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Top cities and nominated heritage sites in Taiwan.
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1
Taipei
A capital that runs on night markets and mountain trails in equal measure — you can hike Elephant Mountain at dawn for the Taipei 101 view and be eating oyster omelettes at Raohe by nine. The National Palace Museum holds the imperial Chinese collection the Nationalists shipped across the strait in 1949, some 700,000 pieces of it.
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2
Hualien
The east-coast base for Taroko Gorge, where the Liwu river has cut a marble canyon so narrow the road tunnels straight through the rock. The city itself is low-rise and unhurried, with a night market heavy on indigenous Amis cooking.
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3
Taichung
Bubble tea was invented here in the 1980s and the city has never let anyone forget it. Between the Rainbow Village, the National Taichung Theater with its cave-like curved walls, and Fengjia — the island's largest night market — it has become the stop that surprises people most.
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4
Kaohsiung
Taiwan's southern port city, warmer and slower than Taipei, built around a harbour that has been turned over to art warehouses and waterfront bars. The Dragon and Tiger Pagodas at Lotus Pond are the classic photograph: enter through the dragon, leave through the tiger, and your bad luck is supposedly discharged.
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5
Tainan
The old capital, founded by the Dutch in 1624 and still the densest concentration of temples on the island — well over a thousand of them. It is also where most Taiwanese will tell you to eat: danzai noodles, milkfish congee, coffin bread, all of it older and fussier than the Taipei versions.
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6
Jiufen
A former gold-mining town stacked up a hillside above the Pacific, its lantern-lit stairways and tea houses drawing crowds who insist they inspired Spirited Away — a claim Studio Ghibli has denied. Come on a weekday, ideally in the rain, when the fog does what the crowds cannot.
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7
Sun Moon Lake
The largest body of water in Taiwan, ringed by a cycle path regularly named among the most scenic in the world. The Thao, the island's smallest recognised indigenous group, have lived on its shores for centuries; the lake takes its name from its two differently shaped halves.
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8
Alishan
A high mountain area reached by a narrow-gauge forest railway the Japanese built to extract cypress, now one of the great slow train rides in Asia. People come for the sea of clouds at sunrise over Yushan and stay for the oolong, which grows better the higher you go.
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9
Kenting
The island's southern tip, where the mountains run out into coral reef and the only national park in Taiwan that is mostly about beaches. Surfers use it in the autumn typhoon swell; everyone else comes for the water and the extremely loud night market.
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10
Tamsui
The end of the Taipei MRT red line and the best sunset in the north, looking across the river mouth to Guanyin Mountain. Fort San Domingo has been Spanish, Dutch, Qing, British and Japanese in turn — a compressed history of who has wanted this island.
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11
Taitung
The least developed of Taiwan's cities, hemmed between the Coastal Range and the Pacific, and the launching point for Green Island and Orchid Island. The East Rift Valley behind it is rice terraces and hot springs, and Jinzun hosts the island's international surf contest.
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12
Yilan
A county rather than just a town, reached from Taipei through a 13-kilometre tunnel under the mountains. It is known for hot springs at Jiaoxi, the Qingshui cliffs where the highway clings to a vertical coast, and a food culture built around scallions.
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13
Keelung
A rainy northern port whose Miaokou night market is considered by many Taiwanese to be the best on the island — go for the crab soup and the nutritious sandwich, which is neither. The Heping Island geology park nearby has mushroom rocks eroded into improbable shapes.
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14
Beitou
A hot-spring valley inside Taipei's city limits, developed by the Japanese and still full of wooden bathhouses and sulphur steam drifting over the streets. Thermal Valley heats to 90°C, hot enough that it was once used to boil eggs and is now firmly fenced off.
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15
Hsinchu
The semiconductor capital of the world, home to TSMC and the science park that makes most of the planet's advanced chips. Older Hsinchu survives around the East Gate and the city god temple, whose surrounding food court is a serious rival to any night market.
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16
Pingxi
A single-track railway line through a valley of old coal towns, where visitors release paper sky lanterns painted with wishes. The Shifen waterfall nearby is the widest in Taiwan, and the trains are slow enough that hopping between stops is the whole point.
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17
Lukang
Once Taiwan's second city and a wealthy trading port, now bypassed by the silting up of its harbour and all the better preserved for it. Lungshan Temple here is the finest surviving Qing-era temple architecture on the island.
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18
Chiayi
The gateway to Alishan and the start of the forest railway, with a wooden Japanese-era station and the Hinoki Village built from cypress. The chicken rice is a local institution defended with unusual seriousness.
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19
Green Island
A volcanic speck an hour by ferry from Taitung, ringed by coral and home to one of only three saltwater hot springs on earth, which sits in rock pools at the water's edge. It also held Taiwan's political prisoners through the Martial Law decades — the prison is now a memorial park.
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20
Penghu
An archipelago of 90 islands in the strait, flat, windswept and made of columnar basalt that cracks into hexagons. The stone fish weirs in the shallows are centuries old, and the double-heart weir at Qimei has become the islands' emblem.
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21
Kinmen
Two kilometres off the Chinese coast and shelled for two decades of the Cold War, this island kept its Fujianese villages intact while the mainland's were remade. Its knife-makers still forge cleavers from spent artillery shells.
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22
Orchid Island
Ninety kilometres out into the Pacific, home to the Tao people, whose plank-built fishing boats and flying-fish season still set the calendar. Getting there means a small plane or a rough ferry, which is exactly why it remains as it is.