About Meridiela
A free travel reference built one place at a time. No account needed, and place write-ups are never sponsored; packing pages and journal posts may carry clearly marked Amazon affiliate links.
What this is
Meridiela lists countries and, inside each one, the places actually worth planning a trip around: waterfalls and national parks, castles and old towns, museums, built attractions, and the market halls and food streets a place is known for. Each entry says what it is, when it is worth going, how long to allow and how to reach it. Right now that is 26,489 places across 243 countries.
What is in a place entry
- What it is - in plain language, in the first two sentences.
- Where - region and the nearest town or city you would actually base yourself in.
- When to go - the season that suits it, and the season that ruins it.
- Time to allow - a realistic figure, including the walk in.
- Getting there - the kind of transport that works, not a timetable.
- What you will actually see - and where expectations tend to be off.
- Official site - the link for anything that changes with the season: hours, prices, closures.
The five categories
- Nature & outdoors - Waterfalls, lakes, canyons, national parks, beaches, caves and the trails that reach them.
- Landmarks & history - Castles, ruins, old towns, monuments and the places where the history actually happened.
- Museums & culture - Museums, galleries, open-air heritage sites and the collections worth planning a day around.
- Attractions & fun - Theme parks, zoos, aquariums, towers and the built attractions families actually queue for.
- Food & drink - Market halls, food streets and the dishes a country is genuinely known for - areas and traditions, not single venues.
What it is not
It is not a booking site, a review aggregator or a directory of restaurants and bars. Individual venues close, move and change hands faster than any reference can track, that listing job is already done well by maps and review platforms, and no one can honestly recommend a dinner they never had. What does hold still is the shape of a food scene: which market hall is worth the morning, which street is where people actually eat, and which dishes a country is genuinely known for. That is what we cover.
Prices and opening hours
We leave them out on purpose. A price written once and never updated is a small lie waiting to happen, so entries link to the official site for anything that changes with the season. Each place page shows the date its entry was last updated.
How it grows
Slowly and on purpose. All 243 countries are listed from day one, but a country only gets its own page once there is something real to read on it. Empty countries stay in the list, greyed out, rather than shipping as empty pages. It is slower, and it means what is here is actually finished.
Who writes it
Fjords Team, a small independent group that publishes free reference sites. We research carefully from official and primary sources, write plainly and say when something is uncertain. If we get something wrong, we would rather hear about it and fix it than leave it standing.
Images
The large image at the top of a place page is our own illustration, made in the spirit of the location and labelled as such. It is never presented as a photograph of the real place. Where photographs exist under a licence that permits reuse, they appear in a separate "Real photos" panel with the photographer and licence credited. More detail on the image credits page.
Contact
Corrections, a place we have got wrong, a photo credit to fix: write to hello@meridiela.com. We read everything, and factual corrections go in first.