The Mediterranean's Most Beautiful Train Journeys

There is a moment, somewhere on a coastal railway with the sea filling the window and your shoulders finally dropping, when you remember that travel used to feel like this. Not a sprint between airports, not a white-knuckled drive on an unfamiliar road, but a glass of something on a fold-down table while the most beautiful country you have ever seen unspools past the glass at a civilised pace.

The Mediterranean is laced with railways built for exactly this. Some are famous, some are barely known, and the best of them turn the journey itself into the part of the holiday you remember most clearly.

Italy: the Cinque Terre line

The easiest beautiful train journey in Europe runs along the Cinque Terre, linking the five villages in a few minutes each, dipping in and out of tunnels to reveal one impossible clifftop town after another. You can hop on and off all day on a single card. It is the gentlest possible introduction to slow coastal travel, and it pairs naturally with the unhurried weekend we describe in A Slow Weekend in the Cinque Terre.

Italy: the Ligurian Riviera

For a longer ride, the line from Genoa to Ventimiglia hugs the Riviera the whole way, threading resort towns, palm-lined promenades, and glimpses of the sea between headlands. Sit on the left-hand, seaward side and let two hours pass like twenty minutes.

Italy–Switzerland: the Centovalli

The Centovalli Railway between Domodossola and Locarno is a different kind of beauty — not the sea but a hundred valleys, chestnut forests, stone bridges, and waterfalls, a narrow-gauge train picking its way through Alpine-Mediterranean borderland. It is one of Europe's great undersung rides.

Spain: the Costa Brava and Málaga–Ronda

In Catalonia, the regional trains up the Costa Brava from Barcelona give you cove after cove. In the south, the line from Málaga up to Ronda climbs from the coast into the mountains through gorges and white villages — a short journey that feels like crossing into another country. It is the perfect overture to the inland Andalusia we cover in Andalusia for People Who Hate Tourist Traps.

Greece: toward the Peloponnese

Greek railways are limited, but the scenic narrow-gauge rack railway through the Vouraikos Gorge at Diakofto–Kalavryta is a small marvel, climbing through a river canyon on a line more than a century old.

How to ride them well

Three small disciplines turn a good train journey into a memorable one. First, choose the slow train. High-speed lines are engineering triumphs that spend much of their time in tunnels; the older regional services run along the coast at the pace scenery deserves. Second, book the right seat — on coastal lines, the sea side; a few minutes' research is worth two hours of view. Third, bring nothing urgent. A book, a snack bought at the station, a window: that is the entire equipment list.

The deeper pleasure of train travel is what it does to your sense of time. A car keeps you braced; a plane erases the in-between entirely. A train hands the hours back to you, slow and framed and yours. It is the same instinct behind everything we write about travelling gently — see Slow Travel After 50 — and there is no purer place to practise it than a window seat above a blue sea, with nowhere you urgently need to be.