Chris Packham: ‘My must-visit on a city break? The cemetery'

Times

30-07-2025

Chris Packham, 64, is a naturalist, broadcaster and author best known for presenting the BBC series Springwatch, Autumnwatch and Winterwatch. He began his career as a wildlife cameraman before presenting the children's wildlife programme The Really Wild Show. He is now an environmental campaigner and lives with his dogs in the New Forest in Hampshire.
Comfort has never really appealed to me. I know what a sunlounger is, but I've certainly never spent time on one. I want travel to challenge me, and I like things to be difficult and edgy. I think that's why cities fascinate me.
I was in Arles in the south of France recently. I hadn't been there since 1983 and it was just as beautiful as I remembered — the textures, the colours, the way light bounces off ancient stone into the narrow streets. I wandered through the cemetery, which is something I always do if I want to quickly get under the skin of a city's culture — places of worship and cemeteries tell you how people lived, what they valued, what shaped them. I'm not religious, but I love these old spaces that have absorbed time; I love the smell of them — you breathe in air that has been breathed by kings, queens, saints and paupers … it's electric.
Places I'd never go back to? Dubai and Las Vegas — incomprehensibly horrible; artificial, carbon expensive, trashy, ugly, devoid of any meaningful culture. In Dubai you try to find some old town, and there's a tiny fragment of it alongside a river, but nothing really remains — and the embarrassing, decadent excess is repugnant to the highest order.
I don't do superficial sightseeing. When I travel for pleasure it's either for art or battlefields; I've visited the latter all over the world to try to reconstruct what happened — my late dad and I shared that obsession. One of the most meaningful trips I've taken was with him to the Little Bighorn battlefield in the US state of Montana . We spent three days walking the site trying to piece it together. That landscape tells the story better than any book or film; being there with him, talking through the horror and injustice of it all, was unforgettable.'
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One of my all-time-favourite places is a tiny sandbar off the coast of Florida, ten miles from Sanibel Island — it appears for only a couple of hours when the tide is right. You go there by boat and just wait, then slowly the water drops and this sliver of white sand rises out of the sea. There's nothing on it. You can just make out the mainland from there in the haze, but mostly it feels as though you're on another planet. I was there as the sun set — the sea was flat calm, the sky peach and gold. Out of nowhere snowy plovers appeared — tiny endangered birds, running across the sand, feeding quickly before the tide turned. It was utterly still. I just stood there, immersed in the landscape. I didn't even take a photo — some moments you just live.
Bats were my first love. When I was a child growing up in Southampton I became obsessed with them, but there weren't any near us, so one weekend in the 1960s my dad borrowed a tent and took me to the New Forest. We camped beside a stream and, by the faint glow of his torch, I saw them — little flickering silhouettes over the water. We watched the bats until the torch batteries went flat. I didn't sleep a wink that night.
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In terms of landscape I've long fantasised about getting a camper van and visiting every North American national park from Alaska to the Mexican border. I've already been to some of them — Big Bend in Texas is a favourite, with its jaguars and rare birds and barely any winter visitors; White Sands in New Mexico feels otherworldly, with its pale dunes. But it's not just about aesthetics. These places are life-support systems — vital for biodiversity and us. This is why it's so heartbreaking that protection of them has been rolled back — defunding, logging, the destruction of old-growth forests; it's catastrophic.
Being neurodivergent, new places can be overwhelming. I feel the onrush of visual information very acutely — it can be dizzying, exhausting even. But it can also be thrilling. That is probably why people go on rollercoasters — to feel out of control and push their senses into new territory. Once, in Kathmandu, I stepped through a little doorway into a temple courtyard that was filled with pigeons. Suddenly the pigeons all rose in a vortex — wings, feathers, wind — and at my feet was a tortoise, ambling past with three little pots of burning oil tied to its shell. The whole thing was utterly surreal, like a scene from Game of Thrones.
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My next big trip is to seek out the spomenici — giant brutalist war memorials scattered across the Balkans. I'm planning a road trip with my friend Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) to find them all, driving from Slovenia through the former Yugoslavia — ideally in winter, as they look magnificent under snow. It's the perfect trip for me: part architecture, part history. It's very niche, but I can't wait.
Holly Rubenstein's travel podcast, The Travel Diaries, is out every Tuesday (thetraveldiariespodcast.com)
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