UNESCO's World Heritage List includes many citations which showcase former mining activities. The extractive industries have led to the development of some of Europe's most distinctive cultural landscapes. But the recent addition of a gold mining site in Romania to the list sparks tensions between conservation and economic interests.
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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
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- Finland
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- Slovenia
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- 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.
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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.
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Paul Scraton reflects on the experience of reading hidden europe over the years, and then in turn becoming a regular contributor to the magazine.
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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.
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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.
Havila Voyages is a Norwegian shipping operator which is now bringing its own style to Norway’s coastal voyage – a very special slow travel adventure which until now has been run exclusively by Hurtigruten. With two Havila ships already in use, and two more making their debut on the coastal voyage in 2023, Havila Voyages is upping its challenge to the incumbent operator.
The island of Frösön in Lake Storsjön is the perfect retreat for walks and bike rides. We follow part of the traditional pilgrimage route over Frösön, passing the most northerly rune stone in the world.
The Baedeker series of guidebooks showed a remarkable consistency in presentation over many decades from the mid-19th century. But many guides were updated every couple of years, so how far did the content change? We compare two editions of Baedeker’s Switzerland, one from 1881 and the other from 1905, and find that the changes nicely reflect new social and travel pieties.
There are thousands of cafés across Europe that have made their mark in the communal psychogeography of the cycling community — places which supply a timely caffeine and calorie boost for the cyclists who have escaped the city for a day or longer. We investigate how coffee became the cyclist’s elixir.
Look for the tell-tale Pentecostal dove that marks out the small chapels dedicated to the Holy Spirit. They are found across the Azores, each chapel the hub of a social network that underpins Azorean Catholicism.