Five European Cities Worth the Airfare This Summer

Every summer the same cities appear on the same lists. The same photographs of the same piazzas, the same advice about avoiding crowds by arriving early, as if arriving at the Trevi Fountain at seven in the morning rather than ten makes it a different experience. It does not. It makes it a colder one.

What follows is not that list. It is five places that reward the kind of travel this publication is interested in. Unhurried, observational, with enough room in the day to notice how people dress. Two of them you already know. One you think you know. One is not a city at all. One will make you wonder why you did not go sooner.

Go in June if you can. Europe in July belongs to everyone. Europe in June still belongs to itself.

Paris - For the person who already knows it and keeps going back anyway.

Palais Royal, a Tuesday in June. Someone is reading. Everyone else has nowhere to be. The correct use of a Paris afternoon.

Paris in summer is a different city from Paris in autumn, and both are worth knowing. The tourists arrive in force by July, which means the locals leave. The result, counterintuitively, is a city that feels more itself. The cafés are quieter. The 6th and the 7th empty out in a way that makes the streets feel borrowed.

Four to five days here in June, before the school holidays, is close to ideal. Spend the mornings in the passages. The covered arcades that run through the 2nd and 9th arrondissements are among the most under visited things in Paris, which is a city not short of under visited things.

Spend an afternoon at the Musée de l'Orangerie. The current Rousseau exhibition is the kind of show that reminds you why you bother with museums at all. Henri Rousseau painted jungles he had never visited, tigers that had never existed, and produced images of such complete conviction that the question of whether any of it was real becomes genuinely irrelevant. Go on a weekday. Sit with the Nymphéas rooms for as long as you can.

End the evening at the bar at Le Meurice. Order something you would not normally order. The room is one of the finest in Europe and the bar understands this without making you feel underdressed for it, which is a considerable achievement. Stay until you feel like leaving. This is the correct approach to most things in Paris.

Lisbon - For the person who wants the feeling of discovery before it closes.

Lisbon, somewhere in the Mouraria. The street goes down toward the river and the city goes about its business. Go now, before it knows what it is worth.

Lisbon is in the middle of its moment, which means it is also in the middle of losing what made it interesting. The rents have gone up. The natural wine bars have multiplied past the point where they feel accidental. The Alfama is photographed more often than it is lived in. None of this has yet ruined it, but the window is not permanently open.

Go now and go to the edges. The Mouraria rather than the Alfama. The LX Factory on a weekend morning when the market is setting up and the city feels like it is still deciding what it wants to be. Take the tram up to the Miradouro da Graça rather than the more obvious viewpoints. Eat pastéis de nata somewhere that does not have them listed on a chalkboard outside. Spend an evening in a tasca in the Intendente neighborhood, which is genuinely local in a way that very few corners of the city remain.

The thing about Lisbon is that it is still possible to have an afternoon that feels like you found it rather than followed someone else's instructions to it. That will not be true indefinitely.

Barcelona - For the person who wants a city that functions in summer.

Casa Batlló, Passeig de Gràcia. Gaudí looked at a building and saw a skeleton, a dragon, the sea. See it once, from here, and move on. The rest of Barcelona is waiting.

Barcelona is one of the few major European cities that does not apologize for being hot. It is built for heat. The architecture provides shade. The eating happens late. The pace adjusts without making a fuss about it. This is a city that understands summer as a condition rather than an inconvenience.

Avoid the Ramblas entirely. This is not contrarian advice. It is just accurate. The Gothic Quarter rewards getting lost in it on foot without a destination. The Eixample, which tourists tend to treat as a grid to pass through on the way to Gaudí, is the neighborhood where the city lives. The Sagrada Família is worth seeing once and from a distance, where the scale makes sense. The Palau de la Música Catalana is worth seeing up close and from the inside, where the light through the stained glass does something you will not expect.

Eat in the Gràcia neighborhood rather than near the waterfront. Order the wine the waiter recommends. Walk to the Bunkers del Carmel at dusk for the view over the city. This is where Barcelona goes to watch the sun go down, which is recommendation enough.

Lake Como - For the person who wants to do almost nothing, extremely well.

Varenna, Lake Como. Not Bellagio. There is a difference and it matters.

Lake Como is not a city and should not be treated as one. There is no itinerary here that makes sense. The point is the water, the light on the water at different times of day, the ferry between villages that takes long enough to feel like a small journey, the lunch that begins at one and ends when it ends. This is not a place that rewards planning. It rewards surrender.

Stay in Varenna rather than Bellagio. Bellagio is beautiful and has understood this about itself for too long. Varenna is quieter, slightly less photogenic, and considerably more worth the time. Take the ferry to Bellagio once, walk up through the gardens, eat something good, take the ferry back. That is enough of Bellagio.

The days here have a particular shape. A morning walk along the lake path before the heat arrives. A coffee somewhere with a terrace. A few hours of nothing organized around the light and the view. A long lunch. An afternoon that disappears without explanation. An aperitivo as the shadows lengthen across the water. This sounds like doing nothing because it essentially is doing nothing, which is precisely why it is worth doing. The clothes you wear here matter in a specific way. The lake rewards linen. It punishes effort.

Copenhagen - For the person who wants proof that cities can be run well.

Torvehallerne, Copenhagen. Bánh mì, cookbooks, and spirits from Las Vegas in the same building. A city that knows how to do a market.

Copenhagen is the outlier on this list, and deliberately so. It is not warm in the way the Mediterranean places are warm. The food is expensive. The design is everywhere, occasionally to an exhausting degree. And yet it belongs here because it represents something the other destinations are still working toward: a city that functions with genuine intelligence.

The cycling infrastructure alone is worth studying. The way the harbor has been opened to swimming. The food markets at Torvehallerne, which manage to be genuinely good rather than merely photogenic. Noma is closed and its alumni have scattered across the city, which means exceptional cooking is now available at restaurants you can get into. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is forty minutes north of the city by train and is among the finest small museums in Europe. Go on a weekday.

Copenhagen in summer has the added advantage of light. The days are extraordinarily long. The city stays outside until late in a way that changes the entire rhythm of being there. It is a different experience from the Mediterranean places, not better or worse, but worth understanding on its own terms.

A word on what is not here.

Venice in July is not a city. It is a queue. Dubrovnik has been managed nearly to the point of destruction by its own popularity. Santorini rewards the photograph and not much else. These are not places to skip forever. They are places to approach differently, in October, in March, with more care about where you stay and less expectation of having them to yourself.

The best version of European summer travel is the one where you choose a single place, stay longer than you planned, and spend most of the time doing things that do not appear on any list, including this one.