Exploring the coastline

Friday 13^th June

Today we visited Cinque Terre in Liguria. This is 5 villages along a short piece of coastline that are accessed by boat or train – only authorised vehicles are allowed in the towns. We caught the first ferry at 9.15 so that we would have the maximum time to visit the villages. We visited only 3 of the villages – one looked like it was a lot of steps up to the village so we gave that a miss and the other one we didn’t visit can only be accessed by train.

Leaving La Spezia. You can't see our hotel
but it is perched half way up those hills
 behind the town. 

La Spezia

There were a few of these small yachts in the area.
 How the other half live.

The church of St Peter at Porto Venere built in 1277
- this is not actually one of the 5 villages
but is the first stop for the ferry.

Houses at Porto Venere
- they call these houses tower houses.
Don't know if they have lifts, but imagine
taking the shopping upstairs, or moving
furniture in and out.

The 3 that we visited were all just a little bit different – at the first one, Riomaggiore, we had a fruit juice, at the second, Vernazza, we had lunch and at the third, Monterosso, we had gelati. We really enjoyed our day at Cinque Terre. It was just like we had seen in the books. There were a lot of tourists but not enough that you were jostling people at every turn – so different to the Amalfi coast and we much preferred this coast.The water along the coast was a really intense blue and as it got shallow at each village it was a lovely green blue. I don't think we got any photos that do it justice. I’ll just post a few photos.

 

Houses and farming land along the journey
 - not sure how they access these places.

Riomaggiore.

Riomaggiore

Riomaggiore

Riomaggiore

More cultivated land.

Fishing boats in the harbour at Vernazza.

The village of Vernazza.
We really liked this one the best I think.

Vernazza 

The swimming beach at Vernazza.
We were wishing we had our bathers with us
because it was stinking hot when we were there.
 Lying on the rocks didn't appeal to me though.

Monterosso. The last village.

Monterosso.

A very narrow house in Monterosso.

Rows and rows of umbrellas
- hiring a sun lounge would be better than the rocky beach.

The train trip back was mostly through tunnels so we didn't really get to see much from the land side – and the train was packed anyway so limited opportunity to get the camera to a window.

Dinner at our B&B and again it was a very nice meal.