Visit the World’s Most Inspiring Cities

Superlatives are common among travel lists: World’s best, greatest, most beautiful, most visited and so on.

Now there’s a list for “most inspiring.” European travel booking site TravelBird has come up with a list of the world’s most inspiring cities based on eight different criteria “associated with the spirit of creativity, romance, culture and innovation.”

To arrive at the list, the survey took into account measurables like the number of performing arts companies, art galleries, museums and art schools in a city. It also looked at creative industries, like music production and film.

The survey measured a “start-up ranking” based on the number of new businesses in a given city. And finally, it looked at the number of times locals and visitors were “romantically inspired” by the city by looking at the number of Google searches for romance-focused keywords like “romantic dinner.”

The survey includes 85 locations around the world and balances well-known centers with smaller cities. Ranking first on the list was Miami. Other cities cracking the top 10 were Bruges, Belgium; San Francisco; Bristol, UK; Reykjavik, Iceland; Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Salzburg, Austria; Zurich, Switzerland; Heidelberg, Germany; and Florence, Italy. See the full list here.