The 100 Best Hidden Gems in The World

The Lofoten archipelago in northern Norway rises dramatically from the Norwegian Sea as a series of jagged peaks and sheltered bays.

Traditional red fishing cabins called rorbuer dot the shoreline against a backdrop of some of Europe's most spectacular mountain scenery, with the Northern Lights frequently visible in winter.

Tucked beneath sheer cliffs on Fernando de Noronha and reachable only by a steep ladder cut into the rock (or by boat), this beach has topped "world's best beach" rankings for good reason.

Turquoise water, sea turtles visible from the shore, and a protected marine park setting mean it stays close to pristine.

The remoteness that makes it special also caps how many people can visit each day.

Lake Baikal holds a fifth of the planet's unfrozen fresh water and is both the world's deepest and oldest lake, ringed by taiga forest and mountains in Siberia.

Its clarity lets you see many metres down in summer, while in winter the surface freezes into clear blue ice sheets thick enough to drive on.

Most visitors base themselves in Listvyanka or on Olkhon Island to explore the shoreline and villages.

Water drops 979 metres off a sheer tabletop mountain in the middle of remote Venezuelan jungle, making this the tallest waterfall on Earth by a wide margin.

The fall is so tall that much of the water disperses into mist before ever reaching the pool below.

Reaching it means days of river travel by dugout canoe through Canaima National Park, so the sheer remoteness is part of what keeps the view unspoiled.

Hegra was the second city of the ancient Nabataean kingdom after Petra, and its more than 100 monumental tombs, carved into sandstone outcrops across a desert plain, survive in far better condition than their Jordanian counterpart.

Saudi Arabia's first UNESCO World Heritage site opened to tourism only in 2019, and the tombs still show sharp carved detail after two thousand years in the desert.

Raja Ampat's four main islands and hundreds of smaller limestone islets sit at the heart of the Coral Triangle, the most biodiverse marine environment on Earth, with reefs holding far more coral and fish species than the Caribbean.

Above water, karst islands draped in jungle ring turquoise lagoons; below, divers and snorkelers find manta rays, reef sharks, and dense coral gardens largely undamaged by mass tourism.

Reaching it takes real commitment, but few marine destinations compare.

Svalbard is a remote Norwegian archipelago deep in the Arctic Ocean, roughly 60% covered by glaciers and home to more polar bears than people.

Longyearbyen, the main settlement, is the base for dog-sledding, snowmobiling and boat trips past calving glaciers and drifting sea ice, with the midnight sun in summer and polar night and northern lights in winter.

Almost everything beyond town requires an armed guide, which shapes the whole experience.

A sub-Arctic town on the Hudson Bay coast known as the polar bear capital of the world, where bears gather each autumn waiting for the sea ice to freeze.

Specially built tundra vehicles bring visitors safely within metres of wild bears, and the same stretch of coast offers beluga whale watching in summer and reliable northern lights viewing in winter.

No road connects Churchill to the rest of Manitoba.

A volcanic archipelago 350km off Brazil's coast, this is regularly ranked among the world's best beaches, with clear water that reveals reef sharks and sea turtles from the shoreline.

A strict daily visitor cap and environmental tax keep the beaches close to empty even in high season.

Morro Dois Irmaos, twin volcanic peaks rising from the sea, anchor the view from almost every beach.

A two-kilometre arc of white sand on Havelock Island backed by dense rainforest, with water that shifts from pale turquoise to deep blue at the reef line.

Time magazine once named it Asia's best beach, and sunset here - sun dropping straight into the Andaman Sea with no development in sight - remains the main draw.

It takes real effort to reach, which keeps it far less crowded than its reputation suggests.

Eleven medieval churches here weren't built up from the ground but carved downward into solid volcanic rock, each one excavated as a single monolithic block below ground level.

Narrow trenches and tunnels connect them, and pilgrims in white robes moving through the passages add scale and colour against the bare stone.

Nothing else in the world uses this exact rock-hewn technique at this scale.

Phong Nha-Ke Bang protects one of the world's largest karst regions, its jungle-covered limestone hiding thousands of caves, including Son Doong, the largest cave passage on Earth, and Paradise Cave's vast chambers of stalactites.

Most visitors explore by boat along the Son River into Phong Nha Cave itself, or walk the lit boardwalks of Paradise Cave.

