I Visited these 10 Places the Internet Keeps Calling Ugly and I Have Never Been More Surprised
Some places get written off online with a few harsh comments and an unflattering photo. But after visiting 10 destinations that regularly show up in “ugliest places” conversations, the gap between internet reputation and real life was hard to ignore.
What stood out most was not that every place was beautiful in a postcard sense. It was that each one had something the internet often misses: scale, history, people, or a setting that looks very different when you are actually there.
Newark, New Jersey
Newark often gets reduced to airport views, highways, and old jokes from people who have never stayed longer than a train transfer. Yet New Jersey’s largest city has been investing in its downtown, riverfront, and arts institutions for years, with visible results around Military Park and the Prudential Center area.
The city is home to the Newark Museum of Art, one of the largest museums in the state, and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which draws major touring productions and concerts. Rutgers University-Newark and NJIT also keep the area active with students, research activity, and new businesses.
What surprises visitors is how walkable parts of the core feel once you leave the roads around the airport. The Ironbound neighborhood, in particular, is known for Portuguese, Spanish, and Brazilian restaurants that attract diners from across the region.
Like many older industrial cities, Newark still has blocks shaped by disinvestment and heavy infrastructure. But the online version of Newark, all concrete and no character, leaves out the neighborhoods and institutions that give the city texture and staying power.
Brussels, Belgium
Brussels gets criticized online for being gray, bureaucratic, and less photogenic than other European capitals. That reputation usually centers on the European Union office district and some postwar redevelopment that replaced older streets with boxy modern buildings.
In person, the city feels far more layered. The Grand-Place remains one of Europe’s most celebrated public squares, and the mix of Gothic, Baroque, and Art Nouveau architecture is wider than quick internet rankings suggest.
Local tourism data has long shown Brussels drawing millions of overnight stays annually, thanks to its role as both a political capital and leisure destination. Museums dedicated to comic art, fine art, and musical instruments help explain why the city keeps a steady cultural pull beyond official institutions.
The surprise is not that every street is charming. It is that Brussels works best as a lived-in city, with busy cafés, strong transit, multilingual energy, and neighborhoods that reward time rather than snapshots. The internet often judges it by office blocks instead of the full map.
Naples, Italy
Naples is frequently targeted online for being chaotic, gritty, and visually rough around the edges. Those descriptions are not invented. The city is dense, loud, traffic-heavy, and marked by long-running struggles over waste management, inequality, and preservation.
But Naples is also one of Italy’s most historically important cities, with a UNESCO-listed historic center and deep ties to archaeology, religion, music, and food. It sits near Pompeii and Herculaneum, beneath Mount Vesuvius, and along a bay that has inspired artists for centuries.
Visitors who arrive expecting only disorder usually notice the street life first. Laundry lines, scooters, churches, markets, and packed piazzas create a city that feels intense rather than polished. That distinction matters because “ugly” online often really means untidy, crowded, or difficult to photograph well.
Naples also remains central to Italy’s tourism economy, with pizza culture alone serving as a global draw. Its beauty is not neat or curated. It is dramatic, layered, and inseparable from the daily life happening right in front of you.
Charleroi, Belgium
Charleroi has spent years near the top of online lists of Europe’s ugliest cities, a label that hardened after old industrial decline left scars across the urban landscape. Located in Wallonia, the city grew around coal, steel, and glass, then struggled as those industries contracted in the late 20th century.
That industrial history is still visible in slag heaps, former factories, and broad transport corridors. Yet it also gives Charleroi an identity that is more distinctive in person than in internet jokes. Regeneration projects, street art, and adaptive reuse have slowly changed parts of the city.
The BPS22 contemporary art museum and the city’s photography and comic culture are examples of how Charleroi has worked to reframe itself. Belgian officials and local planners have repeatedly pointed to culture and public space as part of a longer economic transition.
The surprise here is that Charleroi does not hide its past. It lives with it. For travelers interested in industrial heritage, urban change, and cities outside the standard tourist circuit, that honesty can be more memorable than a prettier place with less to say.
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles often gets slammed online as a giant sprawl of strip malls, freeways, and visual clutter. Critics point to traffic, overhead wires, faded commercial corridors, and the fact that so much of the city reveals itself from behind a windshield rather than on foot.
Those complaints capture part of the truth. Los Angeles is decentralized and can feel messy in ways that postcard images of palm trees and beaches do not show. But that same scale also creates a city of highly distinct neighborhoods, each with its own look, food, architecture, and street rhythm.
The Griffith Observatory, Getty Center, Santa Monica coastline, and views from the Hollywood Hills remain major draws for good reason. At the same time, areas like Koreatown, Boyle Heights, Little Tokyo, and Highland Park show how much cultural depth gets lost when LA is reduced to freeway imagery.
