The 20 Best Places to Travel in 2026: Where the World Is Calling You This Year

Best Places to Travel for 2026: 20 Places the World Is Talking About

A Global Edit of the Destinations That Will Define How We Travel in 2026 — From a Polynesian Lagoon Ringed by Blue to Chile’s Gaucho Heartland, Japan’s Earthquake Recovery, and Europe’s Newest Cultural Capital

The year’s best travel list is not simply a catalogue of beautiful places — it is a record of the world’s mood: where it is healing, where it is celebrating, where it quietly opened a door it has never opened before. BBC Travel’s journalists spread across five continents and came back with 20 destinations that share a single quality none of the obvious choices possess — they are exactly where the world needs you to go right now, for reasons that will feel obvious the moment you arrive and irreplaceable the moment you leave. These are the places that earn the phrase “why didn’t I go sooner.” The only reasonable response is to ensure you don’t ask it again in 2027.

1. Abu Dhabi, UAE

Why Visit in 2026: The Emirates’ Cultural Decade Peaks

Abu Dhabi has been building toward this moment for twenty years — the quiet, considered cultural rival to Dubai’s speed and spectacle finally arriving at the point where its institutions match its ambitions. The Zayed National Museum — the long-anticipated showcase of the UAE’s founding history, designed by Norman Foster — is opening its doors, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is completing the Saadiyat Island Cultural District that has promised to be the most ambitious concentration of world-class cultural architecture outside a European capital. The emirate that built the Louvre Abu Dhabi inside a dome that makes rain from light is now building the Guggenheim beside it, and the combination of both institutions operational simultaneously represents a genuinely new chapter in what Middle Eastern cultural ambition can deliver to the international traveler in a single visit.

What Makes It Unmissable

Beyond the museum openings, Abu Dhabi delivers what Dubai’s full calendar never quite allows — space, silence, and scale that feels genuinely desert-rooted rather than commercially manufactured. The Rub’ al Khali (Empty Quarter) excursions available from the emirate cross into the world’s largest sand desert, the Qasr Al Watan palace interior is among the most sumptuously decorated public buildings in the Arab world, and the Corniche waterfront at dawn, when the dhows are still moving on the gulf and the city’s towers are beginning to catch the light, is the Abu Dhabi that no photograph has adequately represented.​

2. Algeria

Why Visit in 2026: The Mediterranean’s Most Untouched Shore

Algeria is the largest country in Africa, a civilization layering Berber, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French histories onto a landscape of Saharan dunes, Mediterranean coast, and High Atlas mountain plateau — and it remains almost entirely unknown to international tourists because decades of political caution and visa complexity kept it off the circuit that swallowed Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt. That is changing in 2026, as improved visa access for EU and UK nationals and a growing inbound tourism infrastructure make the country’s extraordinary monuments — the Roman ruins at Timgad and Djémila (UNESCO World Heritage Sites that are more complete than most comparable sites in Italy and France), the Casbah of Algiers (the densely packed Ottoman-era hilltop city above the Mediterranean), and the otherworldly red-sand formations of the Ahaggar Mountains — accessible in ways they have not been for a generation.

What Makes It Unmissable

The Tassili n’Ajjer plateau in the Algerian Sahara contains the world’s largest open-air collection of prehistoric cave art — 15,000 engravings and paintings on the sandstone walls of a mountain plateau that rises from the desert in formations of cathedral-scale isolated rock towers — a UNESCO World Heritage Site visited by a fraction of the travelers who arrive at Lascaux in France or Altamira in Spain to see art of comparable antiquity. For travelers whose definition of discovery requires genuinely uncharted ground, Algeria is the last great Mediterranean frontier.​

3. Colchagua Valley, Chile

Why Visit in 2026: South America’s Wine Country Finds Its World Stage

The Colchagua Valley — 200 kilometers south of Santiago in the Andean foothills of central Chile — is where South American viticulture has made its strongest argument yet that the new world of wine has outgrown the label. The valley’s Carménère and Cabernet Sauvignon production, from volcanic soils at altitude with Andean snowmelt irrigation, has been producing wines that international critics are increasingly ranking alongside Napa Valley and Bordeaux first-growths at a fraction of the price — and the wine tourism infrastructure of estate restaurants, hacienda hotels, and horseback riding through the vines between tastings has matured into something that delivers the full Argentine Mendoza experience with the specific Chilean character that altitude, Andean backdrop, and huaso (Chilean cowboy) culture give it.

