Most Underrated Cities to Visit
Settle it: two at a time →A ranking of the most underrated cities to visit, built around places that return more than their reputation promises: intact neighbourhoods, working food cultures, and the sense of a city getting on with its own life rather than performing for arrivals. Entries qualify on substance (UNESCO-listed old towns, distinct regional cooking, genuine civic reinvention) rather than on obscurity for its own sake. The cities near the top pair real depth with crowds that still have not caught up.
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How the opening order was chosen
The opening order is the order I added the items in. Every ballot moves the ranking from there.
A reasonable ordering rewards cities that repay a week rather than a weekend, then discounts anything already carrying a full tourist load. That trade-off is what makes the top contentious: Lisbon and Mexico City are the richest entries here and also the least genuinely overlooked, while Tbilisi and Belgrade are far less travelled but ask more of the visitor.
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Kalemegdan fortress commands the ridge where the Sava meets the Danube, a position that had the city besieged and rebuilt repeatedly across two thousand years. Nightlife runs on the splavovi, floating clubs moored along both rivers, while Skadarlija keeps its 19th century bohemian quarter intact.
Founded as Thang Long in 1010, Hanoi marked its thousandth year in 2010 when UNESCO inscribed the central sector of its Imperial Citadel. The Old Quarter still carries guild names on its streets, and the Temple of Literature, built in 1070, housed Vietnam's first university.
Krakow's historic centre made the very first UNESCO World Heritage list in 1978, as did the Wieliczka salt mine just outside it. Rynek Glowny, laid out under the town charter of 1257, runs some 200 metres a side, and Kazimierz still holds the synagogues of the old Jewish quarter.
The 1755 earthquake flattened most of Lisbon, which is why Alfama's tangle of Moorish-era lanes and the rigid Pombaline grid of the Baixa now sit side by side. Fado, sung in Alfama's back rooms, joined UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2011.
Joze Plecnik redrew his home city between the wars, and his Triple Bridge, market colonnade and Ljubljanica embankments were inscribed by UNESCO as a single body of work in 2021. Cars were pushed out of the centre well before the city took the European Green Capital title in 2016.
Metrocable gondolas, folded into the metro network from 2004, tied hillside barrios to the valley floor and set the reference case for cable cars as commuter transit. Outdoor escalators followed in Comuna 13, and a 2013 competition backed by Citi and the Wall Street Journal named it Innovative City of the Year.
Electrical workers digging beside the cathedral in 1978 struck the Coyolxauhqui monolith, exposing the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan beneath the colonial centre. That layering is the whole argument for the city, and UNESCO listed the historic core alongside Xochimilco's Aztec canals in 1987.
Everything that scares people off, the scooters, the scaffolding, the shouting, is the admission price for a Caravaggio still hanging over the altar it was painted for, the Archaeological Museum's Pompeii holdings, and pizza in the city that invented it. Lisbon cleaned itself up for visitors; Naples never bothered, which is the point.
Seven moles, tlayudas off market comals, mezcal from palenques an hour out, and Monte Alban's Zapotec terraces above town make the depth argument easy. The underrated part is expiring fast though. Day of the Dead week now books out months ahead, and rising rents in the centro are pushing out the families who cook the food everyone came for.
Portus Cale, the Roman settlement that gave Portugal its name, is now the granite terraces of Ribeira under the Dom Luis I bridge, finished in 1886 to a design by Eiffel's former partner Theophile Seyrig. UNESCO listed the historic centre in 1996; the port lodges sit across the water in Vila Nova de Gaia.
Brazil's capital from 1549 to 1763, Salvador was also the colony's main Atlantic slave port. The Afro-Brazilian culture built on that history still runs the city: candomble terreiros, capoeira rodas listed by UNESCO in 2014, and the colonial streets of Pelourinho, listed in 1985.
Ottoman bazaar lanes run straight into Habsburg boulevards, the corner where the 1914 assassination happened sits beside a plain stone bridge most people pass without noticing, and coffee still arrives in a dzezva with lokum on the saucer. Belgrade gets the nightlife votes; Sarajevo has more history per block. Winter is the catch, when valley inversion traps some of Europe's worst air.
Taipei 101 held the world's tallest building title from 2004 until the Burj Khalifa opened in 2010, and its tuned mass damper is still an exhibit visitors can walk around. The National Palace Museum keeps the imperial Chinese collection carried out of Beijing, far too large to display at once.
Warm sulfur springs gave the city its name, tbili being Georgian for warm, and they still feed the domed brick bathhouses of Abanotubani. Georgia's qvevri method, fermenting wine in clay vessels buried underground, joined UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2013.
After the flood of 1957, Valencia diverted the Turia and turned the empty riverbed into a park curving for kilometres through the city, ending at Calatrava's City of Arts and Sciences. Paella comes from the rice paddies of the nearby Albufera, and Las Fallas was listed by UNESCO in 2016.
