by Florence Boyle

It’s holiday season, new places to explore and visitors to occupy. An old colleague of mine had his own tried and tested method of getting to know a new place – ‘go to a barber and take a long taxi ride’. I have my own suggestion, take a guided walk.

At the very least a guided walking tour is a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. More than that, a walk in the company of a knowledgeable guide reveals more about an unfamiliar place than you could ever get from guidebooks or a chat with the locals. Another less obvious advantage for the solo traveller is that it offers the opportunity to wander safely in strange city at night.

It’s now a routine part of my holiday planning that I search out a guided walk. There are well-resourced commercial operations like the walking and dining tour I joined in Rome, which led me to small piazzas and restaurants; or the volunteer walk in Auckland in the company of a PhD student whose knowledge and passion made it a memorable holiday experience.

Architecture

Specialised, niche interest walks offer another perspective. A group of young architects in Barcelona, unemployed during a downturn in the Spanish construction industry, decided to do something different and set up a walking tour exploring Gaudi’s architecture, and not just the famous examples on the main thoroughfares. In their company, wandering down streets we might never have found, our attention was drawn to features and designs that we would never have spotted or understood how often they were repeated through Gaudi’s work. Sagrada Familia is Gaudi’s masterpiece, but this tour showed something of the route he took to it.

Florence Boyle is treasurer of Open House.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash