The minions of the FIFA World Cup may not stand much of a chance on the playing field, but each of them with names difficult to pronounce, and lat-longs impossible to locate, are actually a traveler’s delight
Let’s be honest about your “Places to Visit Before I Die” note. It’s 90 percent Iceland, Zanzibar and Santorini, it hasn’t been updated since 2019, and somewhere between tea and dinner last Tuesday you added Curaçao, Cape Verde, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Haiti because a YouTuber with perfect hair called them “underrated gems” of the World Cup. You still don’t know where two of them are on a map. But now, with the FIFA World Cup 2026 kicking off across the US, Mexico, and Canada, you have the perfect excuse: all four are playing. Yes. All four. Your group chat is going to lose its mind.
Start with Curaçao, because it’s the easiest to love and the hardest to explain. It’s a tiny Dutch island 40 miles off Venezuela, which means you get Caribbean beaches with European bureaucracy and a national sense of humor about it. You land, step into the heat, and Willemstad hits you like a Pinterest board someone dropped in the ocean. The houses are yellow, pink, blue, orange, and it’s technically illegal to feel stressed here. The flamingos enforce it.
Now imagine that same island shutting down because “La Seleccion di Kòrsou” just made the World Cup. The beaches will still have no seaweed and $10 sunbeds, but every bar will have a TV duct-taped to a palm tree. The drink called Blue Curaçao was invented here, and no, it does not taste like the sea. It tastes like a melted popsicle made by adults who were tired of being responsible. You’ll drink it, regret it, and order another while chanting for a team that’s 444,000 people strong and somehow outran giants in qualifying. Everything still closes by 6pm, except during matches. On match days, the whole island pulls an all-nighter and judges you if you don’t.
From there, fly across the Atlantic to Cape Verde, which is Portugal’s group chat with Africa and the wind is the admin. Ten islands, 350 miles off Senegal, and nine of them exist purely to prove that hair products are a lie. Sal Island is white sand, salt flats, and kitesurfers who look like they were cast in a Red Bull ad. If you don’t like wind, Sal will break up with you before your first coffee. São Vicente is where the music lives, home of Cesária Évora, the barefoot diva who sang about longing. After a plate of cachupa, you’ll understand why.
