Cinque Terre City Guide
Cinque Terre Map: Every Village, Trail and Viewpoint
This cinque terre map puts 18 pins on the coast in five colour-coded categories: the five villages, free viewpoints, paid trails, gateway towns and day trips across the Gulf of Poets. Each pin carries a note on the one fact that decides whether it is worth your time. The same pins repeat as a text list and prose sections below argue what the map actually shows. For the rest of the coast, see things to do in Cinque Terre.
Quick answer How to use this Cinque Terre map
This map of Cinque Terre has 18 pins. Paid trail access costs US$11.37 (€10) per day on the Trekking Card, or US$25.00 (€22) with trains on the Treno MS Card.
Key takeaways
- Understand what each colour groups in what the five colours mean, then pick pins from the short list.
- Every village is reachable by one railway line from Levanto to La Spezia. Corniglia has no ferry pier, so trains or trails are the only way in.
- See the coast from the water on the La Spezia boat tour to Riomaggiore and Monterosso, 8 hours for $79.00.
- Via dell'Amore is one way from Riomaggiore to Manarola and needs a booked slot even with a card. Details in the Via dell'Amore guide.
The Map: 18 Pins, Five Colours
Each category has its own colour. Dark teal marks the five villages, green marks free viewpoints and sights, brown marks the paid trail network, deep blue marks the two gateway towns at the ends of the rail line, and grey marks day trips across the Gulf of Poets. The same pins repeat as a text list under the map.
The Five Villages 5 pins
- Monterosso al MareThe largest village, population 1,301, with the widest sandy beaches on this coast. Its Fegina district is where the coastal trail north toward Levanto begins.
- VernazzaPopulation 670, built around a small harbour under the Doria Castle tower. The station sits a short walk from the waterfront.
- CornigliaPopulation 195 and the only village not on the water, sitting about 100m up on its cliff. The ferry does not call here, so you arrive by train or on foot.
- ManarolaCheck AvailabilityPopulation 353, stacked in a ravine above a rocky cove. The hillside above lights up each Christmas season with the recycled-materials nativity.
- RiomaggioreCheck AvailabilityPopulation 1,250 and the southernmost village, where the Via dell'Amore begins. The name comes from the Latin Rivus Maior, the stream the village grew along.
Free to Visit 6 pins
- Il Gigante statue, Fegina, MonterossoA 14-metre Neptune statue built in 1910 by architect Francesco Levacher and sculptor Arrigo Minerbi, damaged in WWII bombing. Free to view from the beach.
- Doria Castle viewpoint, VernazzaFirst records date to the 13th century, with a core believed to be 11th century. The cylindrical tower was restored in the 20th century and overlooks the harbour.
- Terrazza di Santa Maria, CornigliaA viewpoint about 90m above sea level at the end of Via Fieschi. It looks over the whole coast, which is the payoff for climbing to the only inland village.
- Punta Bonfiglio, ManarolaA viewpoint reached by a walkway opened in 1968. The small cemetery at the point is inscribed with verses from Vincenzo Cardarelli's poem Liguria.
- Riomaggiore CastleBuilt from 1260 by the Turcotti marquises and completed in the 15th to 16th centuries by the Genoese. It stands in the upper part of the historic centre above the marina.
- Manarola nativity hillsideAn illuminated nativity lit each Christmas season since 1961, built by Mario Andreoli from recycled materials. Free to view from the village, but only in winter.
Paid Trails 2 pins
- Via dell'Amore, Riomaggiore endCheck AvailabilityA one-way walk to Manarola of about 30 minutes. A booked time slot is mandatory for individuals, even for card holders.
- Punta Mesco / Sentiero Azzurro, MonterossoThe paid trail toward Levanto passes the Punta Mesco promontory. A park card is required and flip-flops are banned, with fines reported from US$56.80 (€50) up to US$2,841.80 (€2,500).
Gateway Towns 2 pins
- La SpeziaCheck AvailabilityThe southern end of the rail line and a cruise port. Most visitors arriving from the south start here.
- LevantoThe northern end of the rail line. Staying here means cheaper rooms and one short train ride into Monterosso.
Day Trips Across the Gulf 3 pins
- PortovenereCheck AvailabilityAcross the Gulf of Poets and part of the same 1997 UNESCO listing as the Cinque Terre. The ferry line connects it north to the villages.
- Palmaria IslandOff Portovenere and part of the same UNESCO listing. A short boat crossing from the gulf's southern shore.
- LericiOn the eastern shore of the Gulf of Poets, also served by the same ferry line that runs to the villages.
