8 Unexpectedly Wild, Beautiful Places in Europe

This marbled, crumpled landscape was created when southern Iceland’s volcanoes belched forth thick rhyolite lava that flowed and cooled slowly. Billowing white steam venting from below the earth is a reminder that this region still is not at rest.

The windblown and remote Faroe Islands, with all the antiquity and modernity of their Danish motherland, are home to rugged mountains and green, treeless slopes that suddenly drop thousands of feet into craggy fjords.

Jutting from the stormy Atlantic Ocean like a pair of sunken Gothic spires, the jagged salt-encrusted islands sit just 7.5 miles (12 km) off Ireland’s Iveragh Peninsula, but remain a world apart.

A chain of slumbering volcanoes called Chaîne des Puys, rounded and velvet green, slinks across central France’s Massif Central to create one of the most stunning, distinctive landscapes in western Europe.

The autonomous region of German-speaking Italy is dominated by nine mountain chains, including the bald, rocky-cropped Dolomites, and several meandering ranges of the Alps.

Visitors to this region are enticed by a dazzling atmospheric display created on cold winter days by innumerable, many-faceted ice crystals lingering in the atmosphere and glittering in the sun.

Gushing waterfalls plunge from 16 terraced, luminous, aqua blue lakes, coursing through wild beech and fir forests in a landscape that was known by 17th-century explorers as “Devil’s Garden” — but Plitvice Lakes is far more like paradise.

Little known and imposing, these ancient massifs of the Albanian Alps soar to heights of 8,835 feet (2,693 m) and harbor aquamarine waterfalls, ancient towpaths, and bridges carved into the golden-hued karstic rock.