What Makes It Unmissable

The Santa Cruz region within the valley anchors a cultural experience alongside the viticultural one — the Museo de Colchagua, consistently rated among the best museums in South America, holds the most comprehensive collection of pre-Columbian artifacts in Chile alongside Chilean independence and colonial history displays that contextualize the landscape’s human depth. The combination of world-class wine, a working gaucho culture, Andean mountain views, and one of the continent’s best regional museums in a single valley makes Colchagua the most complete wine country destination in South America.​

4. Cook Islands

Why Visit in 2026: Polynesia Before It Becomes What Bora Bora Already Is

The Cook Islands — 15 islands scattered across the South Pacific north of New Zealand, self-governing in free association with New Zealand — possess the specific combination of physical beauty, cultural integrity, and accessibility that the travel industry is always promising and rarely delivering: the lagoon of Aitutaki is genuinely among the most beautiful bodies of water on earth, a turquoise expanse of coral-sand shallows ringed by motu (islets) with the white sand beaches and palm silhouettes that constitute the collective human imagination of what a tropical island looks like at its Platonic ideal. The Cook Islands Maori culture — distinct from New Zealand Maori but sharing its Pacific genealogy, expressed in dance, weaving, drumming, and the pareu fabric tradition — is woven into every element of island life with the ease of a culture that did not abandon its practices to attract tourists but maintained them as daily life and then found tourists arriving to witness that.

What Makes It Unmissable

One Foot Island (Tapuaetai) in the Aitutaki lagoon is the islet that exists as the specific proof that the best places on earth really do look exactly like the photograph — a crescent of perfect white sand in a lagoon of turquoise so clear you can count the fish from the shore — accessible by boat from Aitutaki and operated with a post office stamp that has become its own pilgrimage for travelers who want their passport to carry evidence of the world’s beauty. The Cross-Island Track hike on Rarotonga through the cloud forest interior, past waterfalls to the Te Rua Manga (The Needle) rock pinnacle at the island’s heart, adds the adventure dimension that the lagoon’s invitation to do nothing all day consistently delays.

5. Costa Rica

Why Visit in 2026: The Country That Proved Sustainable Tourism Works

Costa Rica has been making its environmental argument for 40 years — dedicating 27 percent of national territory to protected reserves and national parks, eliminating commercial hunting, maintaining forest cover while the rest of Central America was losing it — and 2026 is the year the argument has gathered enough international attention to make the infrastructure required to experience it at depth available at every budget level. The Osa Peninsula on the southern Pacific coast — containing the Corcovado National Park, described by National Geographic as “the most biologically intense place on Earth,” home to tapirs, pumas, all four species of Costa Rican monkeys, scarlet macaws, and the largest colony of wild scarlet macaws in Central America — remains the country’s definitive nature experience for travelers willing to reach it.

