Ilulissat has roughly a dozen hotels, guesthouses, and self-catering cabins for a town of 4,500 people. We've stayed here ourselves — at Cabin Jomsborg, a self-catering cabin sitting ten meters from the water, which turned out to be one of the best accommodation decisions we've made anywhere.

Every property in this guide has icefjord or Disko Bay views in some form. In a town built above a UNESCO World Heritage glacier, there is no such thing as a bad location — only different ways to experience it.

Barceloneta is fine. It's also where roughly four million people go every summer to share a towel-sized patch of sand and a view of someone's discarded Aperol Spritz cup. For everyone else — the people who want actual beach, actual quiet, and an actual reason to leave the city — the answer is a train ride south, a coastal drive north, or a commitment to the Costa Brava.

We live on the Garraf coast, right outside Sitges, so this isn't a list assembled from a search engine. These are the hotels we'd actually recommend to someone who asked us in person — organized around the same coastline we covered in our hidden beaches near Barcelona guide, so if you haven't decided which beach you want yet, that's the place to start.

We modified hiking plans twice on our last trip to the Faroe Islands because of wind. Not rain — wind. The trail was fine, the visibility was fine, but the gusts at the cliff edge were the kind that make you reconsider your absence of vertigo. We sat it out in the car, ate some dry fish and tried again. We had a plan B. And a plan C. That, more than anything else, is what hiking the Faroe Islands is actually like. Sure, it’s not as cold or crazy as neighboring Iceland, but Atlantic moody weather is real.

If you can work with that — stay flexible, check the weather obsessively, and genuinely enjoy the possibility that your plans will change — then the Faroes offer some of the best hiking in the North Atlantic. Accessible trails. Dramatic coastal scenery on almost every route. Elevation that rewards without making you cry (hello, Lofoten). And a scale that means you can do a couple of hikes in a day if the conditions cooperate.

What follows is our island-by-island breakdown of the hikes in the Faroe Islands we'd actually recommend — with the real distances, the current fee situation, and the ferry logistics.

Portugal does boutique hotels exceptionally well, and the reason is mostly architectural. There are centuries of convents, palaces, olive oil mills, quintas, and fishermen's houses to work with — buildings that already have bones and history and character built in. Personally, we prefer hotels with character to big, impersonal chains. If you’re like us, Portugal will be heaven for you! Indeed, the best boutique hotels in Portugal tend to be conversions: a former palace on a Lisbon hilltop, a 16th-century olive mill inside Évora's city walls, a clifftop estate in the Alentejo redesigned by an architect who understood and respected what was already there.

What follows is our region-by-region guide to the best boutique stays across Portugal — from the capital to the wild Atlantic coast. Where we have a full regional guide, we link to it rather than repeating ourselves. Where we don't, we go deeper.

The Faroe Islands have fewer hotels than almost anywhere else in the North Atlantic — and that's part of what makes staying here feel special. You're not choosing between interchangeable chains. You're choosing between a harbor-front hotel in the old capital, a turf-roofed guesthouse in a village of twelve people, or a cottage perched above a waterfall that drops straight into the ocean. The accommodation is part of the experience in a way it rarely is anywhere else, and we love that.

The flip side: options fill up fast, especially in summer. The islands see a lot of visitors for their size, and the best Faroe Islands hotels — particularly anything outside Tórshavn — often book out weeks or months in advance. Read this guide, decide where you want to be, and book early.

December in Rovaniemi is one of the most atmospheric things you can do in Europe. Snow so deep it swallows fence posts. Darkness that falls at 2pm and stays until 10am. Reindeer moving in slow single file through the forest. The northern lights ripping green across a sky you've never seen that dark. And a silence — an actual silence — that you feel in your chest.

The problem is that the internet has convinced most people that Christmas in Lapland means one specific thing: elves, a man in a red suit, and a theme park experience that costs a fortune and delivers considerably less magic than the landscape sitting five minutes outside it.

We're not here to tell you what to do. But we are here to be honest about what you're actually booking when you book "Christmas in Rovaniemi" — and what December in Finnish Lapland looks like when you strip the commercial layer back.

We've chased the northern lights in Iceland several times — and the single most important thing we learned is that timing is only half the equation. The other half is knowing how to read the conditions on the night itself and being willing to move when the forecast tells you to (well, and a bit of elf magic and luck too).

Most northern lights guides will tell you to go in January and cross your fingers. That's not wrong, but it's not the whole picture either. The best time to see the northern lights in Iceland depends on what you're optimising for — maximum darkness, best weather odds, equinox activity, or the current solar cycle — and the answer is different depending on which of those matters most to you.

