Go one step further. Stay on the train for an extra station. Or why not stay on the train to the very end of the line? You should, because often the place at the end of the line is very interesting, as we discovered when we visited Provins, the final station for the commuter trains that run east from Paris.
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hidden europe
Slow travel to Europe's off-beat places
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Welcome to hidden europe. We promise a fresh perspective on well trodden trails, and a cool look at undiscovered corners.
01
Good travel writing
Our brief is Europe wide, and we criss-cross the continent to bring our readers some of Europe’s very best travel writing. We approach every topic with passion, insight, conviction and authority.
02
Offbeat places
We invite you to look beyond the usual tourist trails — or, if you prefer, stay at home, take out an atlas and enjoy our enthusiasm for the offbeat, the eclectic and the everyday.
03
Value driven
hidden europe is a curated collection of words in print and online that has, over two decades, celebrated European
lives and landscapes as part of the publishers’ wider commitment to promote liberal values and mindsets.
#EscapeTheHype
hidden europe aims at discovering the exotic in the everyday. The places we feature are unhyped and unsung yet full of interest. If you want to understand Europe's rich cultural diversity, this is the site for you.
#SlowTravel
hidden europe attends as much to the journey as to the destination. We take the train to Belarus and the ferry to Iceland. And the prose is as unhurried as the journeys it describes.
#StayCurious
We feature genuinely out-of-the-way places. Where we touch down on somewhere more mainstream, the perspective on the place is unconventional. And we never present places merely as points of consumption.
Explore hidden europe
Click on the sketch-map below to search for articles relating to your favourite country (on some devices you will see a list of country names instead). Yet no map is perfect, and for countries not shown on the interactive map — and to explore topics, regions or place names — just use the search box below the map.
- Albania
- Andorra
- Austria
- Belarus
- Belgium
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Bulgaria
- Croatia
- Cyprus
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Estonia
- France
- Finland
- Georgia
- Germany
- Greece
- Hungary
- Iceland
- Ireland
- San Marino
- Italy
- Kosovo
- Latvia
- Liechtenstein
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Macedonia
- Malta
- Moldova
- Monaco
- Montenegro
- Netherlands
- Norway
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Russian Federation
- Serbia
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Turkey
- Ukraine
- United Kingdom
Latest full-length
additions
We regularly make the full version of texts available that were published in hidden europe magazine.
On average we'll add one article every two weeks. Other articles are available as an excerpt on this website.
hidden europe 70
Paul Scraton reflects on the experience of reading hidden europe over the years, and then in turn becoming a regular contributor to the magazine.
hidden europe 70
Is this perhaps the first time in publishing history that a well received and profitable magazine has carefully planned its own sunset? We always knew hidden europe would not be for ever. We saw it as a project with a start, a middle and an end. Now, with a strong sense of having said the things we wanted to say, we reflect on two decades of work celebrating European cultures and communities, and a remarkable mix of lives and landscapes.
hidden europe 66
The 17th edition of Europe by Rail: The Definitive Guide is published in mid-April 2022. It includes new routes through the Alps and central Europe, a completely new journey along Italy’s Adriatic coast, new Baltic region coverage and much more.
hidden europe 63
We suspect that slow travel may just be about to have its moment in the sun. We sense that the COVID interregnum has prompted a rethinking of travel priorities. Away with bucket lists and a culture of consumption, and let’s rediscover the appeal of the journey rather than just dashing to the destination.
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Slow travel is about making conscious choices, and not letting the anticipation of arrival undermine the pleasure of the journey. By choosing to travel slowly, we reshape our relationship with place and with the communities through which we pass on our journeys. In 2009 we launched our 'Manifesto for slow travel'. You can read the full text here.
Latest and popular
We have published 70 issues of hidden europe travel magazine and over 500 issues of our electronic newsletter called Letter from Europe. Enjoy a selection of articles and blog posts below.
We are quietly in awe of how the editors and publishers ever managed to bring The Coastal Atlas of Ireland to print. This is a magnificent volume, one that draws on geography, geology and cultural studies to present an encyclopaedic account of Ireland’s coastline.
hidden europe 63 is now available, featuring articles about Bulgaria, Alsace, rural Galicia and northern Italy. We also look at the prospects for slow travel in the post-COVID world. Single issues and subscriptions are available in the hidden europe online shop.
Friedrich Engels is not someone we would normally associate with travel writing. But, as a young man, he wrote a number of articles in the travel genre; they were all published under the nom de plume Friedrich Oswald.
hidden europe 69: Special spaces
Magazine article
The Serbian city of Niš: On the road to Constantinople
The tinkers are long gone but the pedestrianised centre of the city of Niš still oozes character. The cafés are busy. Meat and cigarettes count for a lot here. Laurence Mitchell, a long-standing contributor to hidden europe, returns to Niš to tease out the appeal of this southern Serbian city.
Fifty years ago adventurous travellers were heading off from Europe to ride the Taurus Express or to explore a desert bus route which linked three capital cities.