The Five Villages On This Map
The dark teal pins run north to south along about one railway line. Populations differ sharply, from Corniglia at 195 to Monterosso at 1,301, and that changes what each village feels like at midday.
| Village | Population | On the Water | What Sits There |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monterosso al Mare | 1,301 | Yes | The widest sandy beaches on the coast, the Fegina district and the 14-metre Il Gigante statue |
| Vernazza | 670 | Yes | A harbour under the Doria Castle tower, first recorded in the 13th century |
| Corniglia | 195 | No, about 100m up | The only village not on the water, with the Terrazza di Santa Maria viewpoint and no ferry pier |
| Manarola | 353 | Yes | Punta Bonfiglio viewpoint and the hillside nativity lit each Christmas season since 1961 |
| Riomaggiore | 1,250 | Yes | The southern trailhead of the Via dell'Amore and a castle built from 1260 |
Figures current in Q3 2026.
Tours That Cover the Middle of This Map
Six tours cover parts of this map by boat, kayak and guided hike. They reach what the rail line and the trail network do not, mostly the coastline between villages.
from $79.00
La Spezia: Cinque Terre Tour by Boat to Riomaggiore and Monterosso
With over 3,400 reviews this is the most-booked boat tour out of La Spezia: an 8-hour return ferry with a guide aboard, choosing either a Portovenere-Monterosso-Vernazza route or a Riomaggiore-Monterosso-Vernazza one. It is not wheelchair accessible.
Check Availability
from $120.00
Monterosso: Cinque Terre Day or Sunset Boat Tour with Aperitif
A small motorboat runs out of Monterosso with a skipper and an on-board aperitif, in a morning, afternoon or sunset slot. Riders over 95 or under 13 are not accepted, and there is no stop to get off in any village.
Check Availability
from $74.00
Vernazza: Pesto Making Class with Wine and Food Tasting
Cinque Sensi's class in Vernazza pairs a hands-on pesto lesson with three local wines and a plate of cheese and focaccia. Book the lunchtime slot to add gnocchi made with your own pesto, plus a liqueur and chocolate to close.
Check Availability
from $171.00
From Porto Venere: Cinque Terre Villages Boat Tour
I Ragazzi di Nakupenda's Porto Venere departure spends four hours cruising past the Cinque Terre villages by sea rather than stopping ashore, with prosecco and a snorkeling kit included. It's the pricier of this operator's two boat tours listed here.
Check Availability
from $85.00
Monterosso: Kayak and Snorkeling Tour
Carnassa runs this two-hour kayak-and-snorkel outing from a beach bar in Monterosso, gear included. It is capped to swimmers under 220 lbs and is off-limits to anyone with a bad back or a child under 6.
Check Availability
from $91.00
La Spezia: Cinque Terre Guided Hiking Tour, Manarola to Corniglia
Shore Emotion leads a 3-hour trek along the coastal path from Manarola to Corniglia, with the Cinque Terre Card for the connecting trains built into the price. It rules out children under 8 and anyone with heart or back problems, since the path is uneven in places.
Check AvailabilityPrices, ratings and details are the platform's own. Dollar figures are the listed prices. The platform bills in your account's currency.
What the Five Colours Mean
The colours are not decoration. Each one encodes a different answer to a practical question: what costs money, what does not, and what sits outside the villages entirely.
Manarola, one of the five villages on this map, with its bell tower against the terraced hillside. Photo: Chabe01, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Five Villages
Dark teal marks the destinations themselves. Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore sit in that order on a single north-south line, which is why almost every itinerary here is a linear one rather than a loop. The populations span from 195 in Corniglia to 1,301 in Monterosso, and the character changes with it.
Monterosso has the region's widest sandy beaches, while its four neighbours sit in rocky coves. Corniglia is the outlier that every map needs a footnote for, because it stands about 100m above the sea and no boat reaches it.
Free to Visit
The green pins are sights that cost nothing at the gate. Il Gigante in Monterosso is a 14-metre Neptune from 1910, scarred by WWII bombing, visible from the beach. The Doria Castle viewpoint in Vernazza has records back to the 13th century.
Punta Bonfiglio in Manarola carries a cemetery inscribed with a poem. The pattern worth noticing is that almost every free pin is a viewpoint or a structure you look at from outside, which reflects how this coast works: the geography itself is the sight, and the buildings frame it.
Paid Trails
The brown pins are the only places on this map where walking costs money. The Via dell'Amore from Riomaggiore to Manarola takes about 30 minutes and demands a booked slot for individuals, no exceptions for card holders. The Sentiero Azzurro section at Punta Mesco above Monterosso needs the park card too, at US$11.37 (€10) per day for the Trekking version.
