Alta gets called the northern lights capital of Norway for a reason. Dark skies, low light pollution once you're a bit outside of town, and an aurora season that runs from late September through early April. And, as usual with northern lights, where you sleep matters. This is a rundown of the best northern lights hotels in Alta to optimize your chances.

We've watched the sunset from Mount Aksla, hiked on Runde bird island, tried the floating sauna Svai when the sea was 4 degrees, and almost stayed forever deep in the Summøre Alps & fjords.

Ålesund, Norway, definitely rewards that kind of wandering, and where you stay changes the trip. A harborside room in the Art Nouveau center is a different experience than a night an hour inland with a fjord out the window! Here's our selection of hotels in Ålesund, and in the surrounding Sunnmøre Alps and fjords.

Vancouver Island, Canada, has two different kinds of great stay. There's the hotel or lodge that does everything for you, and there's the cabin or cottage where you cook your own dinner, light your own fire, and fall asleep to the sound of the waves instead of a hallway. This is our selection of the best hotels and cabins on Vancouver Island.

Lofoten isn't one destination; it's a chain of islands strung together by bridges and a single road. And where you sleep decides how much of it you see, especially if you have a short amount of time. Base yourself wrong and you'll spend half your trip driving back and forth for dinner. Base yourself right, and everything from the Reinebringen sunrise to the last ferry out is fifteen minutes away. This is a village-by-village breakdown of where to stay in Lofoten, built around what each area is good for.

For the full list of specific hotels and resorts across the islands, our Best Hotels & Resorts in Lofoten guide has the complete picks; this one is about choosing the right base first. We stayed at a few!

Every "best glass igloo" list in Finland points you toward the same photos. At Penguin Trampoline, we're not going to pretend we've slept in every one of them, because we haven't. We experienced the aurora igloo concept in Iceland, we visited the Arctic SnowHotel property (more on that below), and we dug into the rest property by property.

Here's what's different between them and what tends to move the price, and we also broke them down by region because we understand it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience and you want to get it right!

We've visited the ICEHOTEL, Swedish Lapland, seven times, and it's a different icy museum every time! The whole thing melts back into the Torne River each spring and gets rebuilt from scratch the next winter by artists from all over the world. We’ve visited other ice hotels in other countries, but this one is admittedly our favorite.

Sure, it’s pricey (and definitely worth it). But if you’re on a budget, you don't have to sleep on ice to visit. Here's the quick version, then the details. Ice ice baby!

Every Finland aurora hotel roundup eventually points you to the same three glass igloos. Fair enough, they're famous for a reason. But Finnish Lapland runs from Levi in the west to Nellim on the Russian border, and the right bed for watching the sky depends more on which stretch of that region you're in than on whichever photo sold you on the trip in the first place.

We haven't slept in every single property on this list. What we did do is stay in one of these ourselves, visit most of the rest, and quietly drop a few famous names that don't hold up once you look past the marketing photos. Here's what's actually worth booking, split by what you want out of the stay: a glass roof over the bed, an ice hotel experience, a proper wilderness lodge, or a resort with enough going on to fill the hours between aurora checks.

We live in Sitges, Spain, so this list isn't pulled from a search engine. We only included hotels that are consistently well reviewed by our friends or that we personally visited or stayed at.

One thing worth saying upfront: Sitges is one of the most LGBTQ+-friendly towns in Europe, and every hotel below openly welcomes gay travelers. It's not a separate category here, it's just the baseline. If you specifically want to be walking distance from Sin Street and the gay beach at Bassa Rodona, we've flagged which picks put you closest.

We split our time on Senja across different corners of the island, and the conclusion was fast: everything is spectacular, close to a fabulous hiking trail, and each accommodation is part of the experience.

Norway's second-largest island sits about two to three hours from Tromsø by car and ferry. The question isn't whether Senja is worth the detour. It is, and we’re pretty confident you’ll agree. The question is which part of it you want as your base.

This guide covers the best hotels in Senja, including the ones we stayed at, plus one bonus option just outside the island that's too well-positioned to leave out.

Tromsø isn't one place to stay — it's five, and the one you pick changes the trip. A central hotel on Tromsøya means walking to everything, but a cabin on Kvaløya means darker skies and a completely different pace. Tromsdalen puts you next to the Arctic Cathedral with a quieter feel than the city. Håkøya Island offers a level of seclusion that's hard to find that close to an airport. And further out — Sommarøy, Malangen, Lyngen — it’s a whole different universe.

This guide covers all of them, with our personal picks at every price point. For aurora-specific recommendations, see our dedicated best hotels in Tromsø for the northern lights guide.

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.

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.