United Kingdom · Scotland

Edinburgh

A medieval fortress town and a Georgian new town facing each other across a drained loch, with an extinct volcano at the end of the high street and the world's biggest arts festival every August.

Edinburgh is built on the wreckage of old volcanoes: Edinburgh Castle on its crag at one end of a ridge, a medieval spine of tenements and closes down the tail behind it, and a drained loch bed between that and the cool Georgian grid beyond. Scotland's capital for most of six hundred years and an Enlightenment centre, it carries national museums and galleries, a parliament and its own legal establishment on under a million people. For one month each summer it hosts the Fringe, the largest arts festival on earth. The rest of the year it is smaller, greyer, windier and better than visitors expect.

Suggested stay

3–5 days

Language

English

Currency

GBP

Timezone

UTC+1

Why you'll love Edinburgh

The setting  a capital laid over extinct volcanoes and glacial crags, where the streets keep tipping into a view - down a close to the estuary, or straight up at a fortified rock.

Two cities  a medieval old town of towering tenements, wynds and buried vaults across the valley from one of the most complete Georgian town plans anywhere, twenty minutes apart on foot.

The festival month  every August the whole place turns over to the arts, with shows running in theatres, church halls, pub function rooms and shipping containers from breakfast until well past midnight, and the audience spilling into the streets between them.

Walkable, and then some  a hill walk, a beach, a wooded river gorge and a regional park of moorland all sit inside or on the edge of the city, and the rest of Scotland starts about an hour away by train.

Best time to visit

May-Sep

14-18° days

Fair weather Mar-Apr, Oct-Nov
Avoid if you can Dec-Feb
Edinburgh

55.953° N, 3.188° W

UTC+1 · Europe/London

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Weather & when to go to Edinburgh

Month by month: typical highs and lows, rainfall and rain days.

✓ Best May-Sep

Jan
94mm
7d rain
Feb
77mm
10d rain
Mar
66mm
7d rain
Apr
11°
50mm
5d rain
May
14°
54mm
7d rain
Jun
16°
65mm
5d rain
Jul
18°
10°
79mm
9d rain
Aug
18°
10°
82mm
7d rain
Sep
15°
69mm
7d rain
Oct
12°
99mm
11d rain
Nov
95mm
7d rain
Dec
101mm
10d rain

Cards tinted by calculated verdict · big number = typical daily high, small = low · hover for conditions

When to avoid Edinburgh

Deep winter is the honest low season: the light is gone by mid-afternoon around the solstice, the wind comes off the estuary with nothing to stop it, and the wet grey version of the city is far more common than the crisp frosty one on the postcards. The other thing to plan around is not weather at all - through August the city is booked out and at its most expensive, and rooms go months ahead.

Top things to do in Edinburgh

  1. Edinburgh Castle - the fortress on the volcanic plug

    history scenic 👍 Popular

    Fortified for two thousand years, a walled town of centuries: the Honours of Scotland and the Stone of Destiny, the Great Hall's hammerbeam roof, St Margaret's Chapel, the city's oldest building, the prisons of war, and the one o'clock gun, daily except Sunday. Go at opening or late, and book ahead in summer: the drawbridge queue wastes a morning. The esplanade is under a Tattoo grandstand much of the summer.

  2. The Royal Mile and its closes - the spine of the Old Town

    history culture arts 👍 Popular

    One street runs the ridge from castle to palace; the interesting part is the closes: dozens of near-vertical alleys dropping into courtyards and hidden gardens, each named for whoever owned it three hundred years ago. St Giles' and its crown steeple sit halfway down, the old parliament hall and courts behind, the Writers' Museum off the Lawnmarket. The top end is tartan and performers; two minutes down any close, gone.

  3. Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags - the volcano inside the city

    scenic nature wildlife ⭐ Highly recommended

    An extinct volcano and its crags fill a park at the foot of the Royal Mile; an hour up gets the city, the estuary, Fife and, on a clear day, the Highland hills. Several routes go up, from grassy to a scramble. The wind is serious, the ground slick after rain, and the path under the crags has been fenced off for rockfall for years, so check what is open.

