Top 5 most beautiful places in Europe

Dubrovnik. Renaissance city of Ragusa and major rival of the venerable Republic of Venice. Tremendously pretty, it is justifiably Croatia's most visited destination. The sun glints off the broad limestone paving stones of the Plaça, polished smooth by generations of footsteps. Narrow hillside alleys of vines and laundry lead up steep steps between Venetian balconies and shuttered windows to the famous medieval walls.

I am only passing through Dubrovnik, on my way to Sarajevo. I've been here twice now, and I think it's one of the most beautiful places in the world. Having travelled to many places I don't say that lightly. Silver-coloured cliffs surrounding Dubrovnik drop into opaline water. Tall spears of mediterranean cypress tower like shepherds above flocks of bony olive trees on the karst rock.

And somehow Croatia produces stunning women—blonde jaw-droppers who would take the catwalks of Milan by storm, and probably do.

So this inevitably leads me to the following entirely subjective list:

The Solonaut's
TOP FIVE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACES IN EUROPE

(in no particular order)

Dubrovnik, Croatia
One of the best preserved walled cities in Europe. Maybe the best. Tourism has grown considerably in the last five years, but even amid the summer throngs it is easy to find a quiet bar in a lane, such as Caffe Soul, to drink local fruit brandy to the serenade of a live guitarist or watch an evening performance of a chamber orchestra in the chapel of Saint Saviour.

Oia, Santorini, Greece
Those famous photos of Santorini—white domed chapels with blue crosses and low, square houses barnacled above an azure sea—are taken from Oia. The island bakes in a delicious heat in summer. It is the only place I have ever been tempted to kick back with a beer and a book on a deck chair by the pool to overlook the caldera. I deliberately missed my departure ferry to stay. Pronounced ee-ah, Oia is probably my personal favourite in this list, above Dubrovnik.

Venice, Italy
Go back a thousand years in time. Tall fourteenth-century Gothic buildings usher you between piazze and you walk and walk and walk, down tall lanes, between palaces and churches, over bridges and under arched overhangs, and there isn't a hint of the modern world anywhere. You get a sense of how powerfully wealthy this state once was from the vast and sumptuous collection of paintings in the Doge's Palace—one after another gilt-framed Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese. It's like feasting on too much chocolate.

The Vézère and Dordogne valleys, France
Go in October, in wool coat and scarf weather. Leaves from woods of oak turn brilliant orange, yellow and brown in autumn and flock like starlings in the wind. Chateaux stud the hills and charming villages grace the valleys, such as the riverside La Roque-Gageac, the dramatic cliff-hugging town of Rocamadour, and the magnificent medieval Sarlat-la-Canéda, where I lodged for a week in a 16th-century tower.

Lucerne, Switzerland
In late spring, Lucerne is storybook. Yellow flowers whiffling in green meadows. Shaggy highland cattle clanking cowbells. Bright sun and blue sky. Tall evergreen trees. Snowy mountains. White swans on crystal waters. It's ridiculous.

Gouffre de Padirac

The Gouffre de Padirac (Padirac Chasm) is a navigable underground river in the Lot départment, east of the Dordogne.  It begins at the bottom of a a 75-metre deep sinkhole, a huge cylindrical shaft which was once a cave before the ceiling fell in eons ago to leave a massive lightwell almost half its height across.  Three separate lifts and a scaffolding of metal stairs have been built against the walls to reach the floor of the chasm.

It was drizzling on the drive there.  It had been raining for days, so we were carrying umbrellas and rain jackets.  By the time we parked the car the rain stopped , but Mai Li asked if we should bring the umbrellas.

"Pff," I mocked. "We're going underground. It doesn't rain underground."

Indeed it does.

After wending us through corridors of limestone on a subterranean passage of water coloured jade with silt, our guide moored the flat-bottomed boat and led us up the corkscrewing ballroom stairway of the enormous Grand Dôme.  Water fell more heavily than the showers outside from the nearly 100-metre ceiling into the Lac de la Pluie, the Lake of Rain, below us, soaking us on the way down.

