The Most Beautiful Villages in Europe

39 places in 15 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Positano

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

   

   Its history is longer than its fame. Wealthy Romans built seaside villas here from around the first century BC. In the Middle Ages Positano served as a port of the maritime Republic of Amalfi, and in the 16th and 17th centuries it prospered as a trading harbour, which paid for many of the grander houses still standing. Then came decline: by the mid-19th century more than half the population had emigrated, mostly to America, and into the early 20th century it was a poor fishing village. Its revival came through artists and writers; John Steinbeck's 1953 essay "Positano Bites Deep" in Harper's Bazaar called it a dream place that becomes real only once you have left.

   Did you know? In 1924 the choreographer Léonide Massine bought the Li Galli islands offshore; in 1988 they passed to Rudolf Nureyev, who spent his last years there.

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2. 02 Albarracín

   Spain40.405° N 1.444° W

   

   The name goes back to the Banu Razin, a Berber family who made the town the capital of their own small taifa kingdom in the 11th century; the Andador tower and the castle that held their citadel are survivals of that time. After the taifa period Albarracín passed to the Navarrese Azagra family, who ran it as a lordship independent of both Castile and Aragon from the later 12th century and even obtained a bishopric for it. Peter III of Aragon besieged the town in 1284, and in 1300 it was formally absorbed into the Kingdom of Aragon. A Jewish community lived here from before the 12th century until the expulsion of 1492.

   Did you know? The rock shelters around Albarracín are part of the Rock Art of the Mediterranean Basin on the Iberian Peninsula, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998.

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3. 03 Vernazza

   Italy44.135° N 9.684° E

   • one of the most beautiful villages

   

   The village is recorded as a fortified settlement in 1080, when it served as a maritime base for the Obertenghi, a family of medieval Italian nobility. On the rocky spur west of the harbour rises the Doria castle, whose tower was built in the fifteenth century as a lookout against pirates, and from which the view runs along the whole coast. On the other side of the cove, the church of Santa Margherita di Antiochia, first recorded in 1318, sits almost on the water, its octagonal bell tower rising from the apse end rather than the façade.

   Did you know? The village also inspired fictional towns in video games, including Sapienza in Hitman (2016) and Manaea in Just Cause 3 (2015).

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4. 04 Manarola

   Italy44.106° N 9.727° E

   

   It may be the oldest of the five villages. The cornerstone of its church of San Lorenzo is dated 1338, and the name is usually traced to the Latin magna rota, a large wheel, taken to mean a mill wheel. For centuries people here lived from fishing and from wine, above all Sciacchetrà, a wine from those terraces mentioned already in Roman writings. The painter Antonio Discovolo, who worked here in the first half of the 20th century, made the village one of his subjects, and in recent years its silhouette has inspired settings in video games and Pixar's film Luca.

   Did you know? The village's main street runs over a covered stream that flowed in the open until 1950, crossed by eleven small stone bridges.

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5. 05 La Roque-Gageac

   France44.826° N 1.183° E

   • one of the most beautiful villages

   

   For centuries before any of that mattered for tourism, the village made its living from the river below it. Flat-bottomed barges called gabares loaded with wine, timber, and local goods worked this stretch of the Dordogne from the Middle Ages onward, and La Roque-Gageac functioned as a working river port — a trade that collapsed almost overnight once the railway reached the region in the mid-19th century and made the slow river route obsolete.

   Did you know? Within the cliff fort stood five noble houses, and it later served as a residence of the bishops of Sarlat.

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6. 06 Oia

   Οία Θήρας

   Greece36.462° N 25.376° E

   

   The village was once rich. In the late nineteenth century Oia was a port of ship owners and sailors, home to around 130 sailing vessels and some 2,500 inhabitants, and its captains built neoclassical mansions, the kapetanospita, on the highest part of the village, their strict, symmetrical facades standing out among the cave houses. A maritime museum keeps figureheads, charts and ship models from that era. At the very tip of the village are the remains of the Venetian castle of Agios Nikolaos, first recorded in 1480, a lookout and refuge from pirates.

   Did you know? The 17th-century French traveller Jean de Thévenot recorded the place under the name Castelli San Nicolas, after its Venetian fort.

