10 Spectacular Autumn Escapes in Europe: The Ultimate Guide

🇸🇮 Slovenia — Bled and Ljubljana. In fact, this is the single most improved-by-autumn place on the list. You get Lake Bled with mist on the water at breakfast, no queue for the pletna boats, and roasted chestnuts on every corner in Ljubljana. The Lake Bled day tour from Ljubljana handles it for you without a hire car.

🇭🇷 Croatia — Plitvice and the Dalmatian coast. The sea holds 22°C into early October while your crowds vanish with the last cruise ship. Plitvice Lakes is at its best now — beech and hornbeam turning above turquoise water — and the Plitvice guided tour from Split with entry tickets saves you the ticket-cap problem that catches people out.

🇮🇹 Piedmont — Alba and the Langhe. Above all, this is the one you go for the food. White truffles come out of the ground from October, the Alba International White Truffle Fair runs weekends through November, and the Langhe vineyard landscape is a UNESCO site that turns copper around you. Go truffle hunting with a trifolau and his dog — you will talk about that two hours for years.

🇮🇹 Lake Como. Autumn is when Como stops being a celebrity postcard and goes back to being a lake. The gardens stay open through October, the ferries switch to the winter timetable but still run, and the mist sitting between the mountains at dawn is worth setting an early alarm for. Take the four-hour boat tour to Bellagio and Varenna and you get all three towns without hiring a car.

🇷🇴 Transylvania. Beech forest going gold over painted Saxon villages, and the cheapest good food in Europe — you will eat well for the price of a London sandwich. The Bran Castle, bear sanctuary and Râșnov citadel tour covers the three things worth your day out of Brașov. Bran throws a Halloween party that is enormous fun and has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual Vlad III.

🇵🇱 Gdansk. Absurdly good value in autumn, and the Baltic light in October does something lovely to those merchant facades — you will take more photos here than you planned to. Give a morning to the Malbork Castle half-day tour, the largest brick castle in the world, which out of season you will have almost entirely to yourself.

🇦🇹 The Wachau Valley, Austria. Terraced vineyards run along the Danube between Melk and Krems, and in autumn the whole valley is drinking Sturm — cloudy, half-fermented grape must that shows up for about six weeks and tastes like nothing else you have had. The Wachau day tour from Vienna gets you Melk Abbey, Dürnstein and Krems in a day.

🇭🇺 Budapest. Of course, the right time to sit in a thermal bath is when the air is cold enough to steam, and October and November are exactly that. A Széchenyi day pass costs less than a cinema ticket in London and nobody minds if you stay six hours. Bring flip-flops, and go on a weekday morning if you want the water quiet.

🇨🇿 Český Krumlov. A UNESCO old town wrapped inside a river bend, and in autumn the day-trippers thin out enough that you can actually walk it. The small-group day trip from Prague is the easy version, but stay the night if you can — the town is a completely different place once the coaches leave.

🇵🇹 Madeira. Twenty-two to twenty-five degrees in November, subtropical, and the levada walks follow irrigation channels along cliff faces through laurel forest that is a UNESCO world heritage site. Do the 25 Fontes and Rabaçal levada hike — it is the one everybody comes home talking about.

🇲🇹 Malta. You can still swim here into the third week of November — the sea holds summer heat longer than anywhere else in Europe. Add Valletta, the megalithic temples that predate the pyramids, and a ferry over to Gozo, and you have a proper trip rather than just warm weather.

Both are three to four hours from most of northern Europe and both are at their cheapest exactly when the north gets grim. If your autumn is really about escaping autumn, start here.