Europe in Motion
Europe's sacred places
Fifteen hundred years of building for reasons other than commerce. Presented as heritage and as architecture, and open to anybody — the history is the point rather than the belief.
The query Any destination tagged Sacred places. Run against all 319 destinations on every build, and nothing here is hand-picked — there is no field for naming a destination in a motion, deliberately. 110 match, in 33 countries; the 55 below are at most two per country.
All of them tagged Sacred places.
Andorra la Vella
Europe's highest capital at 1,023 metres, in a narrow valley, mostly shops with mountains directly behind them.
Madriu-Perafita-Claror
A glacial valley with no road into it, on the UNESCO list for a cultural landscape of summer pasture and stone huts.
Dilijan
A forested spa town called 'Armenian Switzerland', with two of the country's finest monasteries in the woods nearby.
Garni & Geghard
A Hellenistic temple on a gorge, and a monastery partly carved out of the rock face next door.
Blagaj
A dervish monastery built against a cliff at the source of the Buna, where a river comes out of a cave at full size.
Mostar
A 16th-century Ottoman bridge, destroyed in 1993 and rebuilt from the river stones, over a green-blue river.
Bansko
A stone-built mountain town under Pirin, with cheap skiing in winter and hut-to-hut walking in summer.
Nessebar
A rocky peninsula joined by a causeway, with more medieval churches per square metre than anywhere on the Black Sea.
Omodos & the wine villages
Cobbled mountain villages growing indigenous grapes nobody else has, around a 12th-century monastery.
Roskilde
Viking ships raised from the fjord, thirty-nine Danish monarchs in one cathedral, and a festival in a field.
Amiens
The largest gothic cathedral in France by volume, and market gardens on canals behind it.
Avignon
Seven popes ruled from here in the 14th century and left the largest gothic palace in the world behind them.
Sighnaghi & Kakheti
A walled hill town over the Alazani valley, with the Caucasus on the horizon and vineyards to the foot of them.
Stepantsminda (Kazbegi)
A village under a 5,047-metre volcano, with a 14th-century church on a spur above it.
Bacharach & the Rhine Gorge
Half-timbered wine village under a ruined chapel, in the 65-kilometre UNESCO stretch of castles.
Berchtesgaden
An alpine corner surrounded on three sides by Austria, with a fjord-green lake below the Watzmann.
Athens
A sprawling modern capital with a 2,500-year-old temple on a rock in the middle and a food scene that got very good, quietly.
Delphi
The navel of the ancient world, on a terrace of Mount Parnassus above a sea of olive trees.
Szentendre
A Serbian Orthodox artists' town on the river, forty minutes from the capital by suburban rail.
Tihany, Lake Balaton
A lavender peninsula with an abbey on a cliff, sticking into a shallow warm lake.
Dingle
A fishing town on a peninsula of beehive huts, empty beaches and the westernmost point of Europe's mainland fringe.
Dublin
Georgian squares, a 1,200-year-old river crossing, and four Nobel laureates in literature from one small city.
Assisi
A pink stone town on Monte Subasio, built around the basilica of a man who rejected everything it is made of.
Civita di Bagnoregio
A village on an eroding tufa pillar, reached by a footbridge, with about a dozen permanent residents left.
Peja & Rugova
A bazaar town at the mouth of a limestone gorge, with a patriarchate monastery and the Accursed Mountains behind.
Prizren
A river town of mosques, Orthodox churches and a stone bridge, under a fortress with the whole valley below it.
Nida, Curonian Spit
Wooden fishermen's houses under a moving dune, on a sand spit between lagoon and sea.
Trakai
A red brick island castle in a lake, and the Karaim community that has lived beside it since the 14th century.
Echternach
The country's oldest town, with a 7th-century abbey and a hopping procession on the UNESCO list.
Mdina & Rabat
The old walled capital on a hill, with about 250 residents and no traffic — called the silent city for a reason.
Valletta
A planned fortress city of 1566, on a peninsula between two harbours, with Caravaggio's largest painting in its cathedral.
