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Travel

Why Do Hundreds of Macaws Gather at These Peruvian Clay Banks?

Brightly colored parrots of the western Amazon basin display a behavior not seen anywhere else

An aerial view of part of the Idaho National Laboratory.

Tour the World’s First Nuclear Power Plant

The historic site in a remote desert is now a museum where visitors can see the instruments that made nuclear history

Great Wine in Great Britain? The Unlikely Vino Culture Emerging in England

In the south of England, a new class of vintners is giving French bubbly a run for its money

Visit D.C.’s Best Off-the-Beaten-Path Historic Homes and Gardens

History, nature and culture combine at these fascinating estates and gardens in our nation’s capital

Airplanes that never flew and a parade of early automobiles now inhabit the grand exhibit hall of the Arts et Métiers museum, once the home of the medieval Saint-Martin-des-Champs monastery.

Europe

The Best Little Museum You Never Visited in Paris

The Museum of Arts and Crafts is a trove of cunning inventions

Thought to be the world's oldest existing running shoe, this footwear dates back to the early 1860s.

Running Shoes Date Back to the 1860s, and Other Revelations From the Brooklyn Museum’s Sneaker Show

A show on sneaker culture at the Brooklyn Museum hypes its modern Nikes, but perhaps most fascinating are the historic kicks that started it all

Jane's Carousel sits between the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges and is housed in a $9-million-dollar transparent acrylic box. The restoration by artist Jane Walentas took 20 years to complete.

Take a Spin on the Most Beautiful, Hand-Crafted Carousels in the Nation

These historic merry-go-rounds are survivors of a bygone era, when thrills came in a much tamer form

America’s Road Trip: Route 66’s Most Fascinating Museums

Take a drive on Route 66 and encounter the wonders of the road

Signs welcome visitors to Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden.

When Rock Bands Flocked to Howard Finster’s Remote, Bizarre Artist Compound

Even today you can visit the site where groups such as R.E.M. found a true artistic genius

The Milky Way and moon illuminate a lone tree in the Atacama Desert, Chile.

Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly: Inca Road

An Astronomer’s Paradise, Chile May Be the Best Place on Earth to Enjoy a Starry Sky

Chile’s northern coast offers an ideal star-gazing environment with its lack of precipitation, clear skies and low-to-zero light pollution

Stone steps descend as far as 500 feet into the Moray concentric agriculture terraces near Maras, Peru, crossing a temperature differential of some 60 degrees. Ancient innovators may have domesticated and hybridized plant species here, using temperature ranges to simulate conditions found across the far-flung Inca Empire.

Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly: Inca Road

What Endures From the Ancient Civilizations That Once Ruled the Central Andes?

To journey here is to roam through almost six thousand years of civilization, to one of the places where the human enterprise began

Taken by ship to North America and Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, the tiny fruit gave rise to all the many tomato varieties enjoyed today.

Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly: Inca Road

Why Is This Wild, Pea-Sized Tomato So Important?

Native to northern Peru and southern Ecuador, this tiny and rapidly vanishing tomato boasts outsized influence on world gastronomy

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Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly: Inca Road

Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly: The Inca Road

Travel through Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile in the footsteps of the Incas and experience their influence on the history and culture of the region

Oheka Castle, Long Island, New York

You Can Still Stay a Night at These Grand Hotels From the Gilded Age

Those that survive today are a testament to Old World luxury

Inside of the labyrinth, along one of the bamboo corridors.

Get Lost in the World’s Largest Maze

Ponder existence while wandering through the bamboo stalks of Italy’s Masone Labyrinth

The History of Creepy Dolls

Take a trip to the uncanny valley and hope you make it back unscathed

In this intricate mechanical bank, the user balances a coin on the miniature man's gun, which then shoots the coin into a slot in the tree.

One Man’s Obsession With Antique Toys Resulted in a Museum

The Portland, Oregon, attraction is more than just the stuff of Kidd’s play

Urban Explorations

The Stories Behind Disneyland’s Hidden Wonders

As the amusement park celebrates its 60th anniversary, here’s the truth behind some of its more unusual features

Urban Explorations

There Are New World Heritage Sites, Here Are the Ones You Should Travel to Now

This year, 24 sites from across the globe have been added to the heralded Unesco list

The "Queer Threads" exhibition, which ran in early 2014, examined the diversity of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer experiences.

Urban Explorations

What it Took to Create the World’s First Gay Art Museum

Charles Leslie’s passionate half-century of homoerotic art collecting offers a mirror for the history of gay history itself

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