‘My favourite place in Europe’: 17 travel writers on the country that feels like home

Sweden

At noon, steamboat S/S Stockholm pushes away from Boulevard Strandvägen; its elegant art nouveau buildings, piped like cake icing, are the very definition of understated beauty. Our destination is Vaxholm, one of around 30,000 islands, skerries and islets in Stockholm’s archipelago. The city itself spans 14 islands, each with its own flair, like floating 3D puzzle pieces separated by waterways.

As S/S Stockholm begins her journey, the lush island of Djurgården comes into view. The masts of my favourite museum, the Vasamuseet – final resting place of a 17th-century warship – shoot high above the treeline. I hear gut-wrenching screams coming from amusement park Gröna Lund as we sail past. Thick forests, open parks and flower gardens are interlaced with biking routes and walking paths. Our proximity to nature and water organically creates work-life balance and slows me down to be fully present.

The smell of fish permeates the air as attendants set up for the ship’s extensive brunch smörgåsbord, featuring traditional Swedish favourites such as pickled herring (sill), cured salmon (gravadlax), and meatballs (köttbullar). Simple, unpretentious gastronomy.

We float past more islands – Skeppsholmen surrounded by trawlers. Past eclectic Södermalm (“Söder”) – a former 17th-century slum replaced by vintage stores and vegan cafes. Past Fjäderholmarna, where life moves outdoors at the first ray of sunshine – temperature be damned.

We finally reach Vaxholm, and during this three-hour round trip I have experienced all I’ve come to love about living here for the past 13 years.
Lola Akinmade Åkerström

Italy

There were my cappuccino years. Then the espresso years. The years of the brioche, the risino, the treccina. Or sometimes even the bignè. The years with chocolate on my foam, and the years without. Amid the confusion of my first months in Italy, struggling to learn the language, to get a permesso di soggiorno, a certificato di residenza, to find work and, even harder, to get paid for work, the ritual of morning coffee quickly presented itself as an oasis of pleasure in a misery of bureaucracy and graft.

I remember particularly the Pasticceria Maggia in Montorio Veronese, a village near Verona. Outside, everything seemed hostile, hurried, hot and humid; but, inside, decorum, polished surfaces, pretty pastries, rapid service. How do Italians produce your coffee so much faster than elsewhere, so much stronger and better, with so much less fuss? Perhaps playing with the milk jug to trace a heart on your foam. Placing a small glass of mineral water beside. With friendliness and flourish. Leaving newspapers freely available on the tables.

Much of my Italian I learned in cafes, over the pages of the Arena di Verona, trying to get my mind around Andreotti and Craxi, Christian Democracy and communism. It was 1981. In town, the Red Brigades had kidnapped an American general, there were road blocks on the streets. But the carabiniere with his machine gun beside me at the bar was all smiles and solicitude. I like this place, I decided. And in the 40 years since, with the one terrible hiatus of the Covid lockdown, this aspect of Italy has never ceased to be a consolation.

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” moaned Alfred J Prufrock, as if it was a defeat. In Italy, it’s a triumph.
Tim Parks

Lithuania

I first came to Lithuania nearly 30 years ago. Dalia and I had been living together for about two years, but I’d never been to her home city, Vilnius. I’d been to other eastern European capitals, but Vilnius felt different.

There were, of course, the same, large, Soviet municipal buildings and, in the more modern parts of the city, the ever-present heaviness of the brutalist architecture, but when I went to the small apartment where Dalia grew up and where her parents still lived, I saw her in a new and brilliant way. If you want to really know a person, you have to see to where they come from.

We walked and talked in the streets of the old town of Vilnius in -30C temperatures, wrapped in coats that had been made by her uncle from old blankets to keep us warm. We spent our time eating, drinking, laughing and doing our best to communicate in three different languages. And I felt a sense of home, connection and belonging I love to this day. In contrast to my first trip all those years ago, the city’s restaurants are now fantastic. Amandus is particularly good, with a Lithuanian chef trained in Scandinavia who serves food with a cool modern twist.

The people are beautiful, hard-working, funny with a dark sense of humour, as well as generous and creative. I’m honoured to be a citizen and call it my “other” home.
Dexter Fletcher

Ireland

Whenever my love affair with Ireland wobbles – the rain, the dysfunction, the cost of living – I go to a place that restores it so swiftly and completely I want to scream.

That is the moment I let go of the ladder at the Forty Foot, a bathing spot in south Dublin, plunge into the Irish Sea, and hear an inner voice yelling: NO. But I make no sound. The cold takes my breath away. After a minute or two the shock eases, I’m swimming round the rocks, heading to the first buoy, and living in Ireland makes sense again.