The 60-metre tall stalactite called the Grande Pendoloque, the Great Pendant, dips down to just two metres above the surface of the lake.  Limestone formations congealed over millennia on the cavern’s tiers look genuinely organic, like broad mushrooms or a Chinese Juniper bonsai, and in the pools that collect on the cascading plateaux smooth natural weirs form, curving so artistically that we debated over whether it was man-made.

The cave complex is vast.  Two journeys by boat, long passages by foot and hundreds of stairs represent only a tiny fraction which is open to the public.

The Dordogne

Three hours west of Lyon by train I picked up another car and arrived in the Dordogne départment of France in the full of Autumn.  I haven't had a Northern Autumn in over ten years, and the Périgord Noir county and the Vézère Valley is wooded with oak forests.  The countryside is orange, brown, yellow and red and threaded with bermed, winding roads, perfect for driving a stick shift.  I'm soon slaloming through falling showers of oak leaves.  I've driven into my Windows desktop wallpaper.

It is also home to the medieval city of Sarlat-la-Canéda, a preserved and restored living representation of 14th-century France.  I based myself in an apartment here for a week.  A few days later Mai Li arrived to besiege chateaux, spelunk caves, and indulge in fois gras and confit du canard before idling away the last week of this odyssey in Paris.

The day Mai Li arrived, it rained for the first time in the region for six months.  Scattered Autumn showers pestered every day thereafter, but were a cakewalk after the Adriatic vortex.

Where there is Man there is art, and where there is art there is graffiti

The Vézère Valley in the Dordogne region of France is littered with limestone caves, 25 of which are decorated with paintings estimated to be up to 20,000 years old, the earliest known example of painting.  The most famous of these is the Lascaux complex of caves, discovered in 1940 by some boys looking for their dog (actually, it was discovered by the dog himself, Robot, who had fallen in).  Comprising nearly 2,000 figures, primarily of horses but also of stags, bison, and aurochs (ancestors of modern cattle), it has been dubbed "the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory" and includes the famous Painted Gallery and the Great Hall of the Bulls.

The only other polychromatic paintings discovered in the valley are in the Font-de-Gaume cave, depicting bison and horses again but also mammoths and, the principle food source of the time, reindeer.  The best known images from this cave are a frieze of five bison and "the sexual parade of the reindeer," where a stag is smelling the head of a kneeling doe.  The natural contours of the cave walls were exploited to emphasise the hump of a bison or the belly of a horse.  (Photography is disallowed, so here's a picture from a government website.)  Sadly, yet again this is artwork defaced by graffiti, this time from the 19th century, where bison paintings at the fore of the cave have had names carved into them.  It's difficult to excuse, but it has to be said that the paintings had not been scientifically observed at the time and there was no comprehension of their age or significance.

Another site, Grotte de Rouffignac, is sometimes called "the cave of a hundred mammoths."  An electric train takes visitors into a ten-kilometre deep complex of painted mammoths, horses, ibex, and even rhinoceros.  I hugely regret that I missed this.  On 30 October, I set out late to see both Font-de-Gaume and Rouffignac, but had to wait for over an hour at Font-de-Gaume because they limit the size of the tours.  This is understandable; when Lascaux was discovered there was no such limitation, and the change in air quality from 1,200 visitors a day caused the development of a green fungus, la malaise vert, and a white calcite crystal, la malaise blanc, to damage the paintings.  This in turn led Lascaux to first limit numbers of visitors, and then to close permanently in 1963.  Indeed, there is suggestion that this may happen with Font-de-Gaume; the tour guide showed us an example of a white fungus growing on the wall.  The only way to appreciate Lascaux today is to visit "Lascaux II," an impressive centimetre by centimetre three-dimensional reproduction of the cave built into the hillside beside the original, with the paintings exactly reproduced using the same pigmentation and techniques.  Of course, knowing it is a facsimile unavoidably detracts from the awe, and the experience becomes a slightly carnivalesque appreciation of the facsimile itself.  Nevertheless, it is sympathetically and tastefully executed.  But with the delay at Font-de-Gaume and the closing for the season of Grotte de Rouffignac on 01 November, it was too late to return another day.