What Makes It Unmissable

The Nicoya Peninsula has earned the designation of one of the world’s five Blue Zones — regions where people live measurably longer than the global average, attributed to diet, community structure, physical activity, and purpose — and the specific wellness tourism that this designation attracts has seeded a network of yoga retreats, organic farms, and mindful travel infrastructure that the rest of the Blue Zone regions (Sardinia, Okinawa, Ikaria, Loma Linda) do not match for visitor accessibility. The Arenal Volcano hot springs, the Monteverde Cloud Forest, and the Tortuguero canals (a Caribbean coast waterway where nesting sea turtles arrive from May through October in numbers that remain among the world’s most significant) complete a country that manages to hold world-class nature, wellness infrastructure, and biological diversity in a territory smaller than the state of West Virginia.​

6. Hebrides, Scotland

Why Visit in 2026: The North Atlantic Archipelago That Rewrites Your Definition of Wild

The Outer Hebrides — a 200-kilometer chain of islands off the northwest coast of Scotland, separated from the mainland by the Minch and from the Arctic by diminishing distance — hold a landscape of a specific quality that no other part of the British Isles approaches: the machair (a low-lying coastal grassland unique to northwest Scotland and Ireland, covered in wildflowers from May to July), the Neolithic standing stones of Calanais (Callanish) on Lewis (erected 5,000 years ago in alignments that correspond to the lunar calendar and that archaeologists are still interpreting), and the light of the North Atlantic that painters and photographers have been traveling specifically to capture since the 19th century.

What Makes It Unmissable

Harris Tweed — the only cloth in the world legally defined by its place of manufacture, hand-woven by islanders in their homes on the Isle of Harris — is available at weaver’s workshops where the purchase is a transaction with the specific loom, hand, and home that produced the cloth rather than with an intermediary. The St Kilda archipelago — the most remote point of the British Isles, a world heritage site that held Britain’s most isolated community until its evacuation in 1930 — is accessible by boat trip from Harris in summer, weather permitting, for an encounter with emptiness and ancient habitation that nothing in mainland Britain approximates. The NC500 (North Coast 500) road circuit along Scotland’s northern coast brings the Hebrides into a broader driving itinerary that the Scottish tourism board has developed into the most celebrated road trip in UK travel since the route was mapped in 2015.

7. Ishikawa, Japan

Why Visit in 2026: Travel That Heals as Much as It Discovers

On January 1, 2024, the Noto Peninsula Earthquake struck Ishikawa Prefecture on Japan’s Sea of Japan coast — a 7.6 magnitude event that devastated communities in the northern peninsula, disrupted the centuries-old craft traditions of Wajima lacquerware and sake production that had defined the region’s cultural identity, and left the broader prefecture navigating the specific challenge of maintaining tourist arrivals that the economy needed while parts of the north were still in recovery. BBC Travel’s selection of Ishikawa for 2026 is explicitly an act of solidarity — a recognition that traveling to a recovering destination is not disaster tourism but one of the most direct ways that international visitors can contribute to a community’s economic and cultural restoration.

What Makes It Unmissable

Kanazawa, Ishikawa’s main city, holds the Kenroku-en Garden — one of Japan’s three great traditional gardens, across the seasons a landscape of plum and cherry blossom, iris, summer green, autumn maple, and winter snow-covered pine branches propped by bamboo supports (yukitsuri) in a garden management tradition that combines horticultural precision with aesthetic philosophy — and the Higashi Chaya geisha district, a preserved Edo-period entertainment quarter of wooden latticed townhouses where geisha still perform for guests in the same buildings constructed two centuries ago. The Don’t Stop Noto Sake community initiative supporting earthquake-hit breweries now back in operation allows travelers to drink sake brewed with the specific cultural intelligence of the Noto coastline, knowing that the glass in hand is part of a community’s recovery.

8. Komodo Islands, Indonesia

Why Visit in 2026: The Mesozoic World Still Functioning as Designed

The Komodo National Park — a UNESCO World Heritage Site covering three major islands (Komodo, Rinca, and Padar) and 26 smaller ones in the Lesser Sunda Islands between Lombok and Flores — holds the last wild population of Komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis), the world’s largest living lizards, growing to 3 meters and 70 kilograms, hunting deer and buffalo through the dry savannah landscape in a predatory ecology that has been operating since the Pliocene epoch and that the islands’ isolation from the mainland has preserved with a completeness impossible anywhere more connected. A ranger-accompanied walk through Komodo or Rinca delivers one of the genuine wildlife encounters remaining in the world — the encounter with an apex predator the size of a large crocodile, moving through open country at 20 km/h when motivated, that your ranger’s forked stick is your only physical deterrent against, which is simultaneously more and less reassuring than it sounds.

