A scattershot of the destinations our editors keep recommending and that almost no one we know has actually been to.
Some places stayed off the main map for accidental reasons - hard to fly to, awkward to spell, in the wrong country during the wrong decade. Others were simply overshadowed by a neighbour with better marketing. The result is the same: extraordinary destinations that reward the traveller willing to make an extra connection or spend an extra hour on a bus. Here are ten that deserve more curiosity.
Matera, Italy
The Sassi are cave dwellings continuously inhabited for around 9,000 years, making them among the oldest settlements still in use in the Mediterranean. A national disgrace until the 1990s, when the residents were resettled after the caves were condemned as unfit for modern living, and now a UNESCO site with hotels carved into the rock. Staying inside one is not a gimmick: the limestone regulates temperature naturally, the rooms are surprisingly deep, and waking up to a view over the Gravina canyon feels closer to Cappadocia than to Rome. The rock churches, with their faded Byzantine frescoes, are scattered through the ravine and almost empty outside July.
Ohrid, North Macedonia
On a lake that is between two and three million years old, with 365 churches in the town (one for each day, locals say), a Roman amphitheatre still used for performances and a fish (the Ohrid trout) found nowhere else. The old town climbs the hillside in a series of cobbled lanes so narrow that the balconies almost meet overhead. In the early morning the fishermen still mend nets on the quay below Kaneo, and the water is clear enough to see the bottom 20 metres out. The lake itself is one of Europe's deepest, and the surrounding Galicica National Park has walking trails that look down on both Ohrid and Prespa lakes simultaneously.
Gjirokaster, Albania
Ottoman stone town built up the side of a valley, with houses that look like small fortresses from below and like stacked grey boxes from above. The roofs are slabs of grey limestone and the citadel above holds an American spy plane shot down in the 60s. But the real reason to come is the bazaar street, where craftsmen still work copper in open workshops and the Ottoman tower houses have been converted into family-run guesthouses with stone balconies overlooking the valley. The town was Enver Hoxha's birthplace, which partly explains why it was preserved rather than developed, and why it still feels like a place that tourism has circled rather than entered.
Plovdiv, Bulgaria
Possibly the oldest continuously inhabited city in Europe (around 6,000 years), with a remarkable Roman theatre still hosting concerts and a 19th-century Bulgarian Revival old town. The layers are the point: Thracian walls under Roman streets under Ottoman mosques under communist-era apartment blocks. The Kapana district, once the crafts quarter, is now a maze of small bars and galleries that still occupies the same narrow lanes the cobblers used. Summer evenings in the Roman theatre, with a performance and the lights of the city below, are one of the better uses of an evening in the Balkans.
Kotor, Montenegro
Most people now know Dubrovnik. Kotor, an hour down the coast, is similar walled architecture set inside Europe's southernmost fjord-like bay and is still less crowded. The walls climb 1,200 metres up the mountain behind the old town, the Maritime Museum occupies a former palace, and the cathedral holds silver altarpieces that survived the earthquake of 1667. Cruise ships do arrive, but the scale is smaller and the town absorbs them more gracefully. The real trick is to stay overnight: after 5 p.m. the day-trippers leave and the bay returns to the colour it had before tourism.
Bukhara, Uzbekistan
Samarkand gets the headlines. Bukhara is the older, more intact Silk Road city, with the working trading domes and the Ark fortress. The difference is that Bukhara's old city is still a working place: metalworkers hammer bowls in the Tak-i-Zargaron bazaar, the carpet sellers negotiate over green tea, and the minarets are not museum pieces but landmarks in a city that still orients itself around them. The Kalyan minaret, built in 1127, is known as the Tower of Death for its historical use as an execution site, but the view from the top at sunset is simply the best angle on a city that has changed remarkably little in five centuries.
Luang Prabang, Laos
On the Mekong, with the dawn alms procession of saffron-robed monks, the Kuang Si waterfalls and a French colonial old town listed by UNESCO. The pace is deliberately slow: the peninsula between the Mekong and the Nam Khan is only a few kilometres long, and the town's entire economy still runs on a morning market, a handful of temples and the river. The French shophouses have been restored with restraint, and the bakeries still produce decent baguettes. It is the kind of place where you plan one activity before lunch and then see what the afternoon brings.
Salta, Argentina
Colonial capital of north-west Argentina, gateway to the Quebrada de Humahuaca canyon and the salt flats at Salinas Grandes. The city itself sits in a broad valley at 1,200 metres, with a main square framed by a cathedral and a cabildo that looks like it was shipped from Andalusia. The Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña holds the mummified children sacrificed on Llullaillaco, and the peña clubs serve empanadas and folk music until 3 a.m. The surrounding valleys, with their cactus forests and red-rock formations, feel closer to the American Southwest than to Buenos Aires.
Chefchaouen, Morocco
The blue town in the Rif mountains. Painted that way in the 1930s by the Jewish refugees who arrived, and never repainted. The colour has become the town's identity: every doorway, stairway and alley is a slightly different shade of indigo or azure, and the effect in morning light is genuinely disorienting. The medina is small enough to wander without a map, the main square fills with locals in the evening rather than tourists, and the hills above offer walking trails into the Talassemtane National Park. It remains calmer than Fes or Marrakech by an order of magnitude.
Petra by night, Jordan
Most visitors do the standard day trip. The Petra by Night experience, with 1,500 candles along the Siq, is closer to what early travellers must have felt. The narrow gorge, a kilometre long and barely two metres wide in places, is lit only by the lanterns placed every few metres. You walk in silence, guided by the light reflecting off the rose-coloured walls, until the Treasury appears at the end in a pool of candlelight. The performance itself is brief and secondary; the point is the approach, and the memory of walking through a two-thousand-year-old corridor with no electric light at all. It runs three nights a week and is worth planning around.
