France

Collonges-la-Rouge in Corrèze, entirely built from red sandstone, was the founding village of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France in 1982.

Domme in Périgord Noir is a 13th-century bastide town above the Dordogne valley, its fortified gates and grid streets built for Philippe III in 1281.

Eguisheim's streets curve in concentric rings around its original medieval fortress, a layout still legible from above.

With fewer than a hundred residents, Gerberoy is one of the smallest members of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France.

Gordes rises in tiers of pale limestone up a Luberon hillside, its Renaissance château rebuilt in 1525 on the walls of a 12th-century fortress.

Built directly into a limestone cliff above the Dordogne river, La Roque-Gageac once held nearly four times its current population as a working river port.

Lagrasse in the Corbières, Aude, is built around an 8th-century Benedictine abbey still active today, linked to the village by a 1308 stone bridge.

Les Baux-de-Provence in the Alpilles crowns a limestone spur with medieval château ruins — the site that gave bauxite its name.

Set at the mouth of the Verdon Gorge, Moustiers-Sainte-Marie has been a center of faience pottery production since the 17th century.

Najac stretches along a narrow ridge above a bend in the Aveyron river, with a 13th-century castle anchoring one end.

Pérouges near Lyon, a walled medieval village once a linen-weaving centre, is so well preserved it serves repeatedly as a film set for period productions.

Rocamadour in the Lot climbs 120 m of limestone cliff in three tiers — a major medieval pilgrimage site housing the Black Madonna since the 12th century.

Saint-Cirq-Lapopie in the Lot perches 100 m above the river on a cliff — André Breton's adopted village and France's TV-voted favourite in 2012.

Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert grew up around the 9th-century Abbey of Gellone, a stop on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela that earned the abbey its place on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Saint-Suliac sits on the Rance estuary, its slate-roofed houses arranged around a small fishing harbor.

Vézelay's hilltop basilica, a starting point for medieval pilgrims heading to Santiago de Compostela, is itself inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Yvoire in Haute-Savoie occupies a 14th-century Savoyard peninsula on Lake Geneva, 24 km from Geneva, its walled medieval core facing Switzerland.

Mont-Saint-Michel is a tidal island village of 23 residents in Normandy, UNESCO-listed since 1979, crowned by a Benedictine abbey amid 14-metre tides.

Conques is a steep Aveyron valley village on the Camino de Santiago, UNESCO-listed since 1998 for its Romanesque Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy.