The 100 Best City Experiences in The World

Rio de Janeiro's Carnival is the largest and most famous in the world, headlined by Sambadrome parades where the city's top samba schools compete through the night in elaborate feathered costumes and floats years in the making.

Beyond the Sambadrome, hundreds of free street parties called blocos take over neighbourhoods for days, open to anyone who wants to dance along.

Positano is the Amalfi Coast's poster child: a wall of peach, rose and terracotta houses stacked impossibly steeply between the cliffs and a dark-sand beach.

The classic view, the whole town glowing above Spiaggia Grande, is best from the coast path or from the ferry pulling out.

Below the view it's all lemon groves, boutiques and long seafood lunches.

Cinque Terre is a string of five centuries-old fishing villages clinging to the cliffs of the Italian Riviera, connected by scenic hiking trails above the Ligurian Sea.

Manarola, Vernazza, Corniglia, Monterosso, and Riomaggiore tumble down their respective cliff faces in a cascade of colourful buildings.

The holiest site in Sikhism sits at the centre of a large square pool, its upper floors gilded in real gold and doubled by a near-perfect reflection in the still water.

Pilgrims circle the marble walkway at all hours, and the temple runs one of the world's largest free communal kitchens, feeding tens of thousands daily.

Lit at night, the gold dome and its reflection form one symmetrical image.

Every wall, staircase and doorway in this Rif Mountains town is washed in shades of blue, a tradition with disputed origins that's turned the entire medina into one continuous wash of colour.

Cats doze in doorways and potted plants spill over blue-painted steps, with barely a corner that doesn't reward a second look.

Founded as a 15th-century fortress town, its alleys were never built for cars.

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.

The Golden Gate Bridge has been San Francisco's calling card since 1937: 2.

7km of International Orange suspension bridge strung between the city and the Marin Headlands.

It's that rare landmark that looks better in bad weather - the towers rising out of rolling fog are the classic view.

Walk or cycle the deck, then take it in from Baker Beach, Fort Point or Battery Spencer.

The Colosseum is the largest amphitheatre ever built and an enduring symbol of the power and ingenuity of ancient Rome.

Completed in 80 AD, it could hold up to 80,000 spectators who came to watch gladiatorial contests, animal hunts, and public spectacles that defined Roman entertainment culture.

Jorn Utzon's Opera House is the building that gave a whole country its silhouette.

The white shells, actually more than a million cream and white tiles, change character constantly: blinding at noon, golden at sunset, glowing like lanterns at night.

Shoot it from Milsons Point on the Harbour Bridge side, from a ferry, or up close where the tiled geometry turns abstract.

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.

Gaudi's still-unfinished basilica rises in melting, organic stone spires unlike any other building on Earth, over 140 years into construction.

Inside, columns branch like trees to support a ceiling washed in colour from vast stained-glass windows.

The mix of Gothic scale and Art Nouveau strangeness makes both the exterior facades and the interior light equally worth lingering over.

The Vltava River loops almost completely around this medieval town, wrapping its red-roofed old town and Renaissance castle in a natural moat.

A 13th-century castle tower rises above the rooftops, and its viewing gallery gives the single best angle over the whole horseshoe-shaped town below.

Narrow cobbled streets, largely untouched by wartime damage, still follow their original medieval layout.

One of the world's oldest and largest covered markets, Istanbul's Grand Bazaar has traded continuously since 1461 across more than 4,000 shops lining 60 vaulted, hand-painted streets.

Copper lanterns, hand-woven carpets, gold jewellery and spice stalls spill into each other beneath domed ceilings that have survived earthquakes and fires for over five centuries.

Hoi An's Old Town is a remarkably intact 15th-19th century trading port, its ochre-walled shophouses, Chinese assembly halls, and the Japanese Covered Bridge lining the Thu Bon River.

By day it's a working town of tailors and lantern-makers; after dark the riverside glows with silk lanterns and candlelit boats.

UNESCO-listed and largely traffic-free, it rewards slow wandering more than a checklist visit.

The world's largest beer festival, held on Munich's Theresienwiese since 1810, where tents run by the city's traditional breweries fill each day with brass bands, dirndls and lederhosen, and steins raised in unison.

Beyond the beer it's a proper folk festival, with fairground rides and grounds that hold over 100,000 people at once.

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.

Nearly 1,500 years old, this Byzantine cathedral-turned-mosque carries a vast dome that dominated the ancient world's skyline for centuries.

Gold mosaics of Christian saints sit alongside Islamic calligraphy inside, a rare visible record of the building's several religious lives.

Dozens of windows ringing the dome's base light the vast interior.