Orheiul Vechi
A monastery dug into a limestone cliff over a loop of the Răut, inhabited on and off since the 13th century.
Perast
One street, sixteen baroque palaces, two islands offshore, and no room for a car.
Bitola
A former consular city with a wide pedestrian avenue, and the Roman ruins of Heraclea on its edge.
Ohrid
A town of Byzantine churches on a cliff over one of the world's oldest lakes, with a Slavic literary tradition that began here.
Røros
A 17th-century copper-mining town of black timber houses, at -30°C for weeks at a stretch and listed by UNESCO for surviving intact.
Trondheim
A student city built around the northernmost medieval cathedral in the world, and the end of a thousand-year pilgrim path.
Kraków
The royal capital that survived the war, with Europe's largest medieval square and a Jewish quarter that is now a district again.
Zakopane & the Tatras
A wooden mountain town under the only alpine range in Poland, with its own architectural style.
Évora
A walled town with a Roman temple in the middle, a chapel of bones, and megaliths in the fields around it.
Gura Humorului & the painted monasteries
The base for a group of 15th- and 16th-century monasteries frescoed on the outside walls and still bright.
Săpânța & Maramureș
Wooden churches with tall shingled spires, and a cemetery where every headstone is painted, rhymed and often rude.
Moscow
A fortress, a cathedral square and a metro system built as underground palaces.
Mokra Gora
A mountain village on the Šargan Eight, a narrow-gauge line that climbs a figure of eight to gain height.
Studenica
A 12th-century monastery of white marble in a wooded valley, with frescoes from 1209 and monks still living there.
Levoča & the Spiš
A walled medieval town with the tallest wooden altar in the world, under the ruins of Spiš castle.
Poprad & the High Tatras
The gateway town to a 26-kilometre range that reaches 2,655 metres and behaves like the Alps.
Bilbao
A steel city that commissioned one building in 1997 and changed what cities thought was possible.
Cádiz
Possibly the oldest continuously inhabited city in western Europe, on a spit, surrounded by water on three sides.
Uppsala
Sweden's oldest university, its largest cathedral, and the burial mounds of kings who predate both.
Edirne
The Ottoman capital before Istanbul, in the European corner, with Sinan's masterpiece mosque in it.
Göreme, Cappadocia
Soft volcanic rock eroded into cones and carved out for a thousand years into churches, houses and underground cities.
Kyiv
A city founded in the 5th century on hills above a wide river, with a cave monastery from 1051 beneath it.
Canterbury
The mother church of a global communion, in a walled town on the pilgrims' road from London.
Vatican City
A state the size of a large park, holding Michelangelo's ceiling, his dome and his Pietà.
Journeys that go this way
Venice to Dubrovnik the long way round
The Adriatic Run
Venice · Ljubljana · Piran · Rovinj · Split · Mostar · Kotor · Dubrovnik
Six places people have walked to for a thousand years
Camino & Sacred Europe
Canterbury · Chartres · Rome · Meteora (Kalambaka) · Santiago de Compostela
Greek and Roman cities, on both shores
The Classical Mediterranean
Rome · Naples · Palermo · Syracuse & Ortigia · Athens · Selçuk & Ephesus
Themes that run through it
Walls, guilds and the towns that stopped changing
Medieval Europe
Bruges · Siena · Tallinn · Sighișoara · York · Rhodes · Prague · Kotor
Where people have gone on purpose for a thousand years
Sacred Europe
Santiago de Compostela · Vatican City · Canterbury · Meteora (Kalambaka) · Rila Monastery · Studenica · Glendalough · Garni & Geghard
A thousand years, and what remains of it
Jewish Europe
Kraków · Prague · Toledo · Thessaloniki · Vilnius · Girona & the Empordà · Warsaw · Mikulov
Build this into a route
The Journey Planner weights the same tags this page queries on, so choosing Sacred places there will build a route through places like these. Plan a journey → · Discover mode →