10 Art Destinations To Save Around The World

The Costa Brava village that Dalí called home for most of his life, and where it shows. Winding streets, whitewashed walls, and a particular quality of light that has been pulling painters here since the early twentieth century. The Casa Dalí in nearby Portlligat is worth the visit alone. A warren of interconnected fishermen's houses that he spent forty years building into something that could only be described as lived-in surrealism.

A small island in the Seto Inland Sea that Benesse Holdings spent three decades transforming into one of the most quietly radical art destinations in the world. Tadao Ando's concrete museums sit alongside rice fields and traditional houses. Yayoi Kusama's yellow pumpkin is still there, back on its pier. The island works because it never tries too hard - the art arrives at its own pace, and so should you.

César Manrique spent his life arguing that architecture should answer to landscape rather than override it. Lanzarote is the proof. His own house, built into a series of volcanic bubbles, is now a foundation and well worth a morning. The Jameos del Agua and Mirador del Río followed - each one positioned to make you look at the island differently.

No cars, no motorbikes, no noise beyond the sound of hooves and water. Hydra's ban on motor vehicles has kept it at a different pace to the rest of the Aegean, and its art scene has followed suit. Leonard Cohen lived here. So did the painter Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas. The Hydra School Projects and the annual DESTE Foundation exhibition keep the island plugged into the contemporary art world without it feeling forced.

The high desert has been attracting artists since the sixties, when Noah Purifoy arrived and spent seventeen years building an outdoor sculpture museum from the debris of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. It's still there, free to enter, on a quiet road outside the town. The Mojave Desert has something to do with it - the scale and stillness create a particular kind of attention. The 29 Palms Art Gallery and a growing number of artist residencies suggest it's not slowing down.

Frank Gehry's titanium building did something cities rarely manage: it changed the story. The Guggenheim Bilbao opened in 1997 and brought a post-industrial port city to the centre of the international art conversation. It's still exceptional. But the Museo de Bellas Artes, a short walk across the Parque de Doña Casilda, holds its own with a collection that runs from Flemish masters to twentieth-century Basque painters. The two together make a good day.

The light here has always been the explanation - low and lateral, the same quality that brought Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Patrick Heron to Cornwall in the mid-twentieth century. Tate St Ives sits above Porthmeor Beach, its architecture a deliberate nod to the old gasworks that once stood there. Hepworth's studio and garden are preserved almost exactly as she left them in 1975.

A village in southern Poland where, by a tradition that dates back to the nineteenth century, the houses are painted with flowers. Not one or two - nearly all of them, inside and out, including the dog kennel and the well. The painter Felicja Curyłowa is the name most associated with the tradition, and her cottage is preserved as a museum. There is an annual competition each year called Malowana Chata. It is not ironic. It is completely sincere, and the better for it.

The hilltop village above Nice that became, in the postwar years, a place where artists, writers and philosophers seemed to converge naturally. Chagall is buried here. The Fondation Maeght, designed by Josep Lluís Sert, opened in 1964, remains one of the finest small art foundations in Europe, its Miró labyrinth and Giacometti courtyard still exactly right. The village itself is heavily visited, but the foundation sits above it on its own terms.

An hour south of Mexico City, at a lower altitude and a warmer temperature, Cuernavaca has been a place of retreat since the Aztec emperors came here for the climate. Diego Rivera's murals in the Palacio de Cortés are the reason most people stop. They should also stop at the Robert Brady Museum - an American artist's house filled over decades with folk art, pre-Columbian pieces, and works by Frida Kahlo and Graham Sutherland, arranged with the kind of personal logic that no institutional collection can replicate.