Best 15 Places to Travel in 2026

Santorini has a food reputation problem — not because the food is bad but because the island's extraordinary visual beauty has allowed mediocre restaurants to charge extraordinary prices for ordinary food to visitors too distracted by the view to notice what they are actually eating. The caldera-facing terrace, the blue dome in the background, the glass of local wine catching the sunset light — the setting does most of the work and the kitchen frequently coasts on it. But Santorini also has genuinely extraordinary restaurants — places where the volcanic soil, the extraordinary local ingredients, and chefs of genuine talent and genuine ambition combine to produce food that would be celebrated in any city in the world.

Every evening in Santorini the sun performs the same extraordinary act — it descends toward the Aegean Sea in a sky that turns from blue to gold to deep crimson and finally to a darkness full of stars, the white-washed villages on the caldera rim glowing in the last light like something between architecture and dream. The sunset in Santorini is genuinely one of the most beautiful natural events available to a human being on this planet. But the famous Oia sunset — the one on every travel Instagram and every travel magazine cover — comes with a crowd of several thousand people fighting for the same position.