The Most Beautiful Villages in the World

66 places in 31 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Positano

   Italy · 25 km from Salerno40.628° N 14.482° E

   

   Positano is a village that falls down a mountain into the sea. On the steepest stretch of the Amalfi Coast, where the mountains of the Sorrento peninsula drop almost straight into the sea, its houses are stacked one above another in pinks, ochres and whites, joined by stairways rather than streets, until they reach a small beach. Seen from the water or from the coast road above, the whole place reads as a single composition, and it is that vertical, theatrical arrangement, more than any single monument, that makes it one of the most photographed villages in Europe.

   Did you know? Beneath the church of Santa Maria Assunta lies a Roman villa with brightly coloured imperial-era frescoes, first described in 1758 and opened as a museum in 2018.

   More about Positano →

2. 02 Albarracín

   Spain40.405° N 1.444° W

   

   Albarracín seems to grow out of the rock it stands on. The old town clings to a steep spur almost entirely wrapped by a meander of the Guadalaviar River, its houses stacked along narrow, sloping lanes and some of them hanging over the gorge. Much of it is built in or washed with the reddish tone of the local rodeno sandstone, so that walls, roofs and cliffs blend into one warm colour, while a line of fortifications climbs the ridge above to the Torre del Andador.

   Did you know? At the Toros del Prado del Navazo shelter, about 4 km from town, a four-metre frieze holds 19 prehistoric figures, mostly bulls and horses, unusually painted in white.

   More about Albarracín →

3. 03 Vernazza

   Italy44.135° N 9.684° E

   • one of the most beautiful villages

   

   Vernazza is the fourth of the five villages of the Cinque Terre, counting from the south, and for many the most perfectly composed. Its tall, narrow houses in faded reds, yellows and pinks crowd around a small cove that is the only natural harbour on this stretch of the Ligurian coast, with a little piazza opening straight onto the boats and the water. Above, the steep slopes are cut into vineyard terraces held up by dry-stone walls, a landscape shaped by centuries of patient labour that, together with the villages, was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1997.

   Did you know? The harbour piazza of Portorosso, the fictional Italian town in Pixar's 2021 film Luca, was modelled on Vernazza's waterfront square.

   More about Vernazza →

4. 04 Manarola

   Italy44.106° N 9.727° E

   

   Manarola is the smallest drama of the Cinque Terre told at full volume. Tall, narrow houses painted in reds, yellows and pinks are packed onto a spur of dark rock that ends abruptly above the Ligurian Sea, with a tiny harbour cut into the stone at its foot. Behind the village the hillsides are carved into terraces of vines held up by dry-stone walls, and it is the combination of the steep coloured town and the worked landscape above it that makes the view from the coastal path so unforgettable, especially as the light goes down in the evening.

   Did you know? The facade of the Gothic church of San Lorenzo, built of local sandstone, is set with a rose window of Carrara marble dated 1375.

   More about Manarola →

5. 05 La Roque-Gageac

   France44.826° N 1.183° E

   • one of the most beautiful villages

   

   La Roque-Gageac is built into its cliff, not just below it. The limestone face above the village was used as a natural shelter as far back as prehistoric times, and by the 12th century it held a proper troglodyte fort carved directly into the rock — a defensive position that became critical during the Hundred Years' War, when the Dordogne valley was a genuine frontline between English and French-held territory and this village sat within sight of rival strongholds at Beynac and Castelnaud. In an attack, residents could retreat straight into the cave network cut into the cliff behind their houses.

   Did you know? The troglodyte fort sits about 50 m above the river and was reputedly never taken, or even attacked, by the English during the Hundred Years' War.

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6. 06 Oia

   Οία Θήρας

   Greece36.462° N 25.376° E

   

   Oia stretches for almost two kilometres along the northwestern tip of Santorini, perched on the rim of the caldera 70 to 100 metres above the sea. The caldera is the flooded crater of a volcano, and the village clings to its inner wall: white houses, blue domes and terraces tumble down the cliff in layers, and far below the water shines in the drowned crater. Many of the dwellings are hyposkafa, cave houses cut into the soft volcanic rock, tucked into niches of the caldera wall.

   Did you know? Until the second half of the 19th century the village was known as Apano Meria, meaning "the upper side" of the island.