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7. 07 Rocamadour

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

   

   The reason for all this building is a pilgrimage. A wooden statue of the Virgin, dark with age and dating from the 12th century, made Rocamadour one of the great shrines of medieval Europe. In 1166 a body was found near the entrance to the Virgin's chapel and venerated as that of a hermit, Saint Amadour, and a book of the shrine's miracles was compiled in 1172. Kings and queens came - Henry II of England in 1159, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Blanche of Castile and Louis IX of France among them - and in 1536 Jacques Cartier vowed a pilgrimage here. Tradition also says a bell in the sanctuary rang by itself when sailors who had prayed to the Virgin were saved at sea.

   Did you know? The sword long shown wedged in the cliff, said to be a copy of Roland's Durandal, was reported stolen in June 2024.

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8. 08 Les Baux-de-Provence

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

   • one of the most beautiful villages

   

   People sheltered on this naturally defended site very early: a cave nearby holds a collective burial of the early Bronze Age, and in the second century BC the Celts used the spur as a hill fort. In the Middle Ages it became the seat of the lords of Les Baux, a powerful and turbulent family whose domain once covered 79 towns and villages. They claimed descent from Balthazar, one of the three Magi, and took as their emblem a silver star with sixteen rays, recalling the star of Bethlehem, with the motto "Au hasard, Balthazar".

   Did you know? Only around twenty people still live in the upper village beneath the castle ruins.

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9. 09 Saint-Cirq-Lapopie

   France44.464° N 1.670° E

   • one of the most beautiful villages

   

   The site was chosen for defence. The spur on the left bank of the Lot was the main seat of one of the four viscounties into which medieval Quercy was divided, and several families held it jointly over the centuries, among them the Lapopie, the Gourdon, the Cardaillac and later the Hébrard de Saint-Sulpice. The co-lords agreed to keep the peace within their shared town, but in 1580, during the Wars of Religion, Huguenots seized the upper castle, which was afterwards demolished. The name joins Saint Cyr, patron of the parish church, with that of the Lapopie family, though a popular explanation derives it from the Occitan word for the rock at the highest point of the village.

   Did you know? The village reached its peak of 1,461 inhabitants in 1861; today only about 200 people live here.

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10. 10 Gásadalur

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

    

    The image that made Gásadalur famous is Múlafossur, a stream that runs through the village pastures and pours off the cliff edge straight into the sea below, most often put at around 30 metres. Seen from the path along the clifftop, with the houses behind it and the mountains closing the valley, it has become one of the defining pictures of the Faroe Islands.

    Did you know? For decades a postman carried the mail over the mountain from Bøur three times a week, along a route now known as the Postman's Trail.

    More about Gásadalur →

11. 11 Shatili

    Georgia42.658° N 45.157° E

    

    The dwellings, built of flat stone and mortar and stepped up the slope in terraces, date from the medieval and early modern periods, when the gorge was a frontier between Georgian highlanders and the peoples of the North Caucasus. Shatili was the seat of one of Khevsureti's two largest communities; an 1873 census counted five villages and 121 households in the Shatili community. Khevsur men of that era were famous for going about in chain mail and carrying broadswords, their clothes embroidered with crosses believed to protect the wearer, and their villages were governed by elected elders. The region once belonged to the Kingdom of Kakheti.

    Did you know? Nineteenth-century observers, among them the naturalist Gustav Radde, recorded that Shatili's people also spoke a Kist dialect of Chechen, and they remained bilingual into the 1920s.

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12. 12 Riquewihr

    France48.166° N 7.297° E

    • one of the most beautiful villages

    

    The village appears in a document of 1049 under the name Richovilare, and by 1094 a nearby abbey already owned vines here. In 1291 the lords of Horbourg enclosed it with a rectangular wall pierced by three gates and ringed by a deep ditch, turning it into a compact stronghold roughly 300 by 220 metres. The Dolder, the gate tower built with that wall, still stands about 25 metres tall, its outer face severe and military, its town side softened by timber framing. Around 1500, as firearms spread, a second wall was added on the more exposed sides, and the Upper Gate from that period still shows traces of its drawbridge; its portcullis, installed around 1500, is among the oldest in Europe.

    Did you know? The Jules Verne adaptation Maître Zacharius, a French television film of 1973, was largely shot in Riquewihr's streets.

