As every year since 2012, Toprural, a platform for booking rural vacation rentals launched in 2000 and now part of the HomeAway Network, has organized an online contest to select the seven rural wonders of Spain.

Royal Monastery of Santa María of Guadalupe – Photo Courtesy: Rpmayor @ Wikimedia Commons

The 2017 winner is Guadalupe, a village with just over 2,000 inhabitants located in Extremadura known for its beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Monastery, which is the second most important pilgrimage site in the country.

Looking back at the previous editions, Toprural’s users seem to really love this relatively poor area of western Iberian Peninsula. And you can’t blame them. Extremadura is also one of Europe’s least visited regions with only 71 yearly nights spent per square km. What better to enjoy ecotourism in Spain?

Scared of Rocket Man? It is known that North Korea is a mysterious and isolated country, but at least its capital Pyongyang does not look that different from any North American city. On the contrary, it is even more colorful. Aram Pan flew over it with a microlight aircraft to make an exclusive 360 video for NK News.

For those of you who are interested in knowing more about the country from the ground, we recommend two excellent movies: Under the Sun, presented at Austin’s South by Southwest film festival in 2016, and the recent Liberation Day, which records the first performance of a foreign band (Laibach) in North Korea.

There are so many awards that celebrate European cities that it is difficult to track them all. Bilbao, the capital of Biscay in northern Spain‘s Basque Country, has just been named European City of the Year by the Academy of Urbanism, a network of built environment experts from across Europe.

2018 Urbanism Awards: Bilbao is Europe’s Best City – Photo Courtesy: SnapwireSnaps @ Pixabay

A well-deserved prize, given that the city, famous for the Guggenheim Museum, has in fact much more to offer and, as the chair of the Academy said, “is a great example of the wholesale transformation of a former industrial city – not just physically, but socially, economically and culturally.”

Even more interesting, we think, is all the work they do to honor great towns, neighborhoods, streets, and places across the UK and Ireland. Actually, there is an award for each of them and this year’s winners are Corby, Byker (Newcastle), Humber Street Fruit Market (Hull), and the Brunswick Centre (London).

An acclaimed film director (Agnes Varda) and a young, brilliant photographer (JR) travel around rural France with no fixed plan in mind. To guide them is the power of images, which in this case serve to preserve the memory of the places.

Faces Places is an inspiring documentary/road movie of rare tenderness and gentle irony. The unusual couple works perfectly even though she’s losing sight and he always wears sunglasses like J. L. Godard. Past and future shake hands.