   More about Oia →

7. 07 Rocamadour

   France · 39.6 km from Brive-la-Gaillarde44.799° N 1.618° E

   

   Rocamadour is stacked up a cliff. The gorge of the Alzou, a tributary of the Dordogne, is walled here by limestone faces about 120 m high, and the medieval town has been built in layers up one of them: a single street of houses and gates along the bottom, a cluster of churches and chapels wedged into a ledge halfway up, and a castle on the rim at the top. The arrangement was once read as a picture of the feudal order - the working people by the river, the clergy in the middle, the knights above - and seen from the road on the far side of the valley it is one of the most startling views in France.

   Did you know? In 1562 Protestant soldiers sacked the sanctuary, and witnesses said a captain smashed Saint Amadour's body with a blacksmith's hammer; only bone fragments survive.

   More about Rocamadour →

8. 08 Les Baux-de-Provence

   France · 37.1 km from Nîmes43.744° N 4.795° E

   • one of the most beautiful villages

   

   Les Baux-de-Provence occupies a bare limestone spur in the Alpilles hills, and the village and the ruined castle above it seem to grow out of the rock itself. From the edge of the plateau the view runs south across the plains, where olive groves fill the valley. The name comes from the Provençal word for a rocky escarpment, and the village in turn gave its name to bauxite, the ore of aluminium, which the geologist Pierre Berthier identified here in the early 1820s and which was mined in the area until the end of the twentieth century.

   Did you know? Barely 260 people live in the commune today, down from about 3,500 in 1793, while more than 1.5 million visitors arrive every year.

   More about Les Baux-de-Provence →

9. 09 Saint-Cirq-Lapopie

   France44.464° N 1.670° E

   • one of the most beautiful villages

   

   Saint-Cirq-Lapopie clings to a cliff about 100 metres above the Lot river, its stone houses and brown-tiled roofs stepping up the rock towards a fortified church and the scattered ruins of castles on the summit. Across the water a cirque of pale limestone cliffs closes the view. Almost the whole village is protected, and it has often been described as a village-museum.

   Did you know? In 2012 Saint-Cirq-Lapopie was voted France's favourite village in a national television poll, with some 66,000 people taking part.

   More about Saint-Cirq-Lapopie →

10. 10 Gásadalur

    Faroe Islands · 33.4 km from Tórshavn62.112° N 7.435° W

    

    Gásadalur is one of the most isolated-looking places in Europe, and until recently it truly was. The hamlet sits on the western side of Vágar in the Faroe Islands, on a shelf of green pasture enclosed by mountains: Árnafjall, at about 722 metres, to the north and Eysturtindur, about 715 metres, to the east. To the west the ground simply ends in cliffs above the Atlantic. Beyond the water lies the island of Mykines, and to the south the sea stacks of Tindhólmur and Gáshólmur rise out of the ocean. A handful of houses and their fields are all there is of the village itself; the scale of everything around it is what stays in the mind.

    Did you know? Until the tunnel was built, Gásadalur was the only village in the Faroe Islands with no road connection to any other village.

    More about Gásadalur →

11. 11 Shatili

    Georgia42.658° N 45.157° E

    

    Shatili looks less like a village than a single stone fortress: some sixty flat-roofed towers and tower-houses are packed together on a rocky shelf above the Arghuni River, linked by covered passages and stairways so that the whole settlement could be defended as one block. It stands at about 1,400 metres in a deep gorge on the northern side of the Greater Caucasus, close to the border with Chechnya, in the historic highland region of Khevsureti.

    Did you know? Shatili lies only about two kilometres from the border with the Itum-Kali district of Chechnya, where the Shatilistskali stream joins the Argun.

    More about Shatili →

12. 12 Shibam

    Yemen · 17.3 km from Seiyun15.927° N 48.627° E

    

    Out of the flat floor of Wadi Hadhramaut rises a tight, walled block of tower houses, five to eleven storeys tall, all built of sun-dried mud brick and packed so close together that from a distance the town looks like a single carved mass. Shibam has been called the "Manhattan of the Desert" and the oldest skyscraper city in the world, and it remains one of the earliest and most complete examples of urban planning built upwards rather than outwards.

    Did you know? The British explorer Freya Stark is credited with calling Shibam the Manhattan of the desert after travelling in Hadhramaut in the 1930s.

