Macau Destination Guide

Four Centuries of Portugal, Sitting on the Pearl River

The Portuguese arrived here in the middle of the sixteenth century and stayed until 1999, which makes Macau the oldest and the last European settlement in East Asia. What that left behind is a small dense place where pastel church facades, black and white mosaic pavements and colonial squares sit directly against Cantonese temples, market lanes and family restaurants, and where the whole arrangement is now surrounded by the largest concentration of casino revenue on the planet. It is a genuinely strange and genuinely rewarding combination, and it is far more interesting than the gaming figures suggest.

The planning decision: how many nights this really deserves

One or two nights. Possibly three if you are here for a specific event. Macau is roughly thirty square kilometers, the historic center can be walked in a morning, and the resort side is designed to hold you inside it rather than to fill a week. The trip that works is an add on: two nights here inside a Hong Kong stay, or a stop while you are moving through the Pearl River delta toward Guangzhou or Shenzhen. Treated that way it is excellent. Treated as a week's holiday it runs out of material, and honest planning says so at the start.

The dry months, the typhoon signals and the weekend everything fills

October through December is the best window, dry, mild and clear. January and February are cool and comfortable. March through May turns humid, with a damp spell in spring when the air condenses on every surface indoors. June through September is hot and wet and sits inside the typhoon season, when the local warning signal system can suspend ferries from Hong Kong at short notice, which matters if the ferry is your way in or out. Two periods fill every hotel in the territory: Chinese New Year and the mainland Golden Week holidays, and the Grand Prix weekend in November, when the city closes streets for a street circuit and rooms are taken months ahead.

The peninsula or Cotai, and how you actually get here

Macau is two places. The peninsula holds the historic center, the Senado Square area, the ruins of Saint Paul's, the old fortress, the food streets and the original casinos, and it is the half with a real city underneath it. Cotai, built on reclaimed land between two former islands, is where the modern integrated resorts sit, and it is closer to Las Vegas than to anywhere in China. Taipa Village, between the two, keeps a few Portuguese lanes and the best casual eating. From Hong Kong, ferries run to both the peninsula and the Taipa terminal in around an hour, and the bridge across the delta carries shuttle buses in roughly forty five minutes. Macau International Airport handles regional flights. Immigration is separate from both the mainland and Hong Kong, so passports are needed on every crossing and entry rules should be confirmed for your nationality before travel.

Stay strategy where the supply is enormous and the standard is high

Very few places of this size have this much good hotel inventory. On Cotai, Four Seasons Hotel Macao and The St. Regis Macao sit in the Cotai Strip complexes with direct access to the shopping and the shows. Morpheus at City of Dreams is the most architecturally serious building in the territory. Wynn Palace and Grand Lisboa Palace are the two most extravagant. Banyan Tree Macau has the largest suites and a spa to match. On the peninsula, Mandarin Oriental Macau sits away from the gaming floors with harbor views and is the quieter choice, and Wynn Macau anchors the older strip. If you do not want to be inside a casino, say so early, because most of the options are.

When to begin

Two to three months is usually enough, which is unusual for a destination of this quality and is purely a function of how many rooms there are. The exceptions are firm: the Grand Prix weekend, Chinese New Year, Golden Week and the major concert residencies at the arena, all of which take the territory to full and want six months. Restaurant reservations at the small number of serious Macanese and Cantonese rooms are worth holding a few weeks ahead, and the shows are ticketed separately.

Four experiences worth building the days around

• The historic center on foot early in the morning, from Senado Square up to the ruins of Saint Paul's, before the day groups arrive.
• A proper Macanese meal, which is its own cuisine drawing on Portugal, Africa, India and southern China rather than a fusion of them.
• Taipa Village in the late afternoon for egg tarts, almond cakes and the lanes behind the main street.
• An evening on Cotai for a show and the sheer scale of the resorts, taken as spectacle rather than apologized for.

Who this trip suits

Macau suits anyone already going to Hong Kong who wants a completely different two days. It suits food travelers, because the Macanese kitchen exists nowhere else. It suits architecture and history travelers, given the UNESCO listed historic center. It suits families at the Cotai resorts, which are built around pools, shows and shopping. And it suits gaming travelers, for the obvious reason.

When another plan may fit better

There are no beaches here worth the name, and the coastline is working river delta rather than holiday coast. If you want depth of Chinese history and monumental scale, Beijing is a different order of destination. If you want a modern Chinese city with a serious arts and dining scene, Shanghai holds far more for a full week. And if casinos actively put you off, understand that they are woven through most of the good hotels here rather than confined to a district.

Plan it with one accountable advisor

Tell us the dates, whether Hong Kong or the delta sits either side, and whether you want the historic half or the resort half as the base, and we will set the crossing, the hotel and the tables accordingly. Our luxury leisure travel planning handles the wider southern China sequence when Macau is one stop in it.