It's Vietnam's premier caving destination, still largely undeveloped outside the main sites.

A surreal expanse of chalk-white rock formations near Farafra Oasis, carved by millennia of sand-wind erosion into shapes resembling mushrooms, camels, and icebergs scattered across pale desert sand.

Camping overnight among the formations, with no artificial light for miles, is the main way to see it - the white rock glows almost blue under a full moon.

It remains one of the least-visited major landscapes in Egypt outside the Nile corridor.

A gold-leaf-covered boulder balances impossibly on the very edge of a cliff, topped with a small pagoda said to be held in place by a strand of Buddha's hair.

Generations of pilgrims have applied gold leaf by hand, thickening the surface over centuries into a solid gilded shell.

At sunset the rock glows against the surrounding hills, appearing to defy gravity from almost every angle.

The second-largest canyon on Earth cuts a 160km gash through the Namibian desert, its layered rock walls dropping 550 metres to the seasonal Fish River below.

A multi-day hike along the canyon floor is one of Southern Africa's classic treks, but the main viewpoint at Hobas delivers the scale in a single sweeping look without any walking required.

Sunset turns the canyon's rust-red rock a deep orange.

Strung along the Urubamba River between Cusco and Machu Picchu, the Sacred Valley was the Inca empire's farming heartland and still works the same terraced hillsides.

In a day you can walk the Pisac ruins above their market, climb Ollantaytambo's fortress terraces, and see the circular agricultural bowl at Moray.

Lower and gentler than Cusco, it rewards a slower, multi-stop visit.

Peninsula Valdes juts into the South Atlantic off Argentine Patagonia and holds one of the continent's great wildlife spectacles: southern right whales calving close to shore, orcas that beach themselves hunting sea lion pups, and colonies of elephant seals and penguins.

A UNESCO site reached from Puerto Madryn, it's linked by unpaved roads between viewing points.

Sightings are seasonal, so timing matters.

Southeast Asia's largest transnational waterfall spills over limestone terraces straddling the Vietnam-China border, wide enough that bamboo rafts drift right up to its base.

Rice paddies and karst peaks frame the Vietnamese side, while mist rises constantly off the wide, multi-tiered drop, especially heavy after summer rains.

A dramatic clifftop on Vágar island overlooking Lake Leitisvatn, which appears from this angle to float 30 meters above the Atlantic Ocean — a famous optical illusion.

Sheer 300-meter drops, sheep-dotted grass, and constantly shifting Nordic light make it one of Europe's most striking viewpoints.

Jebel Fihrayn, known as the Edge of the World, is a sheer escarpment roughly 1,100 metres above the desert floor, part of the Tuwaiq Mountains that once formed the shoreline of an ancient sea.

A rough 4x4 track and a short walk lead to a cliff edge with no barriers, looking out over a flat desert plain stretching to the horizon, and it has become one of the most visited natural landmarks near Riyadh since the country opened to tourism.

One of the hottest, lowest, and strangest inhabited places on Earth, a volcanic depression over 100 metres below sea level where sulphur springs bubble in acid-yellow and electric-green pools beside the active Erta Ale lava lake.

Camel caravans still cross the adjoining Danakil salt flats to mine slabs of salt by hand, much as they have for centuries.

The colours and scale look almost entirely artificial, which is exactly why people make the brutal trip.

A collapsed cave roof on Kefalonia opens onto an underground lake so clear that the rowing boats appear to hang in mid-air.

When the sun is directly overhead the water turns an electric blue that looks artificially enhanced but isn't.

A short boat trip takes you through the lit chamber and out under the open dome.

Ayutthaya was the capital of Siam for four centuries and one of the largest cities in the world before Burmese armies destroyed it in 1767, leaving rows of brick temple spires and headless Buddha statues across the old city island.

Its best-known image is a stone Buddha head cradled in the roots of a banyan tree at Wat Mahathat, but the wider site holds dozens of temple ruins connected by quiet canals and cycling paths.

Despite the name, this isn't a desert: seasonal rains fill the valleys between hundreds of square kilometres of white dunes with clear turquoise lagoons, usually June to September.

Outside that window, the dunes stretch out bone-dry and empty.

Reaching the interior means a 4x4 or a walk across shifting sand from the gateway town of Barreirinhas, but the landscape has no real equivalent on the Brazilian coast.