  4. The August festivals - the Fringe, the International Festival and the Tattoo

    culture arts nightlife music 👍 Popular

    The Fringe is the world's largest arts festival, open access: anyone who can hire a room can perform, so thousands of shows a day fill hundreds of venues, theatres to tents, comedy the biggest strand. The International Festival is the older, curated one: opera, orchestral music, theatre. The Book Festival brings the writers, the Tattoo fills the castle esplanade with massed pipes and drums. The population doubles, every bed taken.

  5. National Museum of Scotland - the Grand Gallery and the roof terrace

    culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommended

    A Victorian hall of iron and glass bolted onto a modern wing, free, and better than a small country's museum should be: Scotland from the geology up through Picts, Jacobites and the industrial century, plus Dolly the cloned sheep, Lewis chessmen, Egypt and a floor of engineering. The roof terrace: one of the city's best free views, over the Old Town to the castle. Half a day, still not finished.

  6. Holyrood - the palace, the abbey ruin and the Scottish Parliament

    history culture arts

    The monarch's Scottish residence, at the foot of the Royal Mile: state apartments, a long gallery of invented royal portraits, and the tower chambers where Mary, Queen of Scots lived and Rizzio was stabbed. The roofless abbey is the better half. It closes for royal visits, including a stretch of early summer; check first. Opposite, the Scottish Parliament is free, worth the tour, with a public gallery when it sits.

  7. Calton Hill - the unfinished Parthenon and the classic view

    scenic history

    Five minutes of steps up from Princes Street: a hill of follies, a half-built copy of the Parthenon abandoned when the money ran out, Edinburgh's Disgrace ever since, a telescope-shaped monument to Nelson whose time ball still drops with the castle gun, and an old city observatory. This is where the picture of Edinburgh gets taken, back along Princes Street to the castle; best in the last hour of light.

  8. The Scottish National Gallery and the Portrait Gallery - the free national collections

    culture arts

    Three institutions, none charging for the permanent collection. The main gallery on the Mound takes an hour or two: Titian, Vermeer, Velazquez, the Scottish rooms and the skating minister. The Portrait Gallery on Queen Street is a neo-Gothic pile with a gilded frieze of Scottish history round its hall. The modern galleries face each other across the Water of Leith, with a recreated Paolozzi studio and a grass landform.

  9. Dean Village and the Water of Leith walkway

    scenic nature wildlife

    A former grain-milling hamlet in a wooded gorge ten minutes from Princes Street, looking like it belongs several hundred kilometres away: stone mill buildings, a weir, and a bridge high overhead. The river walkway runs from the Pentland reservoirs to the docks, and the stretch from Dean Village past the old mineral well at St Bernard's to Stockbridge is the one everybody does, with the modern galleries a short detour.

  10. Greyfriars Kirkyard and the Old Town graveyards

    history

    A hillside of tombs behind a seventeenth-century kirk, with iron mortsafes bolted over graves against the body snatchers, the walled Covenanters' Prison at the back, and the grave of the little dog whose statue at the gate has its nose rubbed gold. A few headstones carry surnames that turn up in Harry Potter, hence the tour groups. Canongate Kirkyard has Adam Smith, Old Calton has Hume in a drum-shaped mausoleum.

  11. The Real Mary King's Close and the Old Town underground

    history culture arts

    Whole streets of Old Town houses were left standing under the eighteenth-century Royal Exchange, roofed over, and you can walk through them: rooms, hearths, doorways and a close still climbing the hill in the dark. Guided only, and better history than the ghost angle suggests. The arched vaults inside the South Bridge run their own tours, history or things that go bump as you choose.

  12. Whisky in Edinburgh - the tastings, the bars and the working distilleries

    food culture arts

    Not a distilling town by tradition, but where the industry sells itself, and the easiest place to taste widely without driving. A big tasting attraction sits below the castle, a global blender has turned an old Princes Street department store into tasting rooms, and a small working distillery south of the Royal Mile runs tours of the actual process. The real education is the specialist bars, stocking hundreds of bottles.

  13. Leith and the Shore - the old port, the dining strip and the Royal Yacht Britannia

    food history

    The port was a separate town until the twentieth century and still behaves like one. The Shore, where the Water of Leith meets the docks, is a quayside of pubs and restaurants, the best concentration of serious cooking in town, several with stars. The decommissioned royal yacht is at the shopping centre further out, toured deck by deck to the engine room and state dining room, stranger than it sounds.

