Europe, filed.

Europe is where the grammar of luxury hospitality was written, and it is still the only part of the world where a government will tell you, in law, which hotels are the best ones. France invented that argument; everyone else has been answering it since.

We went country by country and counted what is actually there — regions, destinations, the houses that clear the top rung, the tables worth crossing a border for, and the weeks when a town stops being itself. No rankings. A register.