Travel

Finally, it looks like we might actually be able to go on holiday in Europe again. I’ve been overseas a few times since this pesky covid business began, but it’s always been for work, not leisure, and it’s always been a nuisance: tests on the way out, tests on the way back and yet more tests when you get home… However now travel restrictions are loosening up, a trip to the Continent no longer feels quite so fraught, and that magnificent indulgence – a short-haul city-break – seems like a practical option once more. So where to go? Well, you’re bound to have your own favourite destinations - but if you fancy trying somewhere new, here are a few of mine. They’re all popular with locals, but they’re not overrun with sightseers.

Those looking for ancient culture will find it in abundance on Fuerteventura – a canary island known more for its beaches than its heritage. I’d ended up in a hostel run by an Italian couple deep in the island's outback. Looming over the hostel was the holy mountain of Tindaya, on whose summit indigenous islanders once left their dead. It also has the most important set of podomorph engravings in the world — 300 pairs of foot-shaped engravings, the left and right soles with attendant digits flush together, carved into the rock. These simple and rather touching imprints struck a particular chord with me after my extended Camino across the Iberian Peninsula following the steps of previous pilgrims.

Life in the world’s newest republic is sweet. It’s peak season in Barbados, and another wave of Covid hasn’t stopped the rum sundowners flowing on the Caribbean island’s sugar-sand beaches. Given half the chance, many of us might well prefer to spend January wafting between beachfront restaurants and sun loungers, as the packed front-end of planes heading there during December have proved. Many of the island’s predominantly British holiday home owners have been heading to their properties on the West Coast of the island – and there will be no doubt a few villas changing hands too.

Holiday makers tend to divide themselves into two camps – those seeking culture and those for whom a holiday is not a holiday without a chance to flop on the beach or by the pool (with a good book and a cocktail for company). The good news is that in Italy you rarely have to sacrifice the former for the latter. Travel abroad has been slowly cranking into action again since September. And, whilst Omicron might have put a dampener on immediate holiday plans there's still plenty of opportunity to dream about next summer. Fully vaccinated travellers are currently allowed into Italy without the need to isolate which bodes well for a 2022 getaway.

As winter drags on and on, and warm sunny days become distant memories, discussions in our family always turn to summer holidays. We only go away together once a year so our trip has to tick all the boxes. My daughter won’t fly long haul, my son craves excitement, I like exploring places that are off the beaten track and my wife just wants to drop and flop. It’s a tricky combination but, as we’ve found out down the years, there are plenty of European seaside towns in unexpected places – places where you can do all the usual seaside stuff and still have a few adventures while you’re there. Here are our family favourites, plus a couple of offbeat resorts I’ve ended up in on my travels for The Spectator.

Readers of a certain age might recall the days when people 'went for a drive' as a form of pleasure. Yes, as unbelievable as it sounds now that combustion-engined cars are demonised, fuel prices are at an all-time high and unwittingly straying into a 'low emission zone' can cost you the price of a plane ticket to New York, there really was a time when people got behind the wheel and went somewhere simply for the joy of it. And do you know what? I still do. Yes. I am shameless. I still love that feeling of slipping into the driving seat, shutting the door and heading off on a vehicular adventure.I don't mean, I hasten to add, some soul-destroying commute into London in which every tedious mile is overshadowed by thoughts of Sadiq Khan's looming visage.

Burgh Island certainly knows how to make an entrance. As you descend the hill at dusk into Bigbury-on-Sea the white hotel drinks up all the light. Like a flashy piece of costume jewellery, it’s the only thing you notice on the skyline. But, then again, it's used to making good first impressions. Despite its diminutive size, the island appears in Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun before any of the novel’s characters, upstaging even Hercule Poirot. The reader is never in any doubt that the book's murder will hinge entirely on ‘the little windswept gull-haunted promontory – cut off from land at each high tide’ and the ‘comfortable and most exclusive hotel’ on its most northerly shore.

Contrary to the title of this article, do not spend 48 hours in Rome on your first attempt. Unless you have legs of steel, high levels of determination and a desire for non-stop sightseeing. The two pivots about which the city’s history turns – the Vatican and the Roman Forum – are best taken a day each and visited early, fuelled by €1 coffees and sweet, crumbly pasticcini off sticky local bar counters: 48 hours, done. But to focus on these titanic monuments of European history alone is to miss the real chatter of the city: couples meeting for Monday drinks by the Ponte Sisto, watching the sun go down on the Tiber from the Isola Tiberina, lingering under the vaults of (some) of Rome’s more than 900 churches.

Two weeks before Covid began to hit Europe, I stood in the Basilica Cistern beneath Istanbul, steadily getting dripped on. Built during the reign of the Emperor Justinian I in 532, just before another deadly pandemic – the plague of Justinian – the cistern lies beneath Istanbul’s tourist hotspot, and despite it being damp, dark and having stands of 007 merchandise at its entrance and exit, it is one of the most enchanting places in a city that has captivated its visitors for over a thousand years. 'If the Earth were a single state,' Napoleon once pronounced, 'Istanbul would be its capital,’ and upon visiting you begin to understand why.

Birds eye shots of Aston Martins cruising along hairpin roads, steamy scenes on chalk-white beaches: the choice of James Bond filming locations has the power to put new holiday destinations on the map. Here we round up the best places to visit from No Time To Die - and rediscover old favourites from the archive. Puglia, Italy Some of the most nail biting scenes in the latest film involve Bond jumping from an aqueduct into a ravine to escape his pursuers then hurtling round the sidestreets of an ancient Italian town on a motorbike. Most of the scenes are shot around the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Matera in southern Italy. Known as The City of Caves, it sits on a rocky outcrop with troglodyte settlements carved into its base.

The Iranians, here for the booze and the vaccine, are impossible to miss. But Armenians reminisce that, only a few years ago, you couldn’t throw a stone in Yerevan, their zestful, rhubarb-hued capital, without injuring a Californian or a New Yorker. Americans, they say, used to be ubiquitous in Armenia. This is a claim animated more by nostalgia than fact. The truth is, even prior to the pandemic and last autumn’s horrific war with Azerbaijan and Turkey, Americans accounted for only a fraction of the tourists who flocked to Armenia: in 2019, only 63,000 among the nearly two million foreign tourists, and a majority of those members of the Armenian diaspora. I mention this to say that Americans really are missing out.