A Beginner’s Guide to Slow Travel

Slow travel is a mindful travel experience that prioritizes depth over distance, covering less ground and paying closer attention to what's in front of you to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of a place and its people.

It also often means choosing a slower transportation option, such as trains, buses, or bikes—instead of a plane—which give our brains more time to process the experiences we’re having. Slower forms of transportation also make the "in between" moments of getting somewhere a larger part of the overall trip, as opposed to airports and flights, which tend to be relegated to something of a necessary evil to endure before the real adventure starts.

In practice, slow travel looks different for everybody. For me right now, it means spending weekends exploring the small villages and coastline of Asturias in northern Spain, rather than jumping on a plane to another city in Europe every time I have a few days free.

For others, it might mean spending a few more nights in a smaller village rather than a bigger city, opting to focus on cultural experiences in a place instead of zipping to the major sights, or traveling a single country by train for a couple of weeks rather than flying between two or three different countries in the same time frame. Slow travel is less about how long your trip is and more about how you move through it; with curiosity and intention rather than a checklist. It might take longer, but that’s entirely the point.

Iceland's Ring Road is a useful illustration of what gets lost when you travel fast. The 1,332-kilometer (828-mile) circuit of the country passes through some of the most extraordinary landscapes in the world: glaciers, lava fields, basalt coastline, geothermal valleys. People arrive with a week or less and attempt the whole thing, armed with a list of the country’s must-see stops, from the Golden Circle to the Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon.

Some technically manage it, but in doing so, they've simultaneously turned the experience into a logistics exercise. How many hours of driving today? How early do we need to leave to make the next stop before dark? They might see everything on their list, but they’ve probably absorbed very little of what makes Iceland special in the first place.

I've driven that version of the Ring Road, ticking off the major sights in seven days. I've also spent months living in Iceland, and once took five weeks to tour the country by campervan for a guidebook update. It’s an extraordinary amount of time, I'll admit. I drove without a fixed schedule, pulled over where I wanted, spent time in places that I otherwise would have skipped.

The memories of this trip are much more vivid: The conversation with a man in the Westfjords who turned out to remember my aunt and uncle from their time working in the region; an afternoon walk along a river I didn’t know the name of, with a small waterfall at the end, also without a name; sitting in a field of long grass swaying in the wind, and watching the midnight sun graze the horizon before dipping back up into the sky.

You don’t need five weeks to experience these moments, just a willingness to stop optimizing every moment of your trip, to stop checking off all the sights in a fruitless bid to feel as if you’ve “completed” a country.

The environmental cost of travel is overwhelmingly concentrated in flights, but as a slow traveler, you’ll be inclined to spend longer in one region rather than hopping between five countries in your same vacation period, dramatically cutting the footprint of your trip. Prioritizing ground transportation such as buses, trains, and bikes becomes the default, which is both considerably more affordable than flying and, usually, considerably more interesting as well.

And there's a reason for that. When you fly, you lift out of one place and drop into another with no sense of what's in between, the journey beginning when you arrive at your destination. When you take a train or a bus, the journey starts the moment you board—the landscapes shift outside the windows, and you can better understand the scale of a country.

The benefits of slow tourism aren’t just for you, either; slow travel also benefits the destinations themselves. Rather than zooming through, you’ll have time to eat at local restaurants more than once, shop at the same market on different days, and get to know the bars where locals actually drink. The repeated experiences means that your money finds its way into the local economy in a way that a rushed itinerary just doesn’t allow. With more time, you’ll also be pulled away from the most touristed spots.

There’s a reason why destinations around the world are increasingly talking about cultural immersion travel as something to encourage. A slow traveler is probably a more considerate traveler, more likely to find out how a place actually works, more likely to take a guided food tour or a craft workshop, more inclined to ask questions. It’s all good for the people who live in that destination, and makes your journey less about taking from the place and more about participating in a cultural exchange.

There's a version of the slow travel philosophy that treats organized tours with suspicion, as though anything pre-planned is, by definition, a tourist-bubble experience. But some of the most culturally immersive travel I've had has come from guided experiences—a food market tour in Istanbul, a walking tour of Barcelona with a working architect, a driving tour of Iceland with a guide who knew the name and story behind almost every valley we drove by.

What makes the right tour work is the guide's ability to give context you couldn't build on your own in a week of reading. For slow travelers, the most useful tours open doors: Food tours that explain how a cuisine works, cultural tours that trace how a neighborhood got the way it is, craft workshops that connect you with local artisans.

The simplest slow travel tips don't require a dramatic life overhaul. Book accommodation for longer than you think you need—for example, take a week in one neighborhood rather than three nights in three cities. Leave two or three days unscheduled—it might be an uncomfortable amount, but go with it. Choose ground transportation over flights, putting yourself inside the country rather than above it. Eat where locals eat, which usually means trading cathedral views for a side alley and considerably better meal. And if you find somewhere you like on day two, go back on day five.

You also don't need to travel far to start. The simplest version of how to travel slowly is to take somewhere closer to home, somewhere you might overlook precisely because it's too familiar, and give it the same attention you'd give a foreign-to-you city. Catch a train, visit a local museum, talk to people who live there. I've found that planning less doesn't mean you'll do less; things naturally come up when you're not racing between sights. An unexpected invitation, a swimming spot someone mentions in passing, a trail that wasn't on any map you looked at. Slow travel has a way of filling itself in with memorable experiences anyway.