The 10 old towns we would send you to first, from a medina where donkeys still do the deliveries to a Baltic wall circuit, and the city guide that gets you there.
We ranked these ten by how much of the historic town survives and how much of it is still lived in rather than restored for visitors, so the most famous names finish last. Sleep inside the walls if you can: the evening, after the day crowds leave, shows whether anyone still lives there.
Fes el-Bali, founded around 800, still works as a city, and Guinness lists it as the largest car-free urban area by population. Hire a licensed guide for the first morning; the lanes number in the thousands and no map keeps up.
UNESCO calls it the most complete medieval city in Central Asia, its street plan largely intact around the Kalyan Minaret of 1127. Families still live in the lanes behind the madrasas; walk them at dusk, when the Lyabi-Hauz pool fills with locals.
A whitewashed town inside its medieval walls, with a first-century Roman temple at the top and a university first founded in 1559. Students and families keep the centre lived in year round; come midweek, when the day trips from Lisbon thin out.
A Gothic brick town that came through the Second World War almost untouched, birthplace of Copernicus in 1473 and a university city today. The old town is where people shop and live, not a set; buy gingerbread from the bakeries, not the stalls.
The stone-roofed tower houses survive almost whole because the town was declared a museum city in the 1960s. Many families moved down to the new town since, but the ones who stayed still cook and hang washing in the bazaar quarter; stay in a restored house.
About 1.85 km of the medieval wall and 26 towers still stand around a Gothic town that never lost its streets. The lower town now leans to visitors, so climb to Toompea and the quieter lanes behind it, and walk the wall section by the Nun’s Tower.
A 3.4 km ring wall still closes the Hanseatic town, and over 200 houses inside keep medieval masonry. People live here all year, which is why it works out of season; come in June or September rather than Medieval Week in August, when beds sell out.
UNESCO names it the best-preserved planned Spanish colonial town in Asia, and its stone-and-timber houses are still homes upstairs with shops below. Walk Calle Crisologo early or late; take a kalesa, the horse-drawn carriage, only for the outer streets.
The walled town and its fortress walls up the mountain survive in full, restored after the 1979 earthquake put it on UNESCO’s danger list until 2003. Few residents remain inside; climb the 1,300-plus steps to St John at opening, before the cruise passengers.
The finest walls on this list, 1,940 metres of them, intact around the whole city. It finishes last because a 2016 count found 1,557 people living inside, against 5,872 in 1967; walk the walls at opening, then stay somewhere outside them.
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