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Palm Trees and Alpine Peaks
The Tyrolean spa town of Meran, part of Italy since the post-WWI carve-up of the fallen Austro-Hungarian empire, was, a century ago, the hot destination of its day, a leafy Hapsburg Shangri-La teeming with poets, royalty, adulterers, gamblers and the convalescing. Visitors came for the opera, the mild climate, to take the waters and stroll…
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Blue Medina
Traditional Arabic architecture doesn’t give a lot away from its exterior, with often vast, exquisitely decorated spaces secreted behind heavy doors, shutters and blank whitewashed streetscapes. But stay at La Chambre Bleue, a B&B in a vibrant, if totally untouristed, enclave of Tunis’ ancient Medina, and such a space is yours to temporarily call your…
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High Desert Art of Living
The night sky above Cortijada Los Gázquez is an astonishing sight, a glowing canopy of stars all but filling its inky dome. Up in the high desert of the Parque Natural Sierra María-Los Vélez there is almost no light pollution – it is, as they say in the guidebooks, off the beaten track. This is…
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Le Bouche à Oreille
Hotel du Temps has a depth, texture and warmth born out of genuine creative curiosity and fluid, fertile collaboration. And it’s a place that really does feel like home. Winsome, wistful, low-fi rooms have a look that is beguilingly indeterminate; a little bucolic, a touch Scandinavian, but also utterly, totally Paris right now. We talk…