France

France has held the title of the world's most-visited country for decades — roughly 90 million international visitors a year, ahead of Spain and the United States. The dominance is no accident: nowhere else in the world packs together artistic excellence, landscape diversity, historical depth and an everyday art of living quite so generously. From the Eiffel Tower to the cliffs of Étretat, from the châteaux of the Loire to the calanques of Marseille, from Mont-Saint-Michel to the snow-capped peaks of Mont Blanc, France offers within one country a variety of settings and experiences that elsewhere would require a whole continent.

The cultural wealth is unrivalled. 53 UNESCO World Heritage sites, world-leading museums (the Louvre, the planet's most-visited museum with nine million annual visitors), more than 45,000 protected historic monuments, nearly 1,200 listed museums. Paris remains the city of the Louvre, Orsay, the Pompidou Centre and Versailles; but the provinces line up first-rate heritage of their own: Avignon and its papal palace, Carcassonne and its medieval citadel, Strasbourg and its Gothic cathedral, Mont-Saint-Michel and its abbey, the châteaux of Chambord, Chenonceau and Versailles. French gastronomy has been inscribed since 2010 on UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage list — the only national cuisine to receive that distinction. From three-Michelin-starred haute cuisine to neighbourhood bistros, from Bordeaux vineyards to Auvergne cheeses, eating in France is a way of life elevated to national heritage.

Geographically, mainland France is a puzzle of landscapes with no equal in Europe: the Channel and the Atlantic to the north and west (Normandy, Brittany, Basque Country), the Mediterranean to the south (Provence, French Riviera, Languedoc, Corsica), three mountain ranges (the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Massif Central), the Seine, Loire and Rhône valleys, and the cereal plains of the Paris Basin. This diversity makes it possible, on a single two-week trip, to ski in the morning and swim in the Mediterranean by evening, to move from Parisian modernism to perched Provençal villages, from chalk cliffs in Normandy to half-timbered Alsatian houses. No other European country offers such a range.