Valentine’s Day

On February 14, the streets of Mexico City fill with something more than romance. Yes, couples stroll hand in hand through Chapultepec Park and flower vendors do their best business

Colombia celebrates Valentine’s Day in September. Not as a quirk, not as a joke — as the country’s official, beloved, utterly mainstream Day of Love and Friendship, held on the

What if Valentine’s Day lasted a whole week, happened in July, and was for everyone — not just couples? Argentina has exactly that: Semana de la Dulzura, the Week of

In most countries, Valentine’s Day is about dating. In the Philippines, it’s about marrying — hundreds of couples at a time, in public parks and gymnasiums and plazas, dressed in

Denmark does Valentine’s Day the way Denmark does most things: quietly, cleverly, and with a twist nobody else thought of. Forget the dozen red roses — in Denmark, the romantic

Long before the greeting-card industry, before the dozen red roses, before the diamond ring as the default proposal, a young Welshman who wanted to marry a girl did something far

Three weeks before the rest of the world reaches for Valentine’s cards, Wales has already celebrated love — in its own language, on its own date, and with a story

Every February, one Italian city leans into Valentine’s Day harder than anywhere else on earth — and it has been preparing for about four hundred years. Verona, the setting of

In Italy, the most romantic thing you can hand someone on February 14 isn’t a rose or a ring — it’s a small, fist-shaped chocolate wrapped in blue and silver

Paris did not become the “City of Love” by accident — and it did not become it on Valentine’s Day alone. The French capital’s romantic reputation was built over centuries

Ask anyone to name the world’s most romantic country and France usually comes first. Yet what the French actually do on February 14 often surprises visitors expecting grand public spectacles.

France is supposed to be the country of love — so you’d expect its Valentine’s Day to be the grandest on earth. The reality is more interesting: La Saint-Valentin in