Cinque Terre Region Geography & Climate

The Cinque Terre occupy about eighteen kilometres of coast where the Ligurian Apennines meet the sea without an intervening plain. The rock is sandstone and schist, folded and fractured, and the slope from the water to the ridge above is severe — several hundred metres within a kilometre of the shore.

There is almost no flat ground. Each village occupies a small valley or stream mouth, and the buildings climb the sides of it. Monterosso alone has a genuine beach, in the newer half of the village.

The slopes are terraced almost everywhere they can be, and the dry-stone retaining walls are estimated at several thousand kilometres in total length. They are the reason the hillside holds together: where they are abandoned and collapse, the slope fails.

That is not theoretical. In October 2011 a storm dropped extraordinary rainfall in a few hours, and debris flows tore through Vernazza and Monterosso, killing people and burying Vernazza’s main street several metres deep.

The Cinque Terre have a mild Mediterranean climate, protected from northerly weather by the Apennine ridge immediately behind. Summers are hot and dry, generally in the high twenties Celsius, with the sea moderating the extremes.

Winters are mild and wet, typically eight to fourteen degrees in the day. Frost is rare at sea level, which is why olives and citrus grow on the terraces.

Rain falls mostly between October and March, and intense autumn storms are a real risk on this terrain. Heavy rainfall triggers landslides and rockfall, and the coastal paths close routinely after it — sometimes for a season, occasionally for years.