Best UK seaside town for a weekend getaway has 'fairytale' island
One of the UK's oldest and most picturesque towns is also a top choice for a weekend escape. This stunning market village, nestled on the shores of Mount's Bay in Cornwall, has recently been named the best spot for a weekend break.
The historic market town of Marazion offers everything - beaches, shops, a vibrant hospitality scene, and even a magical secluded island. According to consumer research by Sykes Holiday Cottages, Brits have chosen this coastal jewel as their favourite staycation destination for the season.
Marazion, which received its charter in 1257, is home to St Michael's Mount, believed to be the island of Ictis where Romans traded for tin.
'I visited Cornwall's 'forgotten corner' and there's one thing tourists should know'
Cornwall's beautiful but lesser-known beach near St Ives has fewer tourists in summer
The Mount can only be accessed on foot at low tide via a cobbled causeway, while high tide ferries provide transport across the water.
Atop this isolated island sits an ancient abbey open to tourists - just ensure you book in advance if you wish to explore the building and its breathtaking sub-tropical gardens, reports the Express.
Marazion itself offers plenty to do.
For those who love the outdoors, there are cycling routes, paddle boarding opportunities, beach combing, and of course, swimming - the crystal-clear waters around Marazion are a must-see.
For those in need of some retail therapy, take a stroll along the main street that runs parallel to the shimmering ocean. Here, you'll discover a variety of gift and craft shops, galleries, and eateries.
If you're a fan of local art, Out of the Blue Gallery is a must-visit. This delightful local gallery boasts an array of art, pottery, driftwood and more.
Don't forget to bring your wallet and ensure there's ample room in your bag for all the treasures you'll want to take home.
For a cultural excursion, Marazion Museum offers a captivating insight into the history of this ancient town.
What's more, entry to this museum is free, making it an ideal activity for a rainy day.
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New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
Berlin's dark past and me
The platform was empty. It was a serene scene: the rain had stopped and the air smelled green, the trees showering droplets each time the wind blew. My mother and I carefully stepped around the puddles as we read the plaques on the very edge of the platform. 18.10.1941 / 1251 Juden / Berlin – Lodz. 29.11.1942 / 1000 Juden / Berlin – Auschwitz. 2.2.1945 / 88 Juden / Berlin – Theresienstadt. The Gleis 17 (Platform 17) memorial at Grunewald station on the western outskirts of Berlin commemorates the 50,000 Jews who were deported from the city to concentration camps by the Nazis. There are 186 steel plaques in total, in chronological order, each detailing the number of deportees and where they went. Vegetation has been left to grow around the platform and over the train tracks, 'a symbol that no train will ever leave the station at this track again', according to the official Berlin tourist website. Were we tourists? I wasn't sure. I paused at one plaque in particular: 5.9.1942 / 790 Juden / Berlin – Riga. My great-grandmother, Ryfka, was one of the 790 Jews deported to Riga on 5 September 1942. She was murdered three days later. Her husband, Max, had been arrested and taken as a labourer to the Siedlce ghetto the previous year. In 1942 he was shot and thrown into a mass grave. When I told people we were taking a family trip to Berlin, many brought up Jesse Eisenberg's 2024 film A Real Pain (released January 2025 in the UK), in which Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play mismatched cousins on a tour of Poland, confronting the inherited trauma of their grandmother's Holocaust survival story. But when we first started planning our trip six years ago, that wasn't the idea at all. It wasn't supposed to be about Max and Ryfka. It was about their daughter, my grandmother, Mirjam, and my grandfather, Ali, whom we called Opa. Opa's ancestry enabled us to claim German citizenship. My mother, sister and I started this process in 2017 without really thinking about it. The UK had voted to leave the EU, and Brits with relatives from all over were looking for ways to retain an EU passport. The Global Citizenship Observatory estimates that 90,000 Brits have acquired a second passport from an EU country since 2016, not counting those eligible for Irish citizenship. Article 116(2) of the German Constitution states: 'Persons who surrendered, lost or were denied German citizenship between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945 due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds are entitled to naturalisation.' The same applies to their descendants. Mirjam died in 1990, before I was born, and Opa in 2003 – both British and only British citizens. But we had his voided German passport, his birth certificate, the notice of statelessness he'd received when he came to England in 1936. It took two years, but on 3 June 2019, the three of us attended the embassy in Belgravia and were solemnly dubbed citizens of Germany. We received our passports a few weeks later. