Piero Stone

No trip to Pennsylvania would be complete without a visit to the oldest zoo in the United States. Home to 1300 animals, including cougars, polar bears and tigers, the zoo covers an impressive 42 acres of land. You will be shocked to learn that some animals, including tigers, apes and small primates, can walk through the zoo on elevated mesh walkways above the public trails.

The Barnes Foundation is an incredibly impressive art gallery founded by Albert Barnes in 1922; Barnes was a chemist who made a fortune developing a drug against gonorrhea. His wealth allowed him to visit Paris and learn to love art, and he devoted much of his funds to collecting works of art.

Tirana is one of the liveliest capitals on the entire Balkan Peninsula, with many art galleries and museums worth a visit. If you are in Tirana, don't miss the Bunkart, an impressive bunker built on the outskirts of the city in the 1970s by former dictator Enver Hoxlia. It is a must-see place to visit and learn more about Albania's communist history.

The Albanian Riviera is undoubtedly the most popular and essential place in the country. It is easy to understand why it is so popular, just look at its long beaches of sand and pebbles bathed by turquoise water, and charming coastal villages with small Orthodox churches, cobbled streets and flowers everywhere.

The top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii offers the best view of the sky. There are thirteen giant telescopes that have been installed in an area without any indication of unnatural light. Using these telescopes to look at the sky gives us the opportunity to observe the stars, the Milky Way and the Moon. In addition, many discoveries have been made in this place that has an altitude of 4,205 meters.

The Cévennes National Park, the most recent addition to the Dark Sky international reserve list, also holds the title of Europe's largest IDA reserve. Since about 90 percent of the continent's residents live in light-polluted areas, maintaining these dark skies is a necessary priority for the preservation of Europe's night sky.

A green dream
Langre, Ribamontán al Mar, Cantabria


Langre is the embodiment of the idea of ​​a green beach. Broad, wild. Surfera. The orography of pure lines is determined by two sandy sections backed by a colossal hemicycle with vertical walls 25 meters high and surrounded by meadows. Destination in itself that invites you to contemplate over and over again the bursting of the waves. The nudist area had the popularizer Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente as one of its first bathers.

Chlorophyll wins
Torimbia, Llanes, Asturias


This large-format shell treasures all the beauty that the Cantabrian coast is capable of amassing on the coast. The top of Torimbia - parapentistic - serves as a viewpoint (better at low tide), but the thing is to arrive by the path that starts almost without unevenness from the Toranda beach. Naturist by history and vocation, Torimbia attracts by the green of gorse and ferns and is equipped with a chameleonic chiringuito. Be careful, despite its applauded appearance, with the sea in the background Torimbia becomes dangerous.

Amazon Rainforest
Often described as "the lungs of our planet" (it produces 20% of the Earth's oxygen), the remarkable Amazon rainforest surrounds the world's largest river system and is home to thousands of species of plants, birds, mammals and aquatic species on the 1.2 billion hectares it occupies. While this ecotourism hotspot extends through several South American countries, the densest section of the Amazon (60 percent) is in Brazil, where ecotourism enthusiasts can explore a mosaic of ecosystems.

Known as "the great land," Alaska is home to towering snow-capped mountains, tundra and a remote Arctic north - all of which are home to an array of wildlife that is otherwise threatened or endangered in the continental United States. Humpback whales, brown bears, lynx, sea otters, sea lions, bald eagles and blue whales are some of the protected species in this ecotourism destination

PETRA
Undoubtedly, the archaeological park of Petra, the city of the Nabataeans is one of the top ten of world archaeology, after the Swiss Johann Ludwig Burckhardt discovered the city for the western society.

BOROBUDUR
Less than an hour from Yogyakarta, on the Indonesian island of Java, we find one of the largest Buddhist stupas in the world. It was the sovereigns of the Sailendra dynasty who decided to build this enormous enclosure. The monument consists of six square platforms, which are superimposed one on top of the other, until on the upper platform we find three circular platforms which is a real sea of small stone bell-shaped stupas, where inside, is the image of Buddha.

Powdered snow for breakfast
Reverse sublimation is the process by which a body changes from a gaseous to a solid state without going through the liquid state, as occurs with snow or frost when the water v***r present in the air cools below the freezing point. It can also be used to create stunning photos. The image on the right was taken on February 14, at dawn, at the top of the Hafelekarspitze, in the Austrian Alps, at 2,256 meters of altitude and 23 degrees below zero.

School of young penguins
About 150 pairs of king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) gather during the southern spring and summer (from October to April) in Punta Voluntarios, a settlement in the northwest of Soledad Island, in the Falklands archipelago (United Kingdom) , to hatch their eggs and feed their chicks

Santa Elena Canyon (Texas, United States)
The mythical Rio Grande runs through this spectacular gorge in the Big Bend National Park, south of Texas (USA), on the border with Mexico. The Santa Elena canyon, the scene of a western, between walls that rise more than 450 meters above the water, attracts mainly hikers and fans of whitewater descent. You can hire guided canoe trips lasting one to three days, or enter the trail that runs through its steepest part, Terlingua Creek, accessible by road from the town of Castolon.