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13. 13 Eguisheim

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

    • one of the most beautiful villages

    

    At the heart of the rings stands the Château Saint-Léon, an octagonal structure of a rather unusual plan, assembled between the 13th and 19th centuries. A neo-Romanesque chapel was added in 1888–1894 on the foundations of the old keep, honouring the village's most famous son: Bruno of Eguisheim, born here on 21 June 1002, who became Pope Leo IX. An octagonal fountain dedicated to him stands in the square. The Rue du Rempart, which follows the line of the vanished walls, is lined with timber-framed houses from the 16th to the 18th centuries.

    Did you know? The three ruined towers above the village are known in local dialect by a name that sounds like 'the three witches', a pun that has fed folklore.

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14. 14 Hallstatt

    Austria47.556° N 13.647° E

    

    What made the village possible is inside the mountain above it. Hallstatt's salt mine is regarded as the oldest salt mine in the world still in operation, with around seven thousand years of documented history. The finds from its prehistoric graves were so rich and so distinctive that archaeologists named an entire epoch after the place: the Hallstatt culture, the Early Iron Age culture of central Europe, around 800 to 450 BC, associated with early Celtic peoples. The mine and the high valley are reached by the Salzbergbahn funicular, and next to the upper station a viewing platform juts out some 360 metres above the rooftops.

    Did you know? A wooden staircase from the Bronze Age mine has been tree-ring dated to 1344 BC, and it is now displayed underground in the mine.

    More about Hallstatt →

15. 15 San Gimignano

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

    

    The towers were the product of wealth and rivalry. San Gimignano prospered as a staging post on the Via Francigena, the pilgrim road to Rome, and its merchant families competed to build ever higher, both for defence and for prestige. The tallest still standing is the Torre Grossa of 1311, 54 metres high, attached to the Palazzo Comunale, the former seat of the podestà, which now houses the town gallery and a Maestà frescoed by Lippo Memmi.

    Did you know? Dante Alighieri came to San Gimignano on 8 May 1300 as ambassador of the Tuscan Guelph League, and a hall of the town palace is named after him.

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16. 16 Cefalù

    Italy38.038° N 14.026° E

    • one of the most beautiful villages

    

    The cathedral is the reason Cefalù belongs to the UNESCO property of Arab-Norman Palermo, listed in 2015 together with the cathedrals of Monreale and Palermo. Tradition says King Roger II founded it in 1131 to honour a vow made to the Holy Saviour after he escaped a storm on this beach. Building dragged on until 1240 and the church was consecrated only in 1267, but the heart of it came early: the apse mosaics, begun in 1145, are dominated by a Christ Pantocrator of startling calm, one hand raised in blessing, the other holding an open Gospel of John. Above him the Virgin stands with raised hands between four archangels, and the apostles fill the tiers below in a carefully planned sequence.

    Did you know? Crowley covered the villa's walls with occult and erotic murals; they were whitewashed, and in 1955 filmmaker Kenneth Anger uncovered some and filmed them in a now-lost film.

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17. 17 Portmeirion

    United Kingdom52.913° N 4.099° W

    

    The core of the estate was a private house called Aber Iâ, developed in the 1850s on the site of an 18th-century foundry and boatyard. Williams-Ellis bought it and renamed it Portmeirion, from "port" for its place on the coast and "Meirion" for the old county of Merioneth. He also worked salvaged pieces of older buildings into the village: the Town Hall, now listed Grade I, incorporates stonework and the Hercules Hall from Emral Hall in Flintshire. The artist Hans Feibusch, a friend of Williams-Ellis, painted murals inside several buildings, including the Pantheon.

    Did you know? In the 1976 Doctor Who story The Masque of Mandragora, Portmeirion stood in for Renaissance Italy.

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18. 18 Castelmezzano

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

    • one of the most beautiful villages

    

    Its roots go back to Greek settlers who entered the Basento valley around the 6th and 5th centuries BC and founded a settlement called Maudoro, "world of gold". In the 10th century Saracen raids pushed the population up into the rocks. Local tradition holds that a shepherd named Paolino found the site, a nest of steep crags from whose summits defenders could roll boulders onto attackers. The Normans, who settled here between the 11th and 13th centuries, built a castle; its wall fragments and the flight of steps carved into the rock up to the highest lookout can still be seen.

