Atacama Desert, Lit Festivals, Regional Pizza, Library Diaries & More: Endnotes 30 May

Every Friday, we celebrate the weekend — and all the reading and relaxing and daydreaming time ahead — with Melissa's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week. Why work when you can read fun stuff?!

This post is part of our Endnotes series.

Atacama Desert in Chile (above) is the driest place on Earth. The average rainfall is just 1mm per year, and it’s been known to have stretches of four years with no rain at all. (Some areas in the desert haven’t received rain in centuries (?!).) But then, like magic, every five to seven years, intense winter rain drenches the ground, quenching the thirst of dormant seeds, and a massive sea of wildflower erupts like fireworks. The superbloom is called desierto florido (flowering desert) and is made up of more than 200 species of colorful blooms. See a stunning photo here. On the regular, though, the Atacama looks more like an otherwordly landscape of barren sandy and rocky terrain. This awesome video about spending 24 hours in the Atacama asks, ‘Is this Mars?’ In fact, NASA uses the desert to test instruments for missions to Mars because its soil samples are very similar to the red planet. Why visit such an inhospitable place? You can stargaze with an astronomical tour, visit a flamingo reserve, go sandboarding, and explore ghost towns on the pampa. Travel+Leisure recommends the best things to do and the best time to go. Lonely Planet offers tips for the first-time visitor, and National Geographic invites you to explore.

• News you can use! 7 literary and book festivals worth traveling for around the world.

• Related: The Hay-on-Wye Festival is happening right now in Wales. But! Did you know there are other Hay-related book events all over the world throughout 2025? And! You can pay-to-play to watch some of the Hay-on-Wye events online, like this one with Jameela Jamil.

• Scenes from books and movies can feel as real to us as IRL events. This article in Psyche explains why. ‘People with a greater predisposition to experience the emotions of others also tend to engage with their mental representations (of stories) as if they are part of reality, increasing immersion.’ (Shout out to author Amy Tector for sharing this link on her Substack.)

• How to spend an awesome weekend in Charlotte, North Carolina — with ‘forty Picassos, one disco chicken, and unlimited Carolina-blue sky.’

• If our new podcast episode inspires you to visit Portugal, you might like this roundup of its 30 best hotels according to CNTraveler. The Palácio Príncipe Real in Lisbon makes me swoon.

• Sorta related: 10 Unique Hotels That Turn Every Stay Into a Story. Fondue in a former war vault in Switzerland? Yes, please.

• Must-click headline: 9 Regional U.S. Pizza Styles You Need To Try. It will take a lot to sway my devotion to New York-style, but my mind is open.

• At dinner parties, it has always been a struggle to get random people to be interested in my work as a librarian. Um, what?! I would be all over that conversation!

• Kinda related: Peek inside the Librarian’s Log book of Misses Hilda Lofthouse and Pauline Leech, librarians at Wales’ Chetham’s Library in 1947. A snarky snippet: ‘Heresy from a librarian-aspirant: That libraries are definitely better places without readers than with.’

• It’s not too late to join this Middelmarch read-along.

• Margaret Atwood’s 10 Best Books – Ranked. ‘From climate dystopias to her world-conquering handmaids.’

• I will always drop what I’m doing to listen to Helena Bonham Carter read poetry.

• In our podcast episode Outer Space: We Are All Made of Stars, Dave said, ‘Space smells funny.’ The BBC asks and answers the question, What does outer space smell like? ‘From the stench of rotten eggs to the sweet scent of almonds, space is a surprisingly smelly place.’

• Live out your Bridgerton fantasies at the Old Royal Naval College in London. It’s the UK’s #1 filming location and provided settings for Bridgerton, The Crown, Pirates of the Caribbean, Les Misérables, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and more. Tour details here.

New Episode of Strong Sense of Place — Portugal: Storytelling, Surfing, and Ineffable Saudade

Snuggled up next to Spain on the Iberian Peninsula and perched on the westernmost edge of Europe, Portugal has a long love affair with the sea. The Age of Discovery, launched in 15th-century Lisbon, carried Portuguese sailors to far-flung lands and brought sugarcane, tobacco, cotton, coffee, gold, spices, and chocolate back home.

Today, the traditions of the colonies — and a Moorish invasion or two — are integrated into Portugal’s cuisine, music, architecture, and the azulejos that tell stories of Portuguese life in colorful ceramic tiles.

Portugal has treasures to offer every kind of traveler: the fortified wine of Madeira and the port of the Douro Valley, ancient Roman ruins and crenelated medieval castles, lush hilltop gardens and one-of-a-kind beaches, savory fried snacks and perfectly-sweet pastries — and bookish delights including a baroque library, a literary hotel, and a church-turned-bookshop.

In this episode, we hit the high seas with Portuguese explorers, take a virtual visit to the world’s oldest operating bookstore, and learn the multifaceted story of the Portuguese poet Pessoa. Then we recommend great books that took us there on the page, including a punch-you-in-the-feelings thriller, a charming history of Lisbon, a different kind of WWII story, a swashbuckling adventure starring a language-loving ape, and a memoir-cookbook hybrid that reads like the best kind of travel guide.

Get the show notes and transcript.

Parts of the Strong Sense of Place podcast are produced in udio. Some effects are provided by soundly.

May the sun shine upon you today.

Top image courtesy of Marek Piwnicki/Unsplash.