Ruins of St. Paul’s
Why this is the first thing I do every time I land in Macau.
Read MoreLargo do Senado
A closer look at one of Macau's most rewarding experiences.
Read MoreCotai Strip resorts
Where to go next once you have seen the headline sights of Macau.
Read MoreMacau gets reduced too often to its casinos, which miss the point entirely — this is a peninsula where Portuguese colonial architecture, Cantonese temple culture, and Vegas-scale spectacle sit within a few hundred metres of one another, and the friction between them is the actual attraction. I wander the Historic Centre’s calçada pavements, wave-patterned like Lisbon’s, past the ruins of St. Paul’s facade standing alone against the sky, and twenty minutes later I’m under the chandeliers of the Grand Lisboa. The food carries the same hybrid logic — Macanese cuisine is genuinely its own cuisine, African chicken and pork chop buns born of Portuguese trade routes through Africa and India. Macau rewards slow walking far more than it rewards a seat at any table.
Chapter One
The old quarter
Largo do Senado’s black-and-white wave-tiled square is where I always start, ice cream in hand, before climbing the worn stone steps to the Ruins of St. Paul’s — a single baroque facade, all that survives of a seventeenth-century church fire, propped against open sky like a stage set. Behind it, the old Mount Fortress gives a rare high view over the whole peninsula. A Lorcha and Café Litoral serve Macanese classics — minchi, African chicken — in dining rooms that feel closer to Lisbon than to Guangdong, azulejo tiles and all. Taipa Village, across the water, keeps the same colonial-village scale in miniature, with better egg tart competition than anywhere else in the territory.
“Macau is what happens when four centuries of trade routes never quite finish arguing over a single peninsula.”
Chapter Two
Light and spectacle
The Cotai Strip is Macau’s answer to Las Vegas and, in scale, its superior — the Venetian’s indoor canals and painted-sky ceilings, the Parisian’s half-size Eiffel Tower lit gold at dusk. I don’t gamble much, but I go for the sheer architectural excess, and for the genuinely excellent dining rooms tucked inside these resorts. The Macau Tower, meanwhile, offers the bungee jump alternative of simply looking down 233 metres through a glass floor, which is vertigo enough for me. Best contrast of the trip: watching the Ruins of St. Paul’s lit softly at 9pm, then crossing the bridge to see Cotai’s neon wash the sky orange behind it.
The Short List
Do not miss in Macau
At a glance
Macau in numbers
- Capital
- Macau (SAR)
- Language
- Cantonese and Portuguese
- Currency
- Macanese pataca
- Best time
- October to December, dry and comfortably warm
Did you know
Macau has the highest casino gaming revenue in the world, several times that of the Las Vegas Strip.