Cinque Terre, Italy
I've been to nearly every famous city in Italy. By far my favorite city - and if I could only pick one to recommend - would be Cinque Terre.
Well, I guess it's not exactly just one city. It's five. All encompassed in one national park. It is in the Liguria region of Italy, to the west of the city of La Spezia. It contains Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore.
We only knew about this place because of Rick Steves. He highlighted the area in one of his travel books and my friends and I knew we had to go there.
The place was recently designated a national park simply because so many tourists began to travel there because of Rick Steves' recommendations. They could then charge money for people to hike through the cities.
They must be making bank now.
It's one of the most popular hiking destinations in all of Italy.
It takes a rather long day to hike through all five cities, but we were determined to do just that.
We stayed close by in La Spezia and went to the train station to then get our tickets to the last city as well as entrance into the national park - they conveniently combine the tickets at the train station.
We went to the last city and began our hike. It was were the highest mountains were, and so, the most difficult part of the hike.
As you begin to make your way down into each small city you can see that they haven't really changed much in many generations. There's only so much room where the cities are so that they can't be expanded. There are some small houses on the farming mountainsides, but other than that - the small cities are concentrated in the areas by the coast.
We had a goal to eat gelato from each of the five cities. You only live once, after all.
We spent a lot of time at so many different beaches, it was kind of ridiculous. Luckily, we made use of our GoPro in the water - jumping off cliffs and whatnot.
On the last leg of the hike, the trail we were supposed to take was blocked off. We decided to venture through there anyway.
Probably not our smartest idea.
But we eventually made it as it was getting dark. It was blocked off because an area was washed away from a landslide. Probably not the smartest thing we did, but it worked out for us.
It was an extremely memorable day, and it's one of the few places in Europe that I'm just dying to get back to. I made so many great memories that day and the views were incredible from sun-up to sun-down.
