Cinque Terre Region historical timeline

The villages were settled from roughly the eleventh century, by people moving down to the coast as raiding eased. What followed was the slow construction of the terraces — generations of dry-stone walling that turned an uncultivable cliff into vineyards and olive groves.

Under Genoese control from the thirteenth century, the villages lived on wine and fish. Their wine was known well beyond Liguria, and the sweet Sciacchetrà, pressed from grapes dried on racks, was the prestige product.

The railway arrived in the 1870s and did two contradictory things. It ended the isolation that had defined the villages, and it also made emigration easy: through the twentieth century people left, and terraces went out of cultivation because the work no longer paid.

The same railway then brought tourism, which arrived in force from the 1990s and now supports the villages almost entirely. The national park was established in 1999 partly to manage that, and partly to fund the repair of the walls that abandonment had left to collapse.