The walled heart of Quebec City is the only fortified colonial city north of Mexico still standing, its narrow cobblestone streets climbing from the St.

Lawrence River up to the castle-like Chateau Frontenac hotel.

Founded by French settlers in 1608, the Old Town's stone houses and ramparts earned it UNESCO World Heritage status, and the Dufferin Terrace boardwalk gives sweeping river views.

The State Hermitage occupies the Winter Palace and four adjoining buildings on Palace Square, holding one of the world's largest art collections — over three million objects spanning Rembrandt, da Vinci and Impressionist masterpieces inside gilded Romanov staterooms.

A full circuit covers roughly 20 kilometres of galleries, so most visitors pick a handful of wings rather than attempt everything in one visit.

Marrakech's main square transforms completely between day and night: by afternoon it's snake charmers, henna artists and orange juice stalls, and by dusk it becomes one of the world's great open-air food markets, dozens of numbered stalls filling the square with smoke, spice and the calls of vendors.

UNESCO declared it a Masterpiece of Oral Heritage.

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.

Brunelleschi's magnificent dome crowns Florence's skyline and remains the largest brick dome ever constructed.

Built between 1296 and 1436, the Duomo's terracotta-tiled dome and its ornate campanile have defined the city's silhouette for nearly 600 years.

Mykonos built its reputation on whitewashed alleys, the row of windmills overlooking the harbour, and a nightlife scene that runs from beach clubs by day to bars in Chora by night.

Little Venice's balconied houses sit almost in the water, and beaches like Paradise and Psarou draw a see-and-be-seen crowd through the summer.

Away from the party scene, quieter coves and Cycladic villages inland offer a calmer version of the same island.

Salzburg's baroque old town sits below a hilltop fortress on the banks of the Salzach River, its narrow lanes lined with Mozart's birthplace, elaborate church facades, and the gardens used as filming locations for The Sound of Music.

The Hohensalzburg Fortress, one of Europe's largest surviving medieval castles, looms over the skyline and is reachable by funicular, and music runs through the city year-round.

Built for the 1889 World's Fair and nearly dismantled twenty years later, the Eiffel Tower is 330 metres of exposed wrought iron that Parisians initially loathed and now cannot imagine the skyline without.

Lifts and stairs reach two public floors of restaurants and terraces, plus a summit platform with views across the whole city.

After dark, 20,000 bulbs make it sparkle for five minutes on the hour until 1am.

London's most recognisable river crossing, a pair of neo-Gothic towers linked by a pale blue lattice and a glass-floored high walkway.

The bascules still lift around 800 times a year for tall ships, and the best views come from the south bank looking north.

Inside, the Victorian engine rooms hold the original steam machinery that raised the road.

The steel arch Sydneysiders call the Coathanger, carrying eight lanes, two rail tracks and a pedestrian walkway high above the harbour.

The classic view pairs it with the Opera House from Mrs Macquarie's Chair.

Climbers can walk the outer arch on a harnessed BridgeClimb, 134 metres above the water.

Jaipur, the Pink City, commits harder to Diwali than almost anywhere in India: the old city and its bazaars are strung with thousands of clay oil lamps and fairy lights for over a week, and the illuminated pink sandstone facades of Johari Bazaar are considered among the country's best Diwali displays, fireworks lighting the sky above the City Palace.

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.

The Acropolis of Athens is a flat-topped hill rising 150 metres above the city, crowned by the Parthenon — the greatest surviving monument of ancient Greek civilisation.

Built under the direction of Pericles between 447 and 432 BC, the marble temple dedicated to the goddess Athena has stood as a symbol of democracy and Western culture for 2,500 years.

For a week before Easter, Seville's centuries-old religious brotherhoods carry ornate wooden floats bearing statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary through the streets on the shoulders of hidden bearers, accompanied by hooded penitents and mournful saeta singing.

Balconies fill and cafes stay open past midnight as processions cross the city continuously, culminating in the sleepless Madrugada from Maundy Thursday into Good Friday.

The Temple of Dawn rises in a steep, porcelain-and-seashell-encrusted spire directly on the bank of Bangkok's Chao Phraya River.

Its silhouette against a sunset sky, seen from the river or the opposite bank, is one of the most recognisable images of the city.

Close up, the tower is covered in thousands of tiny inlaid ceramic fragments, a texture that only shows up on approach.

The Brooklyn Bridge was the world's longest suspension bridge when it opened in 1883, and its stone Gothic towers and web of steel cables remain New York's most distinctive crossing.

An elevated timber boardwalk runs above the traffic for the full 1.

8km span, with Lower Manhattan directly ahead the whole way from the Brooklyn side.

