Atlas Obscura’s Guide to Unique Romantic Getaways
Travel ideas for couples who don’t want the obvious. You’ve decided to go somewhere together. Maybe you just got married and you’re planning a honeymoon. Maybe you’re marking a decade together with an anniversary trip that actually means something. Maybe you don’t need an occasion at all, save for a wish to get out of ordinary life for a while and remember why you chose each other. Everyone expects you to go somewhere with an overwater bungalow and a fruit plate shaped like a swan. Here's our counterproposal: what if this trip gave you a story no one else you know could tell? The best couples’ trips aren’t the most expensive ones. They’re the ones where you turned a corner together and both stopped breathing for a second—because neither of you expected what was there. This guide is organized not by price tier or beach quality but by the kind of adventure you’re after. Find the entry that sounds like you. Then go. Built in the 14th century, these tombs were once the sumptuous resting places of the Merenids’ finest. dzamonja / Atlas Obscura User Surrender to Your Surroundings Fes, Morocco Fes el-Bali is held by many to be the world’s largest car-free urban zone. This commercial district within the historic city of Fes, largely unchanged since the middle ages, comprises nine thousand four hundred winding alleyways where getting lost amid the merchant stalls, mosques, and shops is part of the appeal. And you will: GPS navigation is notoriously unreliable on these tangled, narrow streets. Start at the Bou Inania Madrasa, a 14th-century theological college known for its intricate carved cedar ornamentation, and elaborate mosaic tilework. Walk toward the Chouara Leather Tannery and watch leather being dyed in vats of saffron, indigo, and poppy from a rooftop terrace above the stalls. The colors are medieval. The process is medieval. The two of you watching it together is not. Eat lunch at a riad hidden behind an unmarked door on a street whose name you won't be able to pronounce: order bastilla, the pigeon pie dusted with powdered sugar, and argue cheerfully about whether it’s the strangest thing you’ve ever loved. Walk to the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter, and find the brass-workers hammering in tiny ateliers no bigger than a closet. In the evening, climb to the Merenid Tombs above the city as the call to prayer echoes and the city turns gold below you. The romance of Fes isn’t in the amenities. It’s in the way the medina demands that you let go—of your plan, your navigation, your sense that you know what’s around the next corner. You don’t. This trip is about living in the moment. Stay at: A riad in the medina, not a hotel on the ring road. Riad Laaroussa or Dar Roumana both have inner courtyards where breakfast arrives as if by sorcery. Don’t miss: The Nejjarine Museum of Wooden Arts and Crafts—an 18th-century caravanserai converted into a museum of carved wood, with a rooftop café that has an incredible view of the medina. See thousands of glowworm hanging peacefully abovehead, forming a magnificent bioluminescent cosmos. Atlas Obscura User Embrace the Silence Waitomo, New Zealand Cave systems in the Waitomo region of New Zealand’s North Island hold a mesmerizing secret: their ceilings glow. Thousands of Arachnocampa luminosa—glowworms found only in New Zealand—have colonized the limestone caverns and created what amounts to a private planetarium. You float through on a small boat in total darkness and total silence, surrounded by cold blue-green constellations. It is profoundly strange. It is also one of the most beautiful things you will ever see. Beyond Waitomo, the surrounding Waikato region is full of the particular New Zealand magic of feeling like you’ve found somewhere the rest of the world simply forgot to claim. Walk the Mangapohue Natural Bridge, a massive limestone arch over a stream where you can find ancient oyster fossils embedded in the rock—this was once the ocean floor. Stand inside a crack in the earth where the walls are six stories tall and the light falls in strange columns. This trip is for couples who can sit with each other in silence and still feel completely present. If that’s you, this is your place. Stay at: Embrace the peace and quiet, and the stunning natural surroundings, by renting a cabin in the surrounding region. Favorites include Te Tiro Accommodation and Golden Ridge Retreat. Don’t miss: The Ruakuri Cave tour, which is longer and less crowded than the main Waitomo tour, includes a remarkable spiral entrance designed to honor the site’s Māori significance, and ends with a boat ride past the densest glowworm colony in the system. Explore the extraordinary moss garden at Saihō-ji. Mike Walker / Atlas Obscura User Travel Through Time Kyoto, Japan Kyoto is beloved by travelers for a reason, but the best way to see this historic destination is to get up early and take in the quiet moments before the rest of the city wakes up. Go to Fushimi Inari-taisha at first