What Makes It Unmissable

Padar Island’s viewpoint — a steep 30-minute trail to the ridge summit that delivers a panoramic view over three distinct-colored bays (black sand, white sand, and pink sand beaches visible simultaneously from a single high point) — is one of the most distinctively beautiful views in Southeast Asia and the photograph that has made the Komodo National Park recognizable globally from an angle that contains no dragons. The Pink Beach (Pantai Merah) at the island of Komodo itself — one of only seven pink-sand beaches in the world, the color produced by crushed red coral mixed with the white sand — adds a coastal color experience that the region’s reptilian fame consistently overshadows.​

9. Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico

Why Visit in 2026: The Original Baja, Before Los Cabos Was a Word

Loreto sits on the Gulf of California coast of Baja California Sur, 500 kilometers north of Los Cabos, and is the place that Baja was before development found it — a colonial town of Mission-era architecture (the Misión de Nuestra Señora de Loreto, the first permanent settlement of the Californias, founded in 1697 and still standing in the original plaza), whale-watching waters that the Gulf of California’s protected marine reserve status has made among the most reliable in the world, and an outdoor sports infrastructure built around kayaking, fishing, and hiking the Sierra de la Giganta mountains behind the town rather than the resort-service economy that dominates the cape.

What Makes It Unmissable

The Espíritu Santo Island accessible by boat from Loreto Bay delivers the specific animal encounter that makes a trip genuinely unforgettable and not replicable: a colony of California sea lions whose adults have become habituated to snorkelers in the shallow bays, resulting in the experience of being approached by wild sea lions who approach you with the curiosity of domestic dogs and the agility of professional gymnasts in water that is simultaneously warm enough to swim comfortably and clear enough to see the sandy bottom ten meters below. The gray whale nursery lagoons of Baja — accessible from Loreto as day trips in season (January–April) — are the only place in the world where gray whale mothers and calves consistently approach small boats for human contact, a behavior so unusual and so consistent that marine biologists have been studying it for four decades without a settled explanation.​

10. Montenegro

Why Visit in 2026: The Most Beautiful Country Turning 20 Years Old

Montenegro becomes one of the world’s youngest sovereign nations in 2026 — declaring independence from the Serbia and Montenegro federation on June 3, 2006, making 2026 its 20th anniversary as an independent state — and this coming-of-age moment is the specific reason why 2026 is the year to see a country whose natural credentials have always been extraordinary but whose political and economic maturity is now catching up. The Bay of Kotor in the south — a dramatically fjord-like bay where limestone mountains descend almost vertically into navigable saltwater, the medieval walled city of Kotor at its eastern end — is the specific combination of landscape drama, cultural depth, and scale that makes it among the most visually striking single landscapes in Europe at the price point of a country that has not yet synchronized its currency with its ambitions.​

What Makes It Unmissable

The Durmitor National Park in the north — a UNESCO World Heritage biosphere covering a karst plateau of glacial lakes, the Tara River Canyon (the deepest river canyon in Europe at 1,300 meters, deeper than the Grand Canyon in certain sections), and the ski resorts of Žabljak — completes a country that holds UNESCO Heritage, European coastal record, and Alpine wilderness simultaneously in a territory roughly the size of Connecticut. The Sveti Stefan penin — a medieval village on an islet connected to the mainland by a causeway, converted into a luxury Aman resort but still accessible as a beach and photographic destination from the public shore — is the single most recognizable image in Montenegrin tourism and the image that most travelers, when they finally see it in person, acknowledge has been accurately represented.​

11. Oregon Coast, USA

Why Visit in 2026: America’s Pacific Edge at Its Most Dramatically American

The Oregon Coast runs for 362 miles from the Columbia River at the Washington border to California’s redwood country in the south — a shoreline of sea stacks, tide pools, lighthouse headlands, whale migration corridors, Dungeness crab harbors, and the specific Oregon light (grey, diffused, oceanic, simultaneously moodier and more saturated in color than California’s sun) that Ansel Adams found less photograph-worthy and that every subsequent landscape photographer has found more compelling. The entire coast is public land — Oregon’s 1967 Beach Bill guarantees public access to every inch of tidal coastline in the state, making it the only US coast where the concept of a private beach does not legally exist.