It is free, open at any hour, and takes about half an hour to walk.

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.

A two-stage cable car, the bondinho, carries visitors from Praia Vermelha up over the forested Morro da Urca to the bare granite summit of Pão de Açúcar, 396 metres above Guanabara Bay.

From the top, Rio unfolds in full: Copacabana's curve, Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado, and the bay's scattering of islands.

It's one stop, one ride, and one of the most complete views of the city available anywhere.

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.

Bryggen is the old Hanseatic wharf on Bergen's harbour, a row of narrow, brightly painted wooden warehouses rebuilt after fires since the 14th century and listed by UNESCO since 1979.

The buildings now hold workshops, galleries and restaurants behind their tilted timber frames, and the wharf sits at the centre of a lively harbour city ringed by seven mountains.

Compact enough to explore in an hour, longer with the Hanseatic Museum.

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.

Table Mountain's flat-topped summit, draped in its famous tablecloth of cloud, presides over Cape Town and offers 360-degree panoramas stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to the Winelands.

The mountain is home to an extraordinary number of endemic plant species found nowhere else on earth.

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque, universally known as the Blue Mosque for its Iznik tile-clad interior, is Istanbul's most iconic building.

Completed in 1616, it is the only mosque in Turkey with six minarets and its cascading domes and slender minarets form one of the world's most beautiful skylines.

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.

Launched in 1985 with what was then the largest concert audience ever assembled, Rock in Rio built a purpose-designed City of Rock venue, spread across multiple stages, a Ferris wheel, and a full mock street of bars and food stalls.

The lineup leans toward major international rock and pop headliners, and the festival has since spread to spin-off editions in Lisbon and Madrid.

Half-timbered houses in candy-bright colours line the canals of this Alsatian town's La Petite Venise district, their upper floors leaning out over the water.

Flower boxes crowd almost every windowsill from spring through autumn, adding another layer of colour to the vivid facades.

The town's mix of French and German influence, a legacy of Alsace changing hands repeatedly, gives it a character unlike anywhere else in France.

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.

Pastel-painted colonial buildings and crumbling Spanish Baroque church ruins fill this former capital, framed on clear days by the smoking cone of Volcan de Fuego.

Cobblestone streets laid out in a strict grid by 16th-century Spanish planners still define the town today.

Climbing a nearby volcano for sunrise, with Antigua's rooftops spread out below, is the classic local excursion.

Four kilometres of powder-fine white sand lined with resorts, beach bars, and sunset boat cruises, split into three "stations" by how developed each stretch is.

It's the Philippines' most famous beach and one of Southeast Asia's busiest, powdery enough that the sand squeaks underfoot.

A government-mandated cleanup and visitor cap in recent years has kept water quality noticeably better than its reputation from a decade ago.

Ronda is a dramatic Andalusian city built on a rocky plateau divided by a 120-metre-deep gorge, over which the 18th-century Puente Nuevo bridge arches in an astonishing feat of engineering.

The combination of Moorish old town, bullring, and vertiginous cliff-edge position makes Ronda one of Spain's most striking cities.

Thailand's traditional New Year erupts across Chiang Mai's old city moat every April, when the custom of pouring water over elders' hands to bless them expands into a citywide water fight, with super-soakers, hoses and buckets thrown from pickup trucks.

Locals and travellers alike end up soaked head to toe against a backdrop of ancient brick gates and temples.

New Orleans' Mardi Gras builds for weeks through parades run by dozens of krewes, social clubs that design elaborate floats and toss beads, cups and doubloons to crowds along St Charles Avenue and through the French Quarter.

By Fat Tuesday the city is in full costume, with the Krewe of Zulu and Krewe of Rex parades considered the day's centrepiece events.

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.

Charles Bridge has carried foot traffic over the Vltava since 1402, running dead straight from the Old Town gate tower to the castle bank beneath a parade of thirty blackened baroque statues.

At dawn, with mist on the river and Prague Castle rising behind, it's one of Europe's great city walks; by mid-morning it's one of Europe's great crushes, buskers and all.

Cobblestone streets in this 16th-century sugar-trade town are lined with candy-coloured colonial houses, many still lived in by the families who've owned them for generations.

Vintage American cars from the 1950s, kept running through decades of improvisation, cruise past pastel facades and a crumbling bell tower overlooking the town.

Live music spills from open doorways most evenings.

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.

Just off Barcelona's Las Ramblas, La Boqueria has traded since the 13th century and sits behind a stained-glass modernist entrance.

Stalls run to jamon iberico, glistening seafood, cured cheeses and fruit cut and stacked for the counter, while several bars at the back serve cooked plates to whoever can claim a stool.

