Gibraltar

Gibraltar is a slab of limestone rising sheer out of the sea, and it feels like nowhere else in Europe. Cable cars climb to the top of the Rock, where wild Barbary macaques — Europe's only free-ranging monkeys — clamber over the rails and occasionally your shoulder. Below, red phone boxes and fish-and-chip shops sit beside tapas bars and Spanish-inflected streets, a British outpost wedged onto the Mediterranean's doorstep. Tunnels burrowed through the rock during centuries of sieges add a layer of wartime history to the views.