What Makes It Unmissable

The whale watching season on the Oregon Coast concentrates two distinct gray whale migrations — the southward migration (December–January) and the northward return (March–May) — in waters close enough to shore that the blows are visible from the cliff viewpoints above the beach without binoculars. The historic lighthouses at Heceta Head, Cape Blanco (the most westerly point in the contiguous United States), and Yaquina Bay mark a coastal heritage of maritime navigation that the Pacific coast’s economic history depended on, and the lighthouse keeper residences now operating as overnight accommodation represent the specific American travel genre of sleeping in the specific building that served the specific function that the landscape history required.

12. Oulu, Finland

Why Visit in 2026: Europe’s Arctic Cultural Capital Has Its Year

Oulu is Finland’s fifth-largest city, located 100 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle on the Gulf of Bothnia, and in 2026 it is one of the two European Capitals of Culture — sharing the honor with Trenčín in Slovakia — which means a year-long programming schedule of outdoor performances, art installations, cultural festivals, and the specific curatorial ambition of a city that has spent years preparing for the international attention that the designation brings. The Arctic Food Lab — a dedicated program of special dinners and tastings celebrating Nordic flavors at their most full-on, from reindeer and cloudberry to fermented arctic herbs and smoked Baltic herring — is the culinary event that food-focused travelers should specifically plan around, a gastronomic argument that the extreme north of Europe has a cuisine as specific and sophisticated as any other regional tradition in the continent.

What Makes It Unmissable

The Climate Clock installation — a citywide open-air gallery in which Finnish artists have collaborated with climate scientists to create works about nature, time, and ecological change positioned throughout Oulu’s urban landscape — converts the city into a contemporary art environment where the gallery walls are the streets themselves. The Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) over the Oulu waterfront and the surrounding snow-covered countryside from November through March add the natural spectacle that the cultural programming calendar sits within, making Oulu the specific 2026 destination where Arctic nature and European cultural celebration are simultaneously and unusually available in the same city during the same trip.

13. Philadelphia, USA

Why Visit in 2026: America’s First City Turns 250

Philadelphia marks the 250th anniversary of American independence in 2026 — the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed in July 1776, where the Constitutional Convention produced the framework of American democracy, where the Liberty Bell was cast and hung and cracked and preserved as the physical evidence of a founding moment — with a year-long program of celebrations, exhibitions, and commemorations that the US government has designated as the semiquincentennial and that the city has been planning with an ambition commensurate with the weight of the occasion. For international travelers whose engagement with American history has been mediated through textbooks and films rather than physical presence at the locations where the history was made, Philadelphia in 2026 offers the specific corrective of standing in Independence Hall, reading the actual parchment in the National Archives, and understanding that American democracy was not an abstraction but an argument conducted in specific rooms by specific people over specific weeks in the summer of 1776.

