All posts tagged: prettiest

Time-travelling in Cantabria: from the stone age to Sartre via the ‘prettiest town in Spain’ | Spain holidays

Time-travelling in Cantabria: from the stone age to Sartre via the ‘prettiest town in Spain’ | Spain holidays

Published by Sam Flores

Exploring the area west of Santander feels like being in a time machine. Within a half-hour drive of the Cantabrian capital on Spain’s green northern coast, you can stumble upon prehistoric cave art, a perfectly preserved medieval town and a laid-back beach resort. When I began my weekend trip, it was raining, so my journey started in the Upper Paleolithic period, at the Cave of Altamira, a Unesco world heritage site, staring up at some of the oldest art on Earth. Well, almost. The original cave was largely closed to the public decades ago to protect the fragile paintings, so we were inside the Neocueva, a painstakingly reconstructed replica built beside it that costs just €3 to enter. image Illustration: Guardian Graphics Above me, bison and deer charged across the undulating rock ceiling, their bodies rendered in rich ochres and charcoals. The prehistoric artists who painted them – hunter-gatherers who lived here 13,000 to 36,000 years ago – used the natural bumps and hollows of the cave to give the animals a three-dimensional presence. Altamira …

UK’s ‘prettiest street’ to get £4.4m makeover to make more beautiful | UK | News

UK’s ‘prettiest street’ to get £4.4m makeover to make more beautiful | UK | News

Published by Sam Flores

The UK’s ‘prettiest street’ is set to get £4.4m for a makeover to make it even more beautiful. The west London high street has featured in hit British films like Notting Hill and Paddington. Plans to “modernise” Portobello Road were recently approved during a Kensington and Chelsea Council meeting. Councillors agreed to spend on upgrading the pavements, lighting and greenery. Other upgrades will see new dropped kerbs installed for wheelchair access, additional parking bays created, and existing anti-terror barriers swapped out for sliding bollards. The council stated that funding for the makeover will come from the Community Infrastructure Levy, which is collected from developers. They added that no money will be taken from other services to pay for the high street’s reinvention. The revamp is due to start in January 2027. Other changes to the area include the council’s plans to use a system called Hydrorock to mitigate flooding, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, following the area’s floods in 2021. The switch from anti-terror barriers to sliding bollards comes after Portobello Road residents took …

‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Is the Prettiest Show on TV

‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Is the Prettiest Show on TV

Published by Jenni Sidey

The first shot in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms—the new, shorter, lighter spin-off from the Game of Thrones universe—is of three horses. Standing in the rain in front of a grassy hill bisected by a muddy track, one horse faces directly toward the camera, one a little out toward the viewer’s right (around 45 degrees) and one almost perpendicular to the first horse. It’s a well-composed shot that looks like a painting. The second shot is much wider—the hill the horses are standing on is now on our left, with the horses revealed to be underneath a wizened tree toward the top of it, and on the right there’s a distant mountain, whose slope mirrors that of the closer hill, so that the bottom of each meet in the middle of the screen. At the bottom of the closer hill, under a marbled sky, a large figure digs. After a few shovelfuls, he trudges up the hill, lifts a body from the ground beside the horses, and turns to carry it back down to …