Each year, TIME solicits nominations of places from its international network of correspondents and contributors, as well as through an application process, to come up with its list of 100 ‘extraordinary’ destinations to stay and to visit.
The selection is split into places to stay and places to visit.
This year’s list includes places such as Celestia (Indonesia), Raffles Jaipur (India), Eriro (Austria), Shebara Resort (Saudi Arabia), Nintendo Museum (Japan) and Eagle Hunter Cultural Center (Mongolia).
READ MORE:
Surge in visitor numbers for Scotland’s historic attractions
How Scotland’s next tourism boom is being made in China – by cows
Two Scottish beaches ranked among best five in the world by famous travel guide
Scotland has two locations that make this year’s list in Port Ellen distillery on Islay and The Flow Country, the world’s most expansive blanket peat bog that spans much of Caithness and Sutherland.
About Port Ellen distillery, TIME wrote: “In the scotch industry, a ghost distillery is the preserved site of former whisky production that has long since shuttered. Until last year, there wasn’t an example more revered than Port Ellen, which developed a cult following as its whiskies became rarer and continued to age when the distillery beside the cragged southern shores of Islay was abandoned in 1983. But after four decades of silence—and a roughly $23 million refurbishment—the legendary malt maker has roared back to life, ushering in a new era of luxury tourism on the remote Hebridean isle. To be sure, spirited pilgrimages to this part of the world are hardly a recent development.
“Nicknamed “Whisky Island,” these peat-bogged slopes host 10 distilleries, 3,000 locals, and an estimated 50,000 visitors each summer. The reincarnated Port Ellen raises the bar for all three. Guests are welcomed with a tea ceremony in a vaulted bay room suspended above the sea, featuring the island’s first Sky-Frame doorway. Although the adjoining stillhouse has occupied a similar footprint for two centuries, it is now bound by a markedly modern showcase: 17.5mm floor-to-ceiling laminated glass. For £250 you can drink in the sights—along with a precious pour, hand-drawn from a 46-year-old slumbering cask. The experience reveals, at once, the source of the property’s cherished past and the promising future of an entire island.”
Meanwhile, about The Flow Country, TIME wrote: “Thoughts of a bog might conjure sodden plains. But in the far north of Scotland known as The Flow Country, fans celebrate the bog as a tapestry of 9,000 years of accumulated flora and reflective pools that support herds of red deer, attract migrating birds, and sequester carbon.
“In the Highland counties of Caithness and Sutherland, Flow Country recently earned UNESCO World Heritage status—joining the ranks of the Grand Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef—as Europe’s largest blanket bog, so named for its consistent coverage of more than 462,000 rolling, largely treeless acres, estimated to store 400 million tons of carbon. The campaign to preserve the bog kicked off in the 1980s after logging operations drained and disturbed it. Now a tourism campaign is poised to supplant the extraction economy and further protect the region.
“Hiking trails take visitors into the world of resilient sphagnum mosses and to an observation platform in the modernist Flows Lookout Tower framing panoramas over the peatlands. During spring and early summer, nature lovers will catch flowering bog-bean and wading birds like the common greenshank on the waterways. Birders will find golden plover breeding in the range. And come fall, bog plants turn red and brown, a colorful backdrop to the trumpeting of rutting stags.”