  14. Eating in Edinburgh - Scottish produce, seafood and the tasting menus

    food

    The larder is the argument: langoustines and hand-dived scallops off the west coast, mussels and crab from the north, beef, venison and game inland, soft fruit from across the estuary. That shows up as tasting-menu rooms in the New Town and Leith, neighbourhood bistros, and old-school haggis and cullen skink. Breakfast and baking are good, and the south side has more Indian and Middle Eastern cooking than the centre suggests.

  15. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh - the glasshouses and the skyline view

    nature wildlife scenic

    A very large botanic garden a short walk uphill from Stockbridge, free to walk into, with a rock garden, a Chinese hillside, enormous mature trees and a range of Victorian and modern glasshouses running from palm house to desert. The reason locals come is the lawn at the top of the slope, which frames the entire Old Town skyline from the castle to Arthur's Seat with a mile of gardens in between.

  16. The Scott Monument and Princes Street Gardens

    history scenic

    The blackened Gothic spire over Princes Street is a monument to a novelist, which tells you something about the city, and the narrow stair inside climbs to balconies, tighter and more alarming with height. The gardens either side fill the bed of the loch drained for the New Town, which is why the Old Town rises out of a cliff opposite and why the trains run along the bottom.

  17. Portobello - the promenade, the sand and the Victorian baths

    scenic wellness

    A proper seaside suburb about twenty minutes by bus from the centre, with a long beach, a promenade of ice cream shops and swimming clubs, and a surviving Turkish bath and pool complex from the 1890s. There is a well-established cold-water swimming and sauna culture along the front. The North Sea here is cold in every month of the year and nobody pretends otherwise.

  18. Hogmanay - the Scottish New Year, at its loudest

    culture arts nightlife music

    New Year matters more than Christmas here, and the city gives it several days: a torchlight procession, a ticketed street party and concerts on the last night, fireworks off the castle rock, and a mass cold-water dip next morning. It is dark, cold and usually wet, the fireworks called off often enough that locals shrug, and it books out far ahead - the one deep-winter event people fly in for.

  19. Surgeons' Hall Museums - the anatomy and pathology collections

    history culture arts

    Edinburgh trained surgeons for the world and kept the specimens. The pathology collection is a wall of nineteenth-century jars arranged by what went wrong, the surgical history galleries run from battlefield saws to modern keyhole instruments, and the Burke and Hare case is here in the most direct way possible, including a pocketbook bound in the skin of one of them. Absolutely not for everyone, and one of the most memorable hours in the city for the people it is for.

Best areas to stay in Edinburgh

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Getting to & around Edinburgh

Getting there

Fly into Edinburgh Airport and take the tram or the Airlink bus into the centre in about half an hour, or arrive by train straight into Waverley, which sits in the valley between the Old and New Towns.

Flight

Edinburgh Airport (EDI)

About thirteen kilometres west of the centre, with three sensible ways in. The tram leaves outside the terminal, takes roughly half an hour to Princes Street and carries on to the Leith waterfront, so it suits stays along that line. The Airlink bus is quicker to Waverley Bridge, very frequent, and runs all night when the tram has stopped. A taxi or private hire takes twenty to thirty minutes off-peak, much longer in peak. All three leave you walking distance from the Old Town, though not with a suitcase.

Train

Waverley Station

Waverley sits in the drained valley in the dead centre of the city, which is close to unbeatable as an arrival: you come up the ramps or the steps and you are on Princes Street with the castle above you. The east coast line runs from London in around four and a half hours, with York and Newcastle on the way, and Glasgow is about fifty minutes away with several trains an hour. Trains north to Perth, Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness leave from here too. Haymarket, one stop west, is the better station if you are staying in the West End.

Train

Waverley Station

The Caledonian Sleeper runs overnight from London to Waverley, in seats or in cabins, arriving in the morning and saving a night's accommodation. It is the civilised way to arrive from the south, and it continues beyond Edinburgh to Fort William, Inverness and Aberdeen on split portions if you are carrying on into the Highlands.