    More about Shibam →

13. 13 Riquewihr

    France48.166° N 7.297° E

    • one of the most beautiful villages

    

    Riquewihr is a walled wine village that has kept the look of the sixteenth century almost intact: half-timbered houses line a main street that climbs gently to the great gate tower at the top of the village. It sits among vineyards on the Alsace Wine Route, at the foot of the Vosges, and two of the slopes around it, Schoenenbourg and Sporen, are classified Alsace grands crus.

    Did you know? One of the village's tallest half-timbered houses, built in 1561, is nicknamed the Gratte-Ciel, the Skyscraper.

    More about Riquewihr →

14. 14 Eguisheim

    France · 32.7 km from Mulhouse48.043° N 7.306° E

    • one of the most beautiful villages

    

    Eguisheim is built in rings. Instead of a main street, the Alsatian wine village wraps itself in circles around a central square where a castle once stood, so that every lane curves back on itself and the half-timbered houses lean together in an unbroken, colourful arc. The layout is a fossil of the Middle Ages: the settlement grew up around a fortress raised by the Dukes of Alsace in the 11th century, and the ramparts that enclosed it date back to 1257.

    Did you know? Two fragments of a human skull found near Eguisheim in 1865 entered the early debate over prehistoric humans and were long argued over as possibly Neanderthal.

    More about Eguisheim →

15. 15 Hallstatt

    Austria47.556° N 13.647° E

    

    Hallstatt occupies a strip of land that barely exists. On the south-western shore of the Hallstätter See the mountains come down so steeply that the village has had to arrange itself in a thin line between cliff and water: pastel houses built into the slope, church towers standing out over the lake, boathouses at the shoreline. So hemmed in was the place that the first road to it was built only in 1890; before that it was reached on foot or by boat. The view of the waterfront with the mountains rising behind it is one of the most reproduced images of the Alps.

    Did you know? In 1734 miners found a prehistoric man preserved by the salt, a fellow miner killed in a disaster in the 4th century BC.

    More about Hallstatt →

16. 16 Aït Benhaddou

    Morocco31.050° N 7.133° W

    

    Aït Benhaddou is an entire fortified village made of earth, stacked up a hillside above the Ounila river on the southern side of the High Atlas. From the opposite bank it reads as a single sculpted mass: tiers of flat-roofed houses and tall kasbahs with crenellated corner towers, all in the same red-ochre clay as the hill beneath them, climbing to a fortified granary at the top. At low sun the walls turn the colour of embers, and the whole ksar looks as if it had grown out of the ground rather than been built on it.

    Did you know? During the French protectorate the ksar was nicknamed 'the Mont-Saint-Michel of the Chleuhs', likening it to the famous Norman island abbey.

    More about Aït Benhaddou →

17. 17 San Gimignano

    Italy · 30 km from Siena43.468° N 11.043° E

    

    San Gimignano announces itself from miles away across the Val d'Elsa: a hilltop crowned by square stone towers that rise above the vineyards like a cluster of medieval skyscrapers. Fourteen of them survive from a skyline that, towards the end of the Middle Ages, counted some seventy-two tower houses, a few of them said to have reached seventy metres. The town sits at about 324 metres on a ridge between Florence and Siena, and its compact walled centre has changed remarkably little since the fourteenth century.

    Did you know? To end the race for height, the town council ruled that no private tower could rise higher than the one beside the Palazzo Comunale.

    More about San Gimignano →

18. 18 Cefalù

    Italy38.038° N 14.026° E

    • one of the most beautiful villages

    

    Cefalù sits on a narrow strip of shore beneath a single enormous limestone headland, La Rocca, and the whole town seems to lean back against it. The Greeks who settled here in the fourth century BC named the place Kephaloidion after that rock — the word comes from their term for a head — and the silhouette still explains the town better than any map: a tight grid of honey-coloured lanes squeezed between cliff and sea, with the twin towers of a Norman cathedral rising out of the middle.

    Did you know? In 1920 the occultist Aleister Crowley set up his Abbey of Thelema in a small villa in Cefalù, until Mussolini's government ordered him out in 1923.