Partly, it’s the well-documented psychological benefit of sea-swimming. But it’s also the setting. The bay – the Killiney and Dalkey hills, the Aviva stadium, the Poolbeg chimneys, the port, Howth peninsula – unfurls in panorama. Beyond the watery horizon, Wales.

Occasionally a seal surfaces. The human wildlife is just as interesting. There are the “hardies”, old-timers who swam here long before it was trendy. There is the “dry-robe brigade” who bring flasks and fleece-lined hooded gear. There are the first-timers who whoop and shriek. The accents are plummy and working class, Irish and foreign, all exchanging intel.

“Any jellyfish?”

“Nah, you’re grand.”

“The current?”

“Not so bad today.”

Watching over us all is the Martello tower, site of the opening chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses, with a famous description of what awaits bathers: “The snotgreen sea. The scrotum-tightening sea.” A coded invitation, surely, to take the plunge.
Rory Carroll

Denmark

When the estate agent first showed me round a flat in Copenhagen, she made a point of remarking on the harbour. “In the summer, you won’t be able to keep us Danes out of it,” she said. I couldn’t really see the appeal. It was a murky splash of greenish water overlooked by a lot of flats. Not an infinity pool.

But after six years of living here, I have changed my tune. I’ve gone a bit Danish, and my favourite thing about living here is the swimming culture. It’s not just a passing summer fancy, a way to cool off on a hot day, but a way of life in this sea-loving nation. If there’s one thing you should pack on a trip to Denmark, it’s a swimsuit.

Long before Wim Hof and wild swimming were a thing, Danes were taking to the water year round. It’s an illicit thrill to enter the black water with nothing on but a bobble hat on a dark winter morning, and a sunlit joy to splash around in the summer. I’ll meet friends for a swim rather than a coffee, and have playdates sitting beside the harbour basins as the kids make the most of the water.

There’s so much to like about Denmark – its bakeries, cycling culture, hygge, trust-based society – but its love of swimming tops the lot.
Laura Hall

Croatia

When I first went to Croatia at the age of 11 (when it was still Yugoslavia), I was a notoriously fussy eater. Thankfully, I grew out of that. Now the thought of depriving myself of foods I adore is too miserable to contemplate. And if there’s one place where food is the heart and soul of a country, it’s Croatia.

Over the decades, I’ve watched the country become more upmarket, collecting Michelin stars along the way, and I’ve had unforgettable meals in some heavenly places on the Adriatic coast. But the ones I savour most hark back to simpler times in my parents’ hinterland region of Lika and its equally mountainous neighbours.

I’d watch my uncle grill fish he’d pick up at the trout farm near his house. Or enjoy the slightly drunken atmosphere when his friend turned up with some wild boar he had shot and made a hunter’s stew packed with paprika and cooked in an iron pot over an open fire.

One of the joys of driving through the Croatian countryside is stopping for lunch at a roadside tavern where lamb will be slowly spit-roasting outside. One of my favourites, Anita, happens to be a few miles from footballer Luka Modrić’s birthplace, Zadar. Sitting on its sunny terrace near the Velebit mountains, diving into tender lamb and crunchy salads, and drinking cold Karlovačko beer, sums up the pleasures of eating and drinking in Croatia. Simplicity at its best.
Mary Novakovich, author of My Family and Other Enemies: Life and Travels in Croatia’s Hinterland

Slovenia

I’m on a jury – seven guys from a remote Slovenian village and me, an American expat. We’ve already downed 17 schnapps. Three to go. The official scorecard requires that I give points for scent, taste, clarity and colour. We cleanse our palates with cubes of mild cheese between sips. My fellow jurors have been downing the shots and are still (mostly) upright but I’m a few sheets to the wind. I clearly have some training to do.

I’m a writer who has lived for more than a decade in Kamnik, in the northern alpine region of Slovenia. One of my earliest memories of feeling welcomed here was my first schnapps tasting, in the village where my then-fiancee grew up. Nothing breaks the ice and helps you feel part of a community like raising a glass (or 20).

Central Europe is schnapps heaven, with most folk drinking homemade distillations made from apples and later flavoured with everything from Williams pear to blueberries to walnut, sage and more. Everyone seems to have a family member who makes their own schnapps, so village tastings are really excuses for community parties, as much as local pride.

Schnapps can be very sophisticated. I lead some foraging and schnapps tasting tours, and a highlight is our visit to Cvet Gora, in Jezersko (site of Boris Johnson’s honeymoon, in case you were wondering), where Tanja Rebolj makes mixological schnapps, one of which has 102 ingredients she gathers herself, and another that tastes of liquified apple strudel.

