Venice is sinking under the weight of its own visitors. Santorini’s clifftop paths are elbow-to-elbow by 10 am. The Amalfi Coast now requires timed entry. At some point, the most famous places stopped being the best. And the slow traveler’s job became finding what came next.

I want to be clear: I am not here to tell you that Venice isn’t beautiful. It is. So is Santorini. So is the Amalfi Coast. The problem isn’t the places, it’s what has happened to them. What the weight of mass tourism has done to the experience of actually being there. When you spend more time managing crowds than you do absorbing a place. Usually, something has gone fundamentally wrong with the trip.

In 2026, overtourism is no longer just an inconvenience. International tourist arrivals increased 5% globally in the first half of 2025.  Surpassing pre-pandemic levels, and the pressure on the most popular destinations is showing in ways that affect locals and visitors alike. Cities like Amsterdam, Venice, and Barcelona have been forced to introduce anti-tourism measures, from daily visitor, limits to outright bans on new hotels. The message from these places is increasingly clear: there are too many of us, and the experience is worse for it.

The good news, and there is very good news,  is that the alternatives are extraordinary. Here are the places I go now, and why each one offers more of what the famous destinations promised and increasingly fail to deliver.

Instead of Venice: Trieste

If what you love about Venice is the idea of a watery, historic, deeply Italian city with extraordinary architecture and a café culture that rewards sitting still. Trieste delivers all of it, with a fraction of the visitors and a personality that is entirely its own.

Trieste sits in the northeastern corner of Italy, between the Adriatic Sea and the Karst plateau.  It carries the layered history of a city that has been, at various points, the most important port in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That history is visible in the architecture, such as grand Habsburg boulevards running alongside baroque churches and Roman ruins.   Audible in the dialect, which mixes Italian with Slovenian and German in ways that remind you how recently borders moved here.

The coffee culture alone justifies the trip. Trieste is widely considered Italy’s coffee capital. The city has its own coffee vocabulary, its own roasting traditions, and a density of historic cafés that rivals any city in Europe. James Joyce lived here for over a decade and wrote much of Ulysses in the city’s caffès. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his Duino Elegies in a castle just outside the city limits. The literary and intellectual tradition is palpable in a way that you feel in the atmosphere, not just in the guidebook.

The seafront promenade, the Piazza Unità d’Italia opening directly onto the water, the fish market at dawn, the aperitivo hour that begins early and ends late, Trieste is a city for lingering. And you can linger, because the crowds aren’t there yet.

Where to stay: Look for small hotels in the city center within walking distance of the seafront. The historic Borgo Teresiano neighborhood is ideal for slow travelers who want to be near everything without being in the tourist center.

Instead of Santorini: Vis Island, Croatia

Santorini’s white and blue clifftop villages are among the most photographed places on earth, which is precisely the problem. The photography has become the point, and the experience of actually being there has been subordinated to the production of images. The sunsets are real. The crowds watching them are also real, and they are enormous.

Vis Island has emerged as a slow-travel alternative in the Adriatic Sea, with no cruise ship stops or airports, disconnecting it more from the mainstream tourist trail. That is not an accident;  it is the selling point. An island that requires a two-hour ferry from Split is automatically protected from the day-tripper crowds that have overwhelmed Dubrovnik and Hvar. You have to actually commit to going there, which means the people who do are mostly those who intend to stay.

The food and wine are a genuine draw, traditional dishes like peka (slow-cooked fish or meat under a bell) paired with wine made from native grapes, including the fruity Vugava and the rich, full-bodied Plavac Mali. For a slow traveler with an interest in wine, that alone makes the journey worthwhile.

The landscape is genuinely beautiful, the luminous Blue Cave, the stunning Stiniva Cove, wildflower-covered hills above fishing villages that have barely changed in a century. In 2026, new cycling and walking trails will have opened, complementing outdoor activities including shipwreck diving, snorkeling, and exploration of the island’s most dramatic coastline. But the real reason to go is the pace, unhurried, genuinely local, and still largely undiscovered.

Where to stay: Small family-run guesthouses in Vis town or Komiža, the island’s two main villages. Both are beautiful, both are quiet after the day visitors leave on the last ferry, and both reward an early morning walk before anyone else is awake.

Instead of  Amalfi Coast: Alentejo, Portugal

The Amalfi Coast is spectacular, expensive, gridlocked, and now requires timed entry on its most famous road. The villages are beautiful. Getting between them in summer is an exercise in patience that many travelers find actively unpleasant.

Alentejo offers something the Amalfi Coast can no longer reliably provide: space. Experts point to Alentejo for its rare sense of space and serenity that is increasingly difficult to find in Europe, with the medieval hill town of Monsaraz and the Alqueva Dark Sky Reserve, the first site in the world to be certified as a UNESCO Starlight Tourism Destination, among its highlights.

But for the slow traveler who also loves wine, Alentejo is one of the most compelling destinations in Europe right now. This vast, cork oak-covered plateau in southern Portugal produces wines of extraordinary character, full-bodied reds from indigenous grape varieties like Aragonez and Alicante Bouschet, and increasingly sophisticated whites that are gaining international recognition. The wine estates here are accessible in a way that Tuscany’s have ceased to be many welcome visitors without appointments, and the winemakers are often on the property and genuinely pleased to talk.

