Pleasure Capitals
These cities are built around the evening: festivals, dance floors, carnival drums and dinners that refuse to end. Pleasure capitals ask only one thing of the traveller — stamina.
A pleasure city is one organised around collective enjoyment on a schedule, and the schedule is usually older and stricter than it looks.
The calendar is the infrastructure. Munich's six breweries brew to a purity law of 1516 and only they may pour at Oktoberfest, which began as a royal wedding party in 1810 and now draws six million people. Rio's carnival is prepared by neighbourhood schools for twelve months.
Enjoyment has a plan. Sapporo carves buildings from two million tonnes of snow each February; Harbin cuts blocks from a frozen river to build illuminated palaces at minus twenty-five.
Somebody bought the land quietly. Disney assembled 110 square kilometres of Florida through anonymous shell companies so the price would not rise; Cancún was chosen by government analysis in the late 1960s and built on a sandbar with three fishermen on it.
The rest of the year is the honest portrait. These cities have an off-season, and what it looks like tells you what the place actually is.
Book early or come in the other eleven months.