So when you go to Slovenia, be sure to indulge in the local tipple and learn to say “Cheers” – raise your glass, make eye contact, and say “Na zdravje!” Awarding points is optional.
Noah Charney is the author of Slovenology: Living and Travelling in the World’s Best Country

Spain

When the temperature hits the high 30s, and, shrill with cicadas, the dusty olive groves shimmer in the heat, people in rural Cádiz move all aspects of daily life to the water. When I first pushed through reeds and oleanders and discovered a family sitting waist-deep in a river, on chairs, around a table laden – with wine and tubs of papas aliñadas, ensalada rusa and pork in tinfoil; bottles of Coke, wine and beer cooling on the riverbed; a radio tuned to coplas – I gawped and apologised for intruding (in the English way). But I was invited to stay, given tortilla and quizzed on every aspect of my life. More people waded past – octogenarians with dresses tucked in their knickers, children in goggles, the electrician carrying a chihuahua, a topless museum guide from Madrid – everyone pausing for a chat, food or wine, as if we were in a house rather than the Guadalete river.

In the 10 years since, I’ve spent many summer days in party rivers, and in another that is more Zen, where people drift along a gorge deep in conversation, only their heads and shoulders above the water, in a dreamy aqueous paseo, accompanied by swimming dogs.

In an age when so much seems overcomplicated, decamping to a river in response to being hot has a childlike simplicity that’s very appealing. No one cares about their shoes or their hair, or mud, or thighs, or noise, or personal space. Cool teens with piercings do star jumps from rocks. There’s no fussing or stressing, and this laid-back conviviality extends to life on dry land. For all the practical benefits, I love this aspect of mountain life, mainly because it is utterly surreal.
Sorrel Downer

Poland

Aged 15 in 1991, my Polish father took me for a summer to the wilds of rural Poland. With rucksacks on our backs, we kicked up a cloud of dust with every step on the baking dirt road in Warmia, in the north-east of the country. The meadows on either side were full of wildflowers and dancing butterflies.

Poland can have glorious, hot summers. And nowhere are they more glorious than when you rent a room in the verdant idyll of a provincial family farm with hollyhocks and goats. On the lane leading up to it, we met the farmer’s niece, a year younger than me, also visiting for the holidays. We went horse riding, had a swim in a lake in the forest, picked apples, turned hay in the wooden barn, listened to the same two vinyl records over and over again, exchanged Polish and English language tips, and smiled a lot.

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After a cold beetroot soup (chłodnik) to cut through the 34C heat, she introduced me to the delights of a shockingly tasty cucumber from the garden, laced with local honey so sweet that it blew my head off.

I had fallen in love, and was too shy to say so. Nothing happened until I went back again and, being very 18, necessarily messed it up. What hasn’t changed is that I’m still in love with summers in the Polish countryside, and always will be.
Keith Lockram

Austria

Before I had even set foot in Vienna, I had mythologised the Viennese coffee house. When I first entered one – very gingerly, I must admit – after moving to the Austrian capital, I was awestruck by the decor (all marble, mirrored glass and brass), intimidated by the supercilious tuxedoed waiters, and confused by the mystifying nomenclature for food and drink. I dared not imitate the locals by standing up to scrutinise the flamboyant cake display, or helping myself to the free newspapers from around the world.

Even my German deserted me, and I ordered a cola in English before downing it and scurrying off in embarrassment. In short, I had entirely missed the point.

By the time I tried again, the Viennese coffee house had been included on Unesco’s list of intangible cultural heritage, a place “in which time and space are consumed, but only the coffee is listed on the bill”. Armed with this knowledge, having in advance deciphered coffee-house speak and prepared myself to face the swagger of the personnel, I returned to Cafe Schwarzenberg (one of the original Ringstrasse establishments, opened in 1861) – the scene of my first, hopeless attempt. After all, I was now a local.

Without hesitation and without consulting the list, I ordered a Melange (a cappuccino in all but name, but the only terminology to use if you wanted to avoid the waiter’s weary eye roll), I surveyed every single cake in the vitrine, and picked up a copy of Le Monde. I ended up staying all afternoon and all evening, perusing more newspapers, succumbing to a Dobostorte and people-watching, while admiring the clockwork passing of the trams outside. I was never asked to move (even when the cafe got busy), I was never pressed to order more (one kleiner Schwarzer – a small espresso without milk – buys you an entire day of sitting, writing, working and daydreaming). As I left, the very waiter who had so terrified me on my first visit granted me an “Auf Wiedersehen”. I had finally made it.
Christopher Brennan

France

Our new French neighbours were mystified by the arrival of a young British family who had moved to a small village in Provence and, after four months of silence, popped by to see if we’d brought over any shortbread. They gave my son a tiny suit of armour and said it was for the forthcoming Foire du Roy René, the local town of Peyrolles’ medieval fair. Our “French” life began at that moment.

