Western Europe

Surely no region on earth is more confidently ticked off. The original home of the six-countries-in-eight-days bus tour. People come back from two weeks in Western Europe and say they've "done" France, or Italy, or Spain. What they've usually done is Paris, Rome, and Barcelona - and increasingly, so has everyone else.

The overtourism problem in Western Europe is real, concentrated, and almost entirely self-inflicted. The crowds exist because tourism here has collapsed into a handful of postcards. Meanwhile, an hour inland, or one train stop off the main line, whole regions go largely unseen.

Germany is the obvious example. Somehow the country that gave the world Beethoven, Bauhaus, and the most consequential - often catastrophic - history of the 20th century barely registers as a travel destination beyond Munich's beer halls and the Rhine. The medieval towns of Saxony, the weird divided energy of Berlin's outer neighbourhoods, the Baltic coast: most visitors never get close.

Austria and Switzerland attract skiers and city-breakers but rarely the deeper attention they deserve. These are small, dense, complicated countries with as much cultural texture per square kilometre as anywhere on the continent.

Western Europe rewards the traveller who resists the obvious. The infrastructure is excellent, the distances are short, and most of what's worth seeing isn't on anyone's list yet.