This article is specifically about timing and forecasting. If you're still deciding whether Iceland is the right aurora destination for you at all, we've covered that in detail in our northern lights Iceland guide. If you're new to aurora hunting altogether, start with our northern lights for dummies guide first. And if you're ready to book and need hotel recommendations, go straight to our best northern lights hotels in Iceland. This piece sits between those two: it's for people who are going, and want to make the most of it.

Everything here is part of our northern lights hub — our full library of aurora guides covering destinations, gear, photography, and planning.

The Algarve everyone knows — the golden sea stacks, the crowded summer beaches, the all-inclusive resorts — is real. But it's a small part of a region that has cork oak forests, protected Atlantic coastline, Moorish architecture, wetland nature reserves, and some of the most characterful small hotels in Portugal.

The accommodation on this list exists across all of it. The best version of an Algarve trip (in our humble opinion) usually combines at least two of these areas: a few days in the backcountry west, a few days in the east near Tavira, and as much time as possible on the beaches in between.

Most people visit Sintra as a day trip from Lisbon. We get it — it's only 40 minutes by train, the palaces are right there, and the Instagram shots basically take themselves. But if you leave when the last bus goes, you miss what Sintra actually is.

Stay overnight and you get the village after the tour groups have gone. Cobblestone streets with no one on them. The fog rolling in off the Serra de Sintra as the light fades. The Pena Palace turning a deep orange in the last hour of sun. And, if you venture towards the sea, you’ll find sweeping ocean views all to yourself. A completely different place from the one 20,000 day-trippers saw.

The other thing nobody tells you: Sintra has some of the most characterful boutique accommodation in all of Portugal. Converted manor houses on century-old estates. Cliff-top guesthouses with rooms named after the Atlantic light. Former town halls turned into seven-suite hotels. The options are unique, and unlike Lisbon, they haven't been swallowed up by big chains yet.

Here's where to stay in Sintra, broken down by area.

The Alentejo is the kind of region that people stumble into without much of a plan and end up rearranging their whole trip around. Cork trees, bone-white hilltop villages, vineyards that stretch to the horizon. Pair it with the Costa Vicentina — the wild, protected coastline that runs south toward the Algarve — and you've got one of the most underrated stretches of Portugal. We absolutely fell in love with it!

The hotels tend to match the landscape. Converted farmhouses on 300-year-old estates. Low-slung whitewashed houses built into the Alentejo plain. Rural guesthouses where breakfast is local cheese, tomatoes, and bread still warm from the oven. Finding the right hotel in the Alentejo or along Costa Vicentina often means the whole trip falls into place around it.

We've split this guide by region, because the Alentejo interior and the coast are different trips (but are ideal when combined).

Portugal is one of those countries where the accommodation itself becomes part of the trip. You can find a hotel in Portugal that overlooks an Atlantic cliff, wake up to the sound of cork oaks in the Alentejo, or stumble into a surf lodge where the salt air never leaves. And you can do most of it without paying five-star prices — if you know where to look.

There are a lot of Portugal guides out there, but they all mention the same tourist spots. What follows is our by-region breakdown of where to stay in Portugal — the places we've stayed, the ones we'd book today, and the regions we think are seriously underrated.

Planning a Ring Road self-drive is one of those trips that feels straightforward on paper — one road, loop it, done — until you actually try to figure out where to sleep. Iceland's Route 1 runs 1,332 km around the entire island, and even the South Coast stretch alone — from Reykjavík east to Höfn, covering the waterfalls, the glaciers, and Jökulsárlón — takes the better part of a week if you're doing it properly (and as it deserves).

This guide covers exactly that section. We've organized it by driving segment, because when you're planning a road trip, what you actually need to know is where to sleep after each day's drive. One rule before we start: book the glacier lagoon area first. Before Vík, before Reykjavík, before anything. Fewest options, highest demand, fastest sellout. If you read nothing else, remember that.

All properties here are bookable via Booking.com. Several also appear in our dedicated northern lights hotels in Iceland guide — we've flagged those below, since this stretch of the South Coast is excellent aurora territory in winter.

Iceland is probably the most Googled northern lights destination on the planet. And honestly? There are good reasons for that — but also a few things the average aurora guide won't tell you. If you're deciding whether Iceland is the right choice for your northern lights trip, this is the honest version of that answer.

The short version: yes, Iceland is a legitimate aurora destination, and for most people it's a brilliant choice. But it comes with a specific set of trade-offs that are worth understanding before you book. Because if you're going solely to see the lights with the highest possible odds, Iceland isn't actually your best bet. If you're going to Iceland for the full experience — and you want the lights as a bonus that will make the whole thing extraordinary — it might be the best trip of your life.

