Penzance, Cornwall, England, UK

© Murray Bosley Photography/Getty Image

Penzance, UK

This bustling coastal town is Penzance in Cornwall, on England’s south-west coast, which attracts visitors with its sandy beaches, rocky cliffs and hidden coves. Jutting out from the seafront in our homepage photo is the UK’s largest seawater lido, the Jubilee Pool, which has been welcoming bathers since 1935. This triangular Art Deco pool offers a chilly swim for the brave, but for those who like it warmer, a separate saltwater pool is heated to a balmy 35 degrees Celsius by pumping heat from a geothermal well 410 metres below ground level.

Penzance is located just across from St Michael’s Mount, a small tidal island in Mount’s Bay, linked to the mainland by a causeway which disappears at high tide. If you want a break from the beach, there’s plenty of history to explore here. The town’s name comes from “Pen Sans” in Cornish, meaning holy headland – early Christians established a chapel here over 1,000 years ago. It has been a commercial centre since the 1600s thanks to the maritime trade of the 18th and 19th centuries and, since the 1860s, the Great Western Railway link to London. Ruins of old tin and copper mines dot the coastline, part of a wider Unesco World Heritage site celebrating the mining landscape across Cornwall and neighbouring West Devon.

But if you’ve eaten enough Cornish pasties in this tourist hotspot, you can always take a ferry from Penzance to explore the Isles of Scilly, the remote archipelago 45 kilometres off Cornwall’s coast.