    More about Cefalù →

19. 19 Portmeirion

    United Kingdom52.913° N 4.099° W

    

    Portmeirion looks like a fragment of the Italian Riviera set down on the Welsh coast. Pastel-coloured houses, arcades, a campanile, a domed pantheon and a hotel cluster on a wooded headland above the sands of the Dwyryd estuary, arranged around a central piazza with all the theatrical charm of a stage set. It was conceived as a single work by the architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who built it between 1925 and 1975 in a playful, Italianate Baroque manner, and many of its buildings are now listed by Cadw, the Welsh historic environment service.

    Did you know? Patrick McGoohan first worked at Portmeirion in 1960, filming the Danger Man episode View from the Villa, years before The Prisoner.

    More about Portmeirion →

20. 20 Castelmezzano

    Italy · 24.4 km from Potenza40.533° N 16.050° E

    • one of the most beautiful villages

    

    Castelmezzano is a village wedged into the jagged sandstone peaks of the Lucanian Dolomites, in the hills of Basilicata in southern Italy. Its stone houses climb in tight tiers beneath a ridge of sharp pinnacles, at about 750 metres above sea level, so that from a distance the rooftops and the rock seem to be one formation. It belongs to the association of I Borghi più belli d'Italia, the most beautiful villages of Italy, and together with neighbouring Pietrapertosa and three other communes its territory forms the Gallipoli Cognato and Piccole Dolomiti Lucane regional park.

    Did you know? The Paschiere line of the Volo dell'Angelo runs about 1,452 metres to Pietrapertosa, with riders reaching up to 120 km/h.

    More about Castelmezzano →

21. 21 Hongcun

    People's Republic of China30.004° N 117.982° E

    

    Hongcun is a village designed around water and read, by its builders, as an animal. It was founded in 1131, under the Southern Song, by the Wang clan, and over the following centuries - especially from around 1400 to 1900, when Wang families prospered as merchants - it grew into one of the richest settlements in the hill country of southern Anhui. Its plan follows the shape of an ox: Leigang Hill behind the village is the head, two great old trees the horns, the bridges over the Jiyin stream the legs, and the houses the body. The water inside the village plays the animal's organs.

    Did you know? The village was originally written with a different character for Hong and was renamed in the Qing era to avoid echoing the Qianlong Emperor's personal name, Hongli.

    More about Hongcun →

22. 22 Masuleh

    Iran37.155° N 48.990° E

    

    Masuleh climbs a steep mountainside in the Alborz range of northern Iran so tightly that its houses are stacked on one another: the flat roof of each lower house serves as the courtyard, terrace or footpath of the one above. The result is a village with almost no conventional streets, only stepped lanes, stairways and rooftops that double as public walkways, and with a difference of about 100 m in height between its lowest and highest houses. Motor vehicles cannot enter its narrow passages, and the village is explored entirely on foot.

    Did you know? A Levallois stone core found in the Masuleh area is thought to have been made by Neanderthals more than 40,000 years ago.

    More about Masuleh →

23. 23 Monemvasia

    Μονεμβασιά

    Greece36.688° N 23.056° E

    

    Monemvasia is a town hidden on a rock. From the mainland of the southeastern Peloponnese it looks like a huge bare island, a slab of stone about a kilometre long, up to 300 metres wide and rising to a plateau some 100 metres above the sea. Only when you walk across the causeway and round its southern side does the town appear, packed into the lee of the cliff, invisible from the land. The name says the same thing in Greek: a place with a single entrance.

    Did you know? Tradition holds that an earthquake in 375 AD split the rock from the mainland, leaving it joined only by a sandy tombolo.

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24. 24 Ghadames

    Libya · 0 km from Ghadames30.133° N 9.500° E

    

    The old town of Ghadames is a walled maze of whitewashed earth on the edge of the Sahara in western Libya, close to where the borders of Libya, Tunisia and Algeria meet. Seen from the rooftops it is a single continuous mass of houses, and inside it is a shaded labyrinth: lanes run as covered tunnels beneath the upper storeys, lit by openings in the roofs, so that a person can cross much of the town without stepping into direct sun. Known as the pearl of the desert, it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986.

    Did you know? The town has its own Berber language, Ghadamès, whose vocabulary shows relatively little Arabic influence and which is now considered threatened.

