A Very Different ‘52 Places’
Read 52 Places to Love in 2021 right here.
At this time of yr The Times’s Travel desk often publishes its lavish “52 Places to Go” listing, a compendium of strategies for the locations which are particularly price visiting within the coming yr, accompanied by showstopping pictures.
But on this pandemic yr, creating our common listing was out of the query. For one factor, there have been the logistics: We often deploy a small military of photographers in quest of these good photographs. That was clearly unattainable. Beyond that, our listing is constructed on a journalistic crucial: What’s new? What makes a spot so thrilling and totally different — lodge openings, new museums, an increasing meals or cultural scene — that it jumps to the highest of the listing of locations to see now? But the pandemic has put a maintain on most of these newsworthy developments.
Instead, in 2021, we face a yr of uncertainty. With vaccines newly accessible, maybe the journey trade — which provides hundreds of thousands of jobs and is a vital a part of the worldwide economic system — will begin to revive. But it’s arduous to know when and the place that rebirth will start. And a listing that appears to encourage individuals to hurry again onto planes when so many are struggling felt unconscionable.
And but, the world with all its beautiful pure magnificence and cultural richness stays. If 2020 has carried out something for individuals who like to journey, it has reminded them that the world will not be a guidelines of locations to tick off — Venice, been there, the Serengeti, carried out that — however one thing to discover, to savor and to like.
That grew to become the animating thought behind this yr’s 52 Places. Instead of turning to our contributors and correspondents, we turned to a different group of passionate vacationers, our readers, and requested them to inform us about their most beloved locations, and why they deserved a spot on our listing, in addition to to share their pictures.
More than 2,000 of them responded.
They instructed us about hometowns for which they’d gained new appreciation throughout the pandemic. Of international locations the place their household connections run robust, however which for the second they’ll solely view with longing. Of trip locations the place they out of the blue acknowledged one thing essential in themselves. In studying by way of the submissions, it grew to become clear that whereas our listing often focuses on what’s altering in a spot, individuals may be profoundly modified by the locations they’ve visited — and isn’t that why we journey to start with?
After we’d made our decisions, a bunch of reporters interviewed the contributors, in some instances to attract extra from them. (We additionally weeded out the submissions from journey professionals trying to promote their locations.) The entries listed here are a mix of the unique submissions and people subsequent conversations, condensed and edited for size and readability.
Our contributors are drawn from all around the world, underlining that regardless of the present shutdowns, we actually are a worldwide neighborhood. This listing skews extra rural than our common one — within the pandemic the wilderness has held particular comfort, it appears. It additionally contains locations that may be unlikely to make the lower in a conventional yr — too “humble,” too “dangerous,” or too private to placed on a places-to-see listing.
But this can be a listing of locations to like. And that has made all of the distinction.