light, before the tour buses arrive. The shrine’s thousands of vermillion torii gates were donated by businesses over the centuries—each one inscribed with the donor's name on the back—and they tunnel up the mountain in a corridor of saturated orange-red that makes you feel you’ve slipped into another dimension of time. The hike to the summit takes about two hours. You will almost certainly have the upper paths to yourself. Sit on a bench at the top, look out over the city, and understand in your body why people have been doing this for thirteen centuries. Then go to Saihō-ji, the Moss Temple, which requires an application to visit weeks in advance and a copying sutra before entry, and has more than one hundred twenty varieties of moss carpeting its garden in every shade of green that exists. There is a quality of stillness here—the particular hush of a garden that has been tended continuously since 1339—that is unlike anything else. On your second day, walk the Philosopher’s Path along the canal in the early morning when the light is still low. Stop at the Ōtoyo Shrine, a small shrine protected by cat statues rather than the traditional lion-dogs. Eat at a counter-seat restaurant where the chef serves you one course at a time and you eat what you’re given. Drink sake from a cedar box. The Kyoto trip asks the question: What does it feel like to be somewhere ancient together? Not as tourists, but as two people who chose to show up. Stay at: A ryokan in Higashiyama—the traditional inn district—where you sleep on futons, wear yukata, and receive an eight-course kaiseki dinner in your room. Tawaraya, if budget permits. Don’t miss: Nishiki Market at opening time, before the crowds—the narrow covered shopping street known as “Kyoto’s Kitchen” where you can eat dashi-soaked tofu, tiny pickled vegetables, and skewered grilled mochi from stall to stall. Also: Kurodani Temple, a 12th-century Tendai temple where monks practice chanting in the early morning and the sound carries through the cedar forest. Mykines, home to a solitary lighthouse, is one of the most remote places you could ever visit. Sigfried Rabanser / CC BY 2.0 See the Edge of the World The Faroe Islands There are eighteen main islands in the Faroe archipelago. They rise dramatically from the North Atlantic between Norway and Iceland, and they look like something that was created intentionally with drama in mind: sheer sea cliffs, waterfalls that blow sideways in the wind before they reach the bottom, sheep grazing on grass so green it seems digitally enhanced, villages of turf-roofed houses clinging to hillsides above fjords of impossible blue. Few travelers come here. But you should. Hike to Trælanípa on Vágar Island to see a lake that appears to float above the ocean in an optical illusion that has to be seen to be believed. Walk out onto the promontory at Enniberg, the highest sea cliff in the Faroese islands, and stand two hundred seventy meters above the Atlantic with nothing between you and Canada. Go to Mykines, the westernmost island, reachable by ferry or helicopter, where a bridge over a gorge leads to a lighthouse and the bridge’s cables are occupied in puffin season by birds that appear to have escaped from a cartoon—orange beaks, dramatic eyebrows, complete indifference to your presence. In the evenings, eat lamb (the islands have three times as many sheep as people) and dried fish and Faroese butter, and watch the light on the water go from gold to pink to grey to a luminous white. Stay at: Hotel Føroyar above Tórshavn, where every room has a scenic view and the turf roof blends into the hillside. Or rent a cottage on one of the outer islands and have almost nothing around you for days. Don’t miss: Kirkjubøur, the tiny village on Streymoy that contains a 13th-century cathedral ruin, a fully operational medieval farmhouse (the oldest continuously inhabited wooden house in the world), and a population of roughly eighty people. The bishop of the Faroe Islands once kept his summer residence here. The view across the sound to Hestur island is one of the finest in the archipelago. Geology and the need for protection against invaders created a city unlike any other. gslohr / Atlas Obscura User Explore the Underworld Cappadocia, Turkey The landscape of Cappadocia looks like it was designed by someone who had read too much science fiction and not enough geology. Millions of years of volcanic ash hardened into soft tuff, and then wind and water carved it into thousands of spires called fairy chimneys, some of them thirty meters tall, some of them capped with harder basalt boulders that balanced improbably on top. Early Christians, escaping persecution, dug into the soft rock and built churches inside the spires. Then they dug deeper and built entire underground cities. Derinkuyu extends eighteen stories below the earth. It has living quarters, wine cellars, stables, a church, a school, and wells that reach the water table hundreds of meters down. Twenty thousand people could live here—and for periods