The park has banned flip-flops and open sandals on trails since 2019, with reported fines from US$56.80 (€50) to US$2,841.80 (€2,500). Wear closed shoes or stay on the streets.
Gateway Towns
The deep blue pins sit at the two ends of the railway line, and they exist on this map because your accommodation decision usually happens in one of them. La Spezia anchors the south with its cruise port. Levanto anchors the north.
Both connect to the villages by the same regional line that threads through the tunnels, and the Treno MS Card at US$25.00 (€22) per day covers unlimited trains between them. Neither town is inside the national park, which is exactly why they are cheaper and quieter places to sleep.
Day Trips Across the Gulf
The grey pins sit across the Gulf of Poets, south and east of the five villages. Portovenere and Palmaria Island share the same 1997 UNESCO inscription as the Cinque Terre, listed together as site 826. Lerici sits further east on the gulf's other shore.
The ferry line run by the Consorzio Marittimo Turistico Cinque Terre Golfo dei Poeti connects all of them with the village waterfronts, so these pins are reachable by boat in season as well as by road. They share the landscape and the listing without sharing the crowds.
How the Coast Is Actually Shaped
The geography here is steeper and more linear than most maps suggest. Three facts about the terrain explain almost every decision you will make.
One railway line runs the whole map. It leaves Levanto in the north, threads all five villages through tunnels, and ends at La Spezia Centrale in the south. The tunnels matter because you almost never see the sea from the train.
You board in one village and step out in the next, which makes village-hopping fast and makes the walking trails the only way to actually see the coast between stations. The Cinque Terre Express reinforced service runs roughly every 15 minutes at peak from mid-March to early November.
Corniglia is the shape of the coast in miniature. It is the only village not on the water, sitting on a promontory about 90m above the sea. Trains stop below at a station that is not in the village, and the Lardarina staircase climbs 33 ramps and 377 steps to reach the centre, or a shuttle bus does the work for you.
No ferry calls because there is no pier and no beach to land one. That single topographic fact makes Corniglia the quietest of the five, and the Terrazza di Santa Maria pays you back with a view over the whole coast.
The Gulf of Poets sits apart to the south. Portovenere, Palmaria Island and Lerici are not part of the Cinque Terre municipalities, but they share the 1997 UNESCO listing and the same ferry operator. The gulf bends away east of Riomaggiore, so a day trip there is a different shoreline entirely, wider and more open than the tight village coves.
The ferry connects the two shores in season, which is the only direct link on this map between the two halves of the listing.
What No Road Reaches
This is the fact that a road map of Liguria hides. For a visitor, the five villages are not connected by road at all.
No road links the five villages for a visitor's purposes. Driving between them means a long inland detour on mountain roads that do not enter the centres, and parking at the villages is minimal. The work of moving between villages is done by the railway line and, if you want to see the coast itself, by the paid trail network.
Plan the trip around train times and trail openings rather than driving distances, because driving distances are irrelevant here.
The rail line does the heavy lifting. Stations sit at or near all five village centres, and the Treno MS Card at US$25.00 (€22) per day adds unlimited travel on the Levanto to La Spezia stretch to the park card's trail access. A single fare within the line is priced by date band rather than distance, so a one-stop hop costs the same as riding the whole line on the same day.
Corniglia makes the no-road point absolute. It has no ferry pier, no coastal road and a station 377 steps below the village. The only ways in are the train plus the stairs or the shuttle, or arriving on foot along the trails.
If the trails are closed for weather, the train is the only option left, and that is worth knowing before you plan a hiking day around it.
The Gaps On This Map, and Why Each One Is a Finding
An honest map shows what is missing. These gaps exist because the figures are not published anywhere we could verify, not because nobody checked.
- No verified walking time or trail length between any two villages. No source in our research pack states a minutes or kilometres figure for any coastal segment, so this map deliberately prints none. Check the hikes guide and the Via dell'Amore page for what is confirmed, which is the roughly 30-minute Via dell'Amore walk and little else. The gap exists because the park publishes segment status but no consolidated distance table, so any figure you see elsewhere is copied without a source. - No ferry day-ticket price is published for the current season. The operator's own fare page did not render a machine-readable price, and third-party figures circulate unconfirmed.
Check the ferry guide before booking. The gap exists because the operator sells through a dynamic fare calculator rather than a flat published rate. - Only Monterosso publishes a confirmed tourist tax. It charges US$3.41 (€3) per person per night. Vernazza, Riomaggiore, Corniglia and Manarola each set their own rate on portals that do not yield a readable figure.
