Rain shortens queues and improves photographs. It clears the outdoor terraces at tourist restaurants and makes the streets look like the photos you see on good travel accounts. A rainy day on a city break is not a ruined day. It is a different day, and once you accept that, it usually turns out well.

Lead With the Covered Market

Almost every European city has a covered market worth spending an hour in. These are excellent in any weather, but on a wet morning they become the obvious anchor: warm, lively, full of food and things to look at, with no need to go outside. Do the market slowly. Buy something. Have a coffee at the counter. A covered market can absorb ninety minutes of a grey morning without trying.

This is the version of sightseeing that rain justifies. You were going to do the main gallery at some point anyway. A wet afternoon is the right time. Galleries and museums that feel slightly dull in sunshine become genuinely absorbing when the alternative is getting soaked. Churches are often free, quiet, and extraordinarily good at being indoors. Pick one you have been walking past and go in properly.

The Long Lunch

The best use of a rainy afternoon is a lunch that takes two hours. Find a restaurant you wanted to try, go early to get a table, and stay as long as the food and conversation hold. A long lunch in a good place costs about the same as a rushed lunch in a bad one and is substantially more enjoyable. Rain is the best excuse to take it seriously.

The Walk in the Rain as a Deliberate Choice

If the rain is not heavy, walking in it is actually fine. An umbrella, a waterproof layer, and the decision to accept that your shoes might get damp: that is the whole kit. The city feels different when you are the only one on a street because everyone else has sheltered. Some of the best photographs from city trips are taken on wet afternoons with reflections on cobblestones.

What Rain Kills and What It Improves

Open-air markets, rooftop bars, harbour views, picnics, and any activity described as "best in sunshine" do not survive rain. Reschedule those. What improves: indoor markets, galleries, cafés, long dinners, bookshops, and any walk through a neighbourhood that is ordinarily too crowded to see properly. Work with what rain gives you rather than against what it takes.