The 11 best places to visit in Scotland

In the Scottish capital, history looms above you at practically every turn. The city is built on and around seven hills, including extinct volcano Arthur’s Seat, and Castle Rock, where the mighty 900-year-old Edinburgh Castle clings improbably to the top. Below in the warren-like Old Town, discover the dense cobbled streets, closes and stairways of a centre of human habitation over a century in the making. In the New Town, admire grand neo-classical Georgian architecture. Every August, Edinburgh hosts the world’s largest arts festival, the Edinburgh Fringe. 

Discover Edinburgh:
📍 The best things to do in Edinburgh
🍝 The best restaurants in Edinburgh
🏘️ Where to stay in Edinburgh

300 miles from the bustling heart of Edinburgh lies a white sandy beach so peaceful and untouched you can barely believe you’re still in the same country. Resembling a tropical paradise with its azure blue seas, Luskentyre lies at the end of a long narrow track on the Hebridean isle of Harris’s Atlantic-facing west coast. Save for a few nearby houses there are few signs of human habitation. Come early enough in the morning and you might get the beach all to yourself.

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At 339 metres above sea level, it’s one of the coldest places in Britain. But for a slice of Scotland at its most dramatic and beautiful, not to mention luxurious, you can’t beat a bit of Braemar. The peaks of the Cairngorm National Park envelop the village, which has an almost Alpine feel thanks to its unusual colourful Victorian-era timber buildings. There’s a plush hotel with a huge art collection and a gourmet restaurant, and a boutique high street with all from cosy pubs to a patisserie. In winter you can ski nearby up at Glenshee.

A corner of Scotland so entrancing that a Beatle was once inspired to write a song about it. Down at the far southwestern tip of the Kintyre peninsula lies headland with views all the way to Northern Ireland on a clear day. Paul McCartney owns a farm in the hills above nearby Campbeltown, where he spent many a happy time in the 1970s together with his late wife Linda McCartney and their young children. It was there that he wrote and recorded one of his most successful songs ‘Mull of Kintyre’ – a heartfelt ode to the mountains and the mist rolling in from the sea that’s as apt today as it ever was. 

What it might lack in good looks compared to Edinburgh, Scotland’s biggest city more than makes up for in personality and passion. The former ship-building mecca on the River Clyde has remerged from late-20th century industrial decline as a cultural powerhouse, famed for its music, clubbing and visual art scenes, and increasingly its wealth of wonderful cafes, bars and restaurants. The leafy green parks and top-class museums aren’t bad either. Glasgow’s down-to-earth sense of humour enriches everything about the place, and makes great nights out a certainty. 

Discover Glasgow:
📍 The best things to do in Glasgow
🍴 The best restaurants in Glasgow
🏨 The best hotels in Glasgow

You’ll find amazing whisky distilleries all over Scotland from Speyside to Skye, but few are as fun and convenient to visit as Arran’s. Get a train from Glasgow direct to the Ardrossan ferry terminal and enjoy a swift hour’s sailing across to the largest island in the Firth of Clyde. From there you can take a bus or taxi up the coast to Lochranza for a whisky tour and a tasting. Once home to more than 50 distilleries (most of them illegal), Arran now has just a handful, of which this the oldest and most visited. Its water, sourced from Loch Na Davie, is said to be the purest in Scotland.

A tiny inner Hebridean island of legends, both ancient and modern. In centuries past Eigg, with its distinctive stump-like peak An Sgùrr, witnessed Viking conquests, warring clans, a brutal massacre and all but complete clearance of human habitation by its lairds in favour of farming sheep. But in 1997 it was given a new lease of life, after being bought over by islanders and reinvented as a bastion of off-grid, sustainable community ownership and living. Population today 100 plus and slowly rising, Eigg’s an inspiration, wrapped in magical seafront and nature, with its own microbrewery, music festival and miles of cliffs, crags and beaches to roam and explore.

What does a giant, desolate peat bog in the far north of Scotland have in common with the Serengeti, the Galapagos Islands and the Great Barrier Reef? Answer: World Heritage Site status, which was granted to the 1,500 square mile Flow Country in 2024. One of the world’s largest carbon stores, vital to the future of mankind, its Scotland’s first World Heritage Site inscribed for purely natural criteria. As one of the most sparsely populated places in Britain, rich in flora and fauna, with great snow-capped mountains rising and falling across its horizon, it’s a breathtaking landscape to behold. Like journeying to the edge of the world.

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The sheer majesty of the Highlands unveils itself few places more powerfully than in this great valley formed by an ancient supervolcano. Glen Coe is synonymous with one of Scotland’s most notorious acts of violence, when around 30 men from Clan MacDonald were slain by government forces in the aftermath of the Jacobite uprising of 1689 in the Glencoe Massacre. Their ghosts are said to still linger in the landscape, but the only thing truly haunting about Glen Coe is its rugged beauty. The way the steep slopes of Buachaille Etive Mòr and Aonach Eagach rise up suddenly and mightily around you along the mountain pass is truly awe-inspiring.

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Scotland’s fourth-largest city has enjoyed a new lease of life in recent years, in many ways thanks to the arrival of the V&A Dundee in 2018 – the first design museum in Scotland and the first Victoria and Albert museum outside of London. Designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma in a striking style evocative of Scotland’s coastal cliffs and Dundee’s nautical heritage, it has hosted fascinating exhibitions on all from tartan to video games and kimonos. Moreover, it has been a catalyst for a stylish regeneration of not just the city’s post-industrial waterfront, but its eating and drinking scene, its nightlife and its sense of cultural self-esteem.