Journal
Reports, analyses and features from all 195 countries - the journalism behind the journeys.
The Mountain That Ate Men
In 1545 someone found silver in a hill at 4,090 metres, and the coin struck from it became the first global currency — circulating from Seville to Ming China. The bill was paid by the men sent underground under the mita, and the mountain is still being worked today by cooperatives with hand drills.
The Islands That Rewrote Biology
A hotspot archipelago where the islands get older from west to east, three ocean currents collide, and nothing on land ever learned to fear a human. What Darwin actually noticed, what two centuries of whalers and goats destroyed, and what thirty years of eradication programmes have rebuilt.
The Country That Bought Its Forest Back
Costa Rica cut down most of its forest for cattle, then spent thirty years paying landowners to put it back — and roughly doubled its forest cover from the low point. The most-cited conservation success on earth, including the parts that get edited out: secondary growth, pesticide intensity and a transport sector nobody has solved.
Slow Fire
Mezcal went from regional spirit with a bad reputation to one of the fastest-growing categories in global drinks. The agave it is made from takes eight years to mature, and twenty-five for the wild varieties — which is the entire problem, written in a plant that flowers once and dies.
The Sky as a Resource
Above the Atacama is the clearest sky on the planet and a large share of the world’s ground-based telescopes. Beneath it is roughly a quarter of the accessible lithium. Chile now regulates darkness as a national asset — while the pumps below the salar draw down water the Atacameño communities have farmed for centuries.
The Men Who Carry the Mountain
Peru wrote one of the only trekking labour laws on earth that is genuinely enforced: twenty kilos, a minimum wage, tents and insurance for the porters of the Inca Trail. Two decades on, the trail is in better condition than it was — and the crowds have moved to the mountains the law does not reach.
Whale Season on the Quiet Coast
No roads reach Nuquí. Ten metres of rain fall every year. And each July, thousands of humpbacks arrive from Antarctica to calve in the warm Pacific bays — watched from wooden boats by one of the least-visited coastlines in the Americas.
Harvest Season in the Cordillera
Six weeks on the fincas of Quindío during the main cosecha: the mathematics of a kilo of cherries, the jeeps that hold an economy together, and what climate change looks like from a slope at 1,800 metres.
The Lofoten Letters: Winter Above the Arctic Circle
At 68° north the sun does not clear the mountains for a month, and the four hours of colour that replace it are why photographers come. Winter in an archipelago that should be frozen and is not.
Salt, Altitude, and the Sacred Lake
Ten thousand square kilometres of salt flat at 3,660 metres, a fifth of the world's identified lithium underneath it, and a lake at 3,812 metres that Andean cosmology says the world began in.
Atlas Light: A Photographer's Journey from Marrakech to the Drâa Valley
The light changes twice on the road south from Marrakech, and both times faster than expected. A photographer's account of the High Atlas passes, the earthen kasbahs and the longest palm grove in Morocco.
Finding Silence in the Noto Peninsula After the Quake
A magnitude 7.6 earthquake hit the Noto Peninsula on New Year's Day 2024, lifting the coastline by four metres and burning a market that had run for a thousand years. Whether to visit now has a specific answer.