Lakeside & Coastal Villages

Gmunden on Austria's Traunsee, home to Schloss Ort island castle and one of Europe's oldest ceramics manufactories, active since 1492.

Rust on Austria's Neusiedler See, a Royal Free City since 1681 and UNESCO World Heritage Site, known for Ruster Ausbruch wine and spring stork nests.

St. Wolfgang on Austria's Wolfgangsee houses Michael Pacher's 1481 altarpiece and the Schafbergbahn steam cog railway, climbing to 1,783 m since 1893.

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

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

Castiglione del Lago occupies a promontory surrounded on three sides by Lake Trasimeno.

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

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.

Vernazza is the only natural port of the Cinque Terre, a UNESCO-listed coastal landscape in Liguria since 1997, built around a fortified fishing harbor.

Manarola is the smallest inhabited Cinque Terre village, part of Italy's UNESCO-listed coastal landscape, known for terraced vineyards and cliffside houses.

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.