Go Where The Sun Shines

As temperatures plummet and the hours of daylight diminish, Rob Crossan rounds up the best winter-sun destinations for short-, mid- and long-haul holidays

- Rob Crossan

THERE really is no such thing as bad weather, only different types of good weather,’ John Ruskin once wrote. Which goes to show, if any further proof were necessary, that you can’t trust 19th-century watercolorists as far as you can throw them. Because, of course, plenty of bad weather visits our little island and it can really take its toll. Not only on our cars, our gardens, and our dress sense but also on our psyches. Come the 18th consecutive day of mackerel-colored clouds and somber-voiced weather forecasts, we begin to feel that we’d be prepared to overcome most things, even navigating Luton airport, in order to get some Vitamin D.

Luckily, there’s a fantastic choice of short-, mid- and long-haul destinations for seasonal sufferers, where sunshine is assured, beaches are golden, skies are cerulean and no one— as far as our research suggests—ever wants to talk about Ruskin.

Short haul

Madeira

It’s a sultry afternoon at the Belmond Reid’s Palace, on the vertiginous island of Madeira. Among the mirrored coffee tables and the canary and navy slipper armchairs of the fourth-floor lounge, I feel sure I’ve just missed Patrick Standish from Take a Girl Like You stealing a kiss from a blushing Jenny Bunn. And on the front terrace, amid the rattan chairs, isn’t that an aging Sir Winston Churchill, staggering in with an easel under his arms, fresh from a few hours painting?

Debonair and defiantly British and wearing its age lightly, Reid’s Palace doesn’t merely look like the kind of place that Churchill would have stayed in. He, and numerous other luminaries, actually did.