There is a strange inverse relationship between how photogenic a neighborhood is and how rewarding it is to actually spend time in. The most-photographed streets in any famous tourist city — Notting Hill’s pastel houses, the rainbow staircases of Lisbon, the Bohemian Quarter of Prague, Venice’s Burano — are usually the streets where actual neighborhood life has been most thoroughly displaced.
The dynamic is straightforward. Once a street becomes Instagram-famous, two things happen: tourists arrive in numbers that overwhelm the residential population, and short-term rentals replace year-round residents. Within a few years, the street is still beautiful but it is empty of the people whose lives gave it its character. What remains is a film set.
Our rule: be skeptical of any neighborhood whose name comes up disproportionately on travel Instagram. The neighborhoods that resist the gravitational pull — because they’re harder to photograph, or because they’ve quietly resisted Airbnb conversion, or because they’re just not photogenic enough for the algorithm — are usually the ones still worth visiting.
We try to flag this on our city pages. The five neighborhoods we list per city always include at least two that are deeply un-Instagrammable but where a serious traveler will have a much better time.