Portugal

Lisbon rewards picking the right neighborhood as much as the right hotel. Casa do Leão sits inside St. George Castle itself, with views across the whole city from what used to be the castle grounds. The Memmo Alfama is in Alfama, Lisbon’s oldest neighborhood and one of the few areas that survived the 1755 earthquake and tsunami — narrow streets, tiled buildings, small cafés. And Sintra, thirty minutes outside the city, is a UNESCO-listed town of palaces that used to be Portuguese royalty’s summer retreat.

On the Algarve coast, Vila Joya’s restaurant holds two Michelin stars and changes its menu daily — the kind of meal we were still thinking about weeks later.