The places of hidden europe - Hamnøy harbour at the mouth of Reinefjord on the Lofoten island of Moskenesøya, right in the heart of what we think is one of Europe’s most magical landscapes...

The places of hidden europe - The former house of the Iranian consul (called Firouza) in Borjomi, Georgia, one of the many extraordinary buildings which attest to the one-time importance of the spa town known for its mineral water. Photo © Mikhail Markovskiy / dreamstime

The places of hidden europe - The view from Epesses over to France with the Alps dominating the southern shores of Lake Geneva. Every available patch of land is under vines in the heart of Lavaux...

The places of hidden europe - Lisbon’s Praca do Comércio, with the prominent statue of King José I on his charger and the triumphal arch and arcades behind. The restaurant-café Martinho da Arcada is to the right of the arch, and was once the haunt of Fernando Pessoa. Photo © Iain Bamforth

The places of hidden europe - Gleisdreieck station in Berlin. For hidden europe 40, it was a 1924 essay by Joseph Roth that fired our imagination and inspired us to take the train. In Roth’s day, Gleisdreieck looked down on a tangled maze of railway lines and sidings...

The places of hidden europe - Traditional Azorean chapel in Topo on the island of São Jorge. Note the dove above the entrance that reveals the Azorean attachment to the Cult of the Holy Spirit… Photo © H368k742 / Dreamstime

The places of hidden europe - “Be plural like the universe!” Pessoa scribbled on a piece of paper, perhaps while sitting at his favourite table at the Café A Brasileira alongside his fellow writers and poets… Photo © Juan Moyano / Dreamstime

The places of hidden europe - Looking east over Lake Lucerne from the hiking trail on Mount Pilatus. Swiss lakes are in a class of their own, but what’s your favourite? Photo © Damien Verrier / Dreamstime

The salt pans in Janubio, Lanzarote were the cover star for hidden europe 54, an issue in which Diago Vivanco took us on a tour of this industrial landscape now finding life as a new conservation zone… Photo © Meinzahn / Dreamstime

“Hot summer days... and we've been meandering through northern Italy…” we wrote a few summers ago. “Virtually, with Shakespeare by our side. Remember Lucentio who, in The Taming of the Shrew, leaves his home city of Pisa in Tuscany?” Photo © Karol Kozlovski/ Dreamstime

The joy of old guidebooks… publications that were published to inform travellers about how best to make use of their time become something else as the decades go by: windows into the interests and preoccupations of travellers of the past...

The places of hidden europe - The lighthouse Rubjerg Knude in North Jutland, a remarkable place on the North Sea coast where the famous structure was pulled back from the eroding shoreline on tracks to prevent it falling into the waves… Photo © Biathlonua / Dreamstime

The places of hidden europe - Sunglasses vendors on Genoa’s waterfront with the Museum of the Sea in the background. We explored the city of St George back in hidden europe 28, celebrating its place in “the premier league of engaging European port cities...”

“Since 2022 the Snowdonia National Park has decided to use the Welsh language names both for the mountain and for the park itself. On its website, and in most hill-walking publications, Yr Wyddfa is the tallest mountain in the Eryri National Park…” Photo © Rory Trappe / Dreamstime

The places of hidden europe - Sculpture on the Tresco coast just north of Old Grimsby, an English Eden on an archipelago of islands just off the southwest coast. We visited the Isles of Scilly back in hidden europe 23...

Each month with our #LetterfromEurope newsletter we are releasing more articles from our magazine archive via our website. Here's one from the Lofoten Islands... and while you are there, you can sign up for future editions of the newsletter ;-) www.hiddeneurope.eu/letter-from-...

The places of hidden europe - The Grand Hotel Zvon dominates one side of the town square in the Bohemian town of Ceské Budejovice. The appeal of the town square is something that endures, because ultimately these are spaces that belong to the people…

One of our favourite Lavaux villages: St Saphorin. Gorgeous setting amid vineyards by Lake Geneva. And with a bonus train. #Switzerland

The places of hidden europe - As a port city, Hamburg has a long history of connection to places across the sea. In a recent edition of our Letter from Europe, Paul Scraton explored port cities and ties that bind… Photo © Elenatur / Dreamstime

If you had just one afternoon in Switzerland, would you opt for a Simplon hike at 2000m or ride the Glacier Express? We'd choose the hike. Agree or not?

The places of hidden europe - The four central figures in the monument to the Reformation in Geneva are William Farel, John Calvin, Theodore Beza, and John Knox. We visited Geneva for a magazine feature back in hidden europe 47...

The places of hidden europe - The 'MV Clansman' arriving at Castlebay on Barra. The prominent mountain is Heabhal, at 383 metres the highest elevation on Barra. There is something about islands that have made them a recurring theme for hidden europe over the years…

Instantly recognisable.... for anyone who has been to Kandersteg in #Switzerland. Staying in Kandersteg this evening before going on to Lavaux Vineyards tomorrow.