Red sandstone spires and narrow corridors give this Central Asian canyon its nickname, the Valley of Castles, carved by the Charyn River over 12 million years.

Often compared to a miniature Grand Canyon, it draws a fraction of the visitors despite comparably dramatic scenery.

Walking the valley floor between the eroded rock towers is the main draw, especially in the low light of early evening.

Built directly into the mouth of a cave halfway up a 123-metre cliff face, this is the largest cave castle in the world and looks almost physically impossible from below.

A network of tunnels behind the walls once let its most famous resident, the robber baron Erazem, escape sieges and raid the countryside undetected.

The combination of Gothic-Renaissance architecture fused seamlessly into raw limestone rock makes it one of Europe's strangest buildings.

At the 2,100-metre summit of Mount Nemrut, a first-century BC king built himself a burial sanctuary flanked by colossal stone heads of gods and eagles, toppled from their bodies by centuries of earthquakes but still staring out over the Anatolian plateau.

Visitors climb the last stretch before dawn to watch sunrise light hit the eastern terrace's statues one by one.

Umluj sits on Saudi Arabia's northern Red Sea coast, where a scattering of uninhabited islands and sandbars sit in water shallow and clear enough to earn the coastline the nickname 'the Maldives of Saudi Arabia'.

Boat trips out to islands like Jabal Hassan reach coral reefs largely untouched by mass tourism, and the coastline remains quiet even as new mega-resort developments rise further south along the same coast.

Tambopata protects lowland Amazon rainforest in southeastern Peru, reached by boat from Puerto Maldonado.

Jungle lodges put visitors within reach of oxbow lakes, giant otters, and one of the Amazon's largest macaw clay licks, where hundreds of parrots gather at dawn.

Guided walks and night boat rides turn up a density of wildlife hard to match elsewhere in Peru, though it costs real time and money to reach.

A vast basin of white salt crust and brine lagoons mirrors the Andes, with flamingo colonies wading in mineral-pink pools.

Otherworldly geology in the driest non-polar desert on Earth, with almost no vegetation, cracked salt crust underfoot, and only the wind and distant volcanoes for company.

Deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Yasuní is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, home to more tree species in a single hectare than in all of North America, alongside jaguars, giant otters, harpy eagles and several uncontacted indigenous groups.

Jungle lodges reached by dugout canoe offer guided hikes, canopy towers and night paddles where caiman eyes reflect torchlight across blackwater lagoons.

Ethiopian Orthodox Christians mark the Epiphany with Timkat, when replicas of the Ark of the Covenant, wrapped in cloth and carried by priests, are paraded from every church to a shared body of water the night before.

Crowds in white robes sing and dance through the night, and at dawn the water is blessed and the crowd surges in for a symbolic re-enactment of Christ's baptism.

Lalibela's rock-hewn churches make the most striking backdrop for it.

A single, uninterrupted drop of 226 metres - about four times the height of Niagara - sends the Potaro River over a sandstone cliff into pristine Guyanese rainforest.

Unlike most waterfalls of this scale, it sits inside a protected national park with almost no development and few visitors, so the viewpoints are typically empty.

Rainbow-coloured mist rises from the base most mornings when the light is right.

Hierve el Agua is a set of mineral-rich springs in the hills outside Oaxaca that have calcified over thousands of years into cliffside formations resembling frozen waterfalls.

Two natural infinity pools sit right at the cliff edge, letting swimmers look out over the valley below.

The site is far quieter than Mexico's beach and pyramid destinations, reachable only by a bumpy mountain road.

The world's largest tropical wetland, a mosaic of rivers, lagoons, and gallery forest holding the highest concentration of jaguars, caimans, capybaras, and macaws anywhere in South America.

Guided boat and jeep safaris reveal wildlife far more reliably than the denser Amazon rainforest.

A labyrinth of marble caverns carved by wave action into a peninsula on Lake General Carrera, forming swirled chambers and arches in white, grey, and cobalt blue.

Accessible only by small boat, with the water's color and the marble's pattern shifting dramatically with the season and light.

The Vinales Valley is a UNESCO World Heritage landscape in western Cuba, where massive limestone mogotes rise dramatically from the flat valley floor like green-covered fortresses.

