Castellfollit de la Roca has a doubly impressive location—it's perched atop a spit of land with cliffs on two sides.
Spot Cool Stuff loves a good cliff-side town. There’s something about them that’s romantic, daring and a little impossible. Here are five of our favorites places where no one with vertigo would want to live:
You don’t need to be as fast as the Kenians. You don’t need to challenge “Ultramarathon Man” Dean Karnazes on a 100 miles race. Running a marathon or a half marathon or a shorter race is more a personal challenge than a struggle against the clock. And you can enjoy the tourist experience as well, it’s called sightseeing on the run. Crossing the Brandenburg Gate at the Berlin Marathon or entering the Panathinaikon Stadium in Athens will leave you breathless (OK, that maybe be the exhaustion) and offers a more vivid memory of the city than thousands of pictures.
In Paris, a pedicure entails something entirely different than your typical scrub and polish.
Monsieur Ho is to feet as Yves Saint Laurent was to fashion—worshipped by his fans and envied by his rivals as a master of his medium. For the last three decades his name has been passed from one glamorous Parisienne to another as the best pedicurist in town. His most fervent supporter? None other than La Deneuve, France’s most famous and demanding diva.
So how do you create a three-story bookstore in a cathedral when you can’t drill any holes into the building or attach anything load-bearing to its walls?
Usually a store is just a store. But a few stores are attractions in and of themselves. So it is with these six incredibly cool-looking bookstores. Next you are in Maastricht, Beijing, Porto, Buenos Aires, Paris or Mexico City, add these stores to your list of must-see attractions—even if you don’t plan on buying a book.
The dining location for your ten-course tasting meal is kept 'secret' until your reservation is confirmed
If there is one dinner to plan in advance on your trip to Paris, make it Hidden Kitchen. Located in the swanky Parisian flat of two talented American chefs, this secret restaurant is where food-loving strangers come to meet and eat.
Here’s a restaurant theme you didn’t see coming: darkness.
The concept of purposefully eating in complete pitch-black dark originated with Jorge Spielmann, a blind clergyman from Zurich. When guests ate dinner at the Spielmann house some would wear blindfolds during their meal to show solidarity with their host and to better understand his world. What Spielmann’s sighted guests found was that the blindfolds heightened their sense of taste and smell and made their dining experience more enjoyable. That gave Spielmann the idea to open a dark restaurant, which he did in 1999.
Today you can stumble into dozens restaurants around the world where that question made famous in an American commercial in the 80s — Where’s the beef? — takes on a whole new meaning. Most dark restaurants employ blind waiters, offer a single set menu, and ban anything that could give off light (like cigarettes, cell phones and cameras) from the dinning area. All of them also have normally lit bathrooms though you’ll need to ask your waiter for help in finding it.
Here’s our illuminating look at some of the world’s dark restaurants:
Staying at the Hotel Everland feels like spending the night in a 1970s shagadelic bachelor pad.
There aren’t many hotels that might have traveled more around Europe than its guests. Then again there’s no hotel like the one-room Everland.
This pre-fab capsule, designed by a pair of Swiss artists who cryptically go by L/B (Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann), was built to be mobile. After stints at Zurich’s Expo.02, on the Shores of Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig, Germany the Everland is now atop the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. At its current location this hotel might have the best Eiffel Tower view of any in the city.
Some lighthouse hotels are a little gritty. (Or, at least cramped). The Phare de Kerbel, on France’s Brittany coast, is spacious and modern. There’s a full kitchen, gorgeously appointed bedrooms and a swimming pool. Better still, there’s the view of the Atlantic from a perch 25 meters (82 feet) above Port Louis.
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