    More about Ghadames →

25. 25 Lauterbrunnen

    Switzerland46.600° N 7.909° E

    

    Few valleys in the Alps show the work of ice as plainly as Lauterbrunnen. The glacier that once filled it carved a textbook U-shape: a flat floor rarely more than a kilometre wide, walled by limestone cliffs that rise sheer for up to a thousand metres. Streams from the hanging valleys and snowfields above have no gentle way down, so they simply leap off the rim. The result is a valley threaded with falling water, with the village of Lauterbrunnen, at about 800 metres, strung along its floor beneath the rock.

    Did you know? Lauterbrunnen is a world centre of BASE jumping, with about 20,000 jumps a year from 13 legal exit points.

    More about Lauterbrunnen →

26. 26 Civita di Bagnoregio

    Italy42.628° N 12.114° E

    • one of the most beautiful villages

    

    Civita di Bagnoregio is a hill town left standing on a pillar of rock. It sits on a narrow plateau of volcanic tuff over a softer base of clay, and all around it the land has fallen away into the Valle dei Calanchi, a badland of grey and ochre ridges carved by rain and streams. The only way in is a long, narrow pedestrian bridge, about 300 metres of concrete climbing across the gap from Bagnoregio, and walking it toward the town, which grows larger and more improbable with every step, is the essence of the place.

    Did you know? Saint Bonaventure's boyhood home no longer exists: the stretch of cliff it stood on has collapsed into the valley.

    More about Civita di Bagnoregio →

27. 27 Chefchaouen

    Morocco35.169° N 5.268° W

    

    Chefchaouen climbs a slope in the western Rif mountains at about 600 metres, and the walls, stairways, doors and lanes of its old town are washed in every shade of blue against white. The effect has earned it the nickname of the Blue City, or the Blue Pearl. Why the town turned blue is not settled: one explanation says the colour keeps mosquitoes away, another that it stands for the sky and heaven, and some residents say painting it blue was required in the 1970s to draw visitors. Above the houses rise the peaks of Kaʻala mountain, and a common reading of the town's name, from Arabic and Berber, is "look at the horns", a reference to the two summits above it.

    Did you know? Before Spanish troops arrived in 1920, Chefchaouen was considered closed to Christians, and only three Westerners are known to have entered it.

    More about Chefchaouen →

28. 28 Vlkolínec

    Slovakia · 35.4 km from Banská Bystrica49.040° N 19.278° E

    

    On a green slope of the Veľká Fatra mountains, a village of log houses climbs the hillside. Vlkolínec preserves some forty-five homesteads of traditional wooden buildings, houses of two or three rooms, alongside barns and outbuildings that still sit on their original plots. It is a rare intact example of a mountain village built entirely of wood, and it has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1993.

    Did you know? Vlkolínec stayed intact largely because of its isolation: until the mid-twentieth century it was reached only by field tracks and had no electricity.

    More about Vlkolínec →

29. 29 Sidi Bou Said

    Tunisia · 12.6 km from Aryanah36.870° N 10.341° E

    

    Sidi Bou Said sits on a headland above the Gulf of Tunis, a cliff-top village whose whitewashed walls and blue doors, shutters and window grilles have become one of the most reproduced images of North Africa. The colour scheme is not a tourist invention: the village grew up in the traditional manner of the Tunis coast, and a decree of 1915, pressed for by the banker and musicologist Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger, placed its appearance under protection — one of the earliest heritage regulations of its kind anywhere. Since then the rule has held: the lanes climbing the hill still show unbroken white surfaces, studded doors painted in deep blue, and black-and-blue ironwork bowing out from the windows.

    Did you know? In July 2026 the village was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in its own right, becoming Tunisia's tenth World Heritage property.

    More about Sidi Bou Said →

30. 30 Giethoorn

    Kingdom of the Netherlands · 24 km from Zwolle52.740° N 6.077° E

    

    Giethoorn is a village where water takes the place of streets. In its old core the farmhouses stand on small islands of peat, each reached by its own wooden footbridge, and much of the village is threaded by narrow canals rather than roads. There are around 176 bridges in the village, and the thatched farmhouses, the footbridges and the quiet of the boats give the place a character found almost nowhere else in Europe.

    Did you know? Most of Giethoorn's more than 176 bridges are privately owned, built by residents to reach their own island plots.

    More about Giethoorn →