This week’s Frifotos was ‘view’. Yes! I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to sort through my photos. Here are my top 11 favourite views, for varying reasons and of different places. What are your favourites?

1. The Pyrenees

Mountains in my opinion make the best views. Whether you’re looking up at them, or down from them, they are the best landscape view. They change every day, every hour. Light, weather, the clarity of the air; they all change mountains and what they looked like. Below is just one view of the Pyrenees from the balcony of the house we lived in last summer.

2. The Pyrenees take 2

This is the Pyrenees on a different day. The sky was clear and the light piercing, and suddenly a whole handful of mountain peaks appeared in the distance. 

3. The Pyrenees Take 3

Mountains changing again at night…

4. Vineyards

In the Languedoc, vineyards are king. And they are everywhere. But with the views you get above, in, or alongside a vineyard, I’m not complaining….

5. Sunset views

Next best after mountains: sunsets. The view from the balcony at home at sunset is always something to behold.

6. View from a bridge in Venice 

All the colours and hustle and bustle of Venice. I’ve never been somewhere so noisy and hectic that retains all of its heritage and beauty. Yes bits are tacky and full of tourists, but Venice rises above it all.

7. A market square in Palma de Mallorca

After exams in my final year at university two friends and I visited Palma. We rented a flat with a balcony looking out onto this square; we dragged the kitchen table to the windows and ate our breakfast, lunch and dinner there. It was the perfect view for an amazing holiday.

8. The Eiffel Tower on Bastille Day 

A blurred view of the Eiffel Tower fireworks. The view from an island in the middle of the Seine was amazing.

9. A view over a Provencal village

10. A snowy view of the River Wear in my university town of Durham 

11. A view of the Stari Most bridge, Mostar. 

The bridge is infamous these days for all the wrong reasons; when it was blown up it was a symbol for the news stories reporting the fissures in Bosnia. In fact its significance goes a lot further back than that, and when it was rebuilt it reinstated an important piece of history to the Balkans.