Christchurch has landed a spot on the prestigious New York Times' "52 Places to Go in 2020".
Lauryn Ishak for The New York Times
Ten years after the 2010 Canterbury earthquake, and not quite a year after the March 2019 terrorist attack on two mosques, Christchurch, where 23 million New Zealand dollars (about $15 million) has been raised to support the Muslim community, continues to prove itself as a global symbol of resilience.
While earthquake destruction remains visible, downtown has been animated by recent building and restoration, including the Turanga, or Central Library, designed in modernist style by the Danish firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen.
Expected to open this year, the nearby Puari Village, a Maori cultural center, will offer exhibitions, Maori food and waka (canoe) tours on the Avon River.
The new Riverside Market offers produce and prepared food from the surrounding Canterbury region, the breadbasket of New Zealand, in 40 stalls adjacent to a lane of new boutiques. Besides a strong public art program, which has installed sculptures across the city, recent highlights include the food hall Little High Eatery, its neighboring wine bar Not Without You, and Eco Villa, an eight-room inn reconstructed from a 1910-vintage, earthquake-damaged house across the street from the architect Shigeru Ban’s Cardboard Cathedral. Christchurch will also soon be easier to reach: American Airlines recently announced direct service from Los Angeles beginning in fall 2020.
—Elaine Glusac
How We Picked the 2020 ‘Places to Go’ List
There are so many places in the world, and only 52 spots. How do we choose? (Do you know all the synonyms for “argue”?)
“Where would you go if you could go anywhere?”
That was the question I posed to the members of The Times Travel desk back at the beginning of September, at our kickoff lunch for the 2020 edition of our annual 52 Places to Go list. Between that day and the list’s publication, there have been almost four months of research, discussion, debate and as many synonyms for “argument” as you can imagine. In the end, we came down to these 52 destinations that we hope will inspire, delight and motivate you to explore the world.
How did we choose them? After that initial poll, we asked our regular contributors, as well as The Times’s foreign and domestic correspondents, to suggest places that seemed newly fresh and compelling. We pestered in-the-know travelers for their 2020 musts.
We grilled travel pros about what had them excited. To make the cut, it is not enough for a place to be beautiful, amazing and culturally significant. It also has to answer the question, why now? Why this place, this year?
