The 38 Best Cities in The World

Table Mountain's flat-topped silhouette looms directly over the city bowl, often capped by a rolling cloud locals call the tablecloth.

A cable car reaches the summit in minutes, but the classic view is looking back at the mountain from Bloubergstrand or Signal Hill, with the city spread out beneath it.

Penguins waddle across a public beach at Boulders just outside the city.

Dubrovnik is a medieval walled city on the Adriatic coast of Croatia, its terracotta rooftops and imposing limestone walls rising directly from the sea.

The medieval Old Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was the backdrop for King's Landing in Game of Thrones, bringing global fame to what was already one of the Mediterranean's most beautiful cities.

Built on the site of ancient Thebes, Luxor holds more of the world's ancient monuments than almost anywhere else on Earth — Karnak Temple's forest of towering columns, Luxor Temple lit dramatically at night, and across the Nile, the Valley of the Kings, where Tutankhamun's tomb and dozens of other pharaohs lie buried in the desert hills.

A hot-air balloon ride at dawn over the West Bank is one of Egypt's most memorable experiences.

Three connected towers topped by a ship-shaped rooftop pool anchor this city-state's skyline, reflected in Marina Bay alongside a garden of illuminated Supertrees.

The city's obsessive approach to greenery and cleanliness has made it one of the most striking modern skylines anywhere.

Hawker centres serving Michelin-recognised street food sit near some of the world's most expensive real estate.

Terracotta-roofed houses stack up the steep riverbank of the Douro in Porto's Ribeira district, a tangle of narrow lanes barely changed since medieval times.

The double-decked Dom Luis I Bridge, engineered by a student of Gustave Eiffel, carries a metro line across the top and traffic below.

Port lodges line the far bank at Vila Nova de Gaia, where the wine is still aged, blended and tasted.

Berlin carries its twentieth-century history openly — the Brandenburg Gate, the remaining stretch of Wall at the East Side Gallery, and the glass dome of the Reichstag sit alongside a city that has rebuilt itself into one of Europe's most creative capitals.

Museum Island holds five major museums on a single stretch of the Spree, while neighbourhoods like Kreuzberg run a nightlife and food scene that runs well past midnight.

Cusco was the capital of the Inca Empire, and the history still shows: Inca stonework underpins colonial churches along cobbled streets radiating from Plaza de Armas.

It's a living Andean city of nearly half a million people, not a museum piece, with markets and restaurants layered over centuries of rebuilding.

Most visitors use it as a base before Machu Picchu, but it easily holds its own for two or three days.

A compact old town of frescoed buildings wraps around the Reuss River where it leaves Lake Lucerne, crossed by the wooden, gabled Chapel Bridge that has linked both banks since the 14th century.

Mount Pilatus and Mount Rigi rise directly behind the rooftops, reachable by cogwheel train, cable car, or lake steamer, making Lucerne as much a gateway to the mountains as a destination of its own.

Pastel colonial facades line the streets of Old Havana, many crumbling in ways that somehow add to the city's atmosphere rather than detract from it.

Vintage American cars from before the 1959 revolution, kept alive through decades of improvised repairs, still work as everyday taxis along the seafront Malecon.

Live salsa and son music spills from bars most nights.

Vienna spent centuries as the seat of the Habsburg Empire, and the grandeur shows — the Ringstrasse boulevard circles an old town of imperial palaces, opera houses, and coffee houses that have hosted composers and philosophers for 300 years.

The Hofburg and Schönbrunn palaces anchor the city's imperial history, while the Naschmarkt and Prater park show its more everyday side.

Portugal's hilly capital rises above the Tagus estuary in tiers of pastel façades, azulejo tilework, and rattling yellow trams.

Alfama's medieval lanes climb past fado bars toward São Jorge Castle, while Belém's monuments trace the Age of Discoveries and the modern LX Factory anchors a livelier scene.

It rewards slow wandering more than a fixed itinerary, with river-view miradouros around every third corner.

A glass-towered harbour city wedged between the Coast Mountains and the Pacific, where downtown ends abruptly at the seawall and North Shore peaks rise directly across the water.

Stanley Park's rainforest and shoreline path wrap the downtown peninsula, while Granville Island's public market sits a short ferry hop across False Creek.

Vancouver pairs an outdoor-focused lifestyle with skiing, hiking and beaches within a short drive of downtown.

Golden limestone fortifications ring this entire harbour city, built by the Knights of St John in the 16th century to withstand a siege that never came again.

Baroque church domes and balconied townhouses in faded pastel line streets laid out on a strict grid, unusual for a city of its age.