Coach

Edinburgh Bus Station, St Andrew Square

Long-distance coaches use the bus station just off St Andrew Square in the New Town, a couple of minutes from the tram stop and about ten from Waverley. Services run from Glasgow every fifteen minutes or so, from the English cities overnight and by day, and from the Highland towns. Slower than the train on every route and the usual budget option.

Drive

The motorway network reaches the western edge of the city from Glasgow and the central belt, the road from the south comes up the coast, and the bridges over the estuary bring you in from Fife and the north. A car is a liability once you are here: the centre has a low emission zone with camera enforcement that older diesels can fall foul of, on-street parking is metered, permit-controlled and scarce, and the Old Town is a maze of one-way cobbled streets. If you are touring Scotland, pick the car up on the morning you leave.

Cruise

Leith, Newhaven or South Queensferry

Cruise ships calling at Edinburgh berth in the docks at Leith or Newhaven, or anchor off South Queensferry under the bridges and tender passengers ashore. All three are a short bus, tram or shuttle ride from the centre rather than a walk, and South Queensferry in particular is its own small historic village worth an hour before you head into town.

Getting around

Walking

The centre crosses in half an hour, but Edinburgh is vertical: bridges and stairs cross the valley, and a route that looks flat on a map may not be. Cobbles are hard on wheeled suitcases.

Free

Buses and trams both take a contactless bank card or a phone tapped at boarding, and the fares cap automatically over a day so there is no need to work out in advance whether a day ticket is worth buying. On the trams you validate at the machine on the platform before you board rather than on board, and the airport counts as its own zone with a separate and dearer ticket. Buses still take cash, but drivers give no change at all, so have the exact coins or use a card. The bus operator's app sells tickets and shows live arrivals, and is the single most useful thing to download here.

Bus

The council-owned operator's maroon buses go essentially everywhere, frequently and late, with a night network. The app shows live arrivals; install it on day one. Buses are the only public transport that climbs the hills.

TBC

Tram

One line, from the airport through the West End and along Princes Street, then down Leith Walk to the waterfront. Useless off it; that corridor covers the airport, the shopping and the Leith restaurants.

TBC

Taxi and private hire

Black cabs at ranks by the station or flagged in the street, plus the ride-hailing apps. They earn their keep on the steep bits, late nights and suitcases uphill, and are slow in festival traffic.

TBC

Cycling

Rewarding once you accept the hills. Old railway lines give traffic-free paths across the north, with the river and coastal routes they avoid the main roads, which are cobbled in places and busy with buses.

TBC

Local trains

Suburban services from Waverley and Haymarket reach the coast and the bridges quickest: a hop to South Queensferry, half an hour along the East Lothian coast, fast links into Fife. In town, take the bus.

TBC

Day trips from Edinburgh

Stirling

Full day

Castle and battlefields

The other castle on a crag, arguably the better one: Stirling sits at the narrow waist of Scotland where the Highlands meet the lowlands, so much of the country's history was decided within sight of it. The restored Renaissance palace is repainted in its original colours, the Wallace Monument stands across the valley up a long stair, and Bannockburn is on the edge of town.

Getting there

train | car

About 50 min by train from Waverley, or under an hour by car

Glasgow

Full day

Second city

Edinburgh's opposite number, fifty minutes down the line: bigger, blunter, funnier, Victorian rather than Georgian, built on shipbuilding money that shows in the scale of things. The municipal art collection is free and outstanding, the Mackintosh buildings are why architects come, the music scene is the best in Scotland, and the shopping is on another level. Go for a long day, late train back.

Getting there

train

About 50 min by train from Waverley or Haymarket, several an hour

North Berwick and the East Lothian coast

Full day

Seabirds and beaches

Sand beaches, golf links and ruined castles east of the city. North Berwick anchors it: a Victorian seaside town with a seabird centre trained on the Bass Rock gannet colony, one of the largest in the world, with boat trips in season. Along the coast: the red cliff-edge ruin of Tantallon, a moated castle at Dirleton, and wide empty beaches, outstanding in any weather.

Getting there

train | car

About 35 min by train from Waverley, or 40 min by car

South Queensferry and the Forth Bridges

Half day

Bridges and an island abbey

Three bridges cross the estuary side by side, spanning three centuries of engineering, and the red cantilever one from 1890 is the famous piece of Victorian iron. The village underneath has a cobbled main street of old inns at the waterline, and boats run from the pier to Inchcolm, with the best-preserved medieval abbey in Scotland plus seals and puffins in season.