What Makes It Unmissable

Philadelphia’s food culture — long overshadowed by New York and Chicago’s more internationally recognized scenes — is in the middle of a genuine renaissance, with a concentration of chef-driven independent restaurants, the Italian Market (the oldest outdoor market in the United States, operating since 1892), the Reading Terminal Market (a Victorian-era train shed converted into the finest covered food market in the American northeast), and the specific regional food culture of scrapple, cheesesteaks, soft pretzels, and hoagies that no other American city produces or consumes with comparable cultural seriousness. The Philadelphia Museum of Art steps, made famous by Rocky but designed in the early 20th century to deliver one of American civic architecture’s great approaches to a great institution, still deserve the run whether or not you make it inside.​

14. Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Why Visit in 2026: A Capital City Reclaiming Its Own Story

Phnom Penh is in the middle of the most significant cultural and economic transformation of any Southeast Asian capital city, and 2026 is the year that the specific quality of that transformation — a city where French colonial architecture, Khmer design tradition, contemporary Cambodian art, a world-class riverfront, and the honest engagement with the country’s recent traumatic history under the Khmer Rouge coexist within walking distance of each other — has matured into something that rewards the culturally engaged traveler with genuine depth rather than the surface-level Southeast Asian capital experience. The Phnom Penh riverfront where the Tonlé Sap and Mekong rivers meet at the Chaktomuk junction is the specific urban geography that makes the city feel simultaneously historical and present — the Royal Palace on the riverbank, the river traffic, and the evening promenade atmosphere of a city that has been through the worst of the 20th century’s horrors and has decided to live.

What Makes It Unmissable

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek are the most historically obligatory and emotionally demanding sites in Southeast Asia — a confrontation with the Khmer Rouge’s systematic murder of approximately 25 percent of Cambodia’s population between 1975 and 1979 that the city has preserved with a seriousness and honesty that makes them essential for any visitor who wants to understand not only Cambodia but the 20th century. The National Museum of Cambodia adjacent to the Royal Palace holds the world’s finest collection of Khmer sculpture, including pieces from Angkor that contextualize the temples’ artistic achievement for travelers heading north toward Siem Reap — making Phnom Penh not a Cambodia afterthought but the essential entry point to the civilization.​

15. Guimarães, Portugal

Why Visit in 2026: The City Where Portugal Was Born

Guimarães is the birthplace of Portugal as a nation — the 12th-century castle on the hill above the town is where Afonso Henriques was born in 1109 and from which he launched the military campaign that established the Kingdom of Portugal as an independent nation separate from the Kingdom of León, beginning the historical trajectory that eventually produced the Portuguese empire, the Age of Discovery, and the global spread of the Portuguese language to 260 million speakers across four continents. The UNESCO-listed historic center — a compact medieval quarter of Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture accumulated across nine centuries of continuous civic life — is one of the best-preserved medieval urban environments in the Iberian Peninsula, and the specific quality of Guimarães relative to the more internationally known Portuguese cities is that it remains primarily a city for Guimarães residents rather than a city redesigned around visitor consumption.​

What Makes It Unmissable

The Paço dos Duques de Bragança — a 15th-century ducal palace whose distinctive pointed chimneys and Flemish-influenced design make it the most architecturally unusual building in northern Portugal — houses tapestries, furniture, and armor from the palace’s operational period and provides the specific material evidence of Burgundian-influenced Portuguese aristocratic culture that the Lisbon museums represent on a grander scale without the personal atmosphere of the original domestic space. The Citânia de Briteiros — a Celtic-Iberian hill fort complex of over 150 round stone foundations 11 kilometers from the city center, occupied from approximately 300 BCE to the Roman period — adds the pre-national layer of Portuguese territory that Guimarães’ medieval focus tends to compress, making the town and its surroundings one of the most historically layered single destinations in the Iberian Peninsula.

16. Samburu, Kenya

Why Visit in 2026: Africa’s Most Exclusive Safari Secret

Samburu National Reserve in Kenya’s northern rift — 350 kilometers north of Nairobi in a landscape of volcanic rock, acacia scrub, and the Ewaso Ng’iro River that sustains the wildlife through the dry season — holds three animal species found nowhere else in the safari circuit: the reticulated giraffe (with a dramatically different coat pattern from the Masai Mara’s Masai giraffe), the Grevy’s zebra (the world’s most endangered zebra species, larger and differently striped than the plains zebra), and the Beisa oryx (a large antelope with long straight horns and a face marked like a ceremonial mask). Collectively called the “Samburu Special Five” (adding the Somali ostrich), these animals draw the specific category of wildlife traveler who has completed the Serengeti and Masai Mara circuits and wants what those landscapes do not contain.

