Where to go: Summer holidays 2027

Azores

Nine volcanic islands in the mid-Atlantic, about four hours from London, where UK visitors come for crater lakes, hot springs, whale watching and lush hiking country rather than beach lounging.

Albania

Ionian beaches, Ottoman hill towns and some of the Balkans' wildest mountains all fit inside a country smaller than Belgium.

Bulgaria

Rila Monastery's striped arcades and frescoed church sit deep in pine-covered mountains, and Plovdiv's old town stacks National Revival mansions above a Roman theatre still used for concerts.

Montenegro

Montenegro squeezes fjord-like bays, Venetian-era towns, deep canyons and high limestone massifs into an area smaller than Northern Ireland.

Cyprus

Look beyond the resort strips and Cyprus offers Roman mosaics at Paphos, frescoed Byzantine chapels in the Troodos pine forests and a capital divided by a UN buffer zone since 1974.

Greece

Athens' Acropolis has watched over the city for nearly 2,500 years, Santorini's caldera is one of the Mediterranean's great views, and Meteora's monasteries perch on pillars of rock in Thessaly.

Madeira

Portugal's Atlantic island is a year-round walking and sunshine destination: Funchal rarely drops below 19°C by day in winter and seldom tops 27°C in summer.

Crete

Greece's largest island packs Minoan palaces, Venetian harbour towns, the Samaria Gorge and some of the country's best beaches into one long, mountainous strip about four hours from London.

Malta

Malta squeezes 7,000 years of history into an archipelago smaller than the Isle of Wight: megalithic temples older than the pyramids, the honey-stoned fortress capital of the Knights of St John, and Caravaggio's largest painting.

Corfu & the Ionian Islands

The greenest of the Greek islands, strung down Greece's west coast: Corfu's Venetian old town and olive-clad north-east, tiny Paxos, Lefkada's white cliffs, Kefalonia's Myrtos Beach and Zakynthos's Shipwreck Cove.

Portugal

Portugal fits a great deal into a narrow strip of Atlantic coast.

Croatia

With nearly 1,800 km of mainland coast and more than a thousand islands and islets, Croatia is Europe's great island-hopping country, with Roman ruins and Venetian towns between swims.

Kosovo

Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008 and has Europe's youngest population, is one of the continent's cheapest places to travel.

Poland

Some of Europe's best-preserved old towns sit alongside sobering 20th-century history in Poland.

Slovakia

Slovakia fits a great deal into a small country: the granite peaks and glacial lakes of the High Tatras, the vast ruin of Spiš Castle, medieval mining towns and Bratislava's castle hill above the Danube, an hour from Vienna.

Slovenia

Slovenia packs Alpine peaks, karst caves, a Venetian-era coast and wine country into an area slightly smaller than Wales, with almost everything within two hours of Ljubljana.

Germany

Germany is far more varied than its beer-hall image: Berlin's layered 20th-century history and nightlife, Bavaria's Alpine villages and Neuschwanstein, castles above the Rhine and Moselle vineyards, and Hamburg's port.

Andorra

This 468 km² Pyrenean co-principality between France and Spain squeezes more than 200 km of pistes, Romanesque chapels and high glacial lakes into a handful of steep valleys.

Austria

Imperial grandeur meets serious mountains in Austria.

Belgium

Flemish masters, medieval belfries and a serious beer and chocolate culture fill a country small enough that most cities are an hour or so from Brussels by train.

Ireland

Ireland's west coast delivers the drama: the Cliffs of Moher above the Atlantic, the mountains and lakes of Kerry, Connemara's bogs and the Aran Islands.

Finland

Finland is a land of forest, lakes by the tens of thousands and extremes of light: summer nights that never quite get dark and winters lit by the aurora.

Eswatini

Eswatini is one of Africa's smallest countries and one of the world's last absolute monarchies, with royal ceremonies such as Umhlanga still central to national life.

Uganda

Uganda packs nearly half the world's mountain gorillas, Kibale's chimpanzees, Ishasha's tree-climbing lions and Murchison Falls into a green, lake-studded country roughly the size of the UK. Gorilla permits cost around half Rwanda's, Jinja's Nile rapids add white-water rafting, and the Rwenzori Mountains offer serious high-altitude trekking.

Mauritius

Mauritius pairs turquoise lagoons and coral-fringed beaches with a mountainous interior of gorges, waterfalls and tea estates, and a culture blending Indian, African, French and Chinese roots.

Canada

Canada is built for road trips and big landscapes: the turquoise lakes of Banff and Jasper, the thunder of Niagara Falls, French-speaking Québec City and the cliff roads of Cape Breton.

Colombia

Cartagena's walled old town glows at sunset, coffee farms in the Andes show you every step from bean to cup, and the Caribbean coast hides Tayrona's palm-backed coves and the jungle trek to the Lost City.

Peru

Watching dawn break over Machu Picchu is one of the great payoffs in world travel, but Peru is far more than one ruin: Cusco's Inca stonework, the Sacred Valley's markets, Lake Titicaca's reed islands and Lima's restaurants all compete for your time.

Rwanda

An hour with mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park is genuinely once-in-a-lifetime, and Kigali has become one of Africa's cleanest, most orderly capitals.

Kenya

Kenya is where the modern safari took shape: wildebeest plunge across the Mara River, elephants roam beneath Kilimanjaro's snows at Amboseli, and Nairobi has lions within sight of its skyline.

Indonesia

Indonesia is more than 17,000 islands strung along the equator: Bali's temples and rice terraces, Java's volcanoes and the Buddhist monument of Borobudur, Komodo's dragons, and coral reefs in Raja Ampat richer than almost anywhere on Earth.

Malawi

Lake Malawi runs along much of the country's eastern edge, a freshwater inland sea whose clear water holds hundreds of colourful cichlid species found nowhere else.

Bali

Bali mixes surf beaches and clifftop beach clubs with Hindu temples, rice terraces and volcano treks, and its dry season from May to September lines up neatly with the UK summer holidays.

Madagascar

Madagascar has been isolated for so long that most of its wildlife exists nowhere else: more than 100 kinds of lemur, chameleons small enough to sit on a fingertip, and baobabs lining red-earth roads.