There's a particular type of tourist attraction in Iceland that does the same thing: ambient music, a café serving overpriced skyr, and a few hundred people in matching robes shuffling between milky pools. They're great. The views are real. But after the third one, you start to wonder if you're visiting Iceland or an influencer's photo shoot studio.

Hvammsvík is different.

Eight natural geothermal pools cut directly into the North Atlantic shoreline of Hvalfjörður — Whale Fjord — about 56 kilometers from Reykjavík. At high tide, the lowest pools merge with the sea. There's no ambient playlist. No silica mud ceremony. No instructions to apply a complimentary face mask. Just warm water, cold air carrying salt and kelp from the fjord, mountains across the water, and — if you go on a quiet winter morning and time it right — almost nobody else there.

We went on exactly that morning. One of the better decisions we've made when choosing hot springs in Iceland.

There's a tunnel under Hvalfjörður that most people take without thinking twice. It shaves 42 kilometres off the drive north. Efficient and practical? Sure. And almost certainly the biggest navigational mistake you can make in West Iceland.

Drive around the fjord instead. And if you really want to do it properly, stay there.

Out of curiosity, I (Eli) drove around Hvalfjördur 15 years ago on my way to the Snæfellsnes peninsula and still remembered it. Quiet, empty, no tour buses, and cool road signs like “Blindhæð” and “Sheep crossing”. The kind of Icelandic landscape that makes you feel like the country is performing exclusively for you rather than for the forty people in matching rain jackets behind you at Geysir.

And this time, even though Iceland got way more (too?) popular, we still found exactly this: a 30-kilometre fjord flanked by mountains that drop straight into dark water, a sky that does something different every single hour of the day, and a cabin on a hillside that we didn't particularly want to leave: Brekka Retreat & Spa Suites.

There's a particular kind of overconfidence that comes with booking an igloo in Iceland. You picture yourself lying in a warm, transparent pod, a glass of something good in hand, the northern lights pulsing overhead like the sky has been switched to a setting nobody told you about. It looks incredible on Instagram. It looks incredible in your head.

But, obviously, Lady Aurora (and nature) doesn’t work on a schedule.

We stayed at Aurora Igloo South just outside the small town of Hella on Iceland's south coast, during a night of low KP and stubborn cloud cover. We didn't see the northern lights. What we did see was a gorgeous orange sunset, followed by the kind of star-filled sky you only get when you're far enough from anything to actually notice the dark. It wasn't what we'd planned. It was still worth every minute.

This is the honest version of that stay.

Most people experience Keflavík at approximately forty miles an hour. They land at KEF, get into a transfer bus, and move toward Reykjavík without a second look. The town slides past the window like the obligatory opening credits nobody reads. A petrol station. Some warehouses. Dark lava on both sides of the road.

It's an unfortunate habit.

We arrived at Hotel Keflavik in March, at the tail end of 17 days against Iceland's winter — frozen waterfalls, snowstorms, wind that had a very clear opinion about us being outside. We were tired in the way that active winter Iceland makes you tired, which is a specific, addictive kind of tired that involves sore legs, perpetually damp base layers, and a negotiated peace with the cold. The hotel was meant to be a convenient pre-flight stop. It turned into a proper, blissful ending to the trip.

Klaksvík is not where most people stay on their first Faroe Islands trip — and that’s exactly why it works so well.

Set in the northern islands, Klaksvík feels lived-in rather than curated. It’s calmer than Tórshavn, closer to some of the Faroes’ most dramatic landscapes (Kalsoy, anyone?), and surprisingly practical as a base if you want space, silence, and real access to the north.

We stayed at a lovely fishermen’s cabin in early September and absolutely loved every minute we spent in this region.

Every stay below is:

• somewhere we’d genuinely consider staying

• chosen for location, comfort, and realism

We’ve mixed hotels, apartments, and cabins, because in Klaksvík, the right choice depends heavily on how you travel.

There aren’t many hotels in Abisko — and that’s exactly why we love it!
You’re staying in the middle of a national park under one of the clearest aurora skies on Earth. No city glow, no chaos, just snow, mountains and open sky.

Keep reading to find your perfect Abisko hotel — we promise you an unforgettable Swedish Lapland experience!

And if you’re here for the aurora, you’ll find our best proven tips, the science, season-by-season breakdowns, and photography settings in our full Northern Lights Hub.

You don’t come to Svalbard for fancy hotels — you come for silence, polar light, and the shock of realizing humans aren’t the main characters here.

But when the wind howls outside and you’re sipping hot chocolate under a reindeer pelt? Comfort matters.