of Byzantine history, they did, sealing the tunnels with enormous rolling stone doors when invaders came. You walk through it with a flashlight and your loved one and try to comprehend the determination required to hollow out the world beneath your feet in order to survive. Above ground, stay in a cave hotel (the rock has been dug into for so long that some of the best accommodation in Cappadocia is, quite literally, inside a fairy chimney) and take a hot air balloon at dawn over the valleys when the light is rose and gold and the rock formations below look like a strange lost city. Rose Valley and Pigeon Valley are both hikeable, and both lead past ancient frescoed churches carved into cliff faces. El Nazar Church, in Göreme, has frescoes from the 11th century that have kept their blue, their red, their strange archaic faces, against all odds. Stay at: A cave suite in Ürgüp or Göreme—Argos in Cappadocia is genuinely beautiful and built into a complex of ancient dwellings—but any of the mid-range cave hotels deliver the extraordinary experience of sleeping inside rock. Don’t miss: Ihlara Valley, a 16-kilometer gorge carved by the Melendiz River where more than a hundred rock-cut churches line the canyon walls, most of them with frescoes worth taking in. Walk the valley floor along the river and look up at the doors cut into the cliff face many stories above you. It’s not the drinks, this bar is actually spinning. Keri Kilgo / Atlas Obscura User The Gothic American Trip New Orleans, Louisiana New Orleans is the city where the Atlas Obscura sensibility was perhaps invented, though the city predates us by three centuries. It is a place that has always understood that pleasure and death are neighbors, that beauty and decay coexist in the same building, and that a good story is worth more than a good night’s sleep. Start in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, the oldest extant cemetery in New Orleans, where the dead are buried aboveground in whitewashed plaster tombs because the water table prevents burial below it. Some of these tombs contain generations of the same family—the bones of the previously interred were swept to the back to make room for the newly dead. The tomb of Homer Plessy—of Plessy v. Ferguson—is here. So is Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen, whose tomb is always marked with X’s left by visitors making wishes. Walk through the French Quarter in the early morning before the tourists arrive and look at what the city actually is: wrought-iron balconies canting slightly over the narrow streets, plaster facades in faded ochre and salmon revealing the brick underneath where chunks have fallen away, courtyards glimpsed through carriageway openings where banana trees and jasmine and a single iron fountain constitute an entire private world. Eat oysters at the bar at Casamento’s (cash only, closed in summer). Drink a Sazerac at the Carousel Bar at Hotel Monteleone, which rotates slowly whether you want it to or not. Go to the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum on Chartres Street, housed in the oldest licensed pharmacy in the United States, where the cases contain leeches jars, poison cure-alls made of arsenic, and the earliest known cocaine preparations marketed as toothache remedies. Go to the Backstreet Cultural Museum in Treme, the oldest African American neighborhood in the country, where curator Sylvester Francis has assembled the most significant collection of Mardi Gras Indian suits in the world—towering hand-sewn beaded constructions that take a year to make and are worn once. Stay at: The Hotel Peter & Paul, a converted 19th-century church complex in the Marigny where the rooms are in the rectory, the chapel, the school, and the convent. Sleeping in a former church in New Orleans feels exactly right. Don’t miss: An evening Second Line, if one happens while you're there. A jazz funeral. The Beauregard-Keyes House on Chartres, which has its original furnishings and a ghost-free reputation that is entirely unearned by its atmosphere. Kayaking through Mosquito Bay. Courtesy Puerto Rico Tourism Company Bask in Bioluminescence Vieques, Puerto Rico Mosquito Bay on the island of Vieques holds one of the highest concentrations of bioluminescent dinoflagellates anywhere on Earth. On a moonless night, every movement through the water produces cold blue-green light—your arms as you swim leave trails like a comet, the wake of a kayak paddle glows, a fish disturbed from the shallows explodes in a small private fireworks display. The effect is so improbable and so beautiful that it’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there—making the shared memory all the more precious. Vieques itself is largely undeveloped—much of the island was a U.S. Navy bombing range until 2003, and the former military lands are now a wildlife refuge that contains not just Mosquito Bay but also pristine beaches accessible only by four-wheel drive, wild horses descended from Spanish colonial stock, and a remarkable herd