What would make a rural area good/set it apart from a bad rural area?
This is not a common standard, I have no idea how to rank rural areas.
I’d say Slovenia has very good rural areas compared to its urban areas. Maybe they’re not to best ones per se, but sometimes they’re legit better than their urban counterparts
In many countries, rich people reside in cities and poorer people live on the countryside.
In Austria it‘s the other way round, most rural areas are affluent and have at least some bus connections, sometimes even a train station. Which means, it‘s theoretically possible to live car free in many smaller villages in Austria.
Norway. Fjords, villages, forrests, oil, decent food, they have it all.
You’ll go bankrupt travelling there, but damn it’s nice.
How do you define best rural areas? What I like about NL is the open landscape. But Iceland is my favorite.
How do you define “best”?
Rural England, in the Cotswolds, Peak District, Lake District, Devon/Cornwall, Northumbria and the Yorkshire Dales is amazing, but the problem with some villages/towns is obviously they’re quite ‘noisy’ due to being rammed full of tourists every summer. Now obviously, the economy benefits from this, but it has an impact on ‘quiet’ living, since in some of those places, like Bourton, there’s no way for locals to even get a drink from their local pub on a Sunday afternoon, because they’re so crowded. Granted, I last visited during the pandemic, which no doubt had an impact.
Some of them, though, are out of the way, and life does seem genuinely ‘slow’ or idyllic there, with farmers’ markets being the busiest times of the year.
It depends what you’re looking for! I personally love rural Italy, the Dordogne region, Provence, Galicia, eastern Poland, southern Norway, the Cotswolds (where I live), the Norfolk broads and north coast, the Gower peninsula, the Pyrenees… in my experience, most places have something going for them.
I don’t wanna speak for the whole country since I’ve simply never been to any other rural areas, but rural Bavaria is pretty nice. Nice scenery, low unemployment, some migration of young people to the cities, but I don’t think as much as in some other areas (and as I’m noticing now that I’m turning 30 many are moving back to have children), decent social life if you’re open to it.
I don’t know what a good rural area is, but in France we have some very different type, so you have the choice : mountain, hills, flat lands, humid, dry, cold, hot, close to the sea or not. Anyway, the farther you are from a big city, the worst the services are : a bus twice a day if you’re lucky, but no train, no doctor, very little shops or a mobile shop that goes from one village to another. You literally can’t have a life if you don’t drive.
If by good you mean lots of nature then the Nordic countries are the best due to the low population density. Romania, if I’m not mistaken, has some of Europe’s largest wilderness areas (excluding Russia) as well.
Surprised nobody said Romania yet. This place is my chosen home and it’s mostly due to the countryside atmosphere. The Carpathians offer a high variety of geography while you don’t have the cost of living of the Alps.
I can’t speak for all of Europe but I found the Icelandic countryside to be absolutely breathtaking, especially in the summer the contrast of green and ice
The older I get, the more I appreciate the gently rolling hills of England. I used to prefer dramatic mountains and conifer forests, but seeing our patchwork gold-green hills with little puffs of trees in the blazing sun puts me in a special kind of zen zone now.
However you rank rural areas (as I see as a discussion point in the comments) it isn’t going to be the Netherlands lol. Unless rural area means still within 30 mins cycling of any civilisation lol.
Finland used to have good rural areas. Due to urbanisation a lot of rural areas that were vibrant 20 years ago are only skeletons now. Many small villages had a kindergarten, library, some had a school, grocery store. The village I grew up in had all of those except a school. Now it has none of those left. All centralized in the nearest town.
Urbanisation is still ongoing and probably majority of the rural areas are slowly declining into nothingness. I, as all other kids born in the village in 1990’s has left it. Most of us moved to the capital region.
15 comments
What would make a rural area good/set it apart from a bad rural area?
This is not a common standard, I have no idea how to rank rural areas.
I’d say Slovenia has very good rural areas compared to its urban areas. Maybe they’re not to best ones per se, but sometimes they’re legit better than their urban counterparts
In many countries, rich people reside in cities and poorer people live on the countryside.
In Austria it‘s the other way round, most rural areas are affluent and have at least some bus connections, sometimes even a train station. Which means, it‘s theoretically possible to live car free in many smaller villages in Austria.
Norway. Fjords, villages, forrests, oil, decent food, they have it all.
You’ll go bankrupt travelling there, but damn it’s nice.
How do you define best rural areas? What I like about NL is the open landscape. But Iceland is my favorite.
How do you define “best”?
Rural England, in the Cotswolds, Peak District, Lake District, Devon/Cornwall, Northumbria and the Yorkshire Dales is amazing, but the problem with some villages/towns is obviously they’re quite ‘noisy’ due to being rammed full of tourists every summer. Now obviously, the economy benefits from this, but it has an impact on ‘quiet’ living, since in some of those places, like Bourton, there’s no way for locals to even get a drink from their local pub on a Sunday afternoon, because they’re so crowded. Granted, I last visited during the pandemic, which no doubt had an impact.
Some of them, though, are out of the way, and life does seem genuinely ‘slow’ or idyllic there, with farmers’ markets being the busiest times of the year.
It depends what you’re looking for! I personally love rural Italy, the Dordogne region, Provence, Galicia, eastern Poland, southern Norway, the Cotswolds (where I live), the Norfolk broads and north coast, the Gower peninsula, the Pyrenees… in my experience, most places have something going for them.
I don’t wanna speak for the whole country since I’ve simply never been to any other rural areas, but rural Bavaria is pretty nice. Nice scenery, low unemployment, some migration of young people to the cities, but I don’t think as much as in some other areas (and as I’m noticing now that I’m turning 30 many are moving back to have children), decent social life if you’re open to it.
I don’t know what a good rural area is, but in France we have some very different type, so you have the choice : mountain, hills, flat lands, humid, dry, cold, hot, close to the sea or not. Anyway, the farther you are from a big city, the worst the services are : a bus twice a day if you’re lucky, but no train, no doctor, very little shops or a mobile shop that goes from one village to another. You literally can’t have a life if you don’t drive.
If by good you mean lots of nature then the Nordic countries are the best due to the low population density. Romania, if I’m not mistaken, has some of Europe’s largest wilderness areas (excluding Russia) as well.
Surprised nobody said Romania yet. This place is my chosen home and it’s mostly due to the countryside atmosphere. The Carpathians offer a high variety of geography while you don’t have the cost of living of the Alps.
I can’t speak for all of Europe but I found the Icelandic countryside to be absolutely breathtaking, especially in the summer the contrast of green and ice
The older I get, the more I appreciate the gently rolling hills of England. I used to prefer dramatic mountains and conifer forests, but seeing our patchwork gold-green hills with little puffs of trees in the blazing sun puts me in a special kind of zen zone now.
However you rank rural areas (as I see as a discussion point in the comments) it isn’t going to be the Netherlands lol. Unless rural area means still within 30 mins cycling of any civilisation lol.
Finland used to have good rural areas. Due to urbanisation a lot of rural areas that were vibrant 20 years ago are only skeletons now. Many small villages had a kindergarten, library, some had a school, grocery store. The village I grew up in had all of those except a school. Now it has none of those left. All centralized in the nearest town.
Urbanisation is still ongoing and probably majority of the rural areas are slowly declining into nothingness. I, as all other kids born in the village in 1990’s has left it. Most of us moved to the capital region.