Border hopping DE/CH. Konstanz on the Bodensee.

The island of Mainau in Lake Constance #Bodensee. Lots of unlikely links with Sweden on this horticultural paradise.

Sunday morning on a boat on Lake Constance #Bodensee #Meersburg

The places of hidden europe - Ouchy, on the shore of Lake Geneva below Lausanne, is a place where one might linger. Byron did just that in late June 1816, when summer storms brought heavy rain…

The places of hidden europe - Chess in Geneva's Parc des Bastions, a place we explored in hidden europe 47 as we took a look at the many sides of the city, a place that turns out to have impeccable radical credentials...

The places of hidden europe - Europe's city squares are being radically reshaped by the arrival of mass tourism. Back when we published hidden europe 24, Poznań’s beautiful central square had resisted the pressure for change…

The harsh experiences of emigrants, movingly captured at the Auswanderer exhibition and documentation centre in #Bremerhaven.

“On recent travels to Poland, I marvelled at the beauty of Warsaw’s Old Town whilst being fully aware that what might seem at first glance to be an ancient place, carefully preserved, is actually the product of twentieth-century reconstruction…”

New article for the Guardian Travel, on the reopening of classic rail routes through the Alps and some new services... www.theguardian.com/travel/2025/...

The places of hidden europe - For many travellers the handsome squares in the heart of major cities - throughout central Europe but also more widely - capture the experience of being away from home… Photo © Sergey Dzyuba / dreamstime

www.hiddeneurope.eu/the-magazine... An ode to a lost era, when Soviet ships piled the North Atlantic carrying passengers from Leningrad via Tilbury to North America.

The harbour of Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel in the Azores. Azorean society has been shaped by emigration. Generations have left the mid-Atlantic islands, motivated by volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and poverty to seek new lives on the European mainland or in the Americas…

The places of hidden europe - The town of Torgau in eastern Germany. The scene is dominated by Hartenfels Castle, the one-time residence of the Electors of Saxony and a place we spent some time exploring for hidden europe 52...

The places of hidden europe - Looking over the peaty blacklands to the hills which line the eastern side of South Uist. This is an island of extraordinary contrasts, an elongated, wild straggle of land and water with a single main road that runs its entire length...

The places of hidden europe - Traditional housing on the island of Frederiksø which, like neighbouring Christiansø, has no roads. The Ertholm Islands (literally 'Pea Islands') are the easternmost fragments of Danish territory, even further east than Bornholm…

The places of hidden europe - The strada sopraelevata (elevated highway) separates Genoa’s port from the Old Town behind. On a good day, you can speed along, catching a kaleidoscope of Genoa from the Porta Siberia to the Stazione Marittima…

The places of hidden europe - landscapes under stress - the Harz Mountains in Germany are also one of the landscapes that so fired the imagination of artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, along with the Baltic coast and the Elbe sandstone mountains… Photo © Arkadij Schell / Dreamstime

Hoek van Holland is a liminal spot, a place not quite of the land and not quite of the sea. In hidden europe 67 we made time for a Dutch town through which generations of sea travellers have passed but few lingered…

A piece of motoring history. A heritage AA Box by the A939 in Morayshire #Scotland

In our most recent #LetterfromEurope about port cities, we touched on the story of Roald Amundsen leaving Bergen to fly north on a rescue mission for his fellow explorer Umberto Nobile - part of the biggest rescue effort in the history of polar exploration. Photo © Tony Skerl / Dreamstime

“Port cities tell the story of how the world has been interlinked, for good and for evil, for centuries. Some are stories of shame. Others of inspiration. There is the sadness of departure and the joy of arrival. The anticipation of adventure or fear of what to come.”

It opened in 2024 and it is now the longest pier on the Baltic Sea at 720 metres. Prerow is a seaside resort on the Fischland-Darß-Zingst peninsula in northern Germany...

The places of hidden europe - The National Museum in Szczecin, formerly the Maritime Museum. The shipyards in Szczecin once built some of the world's finest and fastest passenger liners. But today the cranes are silent…

The places of hidden europe - the Bigo is an architectural installation that now dominates the Porto Antico area of Genoa’s waterfront and was the cover star of hidden europe 28, in which we took some time to explore the city of St George…

Former merchants houses in the Bryggen district of Bergen's harbour. Port cities often have a very special feel. Hamburg, Genoa, Liverpool and Bergen have much in common by virtue of their connection to the sea… Photo © Elenatur / Dreamstime

The Pyrmonter Bergland seen from above Hameln. Love these upland areas of Lower Saxony. Gently rolling hills of delicate beauty so close to main road and rail arteries running west from Hannover to Rhine-Ruhr region.

Memorialising the Berlin Wall. Two former segments of the wall at Wannsee Golf Club, actually about 1500 metres from the actual former line of the wall.