Japan
Naoshima
A fishing island where pumpkins glow yellow and museums burrow underground.
You step off the ferry onto a concrete pier and a polka-dot pumpkin taller than you stares back. Naoshima is a former fishing island off Okayama that the Benesse Corporation has been turning into an art island since the late 1980s. The galleries here do not hang art on walls — they bury it underground, dissolve it into old houses, and stand it on the tide line.
Tadao Ando's Chichu Art Museum sits almost entirely below ground, lit by skylights that shift Monet's water lilies through every shade of daylight. The Art House Project scattered across Honmura village turns empty homes into permanent installations — LED digits counting in a pool inside a 200-year-old house, a dentist's surgery rebuilt as a collage. Naoshima's population is around 3,000, and the art circuit is best ridden by bicycle on lanes that pass between fishing nets and vegetable plots. Every three years the island anchors the Setouchi Triennale, which spreads installations across a dozen islands.
Solo
Cycling between installations at your own pace, sitting alone in the Chichu Art Museum's Monet room as the light changes — Naoshima rewards solitary attention.
Couple
The intimacy of the Art House Project, a fish dinner in the port, and the quiet rhythm of an island without nightlife make this a retreat for pairs.
- Tadao Ando's Chichu Art Museum buries Monet's water lilies in concrete rooms lit only by sky.
- You can cycle the entire island in an afternoon, stopping at artworks tucked into abandoned houses.
- The ferry from Uno takes twenty minutes — short enough to feel like a threshold, not a commute.
- Old island houses have become guesthouses with tatami floors and harbour views.
Sanuki udon, Kagawa's springy noodle, slurped at a port café before the galleries open.
Sea bream and octopus from the Inland Sea in Honmura's café-galleries, some of them inside old houses.
Ales Stenar
Sweden
Fifty-nine megaliths tracing a vast ship outline on a windswept cliff above the Baltic.
Janjanbureh
Gambia
An island bought from a king in 1823 so freed slaves could build a town.
Gebel el-Silsila
Egypt
The Nile squeezes through sandstone quarry cliffs where pharaohs carved temples from the living rock.
Alert Bay
Canada
Living Kwakwaka'wakw culture and a harbour boardwalk meet on small Cormorant Island.
Tono
Japan
A folklore valley where kappa haunt the ponds and every farmhouse once stabled a horse.
Kanazawa
Japan
Samurai and geisha districts untouched by war where gold leaf gilds everything, even ice cream.
Karatsu
Japan
A pottery town where enormous lacquered floats charge through the streets each November.
Takachiho
Japan
A basalt gorge where the sun goddess hid, and a night dance that has never stopped.