Our little bit of ego and our little bit of posture
**DAVID MORALEJO (DIRECTOR OF CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER) : BUENOS AIRES **
_The pool (and me wanting to be Slim Aarons) _ is, in reality, a full-fledged robbery, one of those that you do bursting the zoom of the mobile and trusting that it doesn't pixelate too much to be able to upload it to Instagram and bursting with likes.
The image, taken at Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, where I spent a few days in the southern summer among friends, choripanes and fernets, I like it because it reflects that decadent, snobbish and impeccable dolce far niente air that is so, so Argentine.
MARÍA F. CARBALLO (EDITOR IN CHIEF CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER DIGITAL) : DEATH VALLEY
It has been difficult, very difficult, to choose between the gargantuan still lifes of those roadside diner breakfasts, the neon lights of cities with character, or the surreal landscapes of American highways.
So difficult that I opt for NOTHING. The nothingness that is Badwater Basin, the lowest point in Death Valley National Park (and in all of North America with its 86 meters below sea level). There, at 118 degrees Fahrenheit (47 degrees Celsius), you don't break a sweat: you try to survive by absorbing oxygen.
It is recommended to travel through the park with a full tank of gasoline and several carafes of ice water. Every visit, every view point, a stop of less than five minutes outside the car.
Nevertheless, the big basin has a walk on salt that will take you about 20 minutes (ten out and ten back), under the scorching sun whipping up on your head.
What if it's worth it? Just for feeling in the middle of nowhere, in the most absolute Martian landscape, unprotected, abandoned to nature... 20 minutes, yes. But they remain stuck in your memory forever.
* Bonus Track: shortly after uploading the photo, Jason Pierce from Spiritualized echoed the cover of his new album, And Nothing Hurt... Blessed scuba.
ÁNGEL PEREA (ART DIRECTOR): THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ABLE TO RETURN
After one of those trips I will always remember, west coast all the way to Yellowstone at the end of 2017, this year I have done less kilometers than a snail (Gongggg) .
I have learned that **the important thing is not where you can go, it is where you can return (Gongggg) **, and I that this year for personal reasons I have not been able to GO, but I have been lucky enough to be able to RETURN.
Most of the summer I have spent working, but I have allowed myself to do mini getaways to Navalafuente, a town near Madrid where the memories of my childhood are everywhere . I have also been able to enjoy its San Bartolomé festivities, which every August 25 marked the end of summer.
CLARA LAGUNA (HEAD OF FASHION AND BEAUTY) : ON THE ROAD
Few things are more suggestive than a lost road, empty and so bucolic. This wonderfully deserted place surprised us a few kilometers from Madrid, During our expedition to the 'empty Spain' to honor the 70th anniversary of the publication of Viaje a la Alcarria, by Camilo José Cela.
And even if it is a topic and a corny, here it goes: how many adventures and postcards await us in our own land, just around the corner...
**MARÍA SANZ (EDITOR CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER DIGITAL) : CAMINO DE SANTIAGO **
I could have chosen the one of the arrival, triumphant before the Cathedral, or the one in which we all appear together celebrating having achieved it and having met each other.
However, I prefer this one, with the emotion of leaving behind the three digits, of starting a countdown that made the goal more and more real, but not so much that it would arrive right away. Because there, in the middle of nowhere, reaching Santiago was still the goal even though it began to lose prominence due to the desire to stay and live on an eternal path, in that experience in which the outside world begins to shrink until it disappears; where perspective makes our day-to-day microdramas take the insignificant place that they really deserve; where one recovers the ability to dedicate time (that immaterial good that is so scarce and therefore so precious) to people; where the revolutions are not that they go down, it is that they disappear when spending hours surrounded by nature; where, finally, reconciling with the world and gaining momentum is possible. Zen still lasts for me.
MARÍA CASBAS BAZÁN (EDITOR) : THE ALGARVE
The ocean. My favorite photograph of the year could not be starring anyone but him. Sometimes, we dream of traveling miles and miles, without being aware that paradise is next door.
That's what I felt when setting foot in the ** Algarve. ** In the month of March, when the landscapes begin to show the imminent arrival of spring, the Algarve beaches still preserve their silence and wild beauty that in summer is blurred by the tourists who come to enjoy this landscape dotted with lighthouses, caves and coves where you can forget about the world.
**From the top of the cliffs that flank Praia de Vale Centeanes ** you can see the footprints of the only person who walks barefoot along the shore. A small point in the middle of the immensity that is right now owner and lord of this piece of coast.
Maybe it's because I don't have the chance to see it every day, but the sea has the power to make us stop dead just by looking at it. To stop, think, feel. And in the Algarve, its energy is multiplied making us feel like the smallest ant and the most powerful being in the world at the same time.
It's difficult but we must learn to slow down, or let the ocean slow us down.
**LIDIA GONZÁLEZ (COLLABORATOR): LAGOA, IN AZORES **
Calm, strength, admiration, evasion, melancholy and luck. All those words and feelings come to my mind when I look at this image. “Beauty is what one loves”, says the lyrics of a song, and for what reason. So I could say that I have chosen this photo because I love the sea almost as much as the sunsets.
