Photos: Best travel experiences of 2016

Scheduled to open in spring 2016, this soccer museum in Switzerland will take fans through the game’s history and it will hold the world’s biggest collection of football books.

Tourists can partake in “Mamma Mia! The Party” in January 2016 — a dining experience with audience participation, slated to open at a restaurant in Stockholm’s Grona Lund amusement park. ABBA legend Bjorn Ulvaeus is behind the new interactive disco-dining experience, set within a Greek-style taverna.

Check out the wildlife on St. Helena, a South Atlantic island that until recently was one of the world’s most inaccessible islands. In 2016, an airport opens for the British overseas territory, making the scenery easier to get to.

Experience the growth underway at the Panama Canal. The expansion will make it wider, deeper and passable for bigger boats, and its completion will mean a new, even larger, third set of locks that visitors can ogle.

Budapest’s historic market hall on Klauzal Square has been completely renovated and reopened as Klauzal Square Market. The new emporium in the Hungarian capital holds several stories of market stalls offering local produce, baked goods, as well as arts and crafts.

Landscape artist Christo, who filled New York City’s Central Park with 7,500 saffron-colored gateways in 2005, is set to create artwork at this locale this year. For 16 days, starting June 18, a floating walkway will link the islands of Monte Isola and San Paolo in the center of the lake with Sulzano on the mainland.

Take a bike tour at this location on the Western Cape of South Africa and cover the whale watching capital of Hermanus or cycle among the large dunes flanking the coast.

The organization African Parks, which now operates Akagera and almost a dozen other protected areas on the continent, arranged for seven lions to be transported to this location last year. In 2016, tourists should be able to reap the benefits.