Getting there

train | walk | ferry

About 20 min by train to Dalmeny, then a walk down into the village; boats to the island leave from the pier

Rosslyn Chapel

Half day

Carved medieval chapel

A small fifteenth-century chapel just outside the city whose interior is carved to an obsessive degree - every surface covered in foliage, biblical scenes, green men and the famous Apprentice Pillar - and whose late fame from a bestselling thriller brought a conservation programme that has left it in excellent condition. It takes about an hour inside; pair it with the wooded glen and castle ruin in the valley below to make an outing of it.

Getting there

bus | car

About 40 min by bus from the city centre to Roslin, or 25 min by car

St Andrews

Full day

Golf and ruins

Across the estuary in Fife, a university town with the home of golf attached. The Old Course runs up to the streets and anyone can walk the public path across it; a round means the ballot. Beyond the golf: the roofless remains of Scotland's largest cathedral, a clifftop castle with a crawlable siege tunnel, the third-oldest university in the English-speaking world, and the West Sands.

Getting there

train | bus | car

About 1 hr by train to Leuchars then a 10 min bus, or 1 hr 30 by car

Loch Lomond and the Trossachs

Full day

Highland edge

The nearest properly Highland landscape to Edinburgh, and the one that works as a day out. The national park covers a long freshwater loch with wooded islands, hills behind, and lochside villages with boat trips and short walks. Ambitious walkers take the conical hill above the eastern shore for the view down the loch. Coach tours string it together with a distillery or a castle.

Getting there

car | tour

About 2 hr each way by car, or on a full-day coach tour from the city

A little history of Edinburgh

Edinburgh began as a fort on a volcanic plug. Occupied since at least the Iron Age, it was the Gododdin stronghold of Din Eidyn before the Northumbrians took it in the seventh century. A royal burgh grew down the tail of glacial debris behind it, hemmed in by a loch and a town wall, so it grew upwards instead - tenements of ten and twelve storeys, among the tallest in Europe, stacking judges, merchants and street sellers on floors of the same stair. It became capital in the fifteenth century, lost its court in 1603 when James VI inherited the English throne, and its parliament to the union in 1707.

What happened next is the strangest thing about the city. Stripped of political power, eighteenth-century Edinburgh turned into one of the intellectual capitals of Europe, with Hume, Adam Smith, Joseph Black and James Hutton all working within a few streets of each other, and it built a second city to match: the loch was drained and a Georgian grid was laid out on the fields to the north to a plan won in competition by the young James Craig. The two halves have faced each other across the valley ever since and were listed together as a World Heritage Site in 1995. A parliament returned in 1999, into a building at the foot of the Royal Mile that the city has still not entirely made its peace with.

Timeline
c. 600

The fortress of Din Eidyn on the castle rock is held by the Gododdin, and is remembered in one of the earliest surviving pieces of poetry from northern Britain; Northumbrian forces take the rock in 638, bringing it into an English-speaking kingdom for the next three centuries.

1128

David I founds Holyrood Abbey in the valley below the ridge; the burgh of Edinburgh is chartered under the same king. St Margaret's Chapel is built on the castle rock around the same time, and survives as the oldest building in the city.

1437

The court settles at Edinburgh after the murder of James I at Perth, making the town the effective capital of Scotland.

1513

Defeat at Flodden prompts a new town wall, which pens the population onto the ridge for the next two hundred years and forces the city to build upwards.

1561

Mary, Queen of Scots returns from France to Holyrood; her secretary Rizzio is murdered in her supper room five years later.

1603

James VI inherits the English throne and moves the court to London, leaving Edinburgh a capital without a monarch; the Act of Union dissolves the Scottish parliament in 1707, though Scotland keeps its own law, church and education system, all administered from Edinburgh.

1766

James Craig wins the competition to plan the New Town; the loch below the ridge is drained and building begins on the fields to the north. A decade later Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations, at the height of a Scottish Enlightenment that has the city being called the Athens of the North.

1947

The Edinburgh International Festival is founded to help rebuild European cultural life after the war; eight companies turn up uninvited and perform anyway, starting the Fringe.

