The Canaries have long held a reputation as the ideal winter holiday spot within easy reach of northern Europe. And so it proved when we decided to turn our backs on miserable weather and Christmas shopping and indulge ourselves with some sunshine and good food on Tenerife.
My first visit to the Lake District fulfilled all my expectations, and more. What had I envisaged? Expansive lakes, of course, and wilderness, but I hadn’t foreseen it would be as replete with endearing villages and a sense of society as I found it to be.
Yes, it's a deliberate pun. Getting to the top of any of these mountains will certainly leave you gasping, but just to view them from nearby will also take your breath away.
We were distressed to learn of the devastation caused on Union Island by Hurricane Beryl. We enjoyed our best ever holiday there, where we found not just wonderful natural beauty but charming, friendly, genuine people. We would urge anyone who has enjoyed a holiday in the Caribbean to make a donation here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-the-union-island-population-recover-from-the-hurricane.
All manner of minerals have been mined in Britain, and that industrial legacy has left its mark in many places. Softened and weathered by the passage of time the old mining sites are now places of rugged beauty as well as providing an insight into how our forebears lived and worked.
The Eco Village Finca de Arrieta is such a brilliant idea that we wonder why it hasn't been copied elsewhere. et in rural surroundings only 300 metres from the beach of Arrieta, it offers diverse self-catering holiday options ranging from stone-built villas and a farmhouse to authentic Mongolian yurts.
Terms such as ‘best-kept secret’ or ‘hidden gem’ in tourism seem somewhat ironic, as the very fact that someone has elected to write about such a place indicates either that it has garnered enough plaudits to be written or talked about before, or at the very least that they are about to let the cat out of the bag.
Exmoor is one of Britain's smallest national parks, but none the worse for that! Straddling North Devon and west Somerset and bordering the Bristol Channel, it has scenery, wildlife and interest in abundance.
The Costa del Sol is pretty much where modern tourism began in Spain. The term was coined in 1930 as the cult of sunbathing first appeared, but tourism really took off in the 1960s with the advent of popular air travel. However to think that the Costa del Sol is just a place for lazing on the beach could not be further from the truth.
To us here in the UK (and that's most of our website visitors) we can be pretty blasé about our own wildlife while thinking that the animals in other countries are more "exotic". I would put a lot of that down to familiarity as deer, foxes and badgers are a great sight in their natural setting. So where do we find the "exotic" close to home?
