Produced with Matca Films, the new High Times Travel Series opens with two very different stops: a discreet cannabis club culture shaped by island rhythm and neighborhood respect in Mallorca, and a fast-growing medical cannabis infrastructure boom just outside Lisbon.
High Times has a new travel series on YouTube, and the smart thing about it is that it does not treat cannabis culture like a souvenir.
Produced with Matca Films, the High Times Travel Series is starting from a simple but useful premise: if you really want to understand cannabis somewhere, you have to look beyond the laws and the clichés. You have to see how it actually lives in a place, how people move around it, what local customs shape it and what unspoken rules hold it together. That is the thread running through the first two episodes, which jump from Mallorca to Portugal without flattening either place into generic “weed tourism” content.
The first episode, “Inside the Cannabis Underground of a Mediterranean Paradise,” goes to Mallorca, where the cannabis scene is framed less as a party attraction than as something quieter, more local and more careful. The episode’s guide, Roger, describes the island as a place with its own rhythm, one where cannabis culture sits alongside food, history, climbing, cycling, sea sports and a more discreet way of moving through the world. “Mallorca isn’t just another Mediterranean island,” he says. “Every sunrise here reminds you that this place has its own rhythm.”
That tone matters, because the episode is clearly trying to avoid the usual lazy image of Spain as nonstop social-club hedonism. Instead, it spends time on a hemp-related agricultural project, then heads into Palma to look at how private membership clubs actually function inside tightly packed neighborhoods where discretion is not optional. Roger explains that this is “not about doing party or just being loud,” but about being respectful with the neighborhood, understanding the rules and recognizing that Mallorca does not want to become Barcelona.
That part of the episode is probably its strongest. One club operator talks about checking IDs carefully, making sure members understand the rules and keeping people from smoking outside. The idea is not just safety in the abstract, but coexistence. If people want these spaces to survive, they have to act like they belong there. The result is a cannabis story built around atmosphere, behavior and local balance, not spectacle.
Then the series shifts gears.
The second episode, “How Portugal Quietly Became Europe’s Cannabis Capital,” moves from Mallorca’s social discretion to a very different kind of cannabis ambition: regulated, export-facing, medically framed cultivation just outside Lisbon. The episode centers on Sunlight Green, a large greenhouse operation founded in 2019, where executives and growers describe Portugal as “the pearl of the cannabis industry in Europe” thanks to climate, location, agricultural know-how and a medical regulatory framework that still leaves room for quality genetics and old-school growing values.
There is a real contrast here, and the series is smart to lean into it. Mallorca is about the social fabric around cannabis. Portugal is about infrastructure, standards and scale.
At Sunlight Green, founder Jonathan Goldman says the company’s goal is to balance “the California culture” with the far more regulated European medical market. Head grower Matt Wils talks about exclusive genetics, terpene profiles and changing the way Europe views Portuguese cannabis. Other team members describe a clean, pesticide-free process aimed at giving patients a safer and better product. The language is medical, the setup is serious and the vibe is much closer to a new agricultural frontier than to a countercultural hideaway.
That is what makes these first two episodes work well together. They are not telling the same story twice. One is about cannabis as a social ecosystem built on discretion and trust. The other is about cannabis as a regulated crop, a medical product and a cross-border industry still trying to define its own standards. Put side by side, they suggest what the whole series could do if it keeps its nerve: show how differently cannabis can exist from place to place without forcing everything into the same tired narrative.
That is also where Matca Films comes in. These do not feel like random travel videos with a weed angle stapled on top. They feel like they are trying to observe the shape of each local scene, whether that means walking Palma’s narrow streets and talking about club etiquette or standing in a Portuguese greenhouse while growers explain why they think the future of European cannabis may be taking root there.
The Mallorca episode closes by teasing a broader map of Spain — Barcelona, Madrid, Alicante, Valencia, Marbella, Málaga, Cádiz — while the Portugal episode makes it clear that the series is also interested in following the industry where it is getting more formal, more global and more medically standardized. That is a promising combination. Cannabis culture does not only live underground anymore, but it also has not stopped living there either.
That tension is the whole point.
A lot of cannabis content still makes the mistake of assuming people only want one of two things: either weed porn or policy talk. This series looks like it wants something more useful than that. It wants to show how cannabis actually fits into places, and how those places push back and shape the culture right back.
That is a much better reason to travel.
