All Villages

Alpbach in Tyrol, Austria's most beautiful village, preserved by 1953 building rules requiring Tyrolean wooden architecture. Base for Ski Juwel and European Forum.

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

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

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.

Heiligenblut at 1,291 m marks the southern start of the Grossglockner High Alpine Road in Austria's Hohe Tauern National Park.

Rattenberg in Tyrol, Austria's smallest city by area, is a medieval glass-engraving town pressed between the Inn River and a cliff-top castle ruin.

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.

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.

Anghiari in Tuscany's Valtiberina sits above the plain where the 1440 Battle of Anghiari was fought, the subject of Leonardo da Vinci's lost fresco.

Arquà Petrarca in the Euganean Hills, Veneto, was the final home of Petrarch (1370–1374), whose house and marble tomb still stand in this medieval village.

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.

Castelrotto sits at the foot of the Alpe di Siusi, the largest high alpine meadow in Europe.

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

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

Civitella del Tronto in Abruzzo is crowned by Italy's largest fortress, which surrendered last at Italian unification on 20 March 1861.

Follina in the Treviso Prealps, Veneto, is built around a 12th-century Cistercian abbey and lies along the UNESCO Prosecco Superiore wine hills.

Glorenza (Glurns) in South Tyrol is the Alps' only fully intact walled medieval town, rebuilt after 1499 with walls and towers still standing today.

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

Montefalco in Umbria, the 'Balcony of Umbria' at 472 m, is the centre of Sagrantino DOCG wine country and houses Benozzo Gozzoli's Renaissance frescoes.

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

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

Ostana in the Cuneo Alps, an Occitan village at 1,250 m that reversed near-total depopulation through strict traditional architecture restoration.

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

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

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

Vigo di Fassa sits at 1 382 m in the Ladin-speaking Val di Fassa. Gateway to the Catinaccio, home of the Museo Ladin de Fascia.

Albarracín in Teruel wraps a Guadalaviar river loop at 1,171 m, its salmon-pink medieval walls nearly intact, surrounded by UNESCO-listed Neolithic rock art.

Alquézar in Huesca sits on a limestone spur above the Río Vero canyon, its name from the Arabic al qasr, with a Collegiate church founded in 1099.

Aínsa in the Sobrarbe Pyrenees commands a promontory at two rivers' confluence, its 11th-century walled old town the former capital of the Kingdom of Sobrarbe.

Besalú in Girona, former capital of the County of Besalú, is defined by its 12th-century Romanesque bridge over the Fluvià and a rare restored medieval mikveh.

Capileira at 1,436 m in Las Alpujarras, Sierra Nevada, is the highest village in the Poqueira gorge and the standard base for climbing Mulhacén.

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.

Frigiliana in the Málaga Axarquía preserves Andalusia's best Moorish barrio, its street panels depicting the 1569 last stand of the Morisco population.

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.

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

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

Morella in Castellón at 1,004 m is enclosed by its original 2,500-metre medieval walls, crowned by a castle above a 14th-century Gothic basilica.

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.

Puebla de Sanabria in Zamora commands a hilltop with a 15th-century frontier castle above the Tera river, gateway to Iberia's largest glacial lake.

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.

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.

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.

Alberobello in Apulia is built of trulli, dry-stone huts with conical roofs, UNESCO-listed since 1996. Its Rione Monti district remains fully inhabited.

Pienza in Tuscany's Val d'Orcia was rebuilt as an ideal Renaissance town for Pope Pius II in 1459, designed by Bernardo Rossellino. UNESCO-listed since 1996.

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.

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

Weißenkirchen in der Wachau is a Danube wine village in Austria's UNESCO-listed Wachau Cultural Landscape, known for its fortified church and cable ferry.

Spitz an der Donau is an Austrian wine village in the UNESCO-listed Wachau valley, overlooked by the Tausendeimerberg vineyard and Hinterhaus ruin.