FORGET your Festival and Fringe, ignore your V&A, consign your City of Culture tag to ancient history, because the Scottish city with the most cultural champions is the Granite City itself.

Yes, it’s the people of Aberdeen who have been named the most cultured in the UK, and before the residents of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Perth, Stirling and Inverness start calling or e-mailing The National to complain, can we point out that we are just reporting what Club Med has discovered in a new study called Culture Vultures, which looked at cultural travel trends and destinations chosen by UK citizens but excluding UK cities from the list.

The report states: “Looking at 43 cities across Europe, when it comes to culture, Salzburg, Austria, is the best place to go. It beat many of the tourist culture hotspots to the top spot, including Venice, Italy, which just slipped into 2nd place, Paris, France, which was down in 8th, and Rome, Italy, which only ranked as average for culture down in 28th place.”

The surprise finding, however, was that Aberdonians, or at least those who travel from Aberdeen airport, are the UK’s biggest culture vultures.

Club Med stated: “Using a range of data, the research analysed the number of museums, landmarks and top restaurants in each location to uncover which destinations have the highest proportion of culture on offer, comparing this with air travel data from the UK’s most popular airports.

“Aberdeen is known for its museums, galleries and arts but it appears that its residents can’t get enough of it, with the city’s airport seeing the most trips to high culture locations across the continent.

“Nearly three in 10 trips (28%) from the Granite City’s airport were to cultural hotspots across last year, with more than 2.5 million passengers heading to the city’s top-five most popular destinations: Amsterdam, Stavanger, Paris, Frankfurt and Dublin.

“Heathrow takes second on the list with 27 per cent of those serviced by the airport travelling to top cultural destinations, while Edinburgh has just under a quarter (23%) of its passengers visiting these cities of culture.

In the UK, the location where people are least likely to look go on a cultural break is Liverpool – haven’t they ever heard of the Beatles and the Cavern?