Cinque Terre: Five Villages and the Sea That Connects Them

The five villages of the Cinque Terre cling to the Ligurian coast with the tenacity of people who have always understood that the sea is both their livelihood and their escape route. The best way to visit them is still the one their founders used: from the water.

The Cinque Terre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because its cliff-terraced vineyards, its centuries-old dry-stone walling and its five fishing villages constitute a cultural landscape of the kind that the second half of the twentieth century destroyed everywhere else along this coast. The steepness that made development impossible — no road connects the five villages to each other; only footpaths, the coastal railway and the sea — preserved the character that now draws two and a half million visitors a year. The management challenge this creates is obvious, and the answer to it is equally obvious: arrive early, move by private boat and spend the middle of the day at anchor in a cove with a glass of Cinque Terre DOC and a view of the coast as it has appeared to every sailor who has passed this way for two thousand years.

We arrange private dayboats and sailing yachts from the marinas at La Spezia and Portovenere for programmes that begin before the coastal walking trails have filled and end after the last ferry has returned to the mainland. The perspective from the sea — the villages rising in stacked layers of coloured plaster and terracotta above their small harbours, the vine terraces cut into the cliff face at angles that no mainland viticulture would tolerate, the lighthouse at Punta Mesco visible from every point along the coast — is the defining visual experience of the Cinque Terre, and it is available only from the water.

The Villages: Character and Distinctiveness

Each of the five villages has accumulated, over centuries, a character that distinguishes it from its neighbours. Riomaggiore, the southernmost, is the most concentrated and the least touched by the tourist economy: a single ravine of coloured houses above a boat harbour, steep and intimate and genuinely inhabited. Manarola produces the finest wines of the five villages, its terraced Bosco, Albarola and Vermentino vines worked by a dedicated group of producers who have invested in the monorail systems that make the steepest terraces commercially viable. Vernazza, midway along the coast, is architecturally the most complete: its natural harbour — the only safe anchorage on this coast between Portovenere and Levanto — enclosed by a crescent of pastel houses, a Dominican convent above the cliff and a Genoese watchtower over the church piazzetta. Monterosso al Mare, the northernmost and the largest, has the only proper beach, the strongest restaurant culture and the finest production of preserved anchovies — the fat, salt-packed Monterosso anchovies that are one of the specific pleasures of Ligurian cooking.

Sciacchetrà: The Wine That Justifies the Cliffs

The terraced vineyards of the Cinque Terre — worked entirely by hand on paths too steep for any mechanical assistance, the harvested grapes carried down in small containers on the producers' backs — produce a dry white, Cinque Terre DOC, of mineral salinity and restrained floral character that reflects its coastal limestone soils and its salt-air microclimate directly. The rare passito, Sciacchetrà DOC — made from semi-dried grapes of the same varieties, fermented to a partial sweetness and aged in small wood for a minimum of one year — is produced in quantities so tiny and consumed so locally that it is virtually unknown outside the zone. It is one of the most distinctive and most irreplaceable wines of the Italian Riviera, and we arrange visits to the small producers who maintain its production — some farming less than a hectare on the most extreme terraces — for tastings conducted on the cliff itself, with the appropriate view.

Portovenere: The Companion Piece

The natural conclusion to a Cinque Terre day is Portovenere — the fortified village at the mouth of the Gulf of La Spezia, four kilometres south of Riomaggiore, whose striped marble church of San Pietro stands on the outermost rock above open sea and whose medieval houses rise seven storeys from the harbour wall with a vertical confidence that is purely Genoese in its origins. Byron swam from here across the gulf to Lerici, a crossing of about three kilometres through cold, current-ridden water that only the most committed swimmer would attempt; the landscape that inspired him is unchanged. We arrange a private evening in Portovenere — dinner at a harbour-side restaurant with the last light on the Palmaria island opposite — as the ideal transition from the coast's afternoon to the night's rest.

The Cinque Terre in the early morning, from the deck of a private boat moving along the cliff face before any tourist ferry has departed — the villages catching the first light above their harbours — is worth travelling from anywhere in the world to see.

The Essentials

Best season: April–June and September–October; avoid July–August peak crowds on trails

Signature experience: Private full-day boat with Sciacchetrà tasting on a cliff vineyard; Portovenere dinner at sunset

Stay: La Spezia or Lerici for base; or Portofino and Camogli (one hour north)

Combine with: Portofino (one hour north by sea), the Ligurian hinterland olive oil estates

Every journey we design is entirely bespoke — crafted around your preferences,your pace, and your desire for the exceptional.

Begin Your Journey