Stockholm

Stockholm carries a capital across fourteen islands as if it weighed nothing: palaces, parliaments and tech offices distributed over bridges and ferries, with water so present that a wrong turn ends at a quay, and so clean that people fish salmon downtown. The city's genius is balance — old and new, land and lake, ambition and the sacred coffee pause called fika.

The sensible traveller starts in Gamla Stan's amber alleys before the day boats arrive, crosses to Djurgården for the Vasa — a warship so gloriously failed it sank in 1628 and surfaced as the world's best museum argument —, and gives Södermalm the afternoon: viewpoints, vintage racks and fika executed properly, meaning slowly, twice. In summer, any white boat into the archipelago repays the fare in islands.

The Guide's honesty: cash is nearly extinct — even church collections tap cards —; alcohol outside bars queues at the state shop with civic patience; and fika is not a coffee break but a constitutional right: refusing a second round reads as a cry for help. Sit longer.