It works as both a genuine working market and a place to eat your way through lunch standing up.

Red Square is Moscow's central plaza, framed by the Kremlin's fortified walls, the red-brick towers of the State Historical Museum, the glass-roofed GUM arcade and Lenin's Mausoleum.

It has staged state parades, revolutions and coronations for over five centuries and remains the city's default gathering point — a vast cobbled space distinct from the single view of St Basil's Cathedral at its southern end.

Al-Balad is Jeddah's old town, a UNESCO-listed maze of coral-stone merchant houses several storeys tall, their facades covered in ornately carved wooden latticework called rawasheen that once let residents watch the street below without being seen.

For centuries this was the gateway for pilgrims arriving by sea for Mecca and Medina, and the district's souqs, mosques, and courtyard houses still carry that trading-port history.

Colombia's biggest carnival and, by most measures, the second-largest in the world after Rio, Barranquilla's four-day celebration blends African, Indigenous and Spanish traditions into parades of cumbia dancers and marimonda figures with their signature long-nosed masks.

UNESCO recognised it in 2003 for how intact its folkloric traditions remain.

Quito's historic center was the first UNESCO World Heritage Site ever designated, and remains the largest, best-preserved colonial-era old town in Latin America.

Baroque churches like La Compañía de Jesús drip with gold leaf inside plain stone exteriors, while plazas and narrow streets climb the Andean foothills at over 2,800 meters of altitude.

The Basílica del Voto Nacional's towers offer views across the whole old town.

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.

Saffron-robed monks file silently through the streets at dawn to collect alms, a centuries-old ritual that still happens daily in this Mekong River town.

Gilded temple roofs and French colonial shopfronts sit side by side along streets largely protected from development by UNESCO status.

It also serves as the natural base for visiting Kuang Si Falls' turquoise pools nearby.

A boat trip up the Bosphorus is the easiest way to see how Istanbul straddles two continents, passing Ottoman waterfront palaces, fortified castles, and the suspension bridges linking Europe and Asia.

Ferries run the full length from the old city to the mouth of the Black Sea, or shorter tourist cruises loop back after a couple of hours — either way, it's a relaxed, scenic break from the city's crowded streets and hills.

The Nordkette range rises so steeply above Innsbruck that a cable car runs directly from the edge of the old town to a mountain station above 2,300 metres in under 20 minutes.

From the top, the view takes in the Alpine capital below and rows of peaks stretching into Italy and Germany, and hiking trails and via ferrata routes continue further up the ridge.

The world's oldest and largest continuously occupied castle, still an official residence of the British monarch, with nearly a thousand years of continuous history inside its walls.

State Apartments, St George's Chapel (site of several royal weddings), and the daily Changing of the Guard draw huge crowds year-round.

It sits an easy day trip from London, which keeps it firmly on the well-worn royal-sightseeing circuit.

Prague's Old Town Square has been the city's beating heart for centuries, surrounded by a colourful ensemble of Baroque, Romanesque, and Gothic buildings.

The 15th-century Astronomical Clock performs an hourly show, while the twin towers of the Church of Our Lady before Tyn create one of Central Europe's most distinctive skylines.

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.

Nicknamed the 'Island of Freedom', Sziget takes over an entire Danube island in Budapest for a week each August, mixing major international headliners with theatre, circus, and dozens of themed areas beyond the main stages.

Most attendees camp on-site for the full week, and the festival has grown into one of Europe's largest, drawing well over half its crowd from outside Hungary.

Siena is a medieval city in the heart of Tuscany that has preserved its Gothic character more completely than any other city in Italy.

Its fan-shaped main piazza, the Piazza del Campo, is the venue for the famous Palio horse race held twice yearly, and its cathedral, the Duomo, is considered one of the finest Gothic buildings in Italy.

An intact Edo-period merchant district with preserved wooden machiya townhouses, working sake breweries, and morning markets, set against a backdrop of the Japanese Alps.

One of the country's best-preserved old towns outside Kyoto, and considerably less crowded.

Bangkok's Chatuchak is one of the world's largest weekend markets, spreading across more than 8,000 stalls and 35 acres selling everything from vintage clothing and antiques to exotic plants and street food, packed into a dense grid of covered lanes.

It's as much a local institution as a tourist draw, and the market only runs Saturdays and Sundays.

Niagara Falls sits on the border between Ontario and New York State and comprises three waterfalls: the Horseshoe Falls, the American Falls, and the Bridal Veil Falls.

The Canadian side offers the most dramatic panoramic view of the Horseshoe Falls, which at 57 metres tall and 670 metres wide is the most powerful waterfall in North America.