Exploring cultures and communities – the slow way

Welcome to hidden europe. We promise a fresh perspective on well trodden trails, and a cool look at undiscovered corners.

Our Latest Issue

Water is a recurrent theme in issue 69 of hidden europe magazine as we take time out on Hebridean and Adriatic islands, explore the Wadden Sea coastline, and hop aboard slow boats in both Greece and Norway. We relax in a riverside park in Bulgaria, watching the Danube waters slip by, and we have a distinctly Danish coastal experience as we venture out to Grenen at the extremity of the great sandy spit at Skagen.

Elsewhere in this penultimate issue of hidden Europe we celebrate 150 years of Thomas Cook’s European rail timetable, stop off in the Serbian city of Niš, and reflect on the rewards that await those who stay on the train to the very end of the line. As ever in hidden europe, we try to persuade you to slow down and make time for fine journeys, rather than just dashing to your destination.

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Good travel writing

hidden europe is a print magazine published thrice annually. Our brief is Europe wide, and we criss-cross the continent to bring our readers some of Europe’s very best travel writing.

Offbeat places

We invite you to look beyond the usual tourist trails — or, if you prefer, stay at home, take out an atlas and enjoy our enthusiasm for the offbeat, the eclectic and the everyday.

No advertising

hidden europe magazine is an independent publication — completely free of advertising. Our work is value driven and we approach every topic with passion, insight, conviction and authority.

  • What charm can there be in a journey when one is always sure to arrive and find horses ready, a downy bed, an excellent supper and all the comforts that one enjoys at home?
    — Théophile Gautier

  • We have lost our sense of time. We believe that we can add meaning to life by making things go faster. We have an idea that life is short — and that we must go fast to fit everything in. But life is long. The problem is that we don’t know how to spend our time wisely.
    — Carlo Petrini

  • Journeys are the midwives of thought. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places.
    — Alain de Botton

Our philosophy

hidden europe magazine aims at discovering the exotic in the everyday. The places we feature are unhyped and unsung yet full of interest. If you want to understand Europe's rich cultural diversity, this is the magazine for you.

hidden europe attends as much to the journey as to the destination. We take the train to Belarus and the ferry to Iceland. And the prose is as unhurried as the journeys it describes.

The magazine features genuinely out-of-the-way places. Where we touch down on somewhere more mainstream, the perspective on the place is unconventional. And we never present places merely as points of consumption.

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Flavours of hidden europe

View a sample of hidden europe articles online (click below).

online sample of hidden europe articles

Explore hidden europe

Click on the sketch-map below to search for articles relating to your favourite country (on some devices you will see a list of country names instead). Yet no map is perfect, and for countries not shown on the interactive map — and to explore topics, regions or place names — just use the search box below the map.

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Paper Interrail passes have now given way to mobile passes, which can be managed with the Rail Planner app (photo © hidden europe)
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We know that many readers of hidden europe were quick off the mark in May this year when, to celebrate 50 years of Interrail, some passes were available for 50% off the list price. A superb offer that means that there are now thousands of people ...
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hidden europe note

In search of Joseph Roth

  • 8 Oct 2022
Berlin-based author Paul Scraton explores the mercurial life of Joseph Roth, the Austro-Hungarian writer profiled in a new biography by Keiron Pim and published by Granta Books in October ...

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