The Upper Barrakka Gardens offer a sweeping view over the Grand Harbour, with warships once anchored where cruise liners now dock.

Buenos Aires pairs wide, Parisian-style boulevards with the pulse of a Latin American capital: tango danced in San Telmo squares, steak houses running late into the night, and the pink Casa Rosada overlooking Plaza de Mayo.

Neighborhoods vary sharply, from elegant Recoleta's cafes and cemetery to La Boca's brightly painted tenements.

It's a walkable city built for lingering, not checklist sightseeing.

Guanajuato is a former silver-mining city built into a ravine, its brightly painted houses stacked up impossibly steep hillsides and connected by a maze of underground tunnels and narrow alleys.

The centre is a UNESCO World Heritage site of baroque churches and plazas, and the Callejón del Beso — an alley so narrow that neighbouring balconies almost touch — draws crowds for its star-crossed-lovers legend.

Spain's former imperial capital sits on a granite hill almost encircled by a bend in the Tagus River, its skyline of church towers, synagogues, and mosques layered up over centuries of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim rule.

The Alcázar fortress and Gothic cathedral anchor a warren of narrow medieval streets that fan out below, and the whole old city is compact enough to see on foot in a single, dense day.

Marketed as the southernmost city in the world, Ushuaia sits on the Beagle Channel in Tierra del Fuego, snow-capped peaks rising directly behind its harbour.

It is the main departure point for Antarctica cruises, and shorter boat trips from the same harbour pass the red-and-white Les Eclaireurs lighthouse and islands crowded with sea lions, cormorants and penguins.

Tierra del Fuego National Park lies a short drive west for subantarctic forest and coastal trails.

The world's smallest sovereign state packs an extraordinary concentration of art and architecture into just 44 hectares.

The colonnaded embrace of St Peter's Square, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, and Raphael's frescoed Stanze make Vatican City unmissable for art lovers.

Rotorua is a North Island city built on an active geothermal field, where steaming vents, mud pools and geysers push up through public parks and backyards alike.

It is also the centre of Maori cultural tourism in New Zealand, with performances, carved meeting houses and hangi feasts at Te Puia and Whakarewarewa.

Beyond the thermal activity there is mountain biking, lake swimming and forest walks, worth more than a single day's stop.

Morocco's most visited city layers a maze-like medina of souks, riads and palaces against the backdrop of the snow-capped Atlas Mountains.

Beyond Djemaa el-Fna's nightly spectacle, the city holds the tiled Bahia Palace, the cactus-filled Majorelle Garden, and endless alleys of dyers, leatherworkers and spice sellers.

Getting deliberately lost in the medina, then finding a rooftop café to reorient, is as much the experience as any single sight.

San Carlos de Bariloche sits on the shore of Nahuel Huapi Lake in Argentine Patagonia, a Swiss-styled town backed by the Andes and a gateway to a national park of forested peaks and turquoise lakes.

Chocolate shops line the Centro Cívico, while the Circuito Chico drive and the Cerro Campanario cable car reach panoramic viewpoints over the lake district.

It doubles as a ski base in winter and a hiking and mountain-biking hub in summer.

Traditional hanok tiled-roof houses cluster in the Bukchon district within sight of glass skyscrapers, a centuries-old palace, and a mountain that rises straight out of the city centre.

Gyeongbokgung Palace's guard-changing ceremony still runs daily in period costume against a backdrop of modern high-rises.

Cable cars up Namsan Mountain give a full skyline view at night, when the whole city lights up at once.

Turrets and cobbled lanes fill this Baltic old town's medieval core, ringed almost entirely by its original 13th-century defensive walls.

Toompea Hill rises above the lower town, topped by a Russian Orthodox cathedral and views over red-tiled rooftops toward the harbour.

Despite the medieval look, Tallinn is one of Europe's most digitally advanced capitals.

Ireland's capital pairs a compact, walkable historic core with a genuinely lively pub and music scene, from the Georgian squares around Trinity College — home to the Book of Kells — to the cobbled lanes of Temple Bar.

The Guinness Storehouse and Kilmainham Gaol offer two very different sides of the city's story, industrial and political, while traditional music sessions spill out of pubs most nights of the week.

Chile's main historic port climbs steep hills above the Pacific, linked by century-old funiculars and dense with painted houses and street art.

UNESCO listed the old quarter for its unplanned layout, and wandering the stairways of Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepción, plus Pablo Neruda's clifftop house La Sebastiana, is the main activity.

Parts of the city have visibly declined, and the port is still working, not polished.