Sil river canyon (Lugo and Ourense)
A zigzagging indentation runs through the landscape of the Ribeira Sacra. The river Sil runs in its last section, before joining the Miño, a deep canyon on whose banks the oak, birch and chestnut forests brush the water, and the terraces of vineyards climb the slopes. Several cruises offer crossings through the gorge from the Santo Estevo piers

Lake Kaindy (Kazakhstan)
The tops of the fir trees emerge like spears from the surface of the water in the place where an entire forest was sunk after an earthquake. The Kebin earthquake in 1911 caused a landslide in the Tian Shan Mountains,

Nine Mile Canyon (Utah, USA)
Hidden among the fiery sandstone mountains of Utah is one of the world's oldest and most open-air art galleries: Nine Mile Canyon, a 46-mile (74-kilometer) canyon that houses thousands of ancient petroglyphs carved by the Fremont and Ute tribes between the years 600 and 1300. The scenes - scattered throughout the canyon and easily accessible by the road that crosses it

Forest of Irati (Navarra)
Beech and fir trees have fertilized this forest, becoming one of the most precious examples of these species in Europe. Through the marked trails, on foot or by bicycle, the traveler can enter between the Urbeltza and Urtxuria streams and end up observing the Irati. In autumn, the bellowing of the deer in heat resonate among the vegetation and in the hermitage of the Virgen de las Nieves

Mallos de Riglos (Huesca)
"Among other accidents on the scene, they were deeply etched in my retina: the giant Mallos de Riglos, similar to colonnades of a palace of titans."

Garajonay Park (La Gomera)
Due to its geographical location, together with the mist of the sea and the humidity of the rivers, the center of the island of La Gomera preserves a valuable (and protected) jungle area due to the high number of endemic species that it hosts. The forest of the Garajonay National Park, dominated by the Canarian laurel forest, shows what this region of the planet was like 60 million years ago.

Dunes of Corralejo (Fuerteventura)
The trade wind has shaped this dune field that extends, along almost 10 kilometers, parallel to the northeast coast of Fuerteventura, hiding some of the most idyllic beaches in Spain, in front of the islet of Lobos

Serengeti National Park (Tanzania)
The Serengeti National Park, the main tourist attraction in Tanzania, is famous for wildebeest migrations and for the richness of its wild fauna, among which are the so-called five great African mammals: lion, leopard, black rhinoceros, elephant, buffalo.

Göreme National Park (Turkey)
When you see the typical photo of balloons in the sky of Cappadocia, Turkey, the landscape below will probably be that of the Göreme National Park and Cappadocia Rock Sites, a true open-air museum, world heritage, and the less "natural" park

Jostedalsbreen National Park (Norway)
One of the largest glaciers in Europe, Jostedalsbreen, constitutes the heart of the homonymous national park, the fourth largest in Norway, where despite the rigors of the climate, more than 300 species of plants and flowers grow. Meanwhile, the Stryn Mountains are home to one of the largest reindeer reserves in the Nordic country, although these valleys are also abundant with lemmings and, to a lesser extent, wolves, brown bears and lynxes. There is a visitor center in the area.

Kalkalpen National Park (Austria)
The largest forest area in central Europe rises in Austria under the name Kalkalpen National Park, with the largest karst in the country. It is situated in the Pyhm-Eisenwurzen region and extends to the Alpine regions. Karst canyons and springs and alpine meadows provide shelter for a multitude of plant and animal species. Red deer, deer and fallow deer, alpine salamander, grouse or black grouse, Danube trout, rare birds, butterflies and orchids. Offers active tourism activities

Namib-Naukluft National Park (Namibia)
Namib-Naukluft, with its almost 50,000 square kilometers, became the largest protected area in Namibia in 1979. It is made up of a part of the Namibian desert, considered the oldest in the world, with dunes of up to 300 meters (in the photo ); the Naukluft Mountains, with peaks close to 2,000 meters high; Puerto Sandwich, about 45 kilometers from Walvis Bay, surrounded by dunes and with a shallow lagoon to the south, home to flamingos, cormorants and pelicans; the Sossusvlei salt flat, surrounded by high red sand dunes, and the Sesriem canyon.

Torres del Paine National Park (Chile)
Those who have visited Torres del Paine National Park (in the photo), in the region of Magallanes and Chilean Antarctica, coincide in highlighting the exceptional nature of its landscape: majestic massifs, turquoise lakes, icebergs, rivers, lengas forests (oak of Tierra del Fuego or white oak), vast pampas crossed by guanacos, ñandúes and pumas. This Unesco Biosphere Reserve receives such an influx of visitors that it is mandatory to reserve to spend the night in its camps and mountain refuges.