and everything you came for is a short walk downhill. Pick badly and … Read more

Rome is one of those cities where the gap between a great trip and a frustrating one comes down to planning. The sights are extraordinary, and the queues and ticketing around them are a genuine mess. People lose whole mornings standing in lines that a few minutes of preparation would have skipped entirely, then run … Read more

Lisbon is one of the best food cities in Europe, and also one of the easiest to get wrong. The standout meals are rarely the places with a menu in four languages and a guy outside waving you in. They are the small tascas down a side street in Mouraria, the counter where locals stand … Read more