What Makes It Unmissable

The Samburu people — semi-nomadic pastoralists of the same Nilotic origin as the Maasai, maintaining a culture of cattle herding, elaborate beaded jewelry, and warrior traditions in direct cultural continuity with pre-colonial practice — are the human dimension of Samburu travel that the animal focus of most safari marketing significantly undervalues. Several Samburu conservancies operate cultural engagement programs where visitors participate in community life alongside the wildlife safari — a model of tourism that returns direct economic benefit to the communities whose land conservation the wildlife depends on.​

17. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Why Visit in 2026: The Caribbean’s Most Overlooked Capital Claims Its Moment

Santo Domingo is the oldest continuously inhabited European city in the Americas — founded by Bartholomew Columbus in 1496, nine years before Havana, four centuries before Miami — with a Zona Colonial (Colonial Zone) declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site that contains the first cathedral, the first monastery, the first university, and the first hospital built in the Western Hemisphere, all constructed within living memory of Columbus’s 1492 landing and all still standing in the limestone-block urban fabric of the first permanent city the European world built in the Americas. For travelers who arrive at the Dominican Republic expecting only beach resorts and find instead 16th-century Gothic architecture in a Caribbean city with a working population of three million people, Santo Domingo delivers the specific recalibration that the best travel destinations provide.

What Makes It Unmissable

The Malecón — the waterfront boulevard running west from the Zona Colonial along the Caribbean Sea — is the social artery of the city at evening, when the merengue and bachata music from competing sound systems, the rum punch vendors, the families, and the specific Caribbean city electricity of a place that was never redesigned for tourism creates an atmosphere that the beach resort complex 100 kilometers east in Punta Cana systematically cannot access. The Mercado Modelo in the colonial zone, where the mamajuana (the Dominican herbal rum infusion — bark, herbs, and honey soaked in rum and red wine — that the island’s herbal medicine tradition and its distilling culture produced together) is sold by vendors who will explain each ingredient with the specific authority of people who grew up drinking it as medicine and discovered that tourists would pay to learn what they already knew.​

18. The Slocan Valley, British Columbia, Canada

Why Visit in 2026: A New Trail Opens a Chapter of Canadian History

The Slocan Valley in British Columbia’s Kootenay region — a landscape of clear glacier-fed lakes, deep conifer forests, and the Purcell and Selkirk mountain ranges rising on either side of the valley — has drawn hikers, kayakers, and artists seeking undisturbed mountain wilderness for decades, and the landscape itself would justify a visit without additional context. In 2026, the Japanese Canadian Legacy Trail — a self-guided hiking and cycling route honoring the Japanese Canadian families who were forcibly displaced from the BC coast and confined to internment camps in the Slocan Valley during World War Two — opens, adding a layer of historical significance that transforms the landscape from beautiful to bearing witness. The trail follows the routes that interned families walked between the valley’s camps and the towns where they worked, and the act of walking it in 2026 is simultaneously a hiking experience of considerable natural quality and an act of historical acknowledgment that Canada’s relationship with its own wartime injustice requires.

What Makes It Unmissable

Slocan Lake — 28 kilometers long, impossibly clear, surrounded by mountain forest with no road on its western shore — is one of the most pristine large freshwater lakes accessible in North America, swimmable in summer at temperatures that the glacier-melt origin makes bracing and the mountain setting makes worth every goosebump. The valley’s arts community — painters, potters, writers, and musicians who have been arriving since the 1960s and staying — has created a cultural infrastructure of small galleries, studios, and summer arts residencies that makes the Slocan one of the most genuinely creative rural communities in western Canada.

