The Handmade Landscape Behind Cinque Terre — and the Race to Keep It Standing

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When you first see Cinque Terre, the villages look as though they grew naturally from the rock. The colourful buildings seem to have simply sprouted along the cliffs, tumbling toward the sea over centuries without human help.

They didn’t.

Every inch of the hillside around those five villages was shaped by hand. What looks like a natural coastline is one of the largest feats of sustained human engineering in Italy. It took a thousand years to build. And parts of it are slowly disappearing.

What You’re Actually Looking At

The terraces of Cinque Terre were created over roughly 1,000 years, beginning in the early medieval period.

Farmers carved ledges into sheer cliff faces using only stone and muscle. Then they built dry-stone walls — walls without mortar — to hold the thin soil in place against wind, rain, and gravity.

These terraces stack vertically up slopes so steep that ordinary farming was simply impossible. The result is a staircase landscape that rises for hundreds of metres above the five villages: Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore.

UNESCO recognised the entire Cinque Terre landscape as a World Heritage Site in 1997. Not just the villages. The terraces themselves were the reason.

A Number That Will Stop You

There is a statistic about Cinque Terre that most visitors never hear.

The dry-stone walls of the region stretch for approximately 7,000 kilometres in total. That is further than the distance from London to New York.

Every one of those walls was built without machinery, without concrete, and without blueprints. Farmers learned the craft from their parents, who learned from theirs. Each stone is placed by hand, angled slightly inward, and locked against its neighbours without a drop of mortar.

The walls hold not because of glue but because of geometry. This technique — called muretti a secco in Italian — was listed by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2018.

What Those Terraces Were Growing

The terraces exist because of two things: grapes and basil.

Cinque Terre wine — particularly the rare sweet passito called Sciacchetrà — has been produced on these slopes for centuries. The harvest happens entirely by hand. On the steepest sections, grapes are carried in baskets on workers’ backs or lowered down to the villages by rope and pulley.

The basil grown on these terraces is equally prized. Small-leafed, deeply fragrant, and protected by its own DOP status, Cinque Terre basil is what gives traditional Ligurian pesto its character. If you want to understand why pesto from Genoa tastes unlike anything else, part of the answer grows on these terraced slopes.

To grow anything here required a terrace. There was no alternative. The cliff faces left no flat ground at all.

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How the Terraces Are Being Lost

Since the Second World War, the terraces have been steadily abandoned.

Young people left for cities. The physical demands of terrace maintenance — rebuilding collapsed walls, clearing eroded soil, harvesting on near-vertical slopes with no mechanical help — no longer made economic sense when easier work was available elsewhere.

When walls are not repaired, they collapse. When slopes are not managed, soil washes away. Landslides follow.

In October 2011, violent storms sent catastrophic landslides through Vernazza and Monterosso. Two people died. Thousands of tonnes of earth buried the village streets and destroyed buildings that had stood for centuries. Investigators traced much of the damage to decades of abandoned, unmaintained terraces. The landscape that had protected the villages for a thousand years had become a liability.

The People Still Fighting for Them

The Cinque Terre National Park now runs active restoration programmes to rebuild collapsed walls and replant abandoned terraces.

Volunteer teams travel from across Italy and beyond to spend weekends on the slopes. They learn the muretti a secco technique under the guidance of local craftspeople and rebuild walls that erosion has toppled. The work is slow, physical, and done entirely by hand — the only way it has ever been done.

A small group of farmers still works the active terraces. Some use narrow monorail systems installed on the steepest sections — motorised carts that carry grapes, tools, and soil up and down slopes no vehicle could otherwise reach. Others still carry everything by hand.

They are not performing tradition for visitors. They are maintaining a living landscape that still produces wine, basil, and food for local families and restaurants. The terraces remain functional. Barely, in some places. But they remain.

What to Look For When You Visit

The best views of the terrace system come from the coastal paths themselves. The Sentiero Azzurro — the Blue Trail — runs between the five villages and passes directly through working and restored terraces. You will walk past grapevines and basil plants growing in soil that would have washed into the sea centuries ago without those walls behind them.

Look up at the terraces rising above you. Every wall was placed by hand, stone by stone. Every ledge was carved from rock by someone who expected nothing from their labour except a place to grow food.

The photographs of Cinque Terre that fill every travel magazine exist because of that effort. The views you have come to see are not scenery. They are the residue of a thousand years of work.

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Plan Your Italy Trip

Ready to experience Cinque Terre and the rest of Italy for yourself? Our Ultimate Italy Travel Guide has everything you need — from which regions to prioritise to how long to spend in each area.

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