Egypt's sprawling capital is an overwhelming mix of ancient and modern — the Egyptian Museum's trove of pharaonic artifacts (including much of Tutankhamun's treasure), the medieval alleys and mosques of Islamic Cairo, and the chaotic bargaining of Khan el-Khalili bazaar, all set against relentless traffic and one of the world's largest urban populations.

The density of history alongside the Giza Pyramids nearby makes it hard to skip.

One of Europe's smallest and most walkable capitals, Ljubljana centers on a car-free riverside old town beneath a hilltop castle, its Ljubljanica River crossed by architect Jože Plečnik's distinctive bridges, including the dragon-flanked Dragon Bridge.

Riverside cafés, a lively open-air market and a compact, green city center make it an easy place to explore in a day or two, with a noticeably relaxed pace.

The world's highest administrative capital spills down a canyon at over 3,600 meters, with the wealthier neighborhoods lower in the bowl and poorer areas climbing toward the thin air of the rim — a layout the city's cable-car network, the world's largest urban Teleférico system, makes spectacularly visible from above.

The Witches' Market sells traditional Andean remedies alongside colonial-era churches and a lively street-food scene.

Ecuador's third-largest city is also its most polished colonial one, with blue-domed cathedrals, riverside promenades along the Tomebamba, and a compact historic core awarded UNESCO status for its well-preserved Spanish colonial grid.

It's also the traditional home of the (misleadingly named) Panama hat, and workshops around the city still weave them by hand.

Chile's capital sits in a wide valley with the snow-capped Andes rising directly behind its skyline, a backdrop few capitals can match on a clear day.

The colonial core around Plaza de Armas, the funicular up Cerro San Cristóbal, and the restaurants of Bellavista give it a couple of solid days' worth of things to do.

Most travellers treat it as a stopover before Atacama or Patagonia rather than a destination itself.

Bolivia's constitutional capital is a UNESCO-listed city of whitewashed colonial buildings under a strict preservation code, giving it a cleaner, more uniform look than most Bolivian cities.

Its plazas, churches and the Casa de la Libertad — where Bolivia's independence was declared — reflect its history, while nearby Cal Orck'o holds one of the world's largest dinosaur-footprint collections, on a nearly vertical limestone wall.

Cuba's second city and historic revolutionary heartland has a distinctly different feel from Havana — hillier, hotter, and steeped in Afro-Cuban culture that shows up in its music, religion and the country's biggest Carnival celebration each July.

Landmarks include the Moncada Barracks, site of Castro's failed 1953 attack that kicked off the revolution, and the hilltop Castillo del Morro fortress guarding the harbor mouth.

A compact, colorful university city on Ireland's west coast, Galway trades Dublin's scale for a tighter concentration of traditional music pubs, street buskers and independent shops along its pedestrianized Latin Quarter.

It's the natural gateway to Connemara and the Aran Islands, but has enough character — the Spanish Arch, the Saturday market, a lively arts festival calendar — to justify a stop on its own.

Founded by French settlers rather than the Spanish, Cienfuegos carries a distinctly different architectural character from the rest of Cuba, its neoclassical Parque José Martí and grand Tomás Terry Theatre earning it the nickname 'Pearl of the South' and UNESCO status.

Set on a wide, protected bay, the city has a more orderly, less weathered feel than Havana's crumbling grandeur, with a genuinely pleasant waterfront Malecón for evening walks.

Palm Springs is a desert resort city in the Coachella Valley in southern California, set against the dramatic backdrop of the San Jacinto Mountains.

Famous for its concentration of mid-century modern architecture, the city's pastel-coloured bungalows, extravagant swimming pools, and surrounding date palm groves create a uniquely Californian aesthetic.

Iceland's compact and colourful capital sits between the mountains and the sea as the world's most northerly capital city.

Rainbow-painted corrugated iron houses, the soaring Hallgrímskirkja church, and a bar and music scene far larger than the population suggests fill a centre small enough to cross on foot.

It doubles as the base for Northern Lights trips and Golden Circle day tours.

Namibia's compact capital mixes German-colonial architecture — a hilltop Lutheran church and a namesake fortress — with a modern African city center, serving most visitors mainly as the practical start and end point for a wider safari or desert road trip.

Christuskirche and the Independence Memorial Museum offer a few hours of genuine sightseeing, while the Namibia Craft Centre gathers work from artisans across the country in one stop.

London packs two thousand years into one city: fragments of Roman wall, a Norman fortress, Georgian squares and glass towers all within a few Tube stops of each other.

Its national museums are among the best in the world and free to enter, while the parks, markets and riverside walks give the place room to breathe between landmarks.

The weather is unreliable and the prices are not, but the range of things to do is close to unmatched.