The traditional tobacco farms, red earth roads, royal palm trees, and brilliant blue skies make it one of the Caribbean's most distinctive landscapes.

A switchback road climbs through this dramatic red-rock gorge in the High Atlas foothills, past strange wind-eroded rock formations locals call the Monkey Fingers.

Kasbahs and Berber villages built from the same red earth blend almost seamlessly into the canyon walls around them.

The valley floor, planted with almond and fig trees, adds a green ribbon through the otherwise stark rust-coloured landscape.

Famous for having the most perfectly symmetrical cone of any volcano on Earth, rising in a flawless triangle above rice paddies and palm groves in the Bicol region.

It remains one of the Philippines' most active volcanoes, with periodic eruptions that occasionally force evacuations from surrounding villages, adding genuine drama to its postcard-perfect profile.

The best views come from a distance - from Daraga Church's ruins or the ATV trails around its lower slopes - rather than any close approach to the crater itself.

Europe's largest and best-preserved river delta is a maze of reed-lined channels, lakes and marshland where the Danube meets the Black Sea.

Boat trips glide past pelicans, herons and over 300 other bird species in a UNESCO-protected wilderness.

Traditional fishing villages built on stilts add a lived-in texture to the wildlife-watching, and the sheer scale of untouched wetland is rare anywhere in Europe.

Mexico's Copper Canyon is actually a network of canyons in the Sierra Madre Occidental, several deeper than the Grand Canyon, cut by rivers through pine forest and red rock.

The main way to see it is the Chepe train, which crosses 37 bridges and passes through 86 tunnels on its way between the desert lowlands and the pine-covered rim.

Small Rarámuri (Tarahumara) communities still live within the canyon system.

The Ha Giang Loop is northern Vietnam's classic multi-day motorbike route, threading through the limestone peaks of the Dong Van Karst Plateau past terraced fields, H'mong and Tay villages, and the Ma Pi Leng Pass above the Nho Que River.

Most riders cover the roughly 350km circuit over 3-4 days, self-driving or riding pillion with a local guide.

It's demanding and occasionally hair-raising, but consistently rated among Southeast Asia's best road trips.

Kelimutu volcano holds three crater lakes side by side, each a different color from mineral and gas activity below, ranging through turquoise, teal, and near-black depending on when you visit.

The lakes have shifted hue repeatedly over recorded history, a phenomenon still not fully explained.

Most visitors arrive before dawn to catch sunrise from the rim, then walk a short paved trail between viewpoints overlooking each lake.

A dramatic canyon in Vatnajökull National Park, carved by catastrophic glacial floods, home to the thunderous Dettifoss waterfall and the horseshoe-shaped Ásbyrgi depression.

Dark basalt cliffs and moss-covered riverbanks make it one of Iceland's starkest, most powerful landscapes.

This fortified clay ksar of tightly clustered earthen buildings has stood on a Saharan trade route for centuries and become one of cinema's favorite backdrops, doubling for ancient settings in Gladiator, Game of Thrones and Lawrence of Arabia.

A handful of families still live within its walls.

Climbing to the top for views over the Ounila Valley shows off both the settlement's defensive logic and its striking desert-earth architecture.

A bald granite inselberg rises abruptly out of flat Namibian desert, earning it the nickname the Matterhorn of Africa.

Natural rock arches, San rock paintings and easy scrambling routes over the surrounding boulders fill a day, and with almost no light pollution for hundreds of kilometres the night sky is extraordinary.

Facilities amount to a basic community-run campsite and little else.

Held on farmland outside Pattaya each December, Wonderfruit built its reputation on handcrafted bamboo and reclaimed-material stages rather than steel and plywood, with a sustainability ethos running through its food, waste systems, and art.

The multi-day programme mixes global and electronic music with talks, yoga, and farm-to-table dining, drawing a crowd that skews international and design-conscious rather than mainstream.

Isla Holbox is a car-free sandbar island off Mexico's Yucatán coast, reached only by boat, with sandy streets, pastel-painted guesthouses, and a slower pace than the resorts of Cancún.

Whale sharks gather in the surrounding waters from roughly June to September, drawing snorkel trips out to swim alongside them, and the island's shallow lagoon glows with bioluminescent plankton on dark nights.

