During the XNUMXth century, it was the city that produced the most silver in the world and one of the most opulent in Mexico and colonial Spain. Several of its mines are still active, but the impressive wealth of Guanuajuato lies in the multicolored eccentricity of its history and secular heritage.
Disillusioned with the lack of wine and brandy, the Conquistadors of Mexico improved the millenary indigenous aptitude for producing alcohol. In the XNUMXth century, the Spaniards were satisfied with their pinga and began to export it. From Tequila, town, today, the center of a demarcated region. And the name for which it became famous.
In the XNUMXth century, as the English disputed control of the Caribbean and the sugar trade with their colonial rivals, they took over the island of Antigua. There they came across a jagged cove they called English Harbour. They made it a strategic port that also housed the idolized naval officer.
Bartolomeu Dias was the first European to glimpse Robben Island, when crossing the Cape of Storms. Over the centuries, the colonists turned it into an asylum and prison. Nelson Mandela left in 1982 after eighteen years in prison. Twelve years later, he became South Africa's first black president.
If Tbilisi is the contemporary capital, Mtskheta was the city that made Christianity official in the kingdom of Iberia, predecessor of Georgia, and one that spread the religion throughout the Caucasus. Those who visit see how, after almost two millennia, it is Christianity that governs life there.
Traveling, from top to bottom, across the Lesser Antilles, the Christmas period catches us in Barbados and Grenada. With families across the ocean, we adjusted to the heat and beach festivities of the Caribbean.
Athens, Greece
After three and a half millennia, Athens resists and prospers. From a belligerent city-state, it became the capital of the vast Hellenic nation. Modernized and sophisticated, it preserves, in a rocky core, the legacy of its glorious Classical Era.
One of the main commercial arteries of West Africa, in the middle of the XNUMXth century, the Gambia River was already navigated by Portuguese explorers. Until the XNUMXth century, much of the slavery perpetrated by the colonial powers of the Old World flowed along its waters and banks.
Originally founded and named "Indian Bridge" beside a foul-smelling swamp, the capital of Barbados has evolved into the capital of the British Windward Isles. Barbadians call it “The City”. It is the hometown of the far more famous Rihanna.
In 1919, Arthur Eddington, a British astrophysicist, chose the Roça Sundy to prove Albert Einstein's famous theory. More than a century later, the island of Príncipe that welcomed him is still among the most stunning places in the Universe.
The crossing of Cabo das Tormentas, led by Bartolomeu Dias, transformed this almost southern tip of Africa into an unavoidable scale. And, over time, in Cape Town, one of the meeting points of civilizations and monumental cities on the face of the Earth.
During the Stone Age, the now hay-covered valley of the Aba-Huab River was home to a diverse fauna that attracted hunters. In more recent times, colonial era fortunes and misfortunes coloured this part of Namibia. Not as many as the more than 5000 petroglyphs that remain at Ui Aes / Twyfelfontein.
Mato Grosso Pantanal, Brazil
We leave from the South American heart of Cuiabá to the southwest and towards Bolivia. At a certain point, the paved MT060 passes under a picturesque portal and the Transpantaneira. In an instant, the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso is flooded. It becomes a huge Pantanal.
New Orleans stands out from conservative US backgrounds as the defender of all rights, talents and irreverence. Once French, forever Frenchified, the city of jazz inspires new contagious rhythms, the fusion of ethnicities, cultures, styles and flavors.
With an area of 116km2, Inle Lake is the second largest lake in Myanmar. It's much more than that. The ethnic diversity of its population, the profusion of Buddhist temples and the exoticism of local life make it an unmissable stronghold of Southeast Asia.