Orvieto — Umbria · Italy →Photo: bluejayphoto / iStockAll destinations.
99 places carrying our editorial line — every one of them genuinely undertouristed, every one of them with a named editor and a real local voice.
Marathon
The plain where the Persians lost in 490 BCE, and a modern coastal town an hour from Athens that has simply stayed itself.
Patra (Western Greece)
Greece's third city and its sea gateway to Italy, home to the largest carnival in the country.
Carlingford & Cooley Peninsula
A medieval walled port on the border-water of Carlingford Lough: Norman castle, Old Norse name, and a peninsula of mountain track behind it.
Clonakilty
A West Cork market town built on black pudding, Michael Collins's birthplace, and a pub that drew Ireland's best traditional players for forty years.
Great Western Greenway
Ireland's longest off-road greenway: 42 km along Clew Bay from Westport to Achill, on the trackbed of the Achill railway that closed in 1937.
Loop Head
A 30-kilometre Atlantic peninsula at the mouth of the Shannon: a working lighthouse at its tip, and the western anchor of the Wild Atlantic Way.
Sheep's Head
A walking peninsula in West Cork: 88 km of waymarked old farm tracks between Bantry Bay and Dunmanus Bay, one farmhouse cheese, three villages.
Comacchio
A canal town in the Po Delta lagoons: bridges, eels, flamingos, and a Slow Food marinating works that keeps a centuries-old eel tradition alive.
Penisola del Sinis – Mal di Ventre
Quiet western Sardinia: a quartz-beached peninsula, one of Europe's largest lagoons, Phoenician Tharros, and the Giants of Mont'e Prama.
Salento (interior)
The deep heel of Italy, where a Greek-derived language still lives in a cluster of whitewashed villages and the whole coast empties after August.
Specchia
Pale-stone alleys and walled gardens on a south-Salento hill, far enough inland that the coastal August never quite arrives.
A Guarda
A working lobster port at the mouth of the Miño, with an Iron-Age Celtic hillfort above and Portugal visible across the water.
Ebro Delta
The largest western Mediterranean wetland: 320 km² of Catalan rice fields, salt pans and the world's biggest Audouin's gull colony.
Ecoparque de Trasmiera (Arnuero)
The Cantabrian coastal park of a 2,100-person municipality: three villages, two beaches, a tidal mill, and the regeneration story the EDEN award recognised.