Getting the flavour of…
The Deep South’s hidden past
First opened to the public in 2014, the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana is the US’S first museum dedicated to slavery, says Nigel Richardson in The Sunday Telegraph. At the heart of this 18th century estate on the banks of the Mississippi is a big house noted for its grand Spanish Creole design. But visitors enter through the back door, as slaves would have done, and only after touring various outbuildings, including original slave cabins and the slave pen. Slaves who broke minor rules faced being strapped into this iron cage, and left out in the hot sun. Elsewhere is a granite Wall of Honour featuring the names of 354 people enslaved here. All in all, it is a sobering corrective to the more prettified approach found at other historic sites in Louisiana. Admission $22 (00 1 225 265 3300, www.whitneyplantation.com).
Hiking in La Palma
With its wildly vertiginous slopes and pastelcoloured villages, La Palma is ideal hiking territory – and getting to the fifth-largest Canary Island just got easier thanks to new direct easyjet flights from Gatwick, says Paul Bloomfield in The Daily Telegraph. The capital, Santa Cruz de la Palma, was once the Spanish empire’s third-most important city (after Seville and Antwerp), and its historic links to the Americas remain palpable in the cobbled plazas where you can find hand- rolled cigars, mojitos and Venezuelan-style arepas. In the south, hiking paths cross bleak lava fields, some striped with malvasia vines (the local wine is “a joy”). But the volcanoes further north are far older, with calderas cloaked in lush forests, such as the “colossal” Taburiente, a “Lost World” alive with birdsong and wildflowers. Inntravel (01653617000, www.inntravel.co.uk) has an eightday walking tour from £700pp, excl. flights.
The glories of Fontainebleau
The Château de Fontainebleau, 45 miles south of Paris, receives far fewer visitors than Versailles. Yet this royal palace is similarly vast in scale, and has a far longer history: founded as a royal hunting lodge in 1137, it was then built up over the centuries by some of France’s greatest architects, says Thad Carhart in The New York Times. Inside there are 1,500 rooms; the most fine – “breathtaking” in their richness – date from the 16th century, when François I turned the lodge into a grand palace, which combined classical French restraint with the exuberance and artistic genius of the Italian Renaissance. But there are many wonderful later additions, such as Marie Antoinette’s “deeply personal” Turkish boudoir; the 230-acre grounds are also spectacular, and include Louis XIV’S Grand Parterre, the largest formal garden in Europe. See www. chateaudefontainebleau.fr for information.