The destinations lost to modern travellers

For holidaymakers, horizons are shrinking in troubled times. Our experts celebrate 10 places that were once on travel wishlists but are off-limits now

There are many reasons to read Dostoevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment – but one is its compelling picture of St Petersburg in the mid-19th century.

“The heat in the street was terrible,” runs the opening chapter. “[So was] the airlessness, the bustle and plaster, scaffolding, bricks and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer.” As with Dickensian London and Hugo’s post-Revolutionary Paris, a city and an era comes alive via the written word.

The bleak truth, of course, is that, amid the turbulence of this increasingly troubled century, the St Petersburg of 2024 is just as out of reach for holidaymakers as it was in 1866. And while you would probably have no desire to encounter the rotting alleys and fetid canals of the city in the reign of Alexander II, the splendours which, until recently, made St Petersburg such an alluring destination are currently no more accessible.

This might be a cause for sorrow if you hadn’t visited before Russia became a global pariah in 2022, or a reason for a sad nostalgia if you had.

And it isn’t alone. St Petersburg is just one of 10 travel wonders in this article, in countries as diverse as Venezuela, Syria, Yemen, Mali and Ukraine, that have two things in common. They are now, due to war, political problems or danger, off-limits to tourists. And they have all, in the relatively close past, been seen and loved by one of Telegraph Travel’s team of writers – prompting recollections that are all the fonder for the fact that they may remain unreachable for some time.

I think about Venezuela often, despite the fact that it is hardly ever mentioned in the news and has been on the FCDO’s “Don’t Go Unless You Have To” list since mid-2017. I treasure the memories of a 2014 trip to see Angel Falls – the world’s tallest uninterrupted waterfall – which tumbles from one of the extraordinary table-top tepuis that inspired Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (though the author, like a generation of travellers today, had never been). Venezuela’s wild east is so far from the world’s woes that you feel you have escaped and are safe – or as safe as flying in a single-prop over jungle-clad peaks can ever be.

I spent time on Isla Margarita, which had pith-helmeted female policewomen, white sand and turquoise sea, and rum, and made me think of Bermuda and the Anglophone Caribbean. I have visited Caracas on several occasions; the centre is chaotic and alienating, but the outskirts reminded me of the Hollywood Hills. My chief regret: I never made it to the Llanos. These open plains are, I am told, perfect riding terrain, and I’m

Even in 2009, two years before Syria began its descent into seemingly interminable civil war, travelling to Palmyra felt like climbing through a window in time. Driving out of Damascus, I passed a billboard showing the face of Bashar al-Assad. There it stood, marooned on a featureless stretch of desert highway, the basic message inherent in the hard and hawkish gaze. “All of this is mine.”

This claim seemed especially preposterous three hours later, when those rose-stoned ruins came into view.

Because it was obvious, at first glance, that Palmyra does not belong to al-Assad. It doesn’t really belong to Syria, either. It belongs to the ancient world; to the Palmyrene merchants who founded it as a Silk Road settlement; to the Romans who inevitably conquered it; to Zenobia, the Aramaic queen who rebelled against them in AD 270. I remember walking along the Great Colonnade – constructed under Roman rule – feeling that I had been transported back two millennia; feeling millions

i Power to the people: 65ft-high statues of Kim Il Sung, founder of North Korea, and his son Kim Jong Il dwarf the crowd at the Mansu Hill Grand Monument in the capital Pyongyang. Nigel Richardson stayed in a heavily guarded highrise hotel known as ‘the Alcatraz of Fun’