City guides

Every guide here is built for walking. Not a list of forty things you will never get to — a route you can actually follow, with the time between stops, the days places are shut, and an honest word when something famous is not worth the queue.

They are written the way you would tell a friend where to go. Each one carries a byline and a date, so you can see who wrote it and when it was last checked. Where someone lives in the city, they write it. Where nobody does yet, our own editors do — and we say so, rather than inventing a local to sign it. Every guide is broken into numbered stops, with the practical part (what it costs, when it opens, what is free) kept clear of the story, so it survives being read on a phone at a tram stop.

Each guide is also a route inside the Souvenirs app. The stops you read about here are the stops on the map, and every one of them has a souvenir waiting: a collectible coin for that place, with the story behind it. Read the guide before you go, walk it with the app in your pocket, and you come home with a collection instead of a camera roll.

No affiliate links, no paid placements, nothing padded to fill a page. If a guide sends you somewhere, it is because it is worth the walk. New cities join as we finish them — each one built the same way.