Where to go: Christmas holidays 2026

Gambia

Mainland Africa's smallest country is a thin strip either side of the River Gambia, around six hours' flight from London and on GMT. Most visitors come for Atlantic beaches and birding, with more than 500 species recorded, but the river leads inland to Kunta Kinteh Island's slave-trade history, chimpanzee islands and ancient stone circles.

Cape Verde

Ten volcanic islands some 600km off Senegal, each with its own personality: flat, windy Sal and Boa Vista for beaches and kitesurfing, vertiginous green Santo Antão for some of the Atlantic's finest hiking, Fogo's active volcano, and Mindelo's music bars, home town of the singer Cesária Évora.

Canary Islands

Spain's Atlantic archipelago, off north-west Africa, is Britain's favourite winter-sun escape: around 21–22°C by day in January, roughly four and a half hours from London and on the same clock as the UK. Tenerife and Gran Canaria pair big resorts with volcanic peaks; Lanzarote and Fuerteventura are flatter, windier and built around beaches.

Egypt

The Pyramids of Giza have stood at the edge of Cairo's sprawl for four and a half thousand years, and the Nile between Luxor and Aswan is lined with temples best seen from a cruise boat or felucca.

Ghana

Ghana pairs the sobering slave forts of the old Gold Coast at Cape Coast and Elmina with rainforest canopy walks at Kakum, walking safaris among Mole's elephants and the royal heritage of the Asante in Kumasi.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia only opened to leisure tourists in 2019, and much of it still feels freshly unwrapped.

Madeira

Portugal's Atlantic island is a year-round walking and sunshine destination: Funchal rarely drops below 19°C by day in winter and seldom tops 27°C in summer.

Red Sea coast

Egypt's Red Sea resorts are the nearest winter sun to the UK with a sea above 20°C all year: about five hours to Sharm el-Sheikh or Hurghada for coral reefs a short swim from the beach.

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka packs ancient royal capitals, misty tea country, leopard-filled national parks and palm-backed beaches into an island smaller than Ireland.

Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic is best known for Punta Cana's all-inclusive beaches, but it has far more depth: Santo Domingo's Ciudad Colonial is the oldest continuously inhabited European city in the Americas, humpback whales gather in Samaná Bay each winter, and Pico Duarte rises above 3,000 metres.

Oman

Oman is the Arabia of forts on rocky outcrops, date-palm oases, dunes and mountain canyons, with very little high-rise excess.

Costa Rica

Around a quarter of Costa Rica is protected, and its wildlife is unusually easy to see: sloths and capuchins in Manuel Antonio, nesting turtles at Tortuguero, quetzals in Monteverde's cloud forest.

Cape Town & the Western Cape

Cape Town combines Table Mountain, Atlantic beaches and penguins with excellent-value wine country an hour inland, and the rand makes eating out cheap for UK visitors.

Jamaica

Jamaica is more than its all-inclusive north coast: Kingston's reggae history and food scene, the cool coffee country of the Blue Mountains, Portland's rainforest rivers and the slow south coast around Treasure Beach.

United Arab Emirates

The UAE turns superlatives into sightseeing: the world's tallest building in Dubai, the white marble Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque and Jean Nouvel's Louvre in Abu Dhabi, and desert dunes that rise hundreds of metres near Liwa.

Antigua and Barbuda

Antigua's tourist board counts 365 beaches, and the coastline makes the claim feel plausible, but the island also holds the Caribbean's best-preserved Georgian naval dockyard at English Harbour.

Saint Lucia

Saint Lucia's twin Pitons rise straight from the sea above Soufrière in one of the Caribbean's defining views.

Barbados

Calm Caribbean bays, a wild Atlantic coast and a deep vein of history share an island just 34 km long.

Bahamas

Some 700 islands and thousands of cays are strewn across the shallow Bahama Banks, whose water is about as clear as the Atlantic gets: swimming pigs and rock iguanas in the Exumas, pink sand on Harbour Island, blue holes off Andros.

Goa

Goa is India's beach state: palm-backed sand, beach shacks serving fish curry, whitewashed Portuguese-era churches and an easy-going pace that has drawn British winter-sun seekers for decades.

Andorra

This 468 km² Pyrenean co-principality between France and Spain squeezes more than 200 km of pistes, Romanesque chapels and high glacial lakes into a handful of steep valleys.

Finland

Finland is a land of forest, lakes by the tens of thousands and extremes of light: summer nights that never quite get dark and winters lit by the aurora.

Finnish Lapland

Finnish Lapland is where UK families go to meet Santa and couples go to chase the northern lights: husky and reindeer sledding, snowmobile safaris, glass-roofed cabins and dependable snow from late November to early April.

Austria

Imperial grandeur meets serious mountains in Austria.

Germany

Germany is far more varied than its beer-hall image: Berlin's layered 20th-century history and nightlife, Bavaria's Alpine villages and Neuschwanstein, castles above the Rhine and Moselle vineyards, and Hamburg's port.

Switzerland

Switzerland fits much of the Alps' finest scenery into a country smaller than Scotland, linked by famously punctual trains.

Norway

Norway's fjords, glaciers and Arctic islands give it some of Europe's most dramatic scenery, from a boat on the Geirangerfjord to the jagged peaks of Lofoten rising straight from the sea.

Czech Republic

Prague's Gothic and Baroque old town is the draw, but it is worth going further: Český Krumlov's castle above a loop of the Vltava, Kutná Hora's bone chapel, the spa colonnades of Karlovy Vary and the sandstone towers of Bohemian Switzerland.