United States
Key West
Roosters crossing the street while Mallory Square gathers to applaud the sunset.
Key West smells of salt, frangipani and frying conch, and the roosters really do have right of way. An hour before sundown the island drifts towards Mallory Square, where jugglers and psychics work the crowd until the sun touches the Gulf and the applause begins.
The southernmost city in the contiguous United States sits closer to Havana than to Miami, and its gingerbread cottages and cigar-makers' shotgun houses remember the Bahamian wreckers and Cuban rollers who built the town before the Overseas Highway reached it in 1938. Ernest Hemingway wrote To Have and Have Not at his house on Whitehead Street, where nearly sixty polydactyl cats doze across the garden, some of them carrying the genes of his ship-captain's gift, Snow White. Duval Street runs the island's full width from the Gulf to the Atlantic in a little over a mile of bars, galleries and drag revues. Each January the Key West Literary Seminar fills the theatres, a reminder that this has always been a writers' town.
Couple
Split a slice of key lime pie on a dock, cycle the lanes past gingerbread cottages and let the nightly applause at Mallory Square stand in for an evening plan.
Solo
Hemingway came here to write alone, and the island still rewards solitude: a borrowed bicycle, a bar stool, a book and a sunset nobody owns.
Family
Children get snorkel reefs, a butterfly conservatory and a nightly street circus at Mallory Square, and the whole island is flat enough to bike with them.
Friends
Duval Street needs no map, reef and sandbar trips leave the marinas every morning, and the group story writes itself by the second night.
- Mallory Square's Sunset Celebration is a nightly arts festival: crowds gather at the water's edge an hour before sundown and applaud as the sun goes.
- Nearly sixty six-toed cats roam the Hemingway Home's garden, descendants and kin of the writer's own cat Snow White.
- Islanders call themselves Conchs after the Bahamian divers who built the island's first fishery, and the fritters are still everywhere.
- The Overseas Highway island-hops more than a hundred miles of open water to get here, and at its end Havana lies nearer than Miami.
Conch fritters battered Bahamian-style, eaten hot off a dockside cart with a squeeze of lime.
Key lime pie of tart local limes, egg yolks and condensed milk, Florida's official state pie since 2006.
Essaouira
Morocco
Gnaoua rhythms carry a devotional trance through ramparts that once guarded half Morocco's foreign trade.
La Rochelle
France
Medieval towers guarding a harbour mouth where a chain once locked out the sea each night.
Lake Van
Turkey
A vast soda sea where you float without trying, ringed by snow-capped volcanoes.
Comacchio
Italy
Canals thread a brick lagoon town whose fortunes have always swum in on the eels.
Lancaster County
United States
Horse-drawn buggies, hand-worked fields and no power lines: the current century thins at the county line.
Terlingua
United States
A ghost town at Earth's edge where eccentrics throw an annual chilli cook-off in the dust.
Santa Fe
United States
Adobe walls glow amber at sunset while piñon smoke drifts through the plaza.
Marfa
United States
Minimalist art installations glowing in the Chihuahuan Desert beside a highway that goes nowhere.