You can plan your itinerary down to the tiniest detail, do hours of research before you arrive and have a ridiculously long notes page of recommendations from friends, but sometimes the best places you discover on holiday are ones you just stumble across when you’re wandering around.
Europe is blessed with lots of cities that are great places for a stroll – ‘walkable’ cities, if you will. But where is the very best place to get around by foot? Well, Preply, an online language tutor platform, has researched the walking distance between the top five attractions in Europe’s 30 most popular cities to find out.
Seville claims the top spot – with an average walking distance of just 1.6km and a walking time of just 20 minutes, the city is strides ahead of other destinations in Spain (the next entry is Madrid in 14th place) and has by far the lowest step count, at 2,100.
In second place was Venice, where walking distance is around 2km and time is roughly 27 minutes, and in third place it’s Porto with an average distance of 2.3km but only 30 mins – just prepare yourself for those hills.
Interestingly Munich, which ranked as the world’s most walkable city in this study, ranks as one of the least walkable according to Preply’s research, with an average distance of a whopping 16km and a time of three hours and 15 minutes. The previous study, conducted by Compare the Market AU, looks at stuff like rainfall, number of walking trails, safety score, cost of public transport and car-free places. It might be best to head to Munich yourself and see which research walks all over the other.
The 15 most walkable cities in Europe
1. Seville, Spain
2. Venice, Italy
3. Porto, Portugal
4. Florence, Italy
6. Amsterdam, Netherlands
7. Cologne, Germany and Milan, Italy
9. Verona, Italy
11. Rome, Italy and Istanbul, Türkiye
13. Copenhagen, Denmark
14. Madrid, Spain
The 5 least walkable cities in Europe
1. Lisbon, Portugal
3. Hamburg, Germany
4. Munich, Germany
To read more about this research, you can do so on Preply’s website.
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