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe My mother wanted to celebrate with a trip to Berlin – the city where her parents grew up, and which my sister and I had never visited. Five years later than planned, thanks to Covid travel bans, we made it, honouring Opa by sweeping through immigration on the passports he had posthumously gifted us. I was prepared for the attempts at schoolgirl German, the arguments over bus timetables, itineraries and whether or not it was acceptable to fare-dodge on the U-Bahn. What I wasn't prepared for was being struck down by tears on a suburban street, faced with the reality of how exactly I had come to be there and what my presence meant. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin. Photo by Jon Arnold Images Ltd My grandfather's family made it out of Nazi Germany. So did my grandmother and her siblings. Her parents did not. Max and Ryfka were typical middle-class Berliners, owners of a profitable cigarette factory. They had three children: Fanny, Mirjam and Harry. The family lived in a five-storey apartment block with a dramatic art nouveau facade – an open-mouthed deity staring down as residents came and went – on Thomasiusstrasse, on the edge of the Tiergarten city park. Around the corner, in the same affluent neighbourhood, lived the boy who would become my grandfather, Ali. They used to play together as children. Two decades, multiple emigrations and an internment in Canada later, Ali married Mirjam. My mother was born two years later. I know all this thanks to her, her sister and their cousins. A few years before the Brexit vote, they had set out to consolidate everything we know about the family – sifting through documents, photos and letters, sharing recollections of their parents, writing down everything so the story would not be forgotten. I know, for example, that the basement of the house in Thomasiusstrasse was used for meetings of their Zionist youth movement long before emigration became an urgent issue. I know when and how the siblings fled Berlin to what was then British-occupied Palestine: Fanny going first to Denmark in July 1937, then to Palestine in February 1939, where she worked at the first haute couture fashion house in Israel. Mirjam left in April 1936 via a boat from Italy. She studied horticulture before eventually marrying Ali in 1951 and moving to England. Harry arrived in Palestine on 1 September 1937, his 16th birthday. And I know, from the letters we have, how often and how seriously all three urged their parents to sell the cigarette factory and leave Berlin, before it was too late. On the pavement outside the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, set into the cobblestones, gleamed the Stolpersteine. Any visitor to Berlin will find the streets scattered with these 'stumbling stones', small brass plates, each one a memorial to a victim of the Nazis who lived at that address: their name, year of birth, where and when they were killed. The commemorative art project, begun in 1992 by artist Gunter Demnig, has spread across Europe: there now are more than 116,000 stones, in 31 countries. The Stolpersteine for Max and Ryfka were laid in August 2014. My mother and her family attended; a clarinettist played klezmer music. There are eight stones for that single apartment block. The day before we visited, my mother had booked us on a tour of the Jewish quarter. Our guide told us that the aim of the Stolpersteine initiative was to compel confrontation and reflection, causing passers-by to stumble, both figuratively and physically, over this dark period of European history. Berlin is forthright about confronting its past – using art and architecture in innovative ways to do so. At the Holocaust memorial by the Brandenburg Gate, visitors get lost in an unnerving maze of concrete slabs. At the entrance to the Jewish Museum, the floors slope and the walls are set at odd angles, making the space difficult to navigate with confidence. The 'Garden of Exile' just outside the museum, designed by the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind to capture the disorientation of the refugee experience, is similarly slanted and boxed in by columns. The day we visited, it was raining again, the uneven cobbles slick and treacherous. The garden was empty. I slipped – and through my perhaps disproportionate tears realised there was a lot more to my new German passport than I had imagined. Everyone knows about the Holocaust. Six million Jews, more than a quarter of a million Gypsies, millions more Poles, Soviets, homosexuals and people with disabilities, systematically exterminated at death camps. I had always known that my family was in some way linked to it all, that the Holocaust was why we were in Britain in the first place, that I wouldn't be here were it not for my maternal grandparents being 'denied German citizenship… due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds'. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled the Nazis. Every Jewish family I know has a story: of how their ancestors escaped, and what happened to the ones who didn't. I knew long before I visited Berlin that there is nothing special about my family's history. But I had always seen it as just that: history. The Jewish Museum's core exhibition charts the history of Jews in Germany from medieval times to the present day. The final section looks at descendants of Holocaust victims and refugees who chose to restore their German citizenship – and why they made that decision. Why had I done it? To get an EU passport after Brexit. To make it easier to work abroad one day. To give my future children the option to live anywhere in Europe. To skip the queues at immigration. All valid reasons. And all, suddenly, entirely inconsequential