Photography Destinations

Perched above the Luberon valley, Gordes is built almost entirely from the pale stone quarried beneath it — walls, roofs, and streets in a single material.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Orta San Giulio occupies a promontory on Lake Orta, facing the small Isola San Giulio just offshore.

Neive sits among the vineyards of the Langhe, in the heart of Barbaresco wine country — a UNESCO-listed vineyard landscape.

Asolo occupies a hilltop above the Prosecco-growing hills of the Veneto, a position that earned it the nickname ‘the city of a hundred horizons.’ Several Palladian villas lie within a short drive.

Pitigliano rises directly from a tufa cliff in Tuscany's Maremma, its buildings seemingly continuous with the rock beneath them.

Civita di Bagnoregio stands alone on an eroding tufa pillar, reachable only by a footbridge — no vehicle has ever been able to reach it.

Spello climbs a ridge of Monte Subasio in Umbria, its Roman and medieval layers visible in the same walls.

Sovana, a frazione of Sorano with barely more than a hundred residents, sits above an Etruscan necropolis carved into the surrounding tufa cliffs.

Montagnana is encircled by one of the best-preserved sets of medieval city walls in Europe, complete with two fortified gates.

Santillana del Mar's historic center is closed to motor vehicles, its stone streets unchanged enough to have earned the town the nickname 'the town of three lies' — it is neither holy, flat, nor by the sea.

Frías holds the formal, centuries-old title of Spain's smallest city, granted by King Juan II in 1435.

Grazalema is the highest of the white villages of the Sierra de Cádiz, set inside Spain's wettest natural park.

Setenil de las Bodegas is built directly under and into overhanging rock along the Rio Trejo canyon, with entire streets sheltered by stone ceilings rather than open sky.

La Alberca was the first village in Spain to be granted national historic-monument status, in 1940.

Potes sits at the confluence of four valleys in the Picos de Europa, its medieval bridges and a fortified tower marking the gateway into the mountain range.

Comillas pairs a medieval core with an unusual concentration of late-19th-century modernist architecture, including El Capricho, one of only a handful of buildings Antoni Gaudí completed outside Catalonia.

Liérganes sits on the Miera river beneath a row of grand 'indiano' mansions, built by villagers who returned wealthy from the Americas.

Zahara de la Sierra is built beneath a Moorish castle ruin, overlooking a turquoise reservoir that floods what was once the valley floor below — one of the smaller and steeper of the Cádiz pueblos blancos.

Hallstatt has lent its name to an entire prehistoric era — the Hallstatt culture — after Iron Age salt-mining artifacts were uncovered in the mountain above the village.

Dürnstein's ruined hilltop castle once held Richard the Lionheart prisoner in 1192, on his return from the Third Crusade.