Architectural Digest put together a list of the 35 most beautiful cities in the world, spanning six continents, from the lantern-lit lanes of Hoi An to the pink sandstone streets of Jaipur. It is the kind of list that is fascinating to read but hard to actually use when you are planning where to go next. We believe, a list is flat, but a place is not. That makes this perfect for a map.
So we took AD’s original list and built it into an interactive map using Mapme. Instead of scrolling through a gallery, you can now explore all 35 cities geographically, click on any pin to see where it sits in the world, read a short description, and get a feel for how these cities relate to each other on the globe, from the volcano-ringed streets of Arequipa to the canal houses of Amsterdam.
Explore the interactive map below
The 35 Cities on the Map
- Savusavu, Fiji
- Carmel-by-the-Sea, USA
- Hoi An, Vietnam
- Queenstown, New Zealand
- Hangzhou, China
- Arequipa, Peru
- Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
- Tokyo, Japan
- Providenciales, Turks & Caicos
- Cartagena, Colombia
- Stockholm, Sweden
- Nairobi, Kenya
- Kathmandu, Nepal
- Tbilisi, Georgia
- Rovaniemi, Finland
- Adelaide, Australia
- Tallinn, Estonia
- Portsmouth, Dominica
- San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
- Antigua, Guatemala
- Singapore
- Paris, France
- Chefchaouen, Morocco
- Chiang Mai, Thailand
- Luxor, Egypt
- Istanbul, Turkey
- Kyoto, Japan
- Barcelona, Spain
- Cape Town, South Africa
- Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Florence, Italy
- Djenne, Mali
- New York City, USA
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Jaipur, India
Full credit for the original list and rankings goes to Architectural Digest, whose editors did the hard work of narrowing down the world’s most beautiful places to 35. We just gave that list a home on a map.
Why Location-Based Content Like This Works So Well
A “most beautiful cities” list, a “bike hiking trails” roundup, a “top coffee shops” guide, these are exactly the kind of content that reads well but loses something the moment it is separated from geography. The reader’s next question is almost always “wait, where is that, and what’s near it?”
This is the use case interactive maps are built for. Any editorial team, publication, or travel brand sitting on a list-style article already has a map-shaped piece of content, it just has not been built yet. With Mapme, that list becomes something a reader can actually explore: zoom, into a region, compare distances, plan a route, or just wander the globe out of curiosity. It also gives that content a second life: embeddable on a site, shareable as its own link, and far more engaging than a static gallery scroll.
If you have a list like this sitting in your content archive, a “best of” roundup, a city guide, a curate collection of any kind, it is worth asking whether it should be a map too.