Visiting such ancient places is a privilege that often makes living in them miserable – it’s only fair that tourists pay for their upkeep

Venice has had enough. It is sinking beneath the twin assaults of tourism and the sea and believes the answer lies in fending off visitors by charging them to enter . It is not alone. Tourism is under attack. Seville is charging for entry to the central Plaza de España. In Paris, the Mona Lisa is so besieged by flashing phones she is about to be banished to a basement . Barcelona graffiti shout , “Tourists go home, refugees welcome.” Amsterdam wants no more coach parties, nor does Rome .

The Venice payment will be complicated . It will apply at specific entry points only to day trippers to the city centre, not hotel guests. It will be a mere five euros and confined to peak times of day over the summer. This will hardly cover the cost of running it. It is a political gesture that is unlikely to stem the tourist flow round the Rialto and St Mark’s Square, let alone leave more room for Venetians to enjoy their city undisturbed by mobs.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

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Some residents say €5 fee aimed at curtailing over-tourism goes against principle of freedom of movement

Venice’s entrance charge for day-trippers has got off to a shaky start, bewildering people staying in hotels who needed to prove their exemption and drawing protests from some residents.

The €5 (£4.30) charge, aimed at curtailing over-tourism, has ignited fury among some residents. The charge kicked in at 8.30am on Thursday and will apply on 29 peak days until 14 July as part of a trial phase.

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Strict rules have led to a wild west of rentals, with visitors choosing between huge hotel bills or word-of-mouth deals

Until recently, visitors to New York basically had two options: hotel rooms or short-term rental platforms like Airbnb. But in September 2023, the city started enforcing a 2022 law that banned people from renting their homes for fewer than 30 days (unless the host stayed in the home with guests).

Now the only legit option for people visiting the city is hotel rooms – and they’re unaffordable for many. Most of the Times Square hotels don’t have rooms for less than $300 a night. A search for Thursday 2 May found the Muse at $356, Hampton Inn at $323 and the Hard Rock at $459 (although, because of dynamic pricing, these are subject to regular change). They’re getting more expensive still. Hotel rates have increased between the first quarter of this year and the first quarter of 2023 at twice the rate of inflation, said Jan Freitag, an analyst at the real-estate data firm CoStar Group.

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A Wild Weekend on the 42 Acres estate near Frome offers fresh air, cosy rooms, sumptuous food and a chance to get hands dirty with some land regeneration work

The honk of the geese as they take off from the lake is comically loud, reeds quiver and the reflection of the clouds on the water is momentarily fractured. A butterfly flits by, landing on my boot. We’re on a guided walk at 42 Acres, a regenerative farm, nature reserve and retreat centre near Frome in Somerset – and the whole place feels vibrantly alive.

Our guide Tasha Stevens-Vallecillo, a font of knowledge on plants and wild food and one of the visionaries shaping the retreat, stops to point out yarrow, ribwort plantain and a giant white reishi mushroom as we walk. “There’s medicine everywhere on the land. You just need to know where to look,” she says.

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California city sues neighbor after Oakland votes to rename airport to include ‘San Francisco Bay’, arguing consumers will be confused

San Francisco and neighboring Oakland have long maintained a friendly rivalry, whether over sports or tacos . But a spat over an airport name is taking the feud to new heights.

San Francisco on Thursday sued Oakland over that city’s decision to change the name of its airport to the San Francisco Bay Oakland international airport.

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Would a £35,000 holiday help you live longer or just leave you bankrupt? A surprising number of people are paying to find out

Name: Longevity vacations.

Age: New, but I’ll be older, hopefully.

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A fishing village stay on one of the country’s less-visited large islands reveals a quiet Adriatic gem boasting green lakes, holm oak forests, and unspoilt beaches

The first thing that struck me about Luka was the silence.

My wife, Caroline, and I had driven our rental car from Split north along the Croatian coast to Zadar and taken an hour-and-a-half ferry ride to the island of Dugi Otok. Then we had driven the island’s length southwards, through pine forest and scrub, to arrive at this tiny fishing village, where we would spend the next week. Both of us were slightly wired from driving on foreign roads. But the strange spell of Luka put an end to that.

Nothing moved, not even cats. Before us was a sheltered bay that seemed almost surreally smooth, undisturbed by the faintest breeze. Plaster flaked from the walls of crumbling fishing cottages, their gardens bright with flowering cactuses and bougainvillaea. A row of empty beer bottles outside the shuttered general store gave the deserted quay a Mary Celeste quality. Travelling in space can sometimes seem like travelling in time, and it felt as if we had stepped back to the 1950s.

Dugi Otok (“Long Island”) is the most westerly of the Zadarian Islands off the Dalmatian coast, and one of the least-visited large islands in Croatia. Twenty-seven miles (44.5km) long and only three miles (4.8km) wide, the island’s slenderness makes it easy to explore, with a single road running from north to south. Its inhabitants – fewer than 1,500, many of whom leave in the winter months to escape the notorious Bora winds – are huddled on the eastern side, mostly in the “capital” Sali; the west falls away to steep cliffs and sand beaches. Cypress, pine, fig, olive and holm oak cover much of it, while the rest is blanketed in maquis, the scrubby evergreen underbrush of the Mediterranean. The plants comprising this dense weave are invariably spiked, hooked or barbed, as I learned the painful way when going off piste from a walking trail; the next few days were spent nursing lacerated legs. The maquis makes the island wild in a way I hadn’t encountered before, as swathes of uncultivated land are impenetrable to humans.

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Hundreds of cut-price, sustainable intercity journeys are on special offer this week for trips across England, Scotland and Wales

A transport company is offering £2 tickets for coach trips across the UK to be taken up to May 12. With a £1 service fee, that means travellers planning journeys can book long-distance tickets from £3 on the FlixBus website or app.

In England there is a government-backed scheme capping local bus tickets at £2 until December 2024, but this offer opens up longer routes and also applies to journeys into and around Wales and Scotland, where the £2 cap doesn’t exist. So, if you fancy a trip through the blossoming valleys from Bristol to Swansea, or from Glasgow to Inverness via the Cairngorms, now is the time to book. The deal is available until Sunday 21 April.

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A five-day mindful adventure on the Knoydart peninsula – one of the last great wildernesses in the UK – offers the chance to fully unwind and leap into the unknown

It’s a relief to lay my rucksack down, plunge hot feet into the cool stream and pause to revel in the fairytale surrounds. Foxgloves stand tall against a cornflower-blue sky, ferns look almost luminous, the water glints in the early summer sunshine. A patch of moss-covered ancient forest provides shade, a cuckoo calls in the distance, mountains layer on the horizon.

I’m in Knoydart in the Highlands of western Scotland, one of the last great wildernesses in the UK, on a hiking and wild camping adventure. No roads cross the 22,000-hectare (55,000-acres) peninsula, a rugged place where a trio of Munros soar skyward, sandwiched between sea lochs Nevis and Hourn (poetically translated as heaven and hell). Over five days our group of eight will explore this land on foot, carrying our sustenance and shelter on our backs, led by two guides from The Living Project, Josh and Emily.

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