The internet often expects visual coherence from cities. Los Angeles offers something else: variety at huge scale. Once you stop judging it as one single place and start seeing it neighborhood by neighborhood, the supposed ugliness looks more like complexity.
Birmingham, England
Birmingham is still dogged by old reputations tied to concrete redevelopment, ring roads, and postwar planning decisions that many locals themselves have debated for decades. England’s second-largest city has often been overshadowed by London, Manchester, and more obviously picturesque places.
Yet Birmingham has undergone major rebuilding since the 1990s, including the Bullring area, new public squares, canal-side development, and transit upgrades. The city now has more miles of canals than Venice, a fact often repeated locally and supported by historic waterway records.
Its food scene has also helped reshape outside views. Birmingham has earned recognition for South Asian dining, independent restaurants, and a broad urban population that has made it one of the UK’s most diverse cities.
The city is not uniformly beautiful, and no serious reporting would claim that. What is striking is how outdated much of the online criticism feels. Large sections of central Birmingham are modern, busy, and far more inviting than the old “concrete jungle” stereotype suggests.
Scranton, Pennsylvania
Scranton is better known in the US for punch lines, rust belt assumptions, and television references than for tourism marketing. Online, that often turns into a familiar formula: old brick, former industry, gray winters, and not much else.
In reality, Scranton tells a bigger story about northeastern Pennsylvania and the rise and fall of American coal. Sites such as the Steamtown National Historic Site and the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour give visitors a direct look at the industries that shaped the region and the country.
Downtown architecture, churches, and hillside neighborhoods add more visual interest than outsiders tend to expect. The city has also leaned into local events, small businesses, and heritage tourism, trying to balance preservation with the realities of a smaller postindustrial economy.
What surprises many visitors is the sense of place. Scranton does not feel generic. It feels specific, local, and proud of where it came from. That may not fit the internet’s standard for beauty, but it gives the city more personality than many more polished destinations.
Rotterdam, Netherlands
Rotterdam is sometimes criticized by travelers expecting canal-house charm and finding a city rebuilt after World War II bombing instead. The center is modern, bold, and at times severe, which makes it a regular target for people who compare it unfavorably with Amsterdam or Utrecht.
That judgment overlooks why Rotterdam looks the way it does. After the German bombing of May 14, 1940, much of the city center had to be rebuilt, and planners embraced experimentation rather than imitation. The result is one of Europe’s most architecturally ambitious urban landscapes.
Landmarks such as the Cube Houses, Markthal, Erasmus Bridge, and the rebuilt waterfront make Rotterdam a case study in modern city design. It is also one of the world’s major ports, giving it an economic role that extends far beyond tourism.
The surprise is how lively and confident the city feels. Rotterdam does not ask visitors to pretend it is old-world pretty. It offers design, movement, and a strong civic identity instead. For many travelers, that ends up being more memorable than expected.
Bakersfield, California
Bakersfield appears online in some of the harshest lists about unattractive American cities, usually because of flat landscapes, suburban spread, oil infrastructure, and summer heat that regularly pushes above 100°F. It is not a place that depends on scenic first impressions.
Still, Bakersfield matters economically and culturally in ways those lists rarely acknowledge. Kern County has long been a major player in agriculture and energy, and Bakersfield has deep roots in country music through the Bakersfield Sound associated with Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.
For visitors, the city often works best through local context rather than landmarks. Museums, music venues, Basque restaurants, and access to routes leading toward the southern Sierra Nevada give the city more dimension than a drive-by suggests.
The biggest surprise is how often “ugly” gets used as shorthand for working landscape. Pumpjacks, warehouses, rail lines, and wide roads are part of the visual environment, but so are communities built around them. Bakersfield feels practical, not glamorous, and that difference is worth noting.
Benidorm, Spain
Benidorm is frequently mocked online as overbuilt, brash, and dominated by high-rise towers that seem out of place on the Mediterranean coast. Critics often use it as an example of mass tourism gone wrong, especially when comparing it with older, lower-rise Spanish beach towns.
Yet the skyline that draws criticism is also part of what makes Benidorm function. The city concentrated development vertically, preserving significant stretches of beach access while creating one of Europe’s most efficient resort layouts for large visitor numbers.
According to Spanish tourism authorities, the Costa Blanca remains one of the country’s strongest leisure markets, and Benidorm is a major part of that performance. Its beaches, promenade, nightlife, and year-round tourism economy continue to attract domestic and international travelers in large numbers.
Seen in person, Benidorm is not subtle, but it is also not a failure. It is a highly engineered holiday city that delivers exactly what many visitors want. The internet may call it ugly, but its popularity suggests that reputation tells only part of the story.