of white cattle egrets who have figured out that the horses attract insects—and follow them everywhere with an air of complete entitlement. Spend the days on the beaches—like Playa Negra, made up of dark volcanic sand that holds the heat long into the evening—and on the old fort, El Fortín Conde de Mirasol, which was the last military fortification built by the Spanish in the New World and now houses the Vieques Museum. It has a view over the harbor and the wild horses grazing below the walls. Stay at: The small guesthouses in Esperanza, the fishing village on the south coast, are the right scale for Vieques. Inn on the Blue Horizon is a longtime local institution. Avoid the all-inclusives. Don’t miss: Explore the bioluminescent bay by kayak rather than by motorized tour—the paddle itself becomes part of the spectacle. And be sure to see Sun Bay Beach at sunrise, before the horses have moved into the shade. Black Hills Institute, home of the dinosaurs. Volkan Yuksel / CC BY-SA 3.0 Embark on a Paleontological Expedition Badlands, South Dakota + Rapid City For the couple whose first date involved a natural history museum. The Badlands are geologically young and active—the striped spires and eroded tables formed only in the last 500,000 years, and they’re still actively eroding at a rate of roughly an inch per year, which means fossils are constantly being exposed at the surface. Walk the Notch Trail along the top of the canyon wall and you will almost certainly see bone weathering out of the rock. The park has found Eocene mammals, saber-toothed cats, giant tortoises, and ancient three-toed horses here. The paleontology is everywhere. From the Badlands, drive to the legendary American roadside phenomenon Wall Drug—a drugstore that started advertising in 1936 and now has six hundred billboards across the state and a population of confused tourists larger than some cities. Then drive to Hill City and the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, which is a working commercial fossil preparation laboratory that you can walk through, watching technicians with dental picks working on specimens worth millions of dollars in surroundings that look like a very disorganized workshop. Stan, one of the most complete T. rex skeletons ever found, was prepared here. Sleep in Deadwood, which is a gambling town now but was a gold rush town before that, and before that was a Lakota sacred place where the Treaty of Fort Laramie prohibited white settlement until gold was discovered and the government simply decided the treaty didn't apply anymore. Mount Moriah Cemetery is here, where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are buried next to each other, and where Dora DuFran, the madam of the most successful brothel in Deadwood, rests nearby. They were all, apparently, friends. Stay at: The Hotel Alex Johnson in Rapid City, a 1928 Lakota-inspired hotel that has hosted presidents and rock climbers alike since it opened, and which still feels like it knows something it's not telling you. Don’t miss: Jewel Cave National Monument, the third-longest known cave system in the world, most of which has never been mapped, where guided tours take you past formations called frostwork, moonmilk, and hydromagnesite balloons that look exactly as strange as they sound. Choosing Your Trip: The Atlas Obscura Test Whether this is your honeymoon, your tenth anniversary, or simply the trip you’ve decided to take because life is short and you have a window, skip the reviews that rank beaches by the texture and color of the sand. Ask yourselves these instead: What’s the story you want to tell a year from now? The overwater bungalow story ends quickly. The underground city story, the cave church story, the glowing bay story—those take time to tell, because there’s more to say. The best romantic trips are the ones that become part of your shared vocabulary for decades. Would you go back? The best destinations are the ones that leave you feeling you only scratched the surface. If a place can be “done” in a week, it’s probably not the right place for a trip that’s supposed to mean something. Does it require something of you? Not discomfort for its own sake, but genuine engagement—learning a few words of another language, navigating without GPS, eating something you don’t recognize. Trips that ask something of you tend to return something that package tours can’t deliver. Is there something there that exists nowhere else on Earth? Waitomo’s glowworms. Cappadocia’s underground cities. Fes’s living medieval city. Vieques’s bioluminescent bay. The Badlands’s constant fossil exposure. These are the experiences that become, over time together, the stories you keep coming back to. The good news is this: wonder is not expensive. It requires curiosity, a decent tolerance for the unexpected, and a willingness to be in a place on its own terms rather than yours. That, as it turns out, is also a reasonable description of what makes a relationship work. Go somewhere astonishing. Come home changed.
