National Geographic's Best Pictures Of 2019
National Geographic’s 100 best images of the year-curated from 106 photographers, 121 stories, and more than two million photographs.
Read the best world and travel articles from around the internet, or watch the most insightful world videos from platforms like Youtube, Vimeo or leading world publishers like BBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, Atlas Obscura, Washington Post and many more.
National Geographic’s 100 best images of the year-curated from 106 photographers, 121 stories, and more than two million photographs.
Every third week, a British Royal Mail ship begins its journey from Cape Town to Saint Helena, the remote island in the Atlantic where Napoleon was once in exile. Five days, with a northwesterly course, and only then do the sheer black cliffs appear in front of RMS St. Helena.
Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan is not just the world’s oldest hotel, but the world’s oldest still-operating business. Or at least, that’s one way of looking at it. But things are changing here, just like they always have.
English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. Is there any point in resisting?
Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, Inc, raised some eyebrows in Silicon Valley when he announced he was moving to Africa in 2020. Africa is poised to take off as the next big tech market, and both America and China have taken notice.
Gustavus is remote in a way that only Alaskans can truly grasp. When the town’s usual transport methods were disrupted, its 446 residents found themselves in the midst of a pandemic with diminished access to affordable food. And one man — the town grocer — decided to take matters into his own hands.
When LAX offered me the opportunity to work with its TSA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) teams, I couldn’t say no. From dead bodies in the security line to a cobra in a Pringles can, you wouldn’t believe the crazy things that happen at America’s busiest airport of origin.
When tourists go away, vacations become a gesture of financial support. And we’re told that a tourism economy relishes every dollar that does come. But what big little lies do we tell ourselves when PR companies spin a local disaster into a travel opportunity?
People on long-term foreign assignments often find it hard to adjust once they return home. Many leave their company within a few years, and some leave the country entirely. Long absences can play havoc with a person’s sense of identity, a feeling that is intensified by the length of time away and how often they visit home.
Springtime in northern Albania sparks the herding of goats from the lowlands up to the towering mountainsides. Follow Prek Gjoni and his 160 goats on a grueling four-day journey across the spectacular Valbona Valley, a land that seems to exist out of time.
What is it like to raise your kids on the road? Two families describe how they changed their children’s lives by showing them the world, while a mum-to-be explains why she plans to do just that with her six-month-old baby.
Alongside the government-level efforts to regenerate the city, some residents took matters into their own hands and formed grassroots arts, activism, and charitable projects. Photographer Ozzie Hoppe captures the Colombian city’s growing hip-hop community.
Huge nationwide protests against corruption have been making headlines, but these young millennials are taking on power in a different way, by celebrating beauty, fashion and rap. They’ve got millions of followers, but, as Unreported World finds out, fame can have deadly consequences.
Hicamp is an app that lets you book unique camping experiences on farms, ranches, vineyards and public parks across the country. Find undiscovered, one-of-a-kind camping destinations or visit tried and true staples.
Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s chief executive, was hailed as a kingmaker in 2016 when he unveiled the Vision Fund. Using the cash hoard, Mr. Son poured money into fledgling companies across the world, many of which have a business model of hiring contractors who deliver their services. Above all, he urged these start-ups to grow as fast as possible.
Kinshasa is now bigger than Paris. Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen are forming an epic, 40 million-person super city. Over the past 30 years, the scale of population change is hard to grasp. How do you even visualize 10 million people?
Tribal fighting has long been present in the Papua New Guinea highlands, but the influx of modern automatic weaponry in the 1990s turned local disputes into lethal exchanges. Bootleg copies of the American film Rambo circulated in remote communities, becoming a crude tutorial on the use of such weaponry.
When the Great Depression put Plennie Wingo’s bustling Abilene, Texas, cafe out of business, he tried to find fame, fortune, and a sense of meaning the only way he knew how: by embarking on an audacious trip around the world on foot. In reverse.
France is home to large Vietnamese and Cambodian communities who arrived in the country in great numbers following the wars in the former French colonies in the 1970s. People of Chinese descent have long faced prejudice and violence in France. But today a new generation is staking out its rightful place in society.
Puolanka, a small town in the centre of Finland, had become famous for its particular brand of pessimism. Recurring themes are town’s declining population and lack of much to do.
In the remote archipelago of Lofoten, Arctic cod have been dried on oceanfront racks since the age of the Vikings. This is the unlikely story of how the humble fish became king of Norway.
Few countries in history have experienced as sudden a transformation as Saudi Arabia. The discovery and exploitation of oil brought an unprecedented influx of wealth. Photographer Peter Bogaczewicz captures the past and present of the oil-rich kingdom as it undergoes dramatic transformation.
Photographer Maria Lax comes from a northern Finnish town where UFO sightings were common – so she set about looking for answers. “I’m from a small town in northern Finland surrounded by a vast, sparsely populated wilderness. Most pass through the town without ever knowing it was a hotspot for UFO sightings in the 1960s.”
Street art has transformed Quinta do Mocho, an area once plagued by crime and unemployment. In 2014, local officials decided to improve the district’s image, and invited Portuguese and foreign artists to paint murals for what they now call ‘the biggest open-air art gallery in Europe’.
Armed with his iPhone 11, photojournalist Amos Chapple plunged into the darkness of the Arctic Circle. Chapple spent 40 nights in Murmansk, Russia, which sees 24 hours of darkness every year from December 2 until January 11.
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs on, in and above the Marshall Islands — vaporizing whole islands, carving craters into its shallow lagoons and exiling hundreds of people from their homes.
Cultural norms, complex religious influences and friendly neighbourhood police officers make losing something in Japan no big deal. But does this tell the whole picture about Japan’s relationship with honesty?
In central Finland, there is a small village, Yli-li, nestled against a river called Iijoki that is succumbing to the realities of life, like so many other places. It is a place that captured the interest of Finnish photographer Janne Korkko, who took pictures of the village and the river.
What has prevented Iran, teeming with natural resources and a young, educated population, from becoming a world-leading economy? How did it go from rapid growth to economic failure, and why is it still unable to fulfil it’s potential?
