The Most Beautiful Villages in France
10 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful villages in France are La Roque-Gageac, Rocamadour and Les Baux-de-Provence. The list covers 10 villages. Last updated 14 October 2026.
French villages take their look from the ground they stand on. Medieval builders chose cliffs, spurs and river bends for defence, and they built with stone quarried a short walk away, so each region keeps its own palette: golden limestone in Quercy and the Périgord, pale ochre and grey in Provence, painted half-timbering in Alsace. Because many of these places stayed small and agricultural for centuries, their street plans, ramparts and church towers survived without being rebuilt around them.
La Roque-Gageac is pressed into a narrow strip between the Dordogne and a sheer cliff, while Saint-Cirq-Lapopie hangs above a loop of the Lot. Rocamadour stacks its chapels and sanctuary up a rock face over the Alzou canyon, a pilgrimage site since the Middle Ages. In Provence, Les Baux-de-Provence occupies a bare spur of the Alpilles crowned by a ruined castle, and Gordes climbs in stone tiers along the edge of the Luberon plateau.
Further afield the character changes completely. Riquewihr and Eguisheim are Alsatian wine villages of timber-framed houses, Eguisheim laid out in concentric rings around its castle. Èze perches on a rock high above the Riviera coast, and Moustiers-Sainte-Marie sits at the mouth of a ravine, known for its faience and for the star suspended on a chain between two cliffs above the village.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | La Roque-Gageac | Most beautiful village | |
| 2 | Rocamadour | Most beautiful village | |
| 3 | Les Baux-de-Provence | Most beautiful village | |
| 4 | Saint-Cirq-Lapopie | Most beautiful village | |
| 5 | Riquewihr | Most beautiful village | |
| 6 | Eguisheim | Most beautiful village | |
| 7 | Èze | Most beautiful village | |
| 8 | Moustiers-Sainte-Marie | Most beautiful village | |
| 9 | Gordes | Most beautiful village | |
| 10 | La Grave | Most beautiful village |
01 La Roque-Gageac
France44.826° N 1.183° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Manfred Heyde · CC BY-SA 3.0 The same cliff that makes the village so striking has never really stopped being a threat to it. A serious landslide in 1957 damaged the village and fort and forced stabilization work, and a further rockfall in January 2010 required another round of emergency engineering to secure the rock face above the rooftops — a reminder that the dramatic setting people come to see is also a slope that is still, slowly, moving.
Did you know? The village is first recorded in 1214 as Rupis de Gajaco, in a letter from the abbot of Sarlat to Simon de Montfort.
02 Rocamadour
France · 39.6 km from Brive-la-Gaillarde44.799° N 1.618° E
Dynamosquito from France · CC BY-SA 2.0 Rocamadour lies on a route of the Way of St James and is part of that UNESCO World Heritage listing. For the whole picture, go to L'Hospitalet on the plateau above, named after the pilgrims' hospice founded there, from which the town, sanctuary and castle can be seen hanging over the gorge together.
Did you know? According to legend, Amadour was the biblical tax collector Zacchaeus and the husband of Saint Veronica, who sailed to Aquitaine guided by an angel.
03 Les Baux-de-Provence
France · 37.1 km from Nîmes43.744° N 4.795° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Image by gillag from Pixabay In 1642 the town was granted as a marquisate to Hercule de Grimaldi, Prince of Monaco, and the title of Marquis of Les Baux is still borne by the heir to the Monegasque throne. The village below the ruins keeps the Church of Saint Vincent, where a pastoral Christmas Eve ceremony, in which shepherds bring a newborn lamb in a cart drawn by a ram, has been revived since 1902. In the nearby Val d'Enfer, vast abandoned limestone quarries host Carrières de Lumières, where images are projected across some 4,000 square metres of rock walls.
Did you know? Jean Cocteau shot scenes of his last film, Le Testament d'Orphée, in the quarries of the Val d'Enfer in September 1959.
04 Saint-Cirq-Lapopie
France44.464° N 1.670° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Benjamin Smith · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Church of Saint-Cirq-et-Sainte-Juliette, a sturdy fifteenth-century building, kept the Romanesque apse of the castle chapel and has a square tower and a stair turret; it has been a listed monument since 1911. Higher still, a way of the cross lined with box leads to the Chapel of the Holy Cross, rebuilt in 1854, which recalls relics of the True Cross said to have been brought from the Holy Land by a member of the Cardaillac family. From the Middle Ages the village was home to a guild of wood-turners who made, among other things, wooden taps for wine barrels, and the craft still survives here.
Did you know? André Breton bought the former boatmen's inn in 1950 and likened the village, lit by flares at night, to an impossible rose.
