Riomagiorre and Cinque Terre what a beautiful place!

Cinque Terre' means 'five lands', and Italy's famous Cinque Terre are five villages laid out on steep, inhospitable cliff faces and their surrounding vineyards which scale the steep mountainsides in hard-won terraces.
The Cinque Terre stretch of coastline is a National Park, and a Protected Marine Area, included on UNESCO's World Heritage List. After being placed on a list of sites at risk, the Park Authority began a longterm project to revitalise the farming practices behind the characteristic hillside terraces, many of which were falling into abandonment. It also aims at a sustainable level of tourism, maintaining the character and beauty of the region. We stayed in the village of Riomagiorre which is the last of the five villages.

Riomaggorie!

Vernazza ... along the cinque terre hike

One of the main reasons people come to Cinque Terre is to relax but also to do the hike (9km) from one end of the five villages through the vinyards, lemon and olive orchards to the end. The hike takes anywhere from 3.2hours (which apparently is the record) to however long you want it to take. It is a beautiful area and we stopped in the second town to take a dip in the ocean to cool off and have a light snack. The hike is very picturesque, hills, valleys, the ocean, it is amazing. It took us around 4.5 hours to complete with the stop over that we made, so there is a good chance that without the stop we would have broken the record! (hahaha... just kidding, but we would have been pretty close, we were cruising past people along the way!)

Swimming at Vernazza

Pasta dinner in Riomaggorie

We spent one day getting into the town relaxing and wandering around, one day doing the hike and the last recovering at the beach, the perfect combination. At night we relaxed and had some great food and the best seafood pasta Ewa has ever had. It was beyond amazing. Seriously, no joke. The other nights we had take-out and brought it down to the edge of the water for our own little picnic! Too bad our stop over was so short, only a few days, it seems that the places you enjoy the most go by so quickly and the places you cant wait to get out of seem to drag on for all eternity ahha, glad that hasnt happpened yet! We are now off to Rome to do some serious sightseeing.

Ewa and our picnic in Riomaggorie

Beer in Riomaggorie

written by

ECRadventure on July 21, 2009 from La Spezia, Italy

from the travel blog: ECRadventure's Travel Blog

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