Items21The creator’s order
  1. 1Tallinn Old TownTallinn Old TownTallinn is the rare capital where the medieval wall is still a big part of the walk. About 1.85 km of it survives, along with 26 of its towers, so a loop of the lower town keeps bringing you back to stone curtain and red-capped turrets. The town splits in two: the merchants' lower town around the…0
  2. 2Fes el BaliFes el BaliFes el Bali is not a preserved museum piece but a working medieval city, and that is the reason to go. Founded under the Idrisid dynasty around the turn of the ninth century, it is one of the largest car-free urban areas anywhere, so goods still move through its lanes by handcart and donkey. At…0
  3. 3Cité de CarcassonneCité de CarcassonneFew old towns anywhere give you walls on this scale: about 3 km of double ramparts punctuated by 52 towers, wrapped around a hilltop cité you can walk end to end in an hour. Go knowing what you are seeing. The restoration that began in 1853 under Eugène Viollet-le-Duc saved the place from decay…0
  4. 4VisbyVisbyVisby, on the Swedish island of Gotland, keeps one of the most complete town walls in northern Europe. Built up in stages through the Middle Ages and raised to its full height around 1300, it runs for roughly 3.4 km around the old Hanseatic port, with 27 ground towers and nine smaller saddle towers…0
  5. 5RegensburgRegensburgOld town with Stadtamhof Regensburg is the answer for anyone tired of German old towns rebuilt after 1945. Its medieval center came through the Second World War largely untouched, so the tall patrician tower houses, the Gothic cathedral and the tangle of lanes behind them are the real fabric, not…0
  6. 6Kraków Old TownKraków Old TownKraków shows medieval town planning at full size. When the city received Magdeburg rights in 1257, its layout was set around a vast market square of roughly 200 meters a side, and you still walk the streets that lead off it today. The square, with the long Cloth Hall in the middle, the twin towers…0
  7. 7SienaSienaHistoric center Siena is the Gothic city that stopped growing at the right moment, so its steep brick streets still pour down into the Piazza del Campo much as they did when the city was an independent republic. That square, where the Palio horse race is still run, is one of the great medieval…0
  8. 8Toledo, SpainToledo, SpainHistoric center Toledo packs three religious traditions into one hilltop. Known as the City of Three Cultures for the centuries when Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side by side, it keeps synagogues, a former mosque and a towering Gothic cathedral within a few minutes' walk of each other, all…0
  9. 9ÁvilaÁvilaWalled old town Ávila's wall is complete, and that is rare. The circuit runs 2,516 meters with 87 rounded towers and nine gates, and from the plain outside it still closes around the old town in one unbroken line of stone. You can walk about 1.7 km along the top, entered at set points with a…0
  10. 10YorkYorkWalled city center York's walls are usually counted as the longest town walls in England, a circuit of about 3.4 km, and walking them is the best way into the city. Most of the surviving stonework dates from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, on a line the Romans began, and the walk links…0