    Did you know? The return line, San Martino, covers about 1,415 metres from Pietrapertosa with top speeds near 110 km/h.

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19. 19 Monemvasia

    Μονεμβασιά

    Greece36.688° N 23.056° E

    

    The town was founded in the 6th century by people who moved here from Sparta and the plain of Laconia, and it grew into one of the great trading ports of the Byzantine world, rich above all in the 11th and 12th centuries; the age up to 1460 is remembered as its golden one. It passed to Venice in 1463, to the Ottomans in 1540, back to Venice in 1690 and to the Ottomans again in 1715 until the Greek War of Independence in 1821. Its Italian name, Malvasia, travelled across Europe with the sweet wine shipped from its harbour and survives in the name of the grape.

    Did you know? In 1890 part of that natural sand spit was cut through and replaced by a bridge, which is why the causeway is not continuous.

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20. 20 Lauterbrunnen

    Switzerland46.600° N 7.909° E

    

    The emblem is the Staubbach Falls, which drops about 297 metres just behind the village and is counted as the highest free-falling waterfall in Switzerland. For much of its height the water barely touches the cliff, and in a breeze it frays into a drifting veil of spray, which is what the name, roughly "dust stream", describes. Goethe stayed at the parish house nearby and wrote his poem "Song of the Spirits over the Waters" under its spell. Farther up the valley come the Trümmelbach Falls, about 3 km away, and above the cliffs the Mürrenbach, at 417 metres the tallest waterfall in the country.

    Did you know? The Trümmelbach Falls are ten waterfalls hidden inside the mountain, carrying up to 20,000 litres a second of meltwater from the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.

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21. 21 Civita di Bagnoregio

    Italy42.628° N 12.114° E

    • one of the most beautiful villages

    

    The settlement is ancient: the Etruscans founded it more than 2,500 years ago, and it later became a medieval town of some importance. Saint Bonaventure, the Franciscan theologian, was born here. But the rock is fragile. Erosion keeps eating at the cliff edges, houses and streets have slid into the valley over the centuries, and the town came to be called "the dying town". Only around a dozen people still live here permanently. The present concrete bridge dates from 1965.

    Did you know? A severe earthquake at the end of the 17th century sped the decline, and the bishop and town government moved to neighbouring Bagnoregio.

    More about Civita di Bagnoregio →

22. 22 Vlkolínec

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

    

    The village lies at 718 metres on the southern slope of a spur of the Veľká Fatra, sheltered to the north by the massif of Sidorovo, which rises to 1,099 metres. It probably began between the second half of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth century as a settlement of woodcutters and charcoal burners, and it is first mentioned in writing in 1376. Its name comes from vlk, the Slovak word for wolf. For centuries it belonged to the lands of the town of Ružomberok and of Likava Castle, and it became part of Ružomberok itself in the late nineteenth century.

    Did you know? In October 1944, during the Slovak National Uprising, several houses at the upper end of the village burned after mortar fire and were never rebuilt.

    More about Vlkolínec →

23. 23 Giethoorn

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

    

    The landscape is man-made. Settlers arrived here in the thirteenth century, and from the fourteenth century onwards the digging of peat for fuel transformed the land: the cut-out beds filled with water and became the lakes and channels around the village, while the strips left between them carried houses and farms. Local tradition holds that the first settlers found great numbers of wild goat horns in the ground, remains of animals said to have drowned in a flood of 1170, and called the place Geytenhoren, goat horns, later shortened to Giethoorn.

    Did you know? The village is first recorded in documents in 1225, about half a century after the flood of its naming legend.

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24. 24 Portofino

    Italy · 25 km from Genoa44.304° N 9.207° E

    

    The harbour has been known since antiquity: Pliny the Elder referred to it as Portus Delphini, the port of the dolphin. A document of 986 records it as a possession of the abbey of San Fruttuoso, on the other side of the promontory, and from the 13th century it belonged to the Republic of Genoa. Its strategic value shows in Castello Brown, the fortress above the harbour, built on earlier fortifications, enlarged in 1557 and for centuries one of Genoa's key coastal strongholds.