The first time we went, a jester in a leather hat and wearing necklaces of animal teeth told us that long before dentists existed people’s rotten molars were replaced with sheep’s teeth, and he put one of his necklaces around my tiny daughter’s neck. Thrilled and repulsed, we bought some pommes d’amour (toffee apples), tankards of hydromel (French mead) and soupe dorée (golden soup) from a giant cauldron.

The soup and the search for the toothman made it into our spring calendar every year for a decade – two days of pageantry and sword-fighting, maidens in hennins, grotty peasants, sheep running through Peyrolles’ narrow streets, brutal jousting, falconry and fire juggling on a huge field beneath the village.

The medieval fair inspired my children to dress as a knight and princess for much of their early childhood (there’s no school uniform in France), but it was also the first time I ever heard them speak French. They were talking very seriously to other children, all dressed in chainmail and kirtles, about King Arthur and Merlin. Being transported back 500 years gave us our first bond with France, a country filled with medieval villages, chateaux ruins and ancient stone fountains.
Jon Bryant

Czech Republic

It was Franz Kafka who said that the “sharp claws” of Prague “never let you go” – but for me, it was the writings of a different Czech author that pulled me into the city.

Dopily eating a plate of fried cheese in a Vinohrady pub 14 years ago, I hadn’t yet managed to grasp Czech culture – the people seemed angry, the humour seemed odd, the language plain ridiculous. But noticing the shining bronze head of Bohumil Hrabal affixed to the wall, and being told that the pub, Hlučná Samota (Too Loud a Solitude), was named after one of his books, I decided to give him a go.

I was spellbound. Both childishly funny and acutely philosophical, he unpacks the warm, outlandish Czech character like no other – the large-bellied raconteur, the bellowing drunk, the quiet-yet-contented loner. Through his stories, I realised that beneath the pessimistic, post-communist scowls I’d encountered, lay a nation of welcoming and jocular souls.

A museum trip to nearby Nymburk (one hour by train), where he grew up in the town’s brewery, provided further insight into the Czech persona. But it was spending time in U Zlatého Tygra pub (the Golden Tiger), Hrabal’s old hangout in the centre of Prague, that really brought the city’s characters to life.

The pub is quite the experience. When the doors open at 3pm, you stampede inside to try to bag one of the few tables (they’re all reserved by locals from around 5pm), then frothy pints of delicious Pilsner are perpetually dumped in front of you, whether you want one or not. Although Hrabal no longer holds fort there (he died in 1997), the place is awash with the characters he described – and for a good two hours you can drink great beer and bask in the splendour of his fascinating world.
Mark Pickering

Greece

There was no eureka moment. In the recesses of my mind it is the light that drew me here. It could have been the stones that spoke of history, the poetry of a language little known, the food. All, in their own way, elegant and spare; all as delicious in an odyssey of self-discovery, which is what Greece will always offer. But from the first it was the light, intoxicating and all embracing, the force that is elemental to the magic of this place.

I cannot say when or where it struck me most. Perhaps in the illumination of the marbles at the Acropolis, when on my first visit to Athens aged 13, I was inducted into the language of heat and the yellow white of their glow; perhaps in the intensity of a summer’s day when the light is so fierce it trembles. Or perhaps it all began when I swam into the sun, as I would first learn to do chasing the light in Koufonissi, when Cycladic isles could still be remote and beacons of spare living.

In the throb of change that has come to Greece it is the one constant, irradiating the faces of the old, putting joy into the steps of the young, lighting up the shores from the sea, inspiring artists and poets, underpinning the luminosity of shadow in a country I fell for long ago.
Helena Smith

Portugal

The old fishing town of Olhão in the eastern Algarve captured my heart on a short visit in 2012. The market – housed in twinned redbrick buildings with green domes – was one of the best I had ever been in (and I’ve been in many). I loved the people: they seemed to me like Glaswegians, only in sunshine – warm and funny and kind.