19. Uluru, Australia

Why Visit in 2026: Indigenous Australia on Its Own Terms, Finally

October 2025 marked 40 years since the historic handback of Uluru to its Anangu Traditional Owners — one of the most significant moments in the Australian government’s slowly evolving relationship with Aboriginal land rights — and the four decades since that handback represent a sustained shift in how the land around Australia’s most sacred monolith is experienced by visitors, culminating in 2026 with experiences that the climbing era (before the practice was officially banned in 2019) explicitly could not offer. The Anangu are sharing their narratives on their own terms — through guided experiences led by Traditional Owners that explain the Tjukurpa (the Law, or Dreaming) governing the land, the specific stories encoded in Uluru’s landscape features, and the cultural relationship between the Anangu people and a rock formation they have managed as a sacred living entity for at least 10,000 years.

What Makes It Unmissable

The new five-day walking expedition through previously unexplored dunes and spinifex plains around Uluru — a multi-day cultural and nature experience developed in 2025 and operational in 2026 — offers access to the landscape surrounding the rock that day-visitor tourism had never reached, guided by Anangu whose knowledge of the spinifex ecology, desert water sources, and Tjukurpa narratives embedded in every feature of the terrain gives the walk a depth of encounter that no landscape in the world provides more directly. The Uluru at dawn and at sunset — the sandstone surface shifting through a color range of gold, deep ochre, red, orange, and plum as the light angle changes — is the visual experience that all the photographs have been taken of and none have adequately communicated.

20. Uruguay

Why Visit in 2026: The Small Country With the Biggest Quality-of-Life Argument

Uruguay is the smallest country in South America by territory, the most socially progressive by several measures (first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage, second in the world to fully legalize recreational cannabis, highest press freedom index in South America), and the most consistently overlooked by travelers who cross the Rio de la Plata from Buenos Aires to Montevideo, spend a day, and fly back to Argentina without understanding that the country they saw the edge of has a quality of life, a beef tradition, a wine industry, a coastal landscape, and a political culture that makes it genuinely different from everywhere else in South America. Montevideo is the most livable city on the continent by multiple quality-of-life rankings, and the specific character of that liveability — a European-scale city with Art Deco architecture, a thriving food market at the Mercado del Puerto, and an absence of the urban anxiety that Buenos Aires generates at scale — is the experience the city delivers to visitors who arrive expecting a smaller Buenos Aires and find something significantly more relaxed and specific.

What Makes It Unmissable

Colonia del Sacramento — the colonial Portuguese town on the Rio de la Plata shoreline, a UNESCO World Heritage Site of cobbled streets, 17th-century Portuguese fortifications, and the specific character of a town that was repeatedly fought over between Spain and Portugal and ended up belonging to neither in the cultural sense, creating a hybrid colonial identity that makes its historic center unlike anywhere else in South America. The Punta del Este peninsula during the Atlantic shoulder season (March–May and September–November) — when the summer crowd has left the beach resort and the town reverts to the Uruguayan intellectual and artistic community that uses it as a year-round creative retreat — adds the coastal dimension that the inland and colonial Uruguay cannot provide, making a Uruguay circuit of Montevideo, Colonia, and Punta del Este in 7–10 days the most complete South American experience available on the continent’s smallest and most undervisited stage.

Why This List Is Different From Every Other Best-Of List

The 20 destinations on this list share something that the standard “best beaches, best cities, best adventure” editorial formula rarely produces — they are each at a specific moment in their own story that makes 2026 the year to witness them rather than any year before or after. Ishikawa is rebuilding. Uluru is reclaiming. Guimarães is reaching the world for the first time. Oulu is celebrating with the entire continent. Algeria is opening. The Cook Islands are available before the development that follows discovery. Uruguay is still the secret that everyone who has been there is keeping. The best travel list is not a catalogue of the most beautiful places in the world — it is a specific argument about time, about why these places right now are the version of themselves that matters most. In 2026, these twenty make that argument with more clarity than anywhere else on earth.