🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Scotland
Edinburgh is one of the most beautiful and characterful capitals in Europe. Built on hills and ancient volcanoes, it is a city of dark stone, Gothic towers, alleyways (closes) and steep stairs, crowned by a castle that rises on a basalt crag and has watched over the city for centuries. Its historic centre is really two: the medieval Old Town, packed along the Royal Mile between the castle and the royal palace, and the eighteenth-century Georgian New Town, with wide avenues and symmetrical squares. Together, both are a Unesco World Heritage Site.
But Edinburgh is not just a historical set: it is a living, cultured, theatrical city. It was the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment — David Hume and Adam Smith thought and wrote here — it is the seat of the Scottish Parliament and, every August, it becomes the world capital of the performing arts with the Festival Fringe, the biggest on the planet. It is the city of whisky and pubs with live music, of first-rate free museums, of dark legends (Burke and Hare, the stolen bodies, the ghosts of the underground vaults) and of viewpoints such as Arthur's Seat and Calton Hill from which the city unfolds all the way to the sea.
This guide covers the essentials with a practical eye: how to get here by train from London or by tram from the airport, how to get around on foot and by bus in a city of hills, what to see without rushing (from the castle to Holyrood, from the Royal Mile to the New Town), how to make the most of the free museums, where to try a good whisky and what to bear in mind if you travel in August, when the festivals transform everything. Edinburgh is walked, climbed and enjoyed slowly: it is one of those cities that stays with you long after the trip.
Edinburgh was born on the rock: the volcanic crag where the castle stands today was inhabited from prehistoric times, and by the seventh century it was the Brittonic fortress of Din Eidyn, later taken by the Angles of Northumbria, from whom the name 'Edinburgh' would come. In the Middle Ages it grew as a walled royal burgh along today's Royal Mile, between the castle and Holyrood Abbey, and became the capital of the kingdom of Scotland. The sixteenth century brought the Protestant Reformation led by the preacher John Knox and the turbulent reign of Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1603, with the Union of the Crowns, King James VI of Scotland also came to reign in England, and in 1707 the Act of Union merged both parliaments: Edinburgh no longer had a parliament of its own but flourished as an intellectual centre. In the eighteenth century it lived its golden age with the Scottish Enlightenment — Hume, Adam Smith, medicine, science — and with the building of the elegant Georgian New Town, designed by James Craig, which relieved the overcrowded Old Town. The nineteenth century added literary fame (Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson) and dark episodes such as the Burke and Hare murders for anatomy. In 1999, after almost three centuries, Scotland regained its own Parliament, housed in a modern building next to Holyrood. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The northern nation: from the Picts and Rome's failure to Wallace and Bruce, Mary Queen of Scots, the Union of 1707, the Jacobites and Culloden, the Highland Clearances, the Scottish Enlightenment and the new Parliament of 1999.
Read the history of Scotland →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Everything in Edinburgh starts with a rock. The crag where the castle stands today is Castle Rock, the basalt plug of a volcano that went extinct some 340 million years ago, and the first fortresses were raised on it long before the name 'Edinburgh' existed. Excavations have found human occupation from the Bronze Age, and by the sixth or seventh century the rock was the seat of a Brittonic kingdom — speaking a language related to Welsh — whose fortress was called Din Eidyn, 'the fortress of Eidyn'. One of the oldest poems in the islands, 'Y Gododdin', tells of that settlement, recounting a band of warriors who set out from Din Eidyn towards a disastrous battle against the Angles.
And it was precisely those Angles, the Saxons of the kingdom of Northumbria, who took the fortress around the year 638. From the union of the old Brittonic name 'Eidyn' with the Old English term 'burh' (fortress) came 'Edinburgh'. Over the following centuries, the border between the southern kingdoms and the emerging kingdom of Scotland shifted several times, until Edinburgh was firmly in Scottish hands.
Geography marked the city for ever. A glacier had carved the terrain leaving the castle rock as a defensive outcrop and, behind it, a long descending ramp of earth (a formation called 'crag and tail'). Along that ramp, protected by the castle above, the medieval city spread out in a single long street running downhill: the embryo of the future Royal Mile. The oldest surviving building in the castle, the small St Margaret's Chapel, is from the twelfth century and commemorates Queen Margaret, wife of Malcolm III, later canonised.
In the twelfth century, King David I made Edinburgh a royal burgh and founded, at the foot of the hill, Holyrood Abbey ('the Holy Cross'), according to legend after a vision during a hunt. Between the castle above and the abbey below ran the street that would structure the city for centuries. Edinburgh grew as a trading centre and, by the fifteenth century, became the capital of the kingdom of Scotland: the court, the Scottish Parliament and the main institutions settled there.