I immortalized this moment because for me it was perfect. I was in a cute boutique hotel in Lagoa , a small town of the island of São Miguel. It had been raining non-stop all day and just at sunset the sun began to peek a little over the horizon.
We would be about six people in the accommodation, but I felt luckier than the rest because find myself before that spectacle. Being able to hear how the waves break the silence with their force as they crash against the rocks while you admire in solitude how the sky turns purple is a real luxury.
So hypnotic was the landscape that made me forget everything for a few minutes, to put the brakes on for the first time in a long time and appreciate how amazing nature is sometimes.
Why did I title it melancholy? Because During that moment of happiness I remembered other moments in which I had felt the same and that I cannot rewind. But, above all, I can say (loudly) that I felt lucky to be in the Azores, lucky to have witnessed one of the most spectacular purple sunsets on the planet, lucky to have the best job in the universe.
IRENE CRESPO (COLLABORATOR) : SHINSEKAI NEIGHBORHOOD, IN OSAKA
Travel to Japan in April-May 2018. We were returning from a two-day retreat on Mount Koyasan, where we spent time among stone Buddhas and sleeping in a monastery. We returned to the city, to Osaka, with our minds emptied of stress and Western modernities and we land in a retro-futuristic world that not even Rick Deckard's wildest dreams in Blade Runner.
My 2018 traveler will always be Japan, the country that had resisted me so much and that, despite the very high expectations, He did not disappoint us in any corner or common place.
Now I just want to go back a thousand times: to rural Japan, to the artistic Japan of Naoshima, to the craziest of Tokyo, Osaka, to the most gastronomic.
May this image serve as a summary of the best adventure of 2018 and as a purpose for others to come.
**JAVIER ZORI DEL AMO (COLLABORATOR): VITRAHAUS, IN GERMANY **
It's clear: it's not the best photo in the world, even if it was taken by one of my favorite photographers, Flaminia Pelazzi. Nevertheless, yes, she captured that unexpected satisfaction that comes from returning to a place where you have been happy.
In this case, to a place that first fascinated me in 2010, when I didn't have Instagram and my retinas were still amazingly untouched by places like this. And I'm not going to lie to you: I was afraid to return. Why? Because I am completely convinced that the sensation that a monument, a space, a bite produces in you for the first time is part of its true heritage and of our subsequent journalistic hyperboles.
Rather, it was. Why there, in front of the hypnotic VitraH ** ** aus projected by Herzog & de Meuron, I felt the return as a triumph, especially because it was to feel again the fascination of that young and intrepid journalist who first came to this place eight years ago on a bus surrounded by ladies who were crossing the Swiss-German border to go to Lidl and who now did by car, touring the Black Forest.
And yet I went off track. And yet I came back and I felt again the emotion that only a place as curious as the Vitra Campus provokes. And yet, I realized that the passage of time can gnaw the walls and peel the facades, but it does not eliminate one thing inside each one: the desire to travel and yes, also to return to a place no matter how much it is frowned upon by cheap tourists. Because the new sensations that destiny provokes are strong enough to be a monument in themselves.
So I'm saying it loud, come back, motherfuckers! Rediscover places like Berlin, Dublin, Helsinki, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Lisbon, Geneva, Ezcaray or Bruges. Places that this year I have stepped on again and from which I have returned as if I had never been there.
SARA ANDRADE (COLLABORATOR) : L'AMETLLA DE MAR
Summer was ending, it was the last afternoon of walking that we would do together for the paths between olive trees of l'Ametlla de Mar (Tarragona).
I was beginning to relax, it was the end of a year of vertigo: I had been married for a month and left behind a handful of trips around the world of which I kept great memories. It had been my first year at Traveler and it had been satisfyingly hectic.
Finally savoring that feeling of floating, time to read, discover coves, bathe in them, dive, bathe again, get rid of the algae stuck to my skin, sunbathe… How delicious is summer!
I left thinking “I'll be back next week, summer isn't over and it's close to home...”. But you don't come back September's routine and responsibilities grip you so strongly that you quickly forget the sun's rays, even if you are able to remember them by the marks of the swimsuit on your body.
I keep this photograph because it celebrates the greatest things in life: the little pleasures
Long live the eternal summer afternoons, those so inconsequential, but at the same time they keep such relevance, that sometimes the course of the new year depends on them.
**MARTA SAHELICES (COLLABORATOR): LA HUMMUSERIA DE MADRID **
This simple image of a plate of hummus is my favorite this year for several reasons that have nothing to do with the framing, the light or the composition (although I have been very clever). Its value lies in that new slow life lifestyle that I just embraced not long ago and that I hope never abandons me.
At the table this translates to love for local products, respect for preparations without artifice and a new focus on relationship between food and health.
"We are what we eat" is much more than a well-worn phrase, It is a reality that both science and alternative medicine do not stop reminding us of and whose message seems to have begun to sink in deeply in us.
So, you know, the next time you go to a trendy restaurant or a traditional place where they show off traditional dishes, pay a little attention to the ingredients on your menu and ask with your head, your body will thank you.