Cinque Terre: Five Villages Glued to a Cliff Above the Ligurian Sea

Stand on the cliff path above Manarola in the late afternoon, when the sun is dropping over the Ligurian Sea to the west, and look back at the village. The houses are stacked on the narrow rock shelf above the tiny harbour — four and five storeys of pale yellow, terracotta pink, sage green, built right to the edge of the cliff because there was no other flat ground. The fishing boats are pulled up on the concrete ramp. The church tower catches the last horizontal light. Below everything, the sea is a dark, glittering indigo. This is one of the most complete visual compositions in the geography of Italy — and it is entirely the result of necessity. The people of the Cinque Terre had no choice about where they built. They simply had no other space.

The Cinque Terre — 'Five Lands' — are five coastal villages: Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore. They occupy a 12-km stretch of the Ligurian coast between La Spezia and Levanto where the Apennine mountains plunge almost directly into the sea, leaving no coastal plain. For centuries, the villages were accessible only by sea or by the steep mule tracks (mulattiere) carved into the cliff face. The first road connecting the villages to the rest of the world was only built in the 1960s. The railway came earlier — the late 19th century — threading through a series of short tunnels blasted through the headlands. Before the train, the villages were among the most isolated communities in Liguria, dependent on the sea for fish and on their impossibly steep terraced slopes for everything else.

The terraced vineyards are perhaps the most extraordinary feat of human geography in this landscape. There are an estimated 6,700 km of dry-stone terrace walls in the Cinque Terre — more than the entire length of the Great Wall of China if laid end to end. Each terrace was built and maintained by hand, using stones cleared from the ground and stacked without mortar into walls that can hold several tonnes of soil against the force of gravity and winter rain. Maintaining them required constant labour from the entire community. When young people left for the cities in the 20th century, many terraces collapsed and the vineyards became scrubland. Today, a new generation of winemakers is rebuilding the terraces and reclaiming the slopes, aware that the landscape's UNESCO status (granted in 1997) depends on maintaining the working agricultural character, not just the pretty harbours.

Each of the five villages has its own character. Monterosso al Mare is the largest and the only one with a sandy beach — it is also the most tourist-developed, with hotels and a proper town centre. Vernazza is many visitors' favourite: a perfect natural harbour enclosed by cliffs, a central piazza right on the water, a Genoese watchtower, and steep lanes climbing in all directions. Corniglia is the odd one out — it is not at sea level but perched on a promontory, reachable only by 365 steps from the railway station, and it has no harbour at all. Manarola is perhaps the most photographed — its coloured houses stacked above the rocky inlet are the image you see in every travel magazine. Riomaggiore is the southernmost and the most lived-in, with a working-class vitality that the other villages can sometimes lack.