There are places in the world where the landscape and what grows from it are inseparable — where the wine in your glass is essentially a portrait of the hills around you. The Douro Valley in northern Portugal is one of those places. When you arrive here for the first time, something shifts. The train from Porto curves east along the riverbank, the schist cliffs rising on either side, and slowly the valley opens into something that feels ancient and alive all at once.

A slow travel itinerary is not about doing less. It is about choosing depth over breadth, and arriving home feeling like you actually lived somewhere — even briefly — rather than simply passed through.

When Time Out named the Picos de Europa the most beautiful place in the world, travelers who knew this corner of northern Spain simply nodded. Rising dramatically from the Cantabrian Sea, straddling Asturias, Cantabria, and Castile and León, their highest summit tops out at 2,650 metres. Cantabria wine and culinary travel offers a profound way to experience this landscape — not just as a vista to admire, but as a place that expresses itself through what it grows, pours, and puts on the table.