The Farasan Islands are a low-lying Red Sea archipelago off Saudi Arabia's southern coast, ringed by coral reefs that draw divers and snorkellers to waters that see whale sharks pass through seasonally.

The main island holds crumbling coral-stone merchant houses from an Ottoman-era pearling boom, now mostly abandoned, alongside mangrove channels sheltering gazelles found nowhere else, with ferries from Jazan the only way in.

A narrow alpine lake in Austria's Salzkammergut lake district is ringed by forested peaks and postcard villages, the best-known of which, St.

Wolfgang, grew up around the lakeside White Horse Inn made famous by a 20th-century operetta.

Passenger ferries still cross the lake between villages, a rack railway climbs the Schafberg for panoramic views, and swimming spots line much of the shore in summer.

A dramatic rocky island 12km off the Irish coast, home to a 6th-century monastic settlement perched 200 meters above the Atlantic.

Narrow stone stairways climb to beehive-shaped huts where monks lived in near-total isolation for centuries, and the island later appeared in Star Wars.

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.

The old walled medina of Fes is the world's largest car-free urban area, a dense 9th-century labyrinth of over 9,000 narrow lanes where mules still haul goods past tanneries, madrasas and workshops largely unchanged for centuries.

The Chouara Tannery's terraced dye pits are the best-known sight, but the real experience is the medina itself — genuinely functioning, with artisans working leather, brass and textiles the same way for generations.

Steep, arid mountains drop straight into the sea along this remote Omani exclave, earning the nickname the Norway of Arabia for its fjord-like inlets.

Traditional wooden dhows cruise between the peninsula's narrow channels, where dolphins are a near-daily sighting.

Fishing villages built into the base of sheer cliffs remain reachable only by boat.

Carved into the Cordillera mountains some 2,000 years ago by the Ifugao people using only hand tools, these terraces climb the hillsides in contour lines that follow the land, still irrigated by an ancient engineered system fed from the forests above.

Locals still farm rice here, so the terraces are a living agricultural landscape rather than a preserved relic — often called the 'eighth wonder of the world.

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The largest castle in the world by land area, a vast red-brick Gothic fortress built by the Teutonic Knights on the banks of the Nogat River.

Its scale is genuinely disorienting up close - a walled complex of courtyards, halls, and towers that took over a century to complete and still functioned as a working fortress-monastery for 200 years.

Reflected in the river at dusk, its brick towers and battlements make for one of Northern Europe's most striking medieval skylines.

The world's second-tallest waterfall drops in five free-falling stages down the Drakensberg escarpment, deep in the Royal Natal National Park.

Reaching the top requires a full-day hike including a stretch up two connected chain ladders bolted to the cliff face.

On a clear day after rain, the full 948-metre drop is visible from the valley floor without any hiking at all.

Hexagonal basalt columns, formed the same way as the Giant's Causeway, arch into a natural sea cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa.

The cathedral-like interior, with waves echoing off the columned walls, inspired Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture.

Reaching it requires a boat crossing through open water, which keeps the cave far quieter than its Northern Irish cousin.

Kizhi Pogost is an open-air ensemble of wooden churches on a small island in Lake Onega, built with traditional log construction and no iron nails in the original structure.

The 22-domed Church of the Transfiguration, raised in 1714, is the centrepiece of a wider museum-reserve of relocated wooden chapels, houses and windmills from across Karelia.

It's reachable only by boat in summer or over ice in winter, keeping it genuinely quiet.

The largest continuous sand desert on Earth, an ocean of dunes covering an area bigger than France across the southern Arabian Peninsula.

Some dunes rise over 250 metres, their ridgelines shifting constantly and revealing fossilised lakebeds and ancient artefacts as the sand moves.

Overnight desert camps run by Bedouin-guided outfitters, mostly out of Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter fringes, are the realistic way to experience its scale without a full expedition crossing.

A long, wide stretch of soft white sand on Oahu's windward coast, with the Ko'olau mountain range rising green and jagged directly behind it.

It's popular with locals rather than tour buses, so it stays uncrowded even close to Honolulu, and the water is generally calmer than the island's surf-famous North Shore.

Bellows Beach next door adds a second, quieter option within the same bay.

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.

A series of turquoise limestone pools cascades down a natural stone bridge above the rushing Cahabón River, which vanishes underground beneath the pools before reemerging downstream.

