BEHIND

My name is Gorka and I’m from Spain. I've been to more than seventy countries and lived in five of them. Cities are what I care about most — not as boxes to tick, but as the clearest expression of a country's culture, the place where everything it is shows up at once.

Metropolitania isn't a reaction against traditional guidebooks — I still buy a Lonely Planet or a Rough Guide for almost anywhere I go, and you'll find one recommended in The Bookshelf section of most cities here. It's more that I love travel enough to want to curate it: to take what a city has to offer and filter it through the judgment that comes from doing this, seriously, for a long time.

Some cities I know the way you know a neighborhood — the rest I've researched with the same care. I try to make that honest without making it a disclaimer.

I live in Budapest, and I'll make the case for it being the best city in the world: four real seasons, a size that never tips into either monster or boring, Buda green and elegant against Pest urban and alive, thermal baths, good wine, the Danube running through the middle of it, and an airport connectivity most cities twice its size would envy — plus Vienna, Bratislava, and Belgrade all three or four hours away. But I'll admit it's a biased case — the truth is I've never met a city I didn't want to know better. That's the whole project, really: not an expert's verdict, but a traveler's curiosity, put to some use.