Edinburgh Environmental Guide, Scotland. UK Tourism. Edinburgh is a city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again, as Alexander McCall Smith once wrote. One of the world's stateliest cities and proudest capitals, it is like Rome built on seven hills, making it a striking backdrop for the ancient pageant of history. In a skyline of sheer drama, Edinburgh Castle looks out over the city, frowning down on Princes Street's glamour and glitz. But despite its rich past, the city's famous festivals, excellent museums and galleries, as well as the modernist Scottish Parliament, are reminders that Edinburgh has its feet firmly in the 21st century. Edinburgh is the city, where the Scottish spirit can be felt as vividly, as nowhere else. A bagpipe and a kilt are a part of everyday life even these days. Scottish food, which consists only of healthy products, is well-known for its high quality. Basically, Scottish food is based on such ingredients as beef, lamb, game and a lot of fish. Not only Scottish cheese and Scottish beer are known all over the world, but also Scottish whisk. Edinburgh is also known as Auld Reekie, a down-to-earth place that flicks an impudent finger at the pretensions of the literati. Auld Reekie is a city of loud, crowded pubs and decadent restaurants, late-night drinking and all-night parties, beer-fuelled poets and foul-mouthed comedians. It's the city that tempted Robert Louis Stevenson from his law lectures to explore the drinking dens and lurid street life of the 19th-century Old Town. And it's the city of Beltane, the resurrected pagan May Day festival, where half-naked revellers dance in the flickering firelight of bonfires beneath the stony indifference of Calton Hill's pillared monuments.
