The Best Cities for Solo Travel

Getting around costs almost no effort here. The MRT began operations on 28 March 1996 and picked up a line to Taoyuan airport in 2017, and eating, drinking and chewing gum are all forbidden inside the paid area, which is why the trains look new. Surface at Shilin Night Market and eat standing up, by yourself, late, and nobody looks twice.

October 2002 brought a driverless metro that has never once closed for the night. It is one of three rapid transit systems in the world running 24/7 inside city limits, so a late evening out never turns into a taxi negotiation. Bikes handle the rest. Nyhavn's colorful 17th- and 18th-century houses draw the crowd, and the canal-side tables are priced accordingly.

Rail reaches the terminal itself: Changi's MRT station opened on 8 February 2002, so arrival is a train ride rather than a fare negotiation. Then the hawker center, where you queue at one stall, carry your own tray and share a table with strangers as a matter of course. UNESCO added the country's hawker culture to its intangible heritage list on 16 December 2020, calling the centers community dining rooms.

Coffee houses are built for people sitting by themselves: the waiter brings an obligatory glass of cold tap water with the coffee and refills it unasked, and lingering alone over a newspaper for hours is expected behavior rather than an imposition. Austria's national inventory has listed Viennese Coffee House Culture since October 2011. The U-Bahn covers the distances, and the city center joined the UNESCO list in 2001.

Rebuilt after the earthquake of 1 November 1755 to the Marquis of Pombal's plan, the lower town became the Baixa Pombalina, a flat grid you can cross half-asleep. Above it, Alfama spreads down the southern slope from the Castle of São Jorge, and the stairs there are the real transport network. Metro from the airport, yellow elétricos for the hills, and a counter dinner alone raises nothing.

An urban revival project uncovered Cheonggyecheon in 2005, and the stream now runs below street level through the middle of town, which buys you a long walk across the center without meeting a car. The subway carries more than eight million passengers a day. Solo dinners used to be the awkward part of a trip here, and counter seats and single-serving places have caught up.

Founded as Heian-kyō in 794, when the imperial court moved in, the old grid still governs the Kamigyō, Nakagyō and Shimogyō wards, so an address works as a set of coordinates instead of a riddle. City bus announcements come in English and the stops are signed in the Latin alphabet, which is the single most useful thing about arriving alone. Counter seats do the rest.

Cars have been kept out of Prešeren Square and its surroundings since 1 September 2007, and the effect on a walk by yourself is immediate: you stop tracking traffic and start tracking the river. A funicular has run up to the castle since 2006, if the climb holds no appeal. Small enough that you will recognize faces by day three, which is charming or claustrophobic depending.

UNESCO listed the historic center in 1996, together with the Luiz I Bridge and the Monastery of Serra do Pilar. Cross the upper deck of the Dom Luís I Bridge on foot and you come down in Vila Nova de Gaia, where the port cellars sit in the slope above the Douro, an afternoon that needs no plan and no company. Steep, though. Everything is stairs.

Trams do the work, on the largest urban tram network in the world, and the Free Tram Zone introduced at the start of 2015 covers the CBD, Docklands and the Queen Victoria Market. Duck off the main streets into Block Arcade or Royal Arcade and the coffee arrives for people reading by themselves. Settlers founded the place in 1835, and the street grid has barely moved since.

Winter is the argument for RÉSO, the underground network of 32 km of tunnels tying shopping centers, metro stations and restaurants together beneath downtown, so you cross a good part of the core in February without a coat. Ville-Marie was founded on the island's southern shore on 17 May 1642, and the streets around it still read as a European town set down in North America.

Inaugurated in 1969, the metro is cheap enough that a wrong direction costs you nothing, which matters when you are navigating a city this size by yourself. Chapultepec served as a retreat for Aztec emperors long before it became a public park, and a Sunday spent there is the gentlest solo day on offer, because you eat standing at a stall, like everyone else.

Sources put Mangrai's founding of the city at either 1294 or 1296, and the old town he laid out is still a square roughly 1.6 km on a side, ringed by a moat and the brick remnants of the walls. Tha Phae Walking Street fills Rachadamnoen Road every Sunday from 5 PM until 10:30 PM. No metro, no trains, and inside the moat you walk anyway.

Every building in town is heated by geothermal means, and the same water fills the public pools, Laugardalslaug among them, which is where people actually socialize. Landnámabók dates the settlement of Iceland to Ingólfur Arnarson's arrival from Norway in 874, on this spot. It ranks last because the reason you flew is outside the city, and those days need a coach seat booked ahead.