Each January, the Travel section offers a list of “52 Places to Go” in the coming year, filled with recommendations for destinations that we think are prime to be visited. Our choices are meant to be an inspiration for travelers — and dreamers — not a checklist to be ticked off (though for two years we did send 52 Places Travelers racing around the globe). With next year’s list almost ready to go, here’s a look at how The Times’s writers and photographers covered the places we showcased on our 2024 list when they visited them this year.
1. The Path of Totality
The path of April’s total solar eclipse was our No. 1 pick for 2024, encompassing an area that extended “from the beaches of Mazatlán, Mexico, to the rugged coves of Maberly, Newfoundland,” as we wrote. The day turned into perhaps the biggest travel event of the year, with millions of people heading to a roughly 110-mile wide belt across North America, often ending up in smaller cities that happened to be in the path. Hertz said car reservations jumped 3,000 percent over the previous year, and Airbnb reported a 1,000 percent increase in searches for listings. The traffic afterward: a nightmare. Reporters and photographers from The Times were there to document the minutes of totality and the surrounding hoopla. If you missed it, or the experience turned you into an eclipse chaser, your next chance is in 2026.
2. Paris
Paris, already one of the most visited cities in the world, made our list for a confluence of noteworthy events: the 2024 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games; the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition (an occasion shared with Normandy); and the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral, ravaged by fire in 2019. The city promised to use some of its most famous sites as a backdrop for the Olympics, including an opening ceremony spread throughout the city and swimming events in the Seine, and delivered. We offered help in navigating the Games (including bakeries at which to fuel up), and capping off the year, Notre-Dame reopened as planned. Here’s how to arrange a visit.
3. Maui, Hawaii
We chose Maui for the list because we believed that the heavily tourism-dependent island (Hawaii’s second largest and one of its most popular among visitors) could use the economic support. While there was debate about whether it was too soon for vacationers to return after wildfires blazed across its western shores in 2023 killing at least 100 people and razing the town of Lahaina, we felt it was possible to visit respectfully. In April, our 36 Hours column touched down there, written by Shannon Wianecki, who grew up in Hawaii. “Lahaina will take years to rebuild,” she reported. “But Maui’s inherent beauty and hospitality remain as vibrant as ever.”
4. Baltimore
In choosing Baltimore, we predicted “an enormous year for Charm City,” with an item focused on its role in the Civil Rights movement, the increasing presence of Native artists at its showcase Museum of Art and new development in its long-neglected port area, among other things. Then, in March, life in the city was upended when the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by a container ship, with six people killed. The port reopened within months, but rebuilding the bridge will take years. Our item also noted that the movie director John Waters would be in Baltimore, his hometown, shooting a film in 2024 and in July, we caught up with Mr. Waters, who shared his five favorite places in the city with us.
5. Dominica, the Caribbean
Dominica, a 290-square-mile independent nation in the West Indies, nicknamed the Nature Island, was chosen for a nifty bit of infrastructure: a $54 million, 4.1-mile cable car line to whisk passengers from the lush Roseau Valley up to Boiling Lake, a roughly 200-foot-wide fumarole flooded with nearly 200-degree water, which up till now has required a demanding hike to reach. When the writer Nina Burleigh visited for us, the cable car was still not running (the completion date has been pushed back to 2025). To her the island felt “like an untamed garden,” where “spectacular blossoms peek from profuse green almost everywhere.”
6. Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico
We predicted that the Maya Train, a new line designed to connect popular destinations on the Yucatán Peninsula — including beachy Cancún, historical Mérida and the Maya ruins of Chichén Itzá — to more distant archaeological sites, like Calakmul and Palenque could bring big changes to this Mexican state. The train will eventually ring the peninsula, traversing five states over nearly 1,000 miles of track and connecting directly with the new airport in Tulum. Early in the year, the writer Elisabeth Malkin rode the train on a stretch from Cancún to Mérida, and then south through the port city of Campeche to Palenque. She encountered “scheduling confusion, unfinished stations and a dearth of trains” but also “widespread enthusiasm among fellow travelers who expressed a willingness to give the train time to work out the kinks.” We also featured Mérida in our 36 Hours column, and called it “a young, artsy place best experienced with a free-spirited sensibility.”
7. Grenada, the Caribbean
The Caribbean island of Grenada celebrated its 50th anniversary of independence in 2024 and also got new flights from JetBlue, Virgin Atlantic and Air Canada, making it more accessible. That earned the island a place on our list. Among the island’s highlights, we said, was the Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park, where snorkelers and scuba divers can swim through a submarine exhibit/artificial reef. When Shannon Sims wrote a 36 Hours column about the island, she made Molinere a stop and also suggested visiting nearby Flamingo Bay, “with its lively reef wall buzzing with fish.”
8. Morocco
In September 2023, an earthquake killed almost 3,000 people in Morocco and left many people without homes. The country is heavily dependent on tourism and, as we wrote in putting it on our 2024 list, “needs visitors now more than ever.” We followed up with a 36 Hours in Marrakesh in February. The writer Seth Sherwood found the city still scarred by the earthquake, but also called it “a haven of Islamic architecture, dazzling traditional artisanship, cool contemporary design, and perhaps North Africa’s best restaurants and nightlife.” In December, the country’s Ministry of Tourism said that 15.9 million tourists had visited during the first 11 months of 2024, up 20 percent from the same period in 2023.
9. Singapore
Singapore made our list because it was seeing a boom in luxury hotels and was also expanding what many people believe to be the world’s best airport, Changi. We captured two other aspects of the cosmopolitan city-state during the year: its creative, idiosyncratic cocktail scene, and the food, design and architecture of its local Peranakan population (the word refers to descendants of Chinese settlers who traveled throughout Southeast Asia and married local women).
10. Normandy, France
The biggest exhibition commemorating the 150th anniversary of Impressionism was on view in Paris this year, but as those familiar with art history know, the work that gave the movement its name was painted by Claude Monet in Le Havre, the gritty city in Normandy. That fact put Normandy on our 2024 list. Elaine Sciolino visited Le Havre, which she calls “France’s most important seaport and its most underappreciated big city,” with what is arguably the most important collection of Impressionist paintings in France outside the Musée d’Orsay at the Musée d’Art Moderne André Malraux.
11. Whitehorse, Yukon
Aurora tourism is what draws many people to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon territory in northwest Canada, and its aurora-viewing tours taking place via canoe, snowshoe and fat-tire bike earned it a place on our list. We suggested stopping in at Yukon Brewing, offering “beer worth freezin’ for.” The writer Fiona McGlynn checked in during the Yukon Rendezvous, an annual festival that celebrated its 60th anniversary this year, with events that included chain saw chucking and hair freezing. In addition to seeing the northern lights, she wrote, visitors can view animals like musk ox, bison, caribou, moose, lynx and arctic fox in a natural landscape. As a local resident told her, “In the Yukon, you can hear the quietness.”
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