The beach holiday: Isla Holbox

Just off the Yucatán peninsula’s steamy north coast, Holbox is a 25-mile long sandbar with a gorgeous beach and warm, still waters. Enjoy shoreline walks, swims and SUP sessions, delicious al fresco barefoot lunches and candlelit dinners. The aesthetic is bright, bold, makeshift, with room for shabby as well as stylish. South are lush mangroves and crystalline freshwater lagoons, part of the Yum Balam biosphere reserve. A lazy boat trip or two to see this and, further off, the whale sharks, is the only effort you’ll have to make.

How to do it: 

Journey Latin America (020 8747 8315; journeylatinamerica.co.uk) can arrange a 16-day holiday, taking in Mexico City, a street-food tour, the Teotihuacán pyramids, guided tours of San Miguel de Allende and San Cristóbal de las Casas, the Mayan ruins of Palenque and Chichén Itzá, a cookery class in colonial Mérida and a three-night stay on Holbox island. From £3,860pp, including B&B accommodation (plus two lunches), transfers, international and domestic flight.

Tuscany

The city break: Florence

Florence has inspired millions of words, pictures, songs and memories. Best known as the birthplace of the Renaissance, it was already an outstanding cultural hub by the medieval era, producing artists of the calibre of Giotto and writers like Dante and Petrarch. A political, ecclesiastical and artistic centre, it was also an economic powerhouse – hence the magnificence of the churches and civic palaces. In the Quattrocento (1400-1500), with Cosimo de’ Medici as unofficial ruler, it blossomed into the Humanist centre of Europe and saw Brunelleschi, Michelangelo and Donatello launch neoclassical painting and sculpture. Queues for galleries and honeypots can be extreme in high season, but the buzz on the Piazza del Duomo and the views from the Piazzale Michelangelo are legendary.