Portland, England

Portland, on England's southern coast, is not a typical pretty English seaside town — it is something far more interesting. This limestone peninsula jutting into the English Channel, connected to the Dorset mainland by the extraordinary Chesil Beach, possesses a raw, wind-sculpted beauty that has inspired artists from Henry Moore to Antony Gormley and supplied the pale stone that built St. Paul's Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, and the United Nations headquarters.

Portland stone — the cream-white limestone quarried here since Roman times — is arguably England's most important building material. The island's quarries, some still active and others abandoned to nature, create a landscape of dramatic cuttings and weathered blocks that sculptor Antony Gormley has described as 'the most extraordinary man-made landscape in Britain.' The Portland Sculpture & Quarry Trust invites contemporary artists to create works within this industrial terrain, producing an open-air gallery where modern sculpture inhabits ancient quarry faces.

Portland Bill, the peninsula's southern tip, is crowned by a trinity of lighthouses spanning two centuries of maritime engineering. The current lighthouse, completed in 1906, marks the point where treacherous tidal races — the Portland Race — create some of the most dangerous waters in the English Channel. The views from Portland Bill encompass the Jurassic Coast — England's first natural UNESCO World Heritage Site — stretching east toward the dramatic limestone arch of Durdle Door.

AIDA, Holland America Line, Norwegian Cruise Line, Ponant, Princess Cruises, Seabourn, and Windstar Cruises call at Portland Port, which serves as the cruise gateway to the Jurassic Coast, Weymouth's Georgian seafront, and Thomas Hardy's Dorset — a literary landscape where the novelist's fictional Wessex maps onto real villages and hills with uncanny precision.

May through September provides the best weather, with long summer evenings illuminating the Portland stone in the warm golden light that has made this material so prized by architects. Portland rewards travelers who appreciate beauty in unconventional forms — not the chocolate-box prettiness of the Cotswolds but the fierce, wind-carved grandeur of a place that has given its stone to the world while keeping its soul entirely to itself.