05 Riquewihr
France48.166° N 7.297° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Jean-Pol GRANDMONT · CC BY 4.0 In 1324 the village passed to the counts of Württemberg, who later also held Montbéliard and governed both territories together. The wine trade carried Riquewihr's production across the Empire and as far as the Hanseatic ports, and that wealth paid for the many sixteenth-century burghers' houses, carved wells and fountains, including the Sinne fountain of 1560, that give the streets their character. The lordship turned Lutheran in 1534; the Württemberg castle, built in 1539 with a Renaissance gable, is a listed monument. The Thirty Years' War brought sieges and plunder, and in 1786 a treaty finally attached the village to France.
Did you know? The Dolder gate tower appears in The 10th Kingdom, an Anglo-German-American fantasy miniseries.
06 Eguisheim
France · 32.7 km from Mulhouse48.043° N 7.306° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Image by Christiane13 from Pixabay Above the village, on the slopes of the Vosges, rise the ruins of three towers, the Dagsbourg, the Wahlenbourg and the Weckmund, known together as the castle of Haut-Eguisheim; the Wahlenbourg is recorded as early as 1006 and the Weckmund was raised in the 13th century. Between village and towers lie vineyards, including two classified grand cru sites, Eichberg and Pfersigberg, on limestone soils. Eguisheim sits on the Alsace Wine Route, belongs to the association of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France, and in 2013 was voted the French public's favourite village. The village also keeps a small park for white storks.
Did you know? The original German spelling of the name was Egisheim; the letter u was later inserted to give the name a French form.
07 Èze
France · 3.9 km from Monaco43.728° N 7.361° E
Image by bogitw from Pixabay Below the village, a steep path zigzags down through pine and scrub to the hamlet of Èze-sur-Mer. It carries the name of Friedrich Nietzsche, who lived in Nice, and tradition holds that walking it helped him shape the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Climbing it from the shore is a stiff ascent, and the most rewarding way to arrive.
Did you know? Moors held the area for about 80 years until William of Provence drove them out in 973.
08 Moustiers-Sainte-Marie
France43.847° N 6.221° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Image by lecreusois from Pixabay For centuries Moustiers was a centre of fine pottery, especially faience. Water from the spring-fed waterfall powered the workshops, and from the late 17th century masters such as Clérissy, Olérys and Ferrat made its blue-painted wares famous. The last kiln went cold in 1873, until Marcel Provence revived the craft in the 1920s, and a faience museum opened in the village in 1929. Today the village has fewer than 700 inhabitants and is a member of the association Les Plus Beaux Villages de France.
Did you know? Tradition places the knight's vow in his captivity after the fall of Damietta in 1249, during the Seventh Crusade.
09 Gordes
France43.911° N 5.200° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Jean-Pol GRANDMONT · CC BY 4.0 The land around the village is as remarkable as the village itself. About 1.5 km to the west, the Village des Bories preserves 28 dry-stone buildings — huts, barns and bread ovens made of thin limestone slabs laid without mortar, most of them dating from the land clearance that followed a royal edict of 1766. Close by, in a narrow valley, lies Sénanque Abbey, founded by Cistercian monks in 1148 and still home to a small community; the monks grow lavender in front of the abbey, and the purple rows before its plain stone church make one of the most familiar pictures of Provence.
Did you know? The bell tower of the Saint-Firmin church has an outside staircase that leads nowhere, a trace of a building that once stood against it.
10 La Grave
France45.046° N 6.306° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Image by Sinason from Pixabay La Meije holds a special place in the history of mountaineering. It was one of the last great summits of the Alps to be climbed: the Grand Pic was reached only on 16 August 1877, by Emmanuel Boileau de Castelnau with the guides Pierre Gaspard and his son. A century later, in the 1970s, cable cars were built from La Grave up onto the glaciers of the Meije at around 3,200 metres. Below them there are no groomed runs, only vast high-mountain slopes and couloirs, and La Grave became a legend among freeride skiers. In the shaded valley, frozen waterfalls draw ice climbers each winter, while in summer the Plateau d'Emparis above the village offers lakes that mirror the whole Meije range.
Did you know? La Grave's church dates back to the 11th century and is the oldest monument in the upper Romanche valley.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful villages in France?
- On our list, La Roque-Gageac ranks first, followed by Rocamadour and Les Baux-de-Provence.
- What is the "Most Beautiful Villages of France" label?
- Les Plus Beaux Villages de France is an association founded in 1982 that awards its label to small rural villages, generally under 2,000 inhabitants, with at least two protected heritage sites. Villages are reassessed and can lose the label.
- Why is there a star hanging above Moustiers-Sainte-Marie?
- A gilded star hangs on a long chain stretched between two cliffs above the village. According to local legend it was first hung by a knight, Blacas, returning from the Crusades in fulfilment of a vow.
- Where does the word bauxite come from?
- Bauxite, the main ore of aluminium, is named after Les Baux-de-Provence, where the geologist Pierre Berthier identified it in 1821.
- How many villages are on this list in France?
- The list covers 10 villages.