Sydney, Australia

Sydney is the city that Australia shows the world first — the Opera House sails, the steel arch of the Harbour Bridge, the ferries crossing to Manly in the morning light. It earns the attention. No other city in the southern hemisphere has a skyline of comparable photographic authority, and fewer still can claim that the most famous building in that skyline is also genuinely worth entering: the Sydney Opera House presents more than 2,000 events per year across eight performance spaces, and a Sunday afternoon with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in Concert Hall, the harbour visible through the glass walls, is one of the great urban experiences on earth.

But the Sydney that travellers remember longest is usually found in motion. The Bondi to Coogee Coastal Walk — six kilometres of cliff path from Australia's most iconic beach south through Tamarama, Bronte, Clovelly, and Gordon's Bay to Coogee — is the daily ritual of half the city's eastern suburbs, and for good reason: the sandstone cliffs, the sea pools cut into the rock, and the Pacific horizon beyond the headlands deliver a quality of light and air that Sydney's outdoor culture is built on. Bondi Beach itself is simultaneously overrated (crowds, tourists, aggressive sun) and essential (the surf life-saving club that invented Australian beach culture, the Icebergs ocean pool, the Saturday market at the pavilion). Spend one morning there and one on the northern beaches: Manly by ferry (a 30-minute harbour crossing that is itself one of the best value journeys in the city), Dee Why for the more local version, Palm Beach at the tip of the peninsula for the quietly wealthy long-weekend version.

The food scene is where Sydney has quietly and comprehensively overtaken every other Anglophone city. Quay, on the western side of Circular Quay with direct Opera House and Harbour Bridge sightlines, remains the standard against which Sydney fine dining is measured — Peter Gilmore's eight-texture chocolate cake is genuinely one of the most reproduced dishes in the history of Australian cooking. Tetsuya's, on Kent Street, is still a pilgrimage: Tetsuya Wakuda's Japanese-French degustation has been running since 1989 and has influenced more Sydney kitchens than any other restaurant in the city. The newer generation clusters in Surry Hills and Darlinghurst — Firedoor (Lennox Hastie's wood-fire focused cooking), Automata, and Ester represent the direction Australian cooking moved in the 2010s and has not left. The Sydney Fish Market in Pyrmont is the largest in the southern hemisphere and worth a Saturday morning visit for the working theatre of the auction and the freshness of the prawn rolls at the adjacent stalls.

The Rocks, directly beneath the Harbour Bridge on the western side of Circular Quay, is where European Sydney began — the first fleet landed at Sydney Cove in January 1788, and the district's sandstone warehouses and cobblestone laneways preserve something of that original city beneath the tourism polish. The Saturday Rocks Market is genuinely good for Australian craft and jewellery. The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia sits at the edge of Circular Quay and is admission-free for the permanent collection.

For day trips, two destinations stand apart. The Blue Mountains, two hours west by train or car, deliver the Three Sisters rock formation at Echo Point, the world's steepest railway at Scenic World, and the eucalyptus-hazed valleys of Jamison and Megalong that gave the range its blue. Katoomba is the base town. Hunter Valley, two and a half hours north, is New South Wales' most established wine region — Semillon and Shiraz grown on the red volcanic soils of the upper valley, eaten at Muse Restaurant at Hungerford Hill or at the dining room of Quimet at Tower Lodge. Come in spring (September–November) when the vineyards are flowering and the roads are uncrowded.