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Ins Blaue, вУлица Оноре де Бальзака, 65/1, Kyiv (2026)

10/06/2022

Ozette: The US' lost 2,000-year-old village
In 1970, a violent storm uncovered a Makah village that was buried by a mudslide more than 300 years earlier. A newly re-opened museum tells the fascinating story of the ancient site.
Coming to the end of a short, winding trail, I found myself standing in the extreme north-west corner of the contiguous US, a wild, forested realm where white-capped waves slam against the isolated Washington coast with a savage ferocity. Buttressed by vertiginous cliffs battling with the corrosive power of the Pacific, Cape Flattery has an elemental, edge-of-continent feel. No town adorns this stormy promontory. The nearest settlement, Neah Bay, sits eight miles away by road, a diminutive coast-hugging community that is home to the Makah, an indigenous tribe who have fished and thrived in this region for centuries.

The Makah are represented by the motif of a thunderbird perched atop a whale, and their story is closely linked to the sea.

"The Makah is the only tribe with explicit treaty rights to whale hunting in the US," explained Rebekah Monette, a tribal member and historic preservation programme manager. "Our expertise in whaling distinguished us from other tribes. It was very important culturally. In the stratification of Makah society, whaling was at the top of the hierarchy. Hunting had the capacity to supply food for a vast number of people and raw material for tools."

09/06/2022

The ultimate stargazing road trip
Home to Portugal's "mountain of stars" and some of Europe's least light-polluted skies, the Alentejo region is best seen at night.
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A long twisting road leads up Portugal's highest mountain, and here, unlike many other European summits, visitors can drive right to the top. The peak rises 1,993m above sea level, and although its actual name is Torre (tower), most people just call it by the same designation as the range it lofts over: Serra da Estrela or "mountain of the stars".

By day, the drive offers wonderful views across the undulant landscape of this narrow country – from the red hills of Spain in the east to the blue Atlantic Ocean in the west. However, the real spectacle comes as the sun starts to drop. Not only is this mountain a popular spot to watch golden sunsets, but for those who stay later, it offers a glimmering night-time fresco that covers the heavens, made up of millions of white pinpricks scattered in glorious imperfection.

Over the past decade, Portugal has gained recognition for being one of the top places in the world for travellers to observe the night sky, thanks to the creation of the 3,000 sq km Dark Sky Alqueva reserve, in Portugal's central Alentejo region. In 2011, the reserve was certified as the world's first Starlight Tourism Destination by the Starlight Foundation, a Unesco-supported international organisation that promotes science and tourism. This status celebrates the region's ideal viewing conditions (low levels of light pollution and an average of 286 cloudless nights per year, which result in some of Portugal's darkest skies), but also the wider tourism infrastructure it has inspired, which is set up to cater specifically to stargazers.

Dark Sky Alqueva is also the starting point for a stunning three-hour road trip that takes you through some of the least light-polluted parts of Europe, winding along the area's Dark Sky Route (a curated collection of activities and accommodations), and rising all the way to Portugal's highest peak, fittingly called the Serra da Estrela, or "mountain of stars".

08/06/2022

The sounds that make us calmer
New research shows that soundscapes of forests, rivers and meadows aid wellbeing, even when purely digital. Arwa Haider explores how birdsong and other noises from nature – combined with music – can soothe us.
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Nearly a century ago, acclaimed British cellist Beatrice Harrison performed one of the BBC's first live outside broadcasts, from her own garden in Oxted, Surrey. It was May 1924, and Harrison played familiar melodies including Londonderry Air (Danny Boy) and Dvořák's Songs My Mother Taught Me, while nightingale birds responded and sang sweetly from the surrounding trees. The broadcast proved a public hit, with annual performances for the following 12 years and a record release. Listening back in 2021, these ensemble pieces sound elegant, wistful and serene, and somehow suspended in time.

More like this:
- How images of nature bring us joy
- How nature helps us overcome trauma
- Can trees make you happy?

The rapport between nature sounds and music taps into an age-old sensation of human wellbeing, yet it continually yields new shoots. Generations of international composers have created nature-inspired work, including Beethoven's 6th Symphony (1808) aka "Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life". As recording technologies developed, artists have increasingly sampled the natural world; Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara's Cantus Arcticus (1972) incorporated birdlife sounds from the Arctic Circle. US musician and soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause has spent decades recording and archiving natural world sounds, and collaborated on diverse projects including The Great Animal Orchestra, Symphony for Orchestra and Wild Soundscapes (2014, with British composer Richard Blackford). Nature's ingenuity and unpredictability has also been explored in experiments, such as French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's 2010 exhibition, which brought live zebra finches and Les Paul electric guitars to London's Barbican Curve Gallery.

01/06/2022

Broker: 'One of the year's most delightful films'
Five stars for Hirokazu Kore-eda's big-hearted, funny, knotty caper. The follow-up to Shoplifters is directed with 'impeccable skill, delicacy and compassion', writes Nicholas Barber.
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It's not often that you're in a cinema and you realise that you're watching one of the year's most delightful films, but it happened to me during a screening of Broker at the Cannes Film Festival, and I'm sure that I won't be alone. Broker is written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2018 for Shoplifters, and in some ways his new film is just what you'd expect from the master of nuanced, bittersweet dramas about makeshift families. But in other ways Broker is a major departure. Not only is it Kore-eda's first Korean production, but it's an accessible, high-concept genre movie that brings to mind the Coen brothers and such crowd-pleasing indies as Little Miss Sunshine. I can't recall a non-English-language film which was so ripe for an English-language remake – or one that was so expertly crafted as to render a remake completely redundant.

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