Colour in a city is either accidental or deliberate, and the difference matters more than you might expect. Accidental colour, the kind that comes from centuries of different owners painting different buildings different shades, produces a kind of visual harmony that no design team could replicate. Deliberate colour, the kind that comes from a civic decision to paint everything the same shade of blue or yellow, produces something more theatrical but no less extraordinary.
Both kinds are on this list.
Chefchaouen, Morocco
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Chefchaouen is a city in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco that has been painted in shades of blue for centuries. The origin of the tradition is disputed: some say it was the Jewish community who arrived from Spain in the 15th century, others that the blue was painted to repel mosquitoes. The effect is that the entire medina, the lanes, the stairs, the walls, the flowerpots, all exist in a spectrum from pale sky to deep indigo that changes completely between morning and afternoon light.
The city has been discovered by Instagram travel culture and is considerably more visited than it was a decade ago. The lanes are still extraordinary, the painted walls are still genuinely beautiful, and the surrounding mountains accessed by trails from the edge of the medina are still largely empty of tourists.
Burano, Italy
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Burano is a small island in the Venetian Lagoon forty minutes by boat from Venice, inhabited by lacemakers and fishermen for centuries and distinguished by the practice of painting houses in bright contrasting colours so that fishermen could identify their home from the water in fog. The colours here are not pastels: full red next to bright yellow next to lime green, regulated by a municipal colour scheme that assigns each building its permitted shade.
Visit on a weekday morning. The day trippers from Venice arrive from eleven. Between seven and ten the island belongs to its residents: the lace shops not yet open, the cats on the bridges, the smell of coffee from the bar on the main canal.
Colmar, France
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Colmar in Alsace is a medieval trading town on the Rhine plain whose half-timbered buildings have been painted in colours that seem too vivid for northern France. The effect in the Petite Venise district, where the River Lauch flows through a neighbourhood of coloured houses reflected in the water, is genuinely cinematic. Colmar appears regularly in lists of the most beautiful towns in Europe and the assessment is warranted.
It is also easier to visit than many of its equivalents: direct trains from Strasbourg take thirty minutes, the town has good restaurants drawing on both French and Alsatian traditions, and the Christmas market in December is one of the best in France.
Valparaiso, Chile
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Valparaiso is a port city in Chile built on forty-two hills above the Pacific coast, connected by a network of funicular railways called ascensores. The hillside neighbourhoods, particularly Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepcion, are covered in street murals and painted buildings that have made the city one of the most visually extraordinary in South America. The art here is not decoration. It is political, historical, and alive in a way that curated street art programmes in European cities rarely achieve.
The ascensores are the correct way to move between the hills and the flat port district below. Most of them are over a century old, wooden-cabined, and operated with the pragmatic indifference to aesthetics of infrastructure that has outlasted the era that produced it.