The gap exists because each comune runs its own tax collection on its own documents, so no single source lists all five. - No 3-day Trekking Card price. The card shop lists a three-day item with no price rendered, so this map confirms only the 1-day US$11.37 (€10) figure and the Treno MS alternatives on the card page. The gap exists because the product listing itself is incomplete on the official shop. For a guided way around the villages shown on this map, see Cinque Terre tours.
What the Season Changes on This Map
The pins do not move, but what is reachable from them changes three ways across the year.
The ferry runs a season and skips Corniglia entirely. The Consorzio Marittimo Turistico Cinque Terre Golfo dei Poeti calls at Riomaggiore, Manarola, Vernazza and Monterosso, and no price is verified in our pack. Secondary sources point to a limited spring start and a season ending in the autumn, but the operator's own dates were not confirmed.
In winter the sea route closes and the map collapses back to trains and trails only.
Via dell'Amore hours change three times across the year. From 29 March to 24 October the path is open 09:00 to 21:00 with last entry at 20:30. From 26 October to 28 March it opens 09:00 to 18:00 with last entry at 17:30.
Booked slots are mandatory for individuals in every period, and the slot system means summer evenings and winter afternoons offer very different windows for the same 30-minute walk.
Trail closures follow the weather, and the card does not override a closure. No source states which segment is open today, because the status changes with rain and maintenance. October and November are the wettest months on this coast at 194mm of rain each, against 42mm in July, so autumn is when closures cluster.
Check status close to your travel date rather than trusting any map, including this one.
The Short List: Five Pins Worth a Special Trip
These five pins have the strongest individual reasons to build a day around them. None outranks another. Each pays off a different part of the map.
| Pin | Why It's Worth It |
|---|---|
| Punta Bonfiglio, Manarola | A 1968 walkway to a point where the cemetery facade carries verses from Cardarelli's poem Liguria, above the best angle on the village |
| Riomaggiore Castle | Built from 1260 by the Turcotti marquises, finished by the Genoese, and it crowns the walk up from the marina |
| Doria Castle, Vernazza | A core believed to date to the 11th century, with the cylindrical tower restored in the 20th, looking straight down on the harbour |
| Terrazza di Santa Maria, Corniglia | About 90m above the sea, the only viewpoint that takes in the whole coast at once, and it is free |
| Via dell'Amore | A 30-minute one-way cliff walk between Riomaggiore and Manarola that needs a booked slot, so planning it shapes the whole day |
Facts per the park and municipal sources in our research pack.
Where to Go From the Map
Back to the Cinque Terre, Italy guide (see what to see in the Cinque Terre) for the five villages themselves.
The Five Villages in Detail
A full guide to each of the five pins, what to see and how long to give each one.
The Trail Network
Which trails cost money, which need bookings and what the card covers.
Planning the Trip
Cards, trains, ferries and where to stay, brought together in one planner.
Cinque Terre Map: Questions
How long does it take to walk between the five villages of the Cinque Terre?
Not stated by any source in our research pack. The only confirmed walking figure is the Via dell'Amore, about 30 minutes one way from Riomaggiore to Manarola. For trail-by-trail detail see the hikes guide.
Why can't you wear flip-flops in the Cinque Terre?
The national park has banned open and flat-sole footwear on its hiking trails since 2019 because the paths are steep and slippery. Reported fines run from US$56.80 (€50) to US$2,841.80 (€2,500) depending on the trail section and the risk created.
Which village is closest to La Spezia?
Riomaggiore, the southernmost village on this map. It sits at the end of the rail line before La Spezia Centrale, so it is usually the first village visitors from the south reach.
What city is the Cinque Terre closest to?
La Spezia to the south and Levanto to the north. Both are the gateway towns on this map, anchoring the two ends of the single railway line that serves all five villages.
Does the ferry stop at every village?
No. The ferry calls at Riomaggiore, Manarola, Vernazza and Monterosso, but not at Corniglia, which sits about 100m up on its cliff with no pier. Trains or trails are the only ways to reach Corniglia.
Is the whole Cinque Terre coast UNESCO listed?
The 1997 inscription covers Portovenere, the Cinque Terre and the islands Palmaria, Tino and Tinetto as one cultural landscape, site 826. The grey pins on this map sit inside that same listing, and the national park itself followed in 1999.
The Shape of the Coast on Film
Three films that show the geography this map puts into pins.
Cinque Terre, Italy: Five Fascinating Coastal Villages
An overview of how the five villages sit along the coast.
Video: Google Earth TravelCinque Terre Transportation Guide: How to Get Around
The rail line and transport network this map is built around.
Video: Sharing the RoadThe 5 Cinque Terre Villages
A village-by-village run down the coast, north to south.
Video: ItalyMammaMiaVideos load from YouTube only when you press play.
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