With the advent of new technologies, if you are looking for travel partners nowadays, you could visit the best sites to meet people to get in touch with your ideal travel companion, then plan a weekend break. So if you’ve met someone on a dating platform and you’ve already started to plan a transition from an online or offline environment, Edinburgh is a perfect choice. The capital of Scotland has been a magnet for visitors for decades, especially the romantically-inclined. Built around seven hills and sprawling from the rolling Pentland Hills to the coast of the Firth of Forth, there are cafes, restaurants, historic sites, fabulous pubs and nightclubs, art galleries, museums, sports arenas, and much more. To say you’d be spoiled for choice would be a gigantic understatement! Here are the top six romantic locations Edinburgh has to offer.
Edinburgh Castle
Perched on an extinct volcano, the Castle has been guarding Edinburgh since the 12th century and is now one of the city’s most popular tourist destination (the second most visited in the UK). With majestic battlements, Scotland’s crown jewels, the Stone of Destiny (used during the coronation of Scottish kings and queens for centuries), military museums (including renovated prisons), historical re-enactments, café/restaurants, and a cannon fired over the city every day at 1 pm (loaded with blanks!) this would make the perfect venue for your romantic get-together. To say this place is steeped in history would be an understatement, and the views over the city in each direction are jaw-dropping.
Royal Mile
Linking the Castle with Holyrood Palace at the foot of a mile-long incline, this long road stretches like a spinal column, with numerous side-streets like vertebrae. To stroll down this vista with your partner is to step back in time, as towering buildings encroach on all sides (the world’s first skyscrapers). You can explore the labyrinth of tenements and alleyways (known locally as ‘closes’). On every corner, there are shops of every description – cafes, whisky-tasting outlets, bookshops, the city’s tallest church tower, and a Writer’s Museum exhibiting portraits and manuscripts by many of Scotland’s literary giants (including Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Walter Scott).
Holyrood Park
This sprawling park, a short walk from the Royal Mile, contains three lakes (lochs in the Scots language) and 150-feet cliffs, known as Salisbury Crags. Dominated by Arthur’s Seat, there are countless paths to explore, and on that hill’s lower slopes, you’ll even see evidence of where the city’s first dwellers, back in prehistoric times, cultivated the land. Every May Day, young women wash their faces in the dew here – legend has it this is how to retain youth!
National Museum of Scotland
Every romantic city break should include a museum tour. Edinburgh’s largest museum contains over 8,000 artifacts, from a medieval guillotine to Dolly, the world’s first cloned mammal, and Elton John’s stage costumes.
Royal Botanic Garden
Britain’s second oldest botanical garden was founded as long ago as 1670. Set over 70 acres of verdant scenery and a tranquil pond, there are over 13,000 plant species here, as well as Britain’s largest palm house, glasshouses reflecting the planet’s different climates, exotic orchids, terraced moorland gardens, and a Chinese pagoda garden. With rare giant trees from the Americas and China, walking around this fabulous landscape, hand-in-hand will present numerous photo opportunities.
Calton Hill
Located at the east end of the city’ main thoroughfare, Princes Street, this hill offers panoramic views in every direction; north over the Firth of Forth river, east towards Berwick Law, west towards West Lothian and then Glasgow over the horizon, and south to the rolling Pentland Hills. You can stroll around ‘Scotland’s Disgrace,’ a monument to fallen Napoleonic War soldiers, built to resemble the Ancient Greek Parthenon, but never finished due to funds drying up. Or you can climb Nelson’s Monument for even more spectacular views.
