“Hell is other people” – so wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, who might have been less of a misanthrope had he spent less time in Paris, Europe’s most densely populated capital city, and headed instead for his country’s quieter reaches; the tidal interzone of the Camargue, perhaps, or the salt pans of Occitania.
Today, overtourism has become a problem in corners of the world where humans had barely set foot a century or two ago, let alone France; Antarctica’s filling up with cruise ships, and there are traffic jams on the summit of Everest.
This isn’t just terrible for the environment, but it’s a surefire way to ruin a good holiday, so here are a few suggestions of lesser-visited destinations across the world which are just as captivating as their more popular counterparts.
Read more: These lesser-known Bavaria towns are even better than Munich
Beautiful crowd-free holiday destinations
Albania
Soaring mountains, glorious beaches and a jewel box of islands glittering in the Ionian Sea – Greece is lovely in the spring, but its Balkan neighbour, Albania, promises all these treasures and more, with far fewer visitors and a greater diversity of natural landscapes packed into a smaller land area. Theth National Park in the north of the country is home to brilliant hiking and startling sights like the Blue Eye, an azure spring gathered in a deep hole in the limestone landscape. Nearby, the fantastically named Accursed Mountains form the Albanian stretch of the Dinaric Alps. This place of fearsome, jagged peaks, enclosing green glacial valleys alive with wildflowers in the spring, is surely worth visiting before word gets out and it becomes one of Europe’s hottest hiking destinations.
Elsewhere, the vibrant capital, Tirana, has the feel of a place making up for lost time. The city’s diverse architecture reflects its cultural variety, its movement through fascist and communist dictatorships, and its subsequent opening up to the wider world since the 1990s. Eye-catching buildings include the Pyramid of Tirana, built as a museum to dictator Enver Hoxha; the monumental Namazgah Mosque, the largest in the Balkans; and the House of Leaves, an espionage museum housed in a former Gestapo and communist secret police surveillance centre….
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