Staring at the memorial plaques on Platform 17, sitting on the steps of the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, losing my footing in the Garden of Exile, I felt myself slot into the narrative, the next chapter of a story that is both unfathomable and at the same time utterly unexceptional. Opa died when I was 12. He was so proud of being British. I never asked him how he would feel about us using the trauma of his past to become German for the sake of convenience. I'd always thought he'd like the idea of us reclaiming his rightful heritage, but in Berlin it seemed less clear. But I do think he would have liked the fact that we were all there in Berlin, on the streets where he and his wife grew up, laughing and crying together, realising our mother-and-daughters getaway had ended up a lot like Eisenberg's A Real Pain after all. The three of us lost in reverie outside the apartment block, picturing my grandmother coming and going. A sign by the door was engraved in looping gothic script. It looked like a memorial plaque. We struggled to decipher first the letters, then the German. Eventually we resorted to Google Translate, and discovered in lieu of the profound message we had expected, a polite request for guests to please wipe their feet. [See also: Rachel Reeves' 'impossible trilemma'] Related
The Herald Scotland
5 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Travel warning for Brits heading to Spain amid strikes
While workers are legally required to provide a "minimum service" yet to be determined, the industrial action could still cause significant disruption for travellers. Azul Handling delivers baggage handling services for Ryanair at its Spanish operations. The strikes have been declared following hospitality workers on 12 Spanish islands announcing their own walkout plans. Spanish strikes - what airports are affected? Valencia, Alicante, Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Malaga, Ibiza, Palma, Girona, Tenerife South, Lanzarote and Santiago airports are set to be affected. The strike will impact all operations and work centres in Spain and will occur between 5am and 9am, noon and 3pm and 9pm to 11.59pm. The union has stated its decision to strike stems from what it perceives as a failure to create stable employment and consolidate working hours for permanent part-time workers. Your rights if your flight is cancelled or delayed The unions said in a statement: "UGT regrets having to go to these extremes and all the damages that may occur, for which the direct responsibility will be solely and exclusively the company and its reckless action with the workforce." The FeSMC-UGT Air Sector is calling for the firm to reverse the penalties, adhere to Joint Commission recommendations and immediately begin negotiations to enhance working conditions for more than 3,000 affected employees across the country. A Ryanair spokesperson said: "Ryanair does not expect any disruption to our operation as a result of these third-party handling strikes in Spain." Recommended Reading: The news comes as Brits travelling to Spain from October onwards will also be met with a different-looking entry system. Instead of a paper stamp upon entering countries such as Spain and Italy, there will be a new digital scan. The changes will take place in Europe's Schengen zone within Europe.
Glasgow Times
5 hours ago
- Glasgow Times
Travel warning for Brits heading to Spain amid strikes
More than 3,000 Azul Handling baggage handlers are gearing up to strike on August 15, 16, and 17, followed by every Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday until the end of the year. While workers are legally required to provide a "minimum service" yet to be determined, the industrial action could still cause significant disruption for travellers. Azul Handling delivers baggage handling services for Ryanair at its Spanish operations. The strikes have been declared following hospitality workers on 12 Spanish islands announcing their own walkout plans. Spanish strikes - what airports are affected? Valencia, Alicante, Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Malaga, Ibiza, Palma, Girona, Tenerife South, Lanzarote and Santiago airports are set to be affected. The strike will impact all operations and work centres in Spain and will occur between 5am and 9am, noon and 3pm and 9pm to 11.59pm. The union has stated its decision to strike stems from what it perceives as a failure to create stable employment and consolidate working hours for permanent part-time workers. Your rights if your flight is cancelled or delayed The unions said in a statement: "UGT regrets having to go to these extremes and all the damages that may occur, for which the direct responsibility will be solely and exclusively the company and its reckless action with the workforce." The FeSMC-UGT Air Sector is calling for the firm to reverse the penalties, adhere to Joint Commission recommendations and immediately begin negotiations to enhance working conditions for more than 3,000 affected employees across the country. A Ryanair spokesperson said: "Ryanair does not expect any disruption to our operation as a result of these third-party handling strikes in Spain." Recommended Reading: The news comes as Brits travelling to Spain from October onwards will also be met with a different-looking entry system. Instead of a paper stamp upon entering countries such as Spain and Italy, there will be a new digital scan. The changes will take place in Europe's Schengen zone within Europe.