The medieval villages of Monsaraz, Marvão, and Évora sit on hilltops with views that extend for miles in every direction, over a landscape of cork and olive that changes color through the seasons in ways I find genuinely moving. Évora’s Roman temple, its bone chapel, its cathedral, and its market square form one of the most satisfying collections of history I’ve encountered in any European city of its size. And on a Tuesday morning in May, you can walk through all of it without queuing for anything.

Where to stay: A herdade, a Portuguese wine estate with accommodation,  is the slow traveler’s ideal base in Alentejo. Several offer rooms or cottages on the estate, vineyard walks, and meals using produce grown on the property. This is as deeply immersive as travel gets.

Instead of Paris (Montmartre): The French Basque Country

Paris is irreplaceable, extraordinary, and worth every visit. But the Montmartre neighborhood has been cited by locals as one of the neighborhoods suffering most acutely from overtourism, and the broader experience of Paris in high season has become increasingly difficult to manage for the slow traveler who wants depth over spectacle.

The French Basque Country,  centered on Biarritz, Bayonne, and the smaller villages of the interior,  offers something that Paris increasingly cannot: the feeling of being somewhere that is genuinely itself. Biarritz offers dramatic coastline, surf culture, and a deeply rooted culinary tradition, balancing laid-back elegance with exceptional food, design, and cultural depth. Experts note that 2026 is the ideal moment to visit before demand accelerates.

The food alone is worth the journey. The Basque Country on both sides of the Franco-Spanish border has one of the most extraordinary culinary traditions in the world, and the French side is far less visited than San Sebastián across the border. The markets in Bayonne, the pintxos bars in the coastal villages, the local cheese and ham producers who sell directly from farm gates  , this is the kind of food culture that slow travel was invented to access.

For wine lovers, the Basque wines Irouléguy, produced in tiny quantities from the steep hillside vineyards of the interior, are among the most distinctive and least-known bottles in France. Finding them is part of the pleasure.

Where to stay: A small hotel in Biarritz’s center for coastal access, or a chambre d’hôtes in one of the inland Basque villages for total immersion in the local culture. The latter will cost you less and give you considerably more.

Instead of Tuscany (the Famous Parts): Umbria

Tuscany remains magnificent. It also receives around 15 million visitors a year, and in the high season, the roads between Florence, Siena, and the Val d’Orcia can feel more like a theme park than a landscape. The famous cypress-lined roads are real and beautiful. They are also extremely well known, and the number of people photographing them at any given moment in July is staggering.

Umbria, Tuscany’s quieter, less famous neighbor to the east, offers an almost identical combination of medieval hill towns, olive oil, truffles, and excellent wine, with a fraction of the visitors and a pace that still feels genuinely Italian rather than tourist-facing. Orvieto, Spoleto, Norcia, Assisi, and the Valnerina valley each is extraordinary in its own right, and none requires booking months in advance or navigating crowds to experience properly.

The wine here, Sagrantino di Montefalco, one of Italy’s most powerful and age-worthy reds, and the gentler Umbrian whites around Orvieto, are seriously undervalued by international buyers, which means the prices remain accessible and the producers are still reachable. A slow week based in Spoleto or Orvieto, with day trips to small wine estates and afternoons in hilltop villages, is one of the most quietly perfect travel experiences I’ve had anywhere.

Where to stay: An agriturismo, a working farm with rooms in the hills between Spoleto and Montefalco, puts you in the heart of truffle and wine country, within reach of half a dozen medieval towns, and as far from the Tuscan tour bus as it is possible to be while still being in central Italy.

The Principle Behind All of This

Destinations are coming up with ways to redistribute tourism from densely crowded hotspots to lesser-visited regions. Travelers are seeking cooler climes and embracing slow travel, allowing space to discover somewhere new and riding the destination dupes trend, where overrun holiday destinations are swapped out for less crowded, less expensive, but just-as-good alternatives.

But I want to push back, gently, on the word “dupes.” The places I’ve described above are not inferior versions of the famous ones. They are not consolation prizes for travelers who couldn’t get into the real thing. They are, in several cases, genuinely better, richer in local character, more accessible to the unhurried visitor, and more honest about what they are than the destinations that have been shaped by decades of mass tourism into a performance of themselves.

Slow travel is about intentionality and connection, spending more time at a destination to enjoy yourself fully in the beauty and uniqueness of the land and its people, and taking the time to note all the little details that make a place beautiful. Those details are harder to notice when you’re managing a crowd. They are everywhere when you’re not.

The most famous places will always have their pull. I’ll probably go back to Venice one day, in November, in the rain, when it is quiet and melancholy and entirely itself. But for the foreseeable future, my itinerary points toward the places that still have room for one more slow traveler and toward the particular quality of experience that only comes when a destination hasn’t yet been optimized for the people visiting it.

Those places still exist. There are more of them than you think.