1999

The Scottish Parliament reconvenes after nearly three centuries; its building at the foot of the Royal Mile opens in 2004.

Know before you go

Payment

Cards everywhere

English

Everywhere

Wifi

Reliable

Power

Type G

230 V, 50 Hz

Dialing

+44

Dec-Feb

The months our climate read flags to avoid: the wettest, lowest-rated weather of the year.

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FAQs about Edinburgh

When is the best time to visit Edinburgh?

May to September is the good stretch: the days are long, light in the sky until late, and the city at its best. May and June are the pick without the crush; September is quieter than either. August is far the busiest, because of the festivals. December to February needs the hardest thought: short dark days, wind and rain rather than reliable snow, daylight spent indoors. March, April, October and November hand you anything.

Should I go during the festivals in August, or avoid them?

Depends what you want. In August the city is one enormous arts event: thousands of shows a day, streets closed to traffic, venues in places that are ordinarily car parks, an atmosphere nowhere else in Britain matches. Also rammed: rooms booked months ahead and priced accordingly, restaurants too, the Royal Mile a slow crowd of flyers, the ordinary city hard to see underneath. Come in August for the festival, otherwise May, June or September.

Is winter worth it, given the weather?

Be honest about the daylight: around the solstice light goes by mid-afternoon, and the weather is wet and windy rather than crisp. Hogmanay is the country's biggest New Year celebration: a torchlight procession, a ticketed street party, concerts and fireworks off the castle rock, with a market in the gardens beforehand. Edinburgh has an unusual density of museums, galleries, pubs and restaurants, all indoor, so winter works if you plan around the dark.

How many days do you need?

Three full days covers the centre properly - the castle and the Royal Mile, the Holyrood end, a museum or two, the New Town and the galleries, and a climb up Arthur's Seat or Calton Hill for the view. Four or five lets you add Leith, the Water of Leith walk, the botanic garden or the coast, and take a day out to Stirling, Glasgow or the East Lothian coast without cutting anything short. The city is small and dense, so extra days go further here than in most capitals.

Is Edinburgh expensive?

For accommodation, yes by British standards outside London, and extreme in August: central rooms taken months ahead at rates unlike the rest of the year. Eating and drinking match any big British city, cheaper than London, with value on the south side and Leith. The consolation: how much is free. The national museum and galleries charge nothing for permanent collections, and the best day out - Arthur's Seat, the crags, Holyrood Park - costs nothing.

Edinburgh or Glasgow?

Edinburgh for the history, the setting and the postcard; Glasgow for music, architecture, shopping and a better Saturday night. They are fifty minutes apart by train, with several services an hour running late, so this is not really a choice - base yourself in one and take a day or an evening in the other. Most visitors base in Edinburgh because it is prettier, more compact and better placed for the east coast and Fife.

Do I need to book anything ahead?

The castle is worth a timed slot in summer, the one place with a serious queue at the gate. Underground tours, the palace during royal visits and the more ambitious restaurants all need booking; everything else is walk-up. In August the rule flips: book accommodation months out, any show you care about, and restaurants after seven. Check the palace before you go: it closes for royal visits, including a stretch of early summer.

Can you do the Highlands as a day trip?

You can reach their edge comfortably. Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, around two hours away, works as a relaxed day, and Stirling sits at the lowland-Highland seam, under an hour by train. The full-day coach tours to Loch Ness and Glencoe sell well, but run twelve hours or more, much of it in a coach. If the Highlands are why you came, give them two or three days and a car or train from Waverley.

Is the city walkable, and do I need a car?

Very walkable, and you do not want a car: the centre crosses in half an hour, buses and the tram cover the rest, and driving means a low emission zone, scarce metered parking and cobbled one-way streets. Edinburgh is built on ridges, connected by bridges and stairs, so a route that looks flat on a map often is not. Take the hills into account when picking where to stay, especially with luggage or limited mobility.

What is the Harry Potter connection, really?

Rowling wrote much of the early books in Edinburgh cafes, and the city ran with it. The genuine articles: a graveyard with surnames on its headstones that turn up in the novels, a steep curving street of coloured shopfronts said to have suggested the wizarding one, and the turreted school visible from it. Everything else arrived afterwards. Enjoy it lightly: the graveyard is a working burial ground where people still visit family graves.

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