In the capital city of Edinburgh, Scotland

 “This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop-scene in a theater, but a city in the world of reality.”

-- Robert Louis Stevenson
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(in Scotland) Edinburgh, the capital city of the country, is located in southeastern Scotland with its center near the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, an arm of the North Sea that thrusts westward into the Scottish Lowlands. The city and its immediate surroundings constitute an independent council area. The city and most of the council area, including the busy port of Leith on the Firth of Forth, lie within the historic county of Midlothian, but the council area also includes an area in the northwest, around South Queensferry, in the historic county of West Lothian.

+ Physically, Edinburgh is a city of somber theatricality, with much of this quality deriving from its setting among crags and hills and from its tall buildings and spires of dark stone. Edinburgh has been a military stronghold, the capital of an independent country, and a center of intellectual activity. Today it is the seat of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive, and it remains a major center for finance, law, tourism, education, and cultural affairs.

+ Although Edinburgh absorbed surrounding villages and the Firth of Forth ports between 1856 and 1920, its aesthetic and political heart still lies in its historic core, comprising the Old Town and the New Town. The Old Town, built up in the Middle Ages when the fear of attack was constant, huddles high on the Castle Rock overlooking the surrounding plain. The New Town, in contrast, spreads out in a magnificent succession of streets, crescents, and terraces. The medieval Old Town and the Neoclassical New Town were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995.

+ Edinburgh is one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, draped across rocky hills overlooking the sea. It’s a place that is intimately entwined with its landscape, with buildings and monuments perched atop crags and overshadowed by cliffs. From the Old Town’s jumble of medieval tenements piled high along the Royal Mile, its turreted skyline strung between the black, bull-nosed Castle Rock and the russet palisade of Salisbury Crags, to the New Town’s neat grid of neoclassical respectability, the city offers a constantly changing perspective.

+ Edinburgh is also known as Auld Reekie, a down-to-earth place that flicks an impudent finger at the pretensions of the literati. It is the city that tempted Robert Louis Stevenson from his law lectures to explore the drinking dens and lurid street life of the 19th-century Old Town. And it’s the city of Beltane, the resurrected pagan May Day festival, where half-naked revellers dance in the flickering firelight of bonfires beneath the stony indifference of Calton Hill's pillared monuments. (Like a favorite book, Edinburgh is a city you’ll want to dip into again and again, savoring each time a different experience.)