Compare 576 Travel Destinations

A UNESCO World Heritage colonial city surrounded by volcanoes, with cobblestone streets, baroque churches, and some of Central America's best coffee and chocolate.

Greenland's third-largest town sits 300 km north of the Arctic Circle at the mouth of the UNESCO-listed Ilulissat Icefjord — where Sermeq Kujalleq glacier calves 35 km³ of icebergs per year (more than any glacier outside Antarctica). Home to 4,700 people and roughly 3,500 Greenlandic sled dogs. Midnight sun May–July, polar night November–January, and one of the planet's most reliable Northern Lights viewing windows September through April.

Costa Rica's adventure capital sits at the foot of Arenal — a near-perfect 1,633m volcanic cone, dormant since 2010 but still feeding the area's many hot springs. La Fortuna Waterfall plunges 75m into a swimmable pool; Mistico's hanging bridges thread the rainforest canopy; Río Celeste's impossibly turquoise water sits a day-trip away. Zip-lining, rafting, sloth-spotting, and the famous Jeep-Boat-Jeep crossing to Monteverde all start here. Pura Vida personified.

Manuel Antonio packs Costa Rica's most photogenic combination into a tiny coastal sliver: a 1,983-hectare national park where white-sand crescents meet primary rainforest, and squirrel monkeys, sloths, and white-faced capuchins routinely cross the trail in front of you. The park sits at the foot of a steep ridge climbing up from Quepos, and the strip of road between has become Costa Rica's most concentrated tourism corridor — luxury jungle lodges, sea-view restaurants, and zip-line operators stacked along three switchbacked kilometres. Pura vida arrives with monkeys raiding your beach bag.

Monteverde sits at 1,330 metres on the Tilarán mountain ridge, where Pacific and Caribbean trade winds collide to create one of the wettest, mistiest, most biologically rich cloud forests on Earth. The town began in 1951 when a group of Alabama Quakers fleeing the U.S. draft bought land here for dairy farming, and accidentally protected the forest above their fields — now the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve, with 500+ orchid species and the resplendent quetzal as its mascot. The dirt road in is famously rough, the gondola-and-cable canopy tours were invented here, and Santa Elena village still feels like a frontier outpost.

A small town of about 10,000 people set among Arizona's most photogenic red sandstone — the iron-oxide-coated Schnebly Hill Formation deposited 270 million years ago when the area was a vast inland sea, the same geological layer that extends north to the Grand Canyon's pink lower walls. Cathedral Rock, Bell Rock, Boynton Canyon, and Airport Mesa are the four 'vortex' sites of the New Age belief system that has driven a wellness/metaphysical tourism economy here since the 1980s — there is no scientific evidence for vortexes; there is also no shortage of believers. Sedona was designated only the 8th International Dark Sky Community in the world in 2014, and the Milky Way is naked-eye visible from anywhere in town on clear nights. The Chapel of the Holy Cross (built 1956 by Marguerite Brunswig Staude) rises directly out of the red rock walls with a 250-foot iron cross as structural support. Slide Rock State Park is named for the natural 80-foot sandstone water slide carved into Oak Creek bedrock. Population is just 10,000 but the town receives over 3 million visitors per year — the result is severe summer/holiday traffic on SR-89A and an enforced parking permit system at popular trailheads. Closest airport: Flagstaff (FLG) 30 mi north, or Phoenix Sky Harbor (PHX) 2 hours south.

Tamarindo is the unofficial capital of Costa Rica's Pacific surf coast — a former fishing village transformed by The Endless Summer II in 1994 into a 7,000-person beach town stacked with surf schools, smoothie bars, and sunset-bar circuits. Playa Tamarindo's mile-long beach break works for total beginners; the more powerful Playa Grande across the estuary is the protected nesting beach for endangered leatherback turtles in Las Baulas National Marine Park. The Liberia airport (LIR) is just 75 km north, putting Tamarindo within five hours of Miami and making it the easiest beach landing in the country.

Riviera Maya's boho-chic capital — the only walled coastal Mayan ruins, perched on a cliff above turquoise Caribbean. Two Tulums coexist: the Pueblo (taco stands, hostels, real prices) and the Beach Hotel Zone (Instagram-famous palapa resorts at eye-watering rates). Cenotes everywhere — Gran Cenote, Dos Ojos, Sac Actun. Sian Ka'an Biosphere south, Coba Ruins inland. The new Maya Train and a brand-new Tulum airport opened late 2023.