Road Trip Stops

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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