Hemmed in by walls — especially after the building of the Flodden Wall following the disastrous Scottish defeat by the English in 1513 — the city could not grow outwards, so it grew upwards. On both sides of the main street rose tenement buildings ('lands') of up to ten and eleven storeys, extraordinarily tall for the time, separated by narrow, dark alleys called 'closes' and 'wynds'. In those buildings, nobles and poor people were packed on top of one another, in one of the most densely populated cities in Europe. The lack of hygiene was proverbial: rubbish and waste were thrown into the street with a cry of 'gardyloo!' (from the French 'gardez l'eau'), and the constant chimney smoke earned Edinburgh the affectionate nickname 'Auld Reekie' ('the old smoky one').
That vertical, crowded world, with its underground passages and vaults beneath the bridges, is what history and ghost tours walk through today, and it explains much of the dense, theatrical character of the Old Town.
The sixteenth century was as brilliant as it was bloody. In 1560, the preacher John Knox, a disciple of Calvin, led the Protestant Reformation in Scotland from the pulpit of St Giles' Cathedral, right on the Royal Mile. The Reformation transformed the country's religion, education and politics, and left Edinburgh a bastion of Presbyterianism. In the middle of that storm reigned Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic queen in a country turning Protestant. Her reign was a run of tragedies: in 1566, in her apartments at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, a group of nobles stabbed her Italian secretary David Rizzio to death in front of her while she was six months pregnant. Shortly afterwards her husband, Lord Darnley, died in a suspicious explosion; Mary married the chief suspect, was deposed, fled to England and ended up executed on the orders of her cousin Elizabeth I in 1587.
Her son, James VI of Scotland, by contrast brought about a historic turn: in 1603, when Elizabeth I died without issue, he also inherited the English throne and became James I of England. This was the Union of the Crowns; the court moved to London and Edinburgh lost its king, though it kept its Parliament. The decisive step came in 1707, when the Act of Union merged the parliaments of Scotland and England into a single one at Westminster, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. Edinburgh stopped being a capital with its own parliament — a loss many Scots felt bitterly — but, paradoxically, it was about to live through its most brilliant century.
Deprived of court and parliament, Edinburgh channelled its energy into thought, and the result was extraordinary. Between the middle and the end of the eighteenth century, the city became one of the great intellectual centres of Europe, at the heart of what is known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The philosopher David Hume, one of the sharpest minds in the history of Western thought, lived and wrote here; here Adam Smith published 'The Wealth of Nations' in 1776, the founding work of modern economics. The University of Edinburgh shone in medicine, science, geology (with James Hutton, father of modern geology) and philosophy, and the city filled with scientific societies, debating clubs and publishers. It was said that a visitor standing on the High Street could shake the hands of a dozen geniuses within a few minutes.
That intellectual splendour needed a setting to match, and the old crowded, unhealthy city could take no more. In 1766 a competition was held to design a new city to the north, and it was won by a 26-year-old architect, James Craig, with an ordered, rational grid plan, the perfect urban expression of the Enlightenment: wide, straight streets, landscaped squares and elegant Georgian stone facades. So was born the New Town, built from 1767, with axes such as George Street, Princes Street and St Andrew and Charlotte squares. The rich abandoned the Old Town tenements and moved to the new houses, and Edinburgh was left divided into two complementary cities — the medieval and the Georgian — which in 1995 Unesco would jointly declare a World Heritage Site. The taste for classical architecture and Greek-style monuments on Calton Hill earned the city the nickname 'the Athens of the North'.
The nineteenth century cemented Edinburgh's double face: the cultured city and the dark city. It was a literary capital of the first order. Sir Walter Scott, with his historical novels, created much of the romantic image of Scotland that still sells the country today (the tartans, the clans, the legendary Highlands), and the city honoured him with the imposing Scott Monument on Princes Street. Later, Robert Louis Stevenson — author of 'Treasure Island' and of 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' — was born and grew up in Edinburgh, and it is no accident that his tale of the split human soul came out of a city literally divided in two, decent by day and murky by night.
That murky side had chilling real episodes. Between 1827 and 1828, William Burke and William Hare murdered at least sixteen people to sell fresh corpses to the anatomist Robert Knox, who needed them for his dissection classes at a university hungry for bodies. The scandal ended with Hare informing on Burke, who was hanged and, in a macabre kind of justice, publicly dissected; his skeleton is still on display at the university. Stories like this, along with the graveyards, the bodies stolen by 'resurrectionists' and the Old Town's underground passages, feed Edinburgh's Gothic reputation.
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries brought a slow but deep political recovery. After almost three hundred years without a parliament of its own, in 1997 a referendum approved devolution, and in 1999 a Scottish Parliament met again, housed in a bold contemporary building by the architect Enric Miralles, next to the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Scotland regained its institutional voice, and the debate about its relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom — including the 2014 independence referendum — is still very much alive. Today Edinburgh is a proud, cosmopolitan capital that every August becomes the world capital of the performing arts with the Festival Fringe, born in 1947. Between the castle rock, the verses of its writers, the smoke of 'Auld Reekie' and the lights of the New Town, the city goes on telling its story to anyone willing to walk it.