I had come with my friend, the Portuguese journalist Célia Pedroso, to visit a new hotel in the countryside called Fazenda Nova, which I wrote about for the Guardian (it’s about to reopen its doors after a refurbishment).But it was the gnarly old town that did it for me. I kept coming back for its clams, dug fresh from the Ria Formosa, and its blazing sunsets, the light and the vast, open skies.It was just short, long weekends. With pals. Alone. For my birthday. It became my place.

Then in the middle of the pandemic, when we were released after the first lockdown, I came back. I ended up on Ilha da Armona, a 15-minute ferry ride from Olhão. I got stuck, though it never felt like it. Then one day I saw a house with a wooden, handwritten sign, “Vende se”. For sale. I went to see it a couple of times and loved it. Then I had the collywobbles for a week. But one evening I swam in the sea under a fiery red moonrise. That April moon is called a pink moon. I bought the house and called it Lua Rosa.
Audrey Gillan

Estonia

There is a smell that is Estonian summer. It’s a combination of asphalt and flowers, most notably lilacs and peonies, which bloom as the weather warms up after a long winter. I hadn’t planned on settling in Estonia, the birthplace of my grandparents, but those scents invoked childhood memories and called to me to stay a little longer, reminding me each year that winter is only temporary. Twelve years later, the allure of such simple pleasures anchors me.

One of my favourite rituals is gathering with friends and family for midsummer – which coincides with my birthday –, celebrated on the evening of 23 June (a holiday more important than Christmas). We gather at my summer home in Kojastu and kindle the charcoal grill. A potluck ensues, with fresh salads, pickles, sweets and offerings for the grill. I take pride in preparing my father’s mother’s potato salad, subtly enhanced with a touch of apple, and my mother’s mother’s rhubarb cake, a beloved delicacy that adorns our table for as long as the rhubarb season permits.

As twilight descends, the fading scent of charcoal makes way for the bonfire, a towering structure composed of old trees, garden clippings and, perhaps unknowingly, the burdens of the last year. The flames dance to life, engulfing the pile, symbolically bidding farewell to the past. The embers glow with a comforting warmth, lingering for days to come and, with their fading light, we begin again, laying the foundation for the bonfire of the following year. Estonia is a tapestry of memories, scents and traditions. It is the feeling of home.
Kristina Lupp

The Netherlands

The Netherlands is famous for its bicycles, but if you spend time there you’ll soon realise there’s another mode of transport that the Dutch love perhaps even more than two wheels: two blades. When the weather turns cold enough for its lakes, canals and rivers to freeze, half the country dons ice skates and takes the day off work.

These days, ice skating is perhaps the closest thing to a national religion. When the big lakes near my house froze last year, the ice was soon packed with everyone from toddlers learning to skate by holding on to the back of chairs, to muscular young men in Lycra who looked like Olympic champions. There were even a couple of very elderly people being pushed across the ice on wheelchairs.

People lit campfires on the ice and neighbours passed around cups of Glühwein, while local teenagers raced motorbikes across the frozen lake. It captured the national character at its best: intensely social and communal, outdoorsy and athletic, with a flagrant disregard for health and safety.

These days, the fun is tempered by poignancy: we all know that on a rapidly warming planet winter skating might not be an option for much longer. The epic Elfstedentocht race – a sort of Dutch Tour de France on ice – hasn’t been held for more than 25 years now, because the ice is never thick enough. But, for now, I’ll keep sharpening my blades and praying for cold weather.
Ben Coates

Romania

Now in its 27th year, the Gărâna jazz festival gathers international bands and hundreds of aficionados every summer on top of a mountain in the West Carpathians. For me, the mountains are Romania’s greatest treasure. Getting there involves travelling through layers of Romanian history and culture. We went via Timișoara, this year’s European capital of culture. Close to the Serbian and Hungarian border, Timișoara is one of Romania’s most multicultural and architecturally best-preserved cities. It is also where the 1989 revolution that brought down the communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu started.

From Timișoara, we took a train to Resita, an old industrial town, whose steelworks and machine building plant date back to 1771. Following privatisation in the 1990s, the factories were reduced to a fraction of their former size – when I first saw the town years ago, it looked abandoned, but now a series of artistic initiatives transforming old industrial spaces into cultural hubs is giving it a new lease of life.

From Resita, we took a minibus to Gărâna. Some people camp in the outdoor concert venue; others get a bed in one of the traditional homes in Gărâna village, enjoying homemade pies, local cheeses and meats. We booked a hut right on the bank of the breathtaking Lake Trei Ape (Three Waters), where every morning we were woken up by booming Europop (one more facet of contemporary Romania). The highlight: listening to the final concert from the cemetery on the hill – a magical experience.
Paula Erizanu