Most walkable cities in Europe, ranked by daily life

The top 25 cities for daily life on foot

Paris (88) is first. Albacete (85), in 6th place, has a note below the table. Spain holds 15 of the 25 places and 25 of the top 50.

This isn't a Spain list. Six countries reach the top 25, and France has 6 of the 25 places. In every top-25 city, the typical walk takes 1 to 3 minutes to groceries and 1 to 3 minutes to health care. It takes 2 to 4 minutes to school and 1 to 2 minutes to a park.

Minutes are the walk for the typical resident of each city. Cities with the same whole-number score are ordered by their score to one decimal place, then by name.

* A note on Albacete: its score of 85 gives more weight to streets where more people live. Give every building the same weight and the score is 45. That gap is big: the dense town centre pulls up the city's score. Read the 85 with care. This table shows the 85, the score on its page.

Surprises: small cities that score high, and some big names that score lower

City size doesn't decide the score. Reus (81) has about 110,000 people, and its park is 1 minute away. It scores above Berlin (78).

Santa Coloma de Gramenet (85), Girona (85), Boulogne-Billancourt (85) and Reus (81), each with fewer than 125,000 people, rank 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 24th overall. Salamanca (83) and Burgos (81), each with fewer than 180,000 people, rank 12th and 21st.

Big cities are not all alike. Paris (88) is first in the whole list. Warsaw (79) and Berlin (78) score lower, and London (70) and Rome (67) score lower still. Health care takes 2 minutes in Paris and 4 minutes in Berlin.

The top 50 has cities from 11 of the 29 countries. Spain holds 25 places and France holds 9. Italy and Switzerland have 4 each.

Large cities and council areas that score low

The table below shows the 15 lowest scores among the 100 largest cities and areas. They run from North Lanarkshire (48) to Cardiff (63).

Thirteen of the 15 are in the United Kingdom. Many UK entries are council areas, which are the areas a local council runs, and they can include several towns: Bradford's page (57) also lists areas in Ilkley and Keighley. The two outside the UK are Aarhus (56) and Gothenburg (62).

North Lanarkshire (48) has the lowest score in the group. The typical resident walks 12 minutes to health care and 7 minutes to groceries. Even so, 36 in 100 of Europe's people live in a place that scores lower. In Paris (88), the same walks take 2 minutes and 1 minute.

Minutes are the walk for the typical resident.

The best city in each country

In this ranking, 29 countries have a city of 100,000 people or more. National winners in this table range from Reykjavik (63) to Paris (88). After Paris (88) comes Santa Coloma de Gramenet (85), the best city in Spain, then Geneva (83), and Brussels (82) and Athens (82).

* A note on Vilnius: its score of 70 gives more weight to streets where more people live. Give every building the same weight and the score is 33. That gap is big: the dense town centre pulls up the city's score. Read the 70 with care. This table shows the 70, the score on its page.

How the score works

Every street gets a score from 0 to 100 for eight daily needs from public map data. Reach is 60% of the score: how close the eight daily needs are on foot, measured on real streets, never in a straight line. Street quality is 40%: traffic, noise, summer shade, busy roads and slope.

A city's score shows where its typical resident lives. Half of its people live in places that score higher, half in places that score lower. It uses census counts and doesn't use personal data.

The EU's statistics office sets the boundaries; a greater city is the city and the towns that have grown into it. Some UK entries are council areas, the areas a local council runs. The scores on this page are the ones shown on walkably.org on 8 November 2026, based on map data from late October 2026.

Read the full method on the About page.

Download the data

You can download the full table for every city as a CSV file: Europe walking scores, CSV