Swimming from one pool to the next, framed by dense jungle on all sides, feels remote in a way that matches the effort of reaching it — the last stretch of road is famously rough.

A steep viewpoint hike above gives the classic aerial view of the stacked terraces.

Munnar is a hill station in the Western Ghats of Kerala renowned for its rolling tea plantations, which cover the mountain slopes in an unbroken carpet of vivid green.

Set at around 1,600 metres, the cool mist-covered landscape of tea gardens, colonial plantation buildings, and wildlife sanctuaries offers a striking contrast to Kerala's tropical coast.

India's tallest plunge waterfall drops in a single sheer fall into a striking turquoise pool at the base of the Khasi Hills, near Cherrapunji - one of the wettest places on Earth.

Monsoon season turns it into a thunderous wall of water visible from a paved viewpoint without any hiking required.

A local legend about a mother's grief gives the falls their name and a somber backstory repeated by every guide.

Held over a full month each summer in Denpasar, the Bali Arts Festival gathers traditional dance, gamelan orchestras, shadow puppetry, and crafts from villages across the island into one showcase, opened with a parade of regional delegations in ceremonial dress.

Unlike festivals built around foreign headline acts, this one exists to keep Balinese Hindu performing arts alive for local audiences, with tourists welcome as spectators.

A vast, sparsely populated expanse of rock desert and singing sand dunes stretching across southern Mongolia, home to the towering Khongoryn Els dunes, dinosaur fossil beds at the Flaming Cliffs, and nomadic families still living in traditional gers.

The scale is almost incomprehensible - days of driving between landmarks across open steppe with barely another vehicle in sight.

It rewards travellers looking for genuine remoteness over polished infrastructure.

Named for the whale bones once littering its shore and the shipwrecks still rusting in its surf, this remote stretch of Atlantic coastline is where the Namib Desert's dunes meet a cold, fog-shrouded ocean in a landscape that feels genuinely otherworldly.

Seal colonies numbering in the thousands gather at Cape Cross, while the fog sustains desert-adapted wildlife found nowhere else, including elephants that wander dry riverbeds toward the coast.

A pair of small roadside lakes on the drive to Milford Sound that reflect the surrounding peaks and tussock grassland with near-perfect clarity on calm mornings.

A short boardwalk loop makes them one of the easiest stops on the whole Fiordland route.

Over 1,200 near-perfectly conical grass-covered hills spread across Bohol island, turning chocolate-brown in the dry season.

A geological oddity of uncertain origin, best appreciated from the Chocolate Hills Complex viewing deck at sunrise or sunset.

This 155-kilometre gorge in Argentina's arid northwest has been a travel corridor since long before the Inca, its adobe villages and banded red-and-ochre rock now UNESCO-listed.

Purmamarca sits beneath the striped Cerro de los Siete Colores, while Humahuaca and Tilcara keep colonial churches and pre-Columbian ruins within walking distance.

It rewards slow travel along Ruta 9, not a single stop.

A tiny medieval town entirely enclosed by 14th-century walls an hour north of Lisbon, Óbidos was once a traditional wedding gift from Portuguese kings to their queens.

A single cobbled main street runs between whitewashed, bougainvillea-draped houses to a hilltop castle, and the full circuit of the ramparts can be walked in under an hour for views over the surrounding countryside.

St Barbara's Church rises over Kutná Hora, a UNESCO-listed medieval silver-mining town an hour from Prague.

Building began in 1388 and dragged on for five centuries, leaving a soaring Gothic nave ringed by flying buttresses and gargoyles, with faded frescoes of miners and moneyers inside.

It shares the skyline with Baroque terraces and the Jesuit College, making the old town worth a half-day wander.

High in the Bolivian Andes, Oruro's carnival is built around the Diablada, an elaborate devil dance performed by dancers in ornate horned masks and embroidered costumes depicting the battle between good and evil.

UNESCO recognised the event in 2001 for how deeply its folklore and costume-making traditions are woven into the city's identity.

A hypersaline lagoon in the Atacama salt flat, dense enough with dissolved minerals that swimmers float effortlessly, Dead Sea-style.

Ringed by pale salt crust and distant volcanoes, it's a strange, buoyant swim in one of the driest places on Earth, best paired with a freshwater rinse straight after.