Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 18th of

December, one week till Christmas. Oh, I know you're really busy, but do start planning some exciting

trips for 2026. The whole purpose of the travel podcast during the Advent spell is to look at opportunities for next year.

If you were kind enough to listen yesterday, you would have heard my excellent colleague,

travel writer Amelia Neith, talking us down this amazing top 10 of Great Value City Breaks.

Yesterday, just to refresh your memory, we went through Thessaloniki in Greece,

Katania in Sicily, Budapest in Hungary, Seville in Spain and Tirana in Albania.

Which means we've got five more to go.

So where are we going first, Amelia?

So another affordable city break in Europe is Krakow in Poland. This will be a place for

someone who really loves their architecture. In fact, it was one of the very first

UNESCO World Heritage sites to be inscribed on the list when it was first formed in 1978.

Oh, where none of us were born. It's a magnetic sort of place, a fantastic, main square,

beautiful churches and then so much of interest beyond the centre. Novojuta, which is a massive socialist, realist settlement. Think of it as a kind of

Polish take on Crawley Newtown, if you've ever been there. And very somber indeed, the former

concentration camp at Auschwitz, which I think is an important part of any city break there.

There are plenty of good value flights to get there and good value places to stay and to eat.

So it's getting tense now. Number four.

Number four is Bucharest in Romania. This is another one that if you're looking for a good

value spa break in Europe, then maybe you should have a look at this city.

Bucharest was one of the first places I got arrested, actually, for spying. That's not important

right now. The Paris of the East, that's what they like to claim. It has a couple of astonishing claims to fame,

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