    Did you know? Richard the Lionheart called at Portofino in 1190, and Pope Gregory XI visited in 1377.

    More about Portofino →

25. 25 Castellfollit de la Roca

    Castellfullit de la Roca

    Spain42.221° N 2.551° E

    

    The cliff is a product of the Garrotxa volcanic field, where some forty extinct volcanoes are scattered around Olot; the last eruption, at Croscat, took place about 11,000 years ago. Two lava flows from neighbouring volcanoes, one from the Batet area near Olot and a later one from the Begudà valley, poured down the river valleys and settled one on top of the other. Over time the two rivers cut down on either side, leaving the hard rock standing as a long, narrow ridge. Erosion at the foot of the wall continues: over the years parts of back yards and buildings have broken away and fallen into the Fluvià. The village is part of the Garrotxa Volcanic Zone Natural Park.

    Did you know? The two lava flows forming the cliff are dated to about 217,000 and 192,000 years ago.

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26. 26 Èze

    France · 3.9 km from Monaco43.728° N 7.361° E

    

    The site has been fought over for most of its history. It passed to the House of Savoy in 1388; in 1543 Franco-Ottoman forces under Hayreddin Barbarossa took it; and in 1706, during the War of the Spanish Succession, Louis XIV had the castle and walls pulled down. The inhabitants voted in 1860 to join France. What survives from before those upheavals is small and precious - the chapel of the Holy Cross, known as the chapel of the White Penitents, is the oldest building in the village, dating from 1306. The parish church of Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption, built in 1764 and a listed historic monument, was rebuilt on the site of an older church.

    Did you know? The Antonine Itinerary, a Roman route guide, records the bay below the village as Avisionis portus.

    More about Èze →

27. 27 Ushguli

    Georgia42.918° N 43.016° E

    

    The towers are the heart of it. Svan families built them mainly between the 9th and 12th centuries as refuges and lookouts, attached to the dwelling below. Ushguli is made up of several hamlets strung along the valley, among them Zhibiani, Chvibiani, Chazhashi and Murqmeli, and the whole community is said to have some two hundred of these towers, with Chazhashi holding the densest cluster. Upper Svaneti was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1996 for this living medieval landscape.

    Did you know? Mikhail Kalatozov filmed his silent documentary Salt for Svanetia here, preserving the look and life of the village in the 1920s.

    More about Ushguli →

28. 28 Setenil de las Bodegas

    Spain36.864° N 5.181° W

    

    The two best-known streets show the effect from opposite sides. Cuevas del Sol, on the sunny side of the river, has cave-houses beneath the ledge with open fronts facing the light; Cuevas de la Sombra, in the shadow, lies deep under the overhang, with rock overhead for much of its length and a cool, dim atmosphere even in summer. Wandering further up the lanes, the village climbs to its old centre at around 640 m, and the contrast of white plaster and dark rock keeps reappearing at every turn.

    Did you know? The Nasrid fortress kept some 530 metres of walls and nearly 40 towers, and is one of the few Nasrid strongholds to retain its whole medieval town plan.

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29. 29 Reine, Lofoten

    Norway67.932° N 13.089° E

    

    The cabins are rorbuer, the traditional huts in which visiting fishermen lodged during the great Lofoten cod season. Reine itself has been a trading post since 1743 and long lived by the fishing fleet and its processing plants. The village, with its small church, has fewer than three hundred inhabitants, packed onto an area of well under a square kilometre.

    Did you know? In December 1941 German forces burned part of the village in reprisal for a British commando raid on the Lofoten Islands.

    More about Reine, Lofoten →

30. 30 Počitelj

    Bosnia and Herzegovina · 25.1 km from Mostar43.133° N 17.733° E

    

    The settlement first appears in charters of Alfonso V of Aragon and Frederick III dated between 1444 and 1448, and its fortress was most likely built around 1383 under the Bosnian king Tvrtko I. It was strengthened by Vladislav Hercegović between 1463 and 1471, and in 1471 the Ottomans took it. They held it until 1878, and for long periods it served as the seat of a military district and of a kadi, a judge.

    Did you know? For a long time Počitelj was wrongly thought to be the site of King Tvrtko's royal shipyard of 1383, which historians later placed at Brštanik further away.

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