Wales
Hay-on-Wye
Two dozen bookshops turn a Welsh border town into a literary treasure hunt.
One doorway leads to rare children's books, the next to crime novels, antique maps or rooms of science fiction. Hay-on-Wye, Y Gelli Gandryll in Welsh, sits in Powys on the Welsh side of the border, where roughly two dozen second-hand bookshops make browsing feel less like shopping than following a trail through other people's imaginations.
Richard Booth began turning Hay into a book town in the 1960s and declared himself king of an independent Hay in 1977, a theatrical stunt that carried the town's story around the world. Hay Festival, first held in 1988, still fills the town with writers and thinkers in late May, and the castle above the high street, restored and opened to the public in 2022, opens its Norman, Jacobean and Victorian layers to visitors. Thursday market has traded for 700 years, forty-plus stalls filling Memorial Square and the old market halls, and the river answers the bookshops: locals skim stones at the Warren's shingle beach while canoes wobble past, and the Gospel Pass, the highest public road in Wales, climbs out of town between Hay Bluff and Twmpa.
Solo
Hay rewards the slow browser: a morning lost in specialist shelves, lunch at a market stall, an afternoon beside the Wye with whatever you bought. Nobody hurries you here.
Couple
Hunt different shelves and compare finds over ales at an old inn, then walk down to the Warren as the evening light leaves the Bluff. A bookish weekend with a river attached.
- Two dozen second-hand bookshops turn a compact Welsh market town into an afternoon of specialist shelves and unexpected finds.
- The annual Hay Festival brings writers, thinkers and artists to the Welsh border in late May and early June.
- The River Wye and the Warren's shingle beach sit an easy walk from the bookshops, adding a riverside pause between shelves.
- Hay Castle, reopened after restoration in 2022, mixes Norman and Jacobean fabric with exhibitions and a café.
High-end pub grub and well-kept local ales at the Old Black Lion, with rooms upstairs if the evening runs long.
Thursday market has fed this town for 700 years: local produce, hot food and vintage finds across forty-plus stalls.
Shimoni
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A thousand-year-old adobe pueblo still inhabited beneath a mountain the Tiwa call sacred.
Buyeo
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Lotus flowers choke the pond of a kingdom that fell fourteen centuries ago.
Thatta
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Ninety-three domes amplify a single voice inside a mosque tiled in Mughal blue and white.
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A tidal island monastery where the causeway drowns twice daily and the tide writes the rules.
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Daphne du Maurier's estuary, where wooded creeks swallow the sound of the open sea.
Aldeburgh
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Salt wind and Britten's music haunting a shingle beach where fishing boats still launch.
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Light so luminous it lured a century of painters to this harbour of turquoise shallows.