How to Plan a Naturist Road Trip through Europe

Europe is a paradise for naturist vacations. When we look at NUDE, for example, we notice that the large majority of nude vacation destinations can be found in Europe. In fact, even in just the south-western part of Europe. The continent has much more to offer to its visitors than just an abundance of naturist resorts and nude beaches. Within relatively short distances you can find yourself indulged by amazing art and culture, standing in awe in front of magnificent architecture and exploring splendid nature. In short, Europe is an excellent destination for a naturist road trip.

We’ll start straight away with the most difficult part of planning your naturist road trip: Which places would you like to visit? You will need to make a selection. Back in 2019, we did an epic nude European road trip for more than 3.5 months and probably visited less than 5% of all naturist places, so covering them all is just not an option.

One question you want to ask yourself before you start planning is where you want to put the focus of this trip.
Do you want to explore Europe and occasionally stay at a naturist place?
Or do you want a naturist vacation and occasionally visit some of the country’s highlights?

For finding the naturist options in a certain country or region, we recommend to have a look at our Destination page or to get one of our Ultimate Naturist Destination guides. If you would be looking at a region that we haven’t visited yet, you can always rely on NUDE as well to explore the options.

The naturist season (meaning: at least some agreeable weather during the day to spend some time outside in the nude) in Europe starts around early April and runs to the end of October. Of course, this is different from destination to destination, so we’ll give you an indication of when is the best time to travel to which part of Europe.

Netherlands: June to September
Belgium: June to September
Germany: June to September
Northern Italy: June to September
Southern Italy: May to October
Northern France: June to September
France Atlantic Coast: June to September
France Mediterranean Coast: May to October
Northern Atlantic Spain: June to September
Northern Mediterranean Spain: May to September
Southern Mediterranean Spain: April to October
Spain Canary islands: Year-round
Northern Portugal: June to September
Central Portugal: May to October
Southern Portugal: April to October
Greece: May to October
Croatia: May to October
Montenegro: May to October
Nordic countries: June to September
Eastern Europe: May to September

This is of course just an indication. Even in the middle of winter, there will be days when you can comfortably spend a couple of hours naked outside in southern Spain or southern Portugal, for example. But if you pick our proposed periods, your chances for decent naturist weather will be the highest.

Also important to keep in mind is that July and August are high season in pretty much all of Europe. This means more people and higher prices.

For a very long time, naturist resorts in Europe were exclusively campsites. Those days are in the past and the variety of European naturist options keeps growing year after year. Also, the campsites have noticed this growing request for more comfort and luxury and tackle this with an offer of rental accommodations like safari tents, bungalows, and mobile homes. Today, there are few naturist campsites left where you can only stay when you bring your own accommodation.

The accommodation offer tends to differ from country to country. If the type of accommodation is important to you, here’s a short overview of what the different countries have to offer:

Netherlands: Campsites and B&B
Belgium: Campsites and 1 B&B at the coast
Germany: Campsites
Italy: Campsites and B&B
France: Mostly Campsites, a growing number of B&B, and self-service apartments/villas.
Spain: Campsites, hotels, B&B, and self-service apartments/villas.
Portugal: Campsites, B&B, and self-service apartments/villas.
Greece: Hotels and self-service apartments/villas.
Croatia: Campsites
Montenegro: Campsites
Nordic countries: Campsites
Eastern Europe: Campsites.

NUDE is an excellent place to find naturist accommodations all over Europe (and the rest of the world).

An advantage of naturist traveling in Europe is that naturist resorts are never far away from each other. Especially in western Europe, it’ll rarely take you more than a couple of hours to drive from one naturist place to the next. But there will always be reasons to choose for textile accommodation instead when you’re road tripping. After a romantic dinner in Paris, a day of exploring Rome, a night out in Berlin or an exhausting afternoon at a Spanish nude beach, you really don’t want to get back into the car anymore. Or wait for the next train.

To find textile accommodations, Booking.com is by far and large our preferred website. They often have amazing deals and after your second stay with them, you start receiving “genius” discounts.

Another website that you definitely want to look into as well is Airbnb.

The decision about how to move from one place to another in Europe will be a constant fight between your wallet and your ecological conscience. Strangely enough, the most polluting ways of travel, flying, and driving, are also the cheapest. When we did our European road trip, we compared the prices for our long-distance journeys. Train travel appeared to be 5 times as expensive as flying. Go figure…

Sad but true, flying is in many cases the cheapest option to cross a distance of more than a couple of hundreds of kilometers in Europe. Ryanair is by far the most famous low-cost airline on the continent, but also with Wizzair, Vueling and Volotea it might happen that your coffee and sandwich in the airport turn out to be more expensive than your flight.

When booking with low-cost airlines, it’s important to keep in mind that the comfort of your flight will be little to none and that the company will pursue you to pay for every little extra.

An example:
We found a Ryanair flight from Brussels to Berlin for 13€
✔️ Extra leg space: 9€
✔️ Fast track: 9€
✔️ 1 Hand luggage: 10€
✔️ 1 check-in bag: 20€
✔️ A soft drink and a snack on board: 5€
As you can see, a little bit of comfort easily makes our flight 5 times more expensive. You can definitely find great deals when flying low-cost airlines, but then you’ll need to leave all comfort behind.

To find the best flights, check our Resources Page!

Although train travel can be quite expensive in Europe, it’s still by far our favorite way of traveling. There are several high-speed train networks which get you from one place to another in no time and the train is so much more comfortable than a plane. And then we’re not even mentioning the difference in ecological footprint.

If you’re planning to travel a lot by train and cover different countries, it can be interesting (and save you a couple of Euros) to buy a rail pass. The most popular providers of rail passes are:
Rail Europe
Trainline

Cheaper than the train, but less idyllic and much slower are the long haul bus companies. These connect the majority of European cities with each other for prices that are very competitive with flights and they tend to be more comfortable. The most popular European long haul bus company is Flixbus

A great website to find the perfect bus schedule for your road trip is Busbud.

If you’re hoping to add a lot of nude beaches and naturist resorts to your itinerary, you’ll find out that there will be no other choice than renting a car at one point or another. Public transport is great to get from one major highlight to another, naturist places have the tendency to be away from the major highlights.

Car rental offices can be found in all major airports and train stations and renting a car in Europe can be very cheap. As with low-cost airlines, also low-cost car rentals come with a side mark. Only when you know very well what you’re doing, you’ll be able to get ridiculously cheap deals. Lots of tips about how to pick the right car rental can be found in our blog post about how to travel without a travel agency.

There is, for example, often a very huge price difference between returning your car to the same place or to another city. And when renting a car, also the many tollways in Europe need to be taken into account. We found that car rentals are amazing (and a necessity) to get to naturist resorts, nude beaches, and local highlights, but that it’s much more affordable to use public transport for long distances.

Our favorite car rental websites are:
Auto Europe
Rentalcars.com

Since the majority of naturist resorts in Europe are campsites and since the prices of rental accommodation tend to go up in the high season, you might want to look into renting a camper or RV instead. That’s transport and accommodation in one (well, of course, you’ll still have to pay for your pitch, but that’s a fraction of the rental accommodation price).

A great website to find rental RVs and campers is Outdoorsy. It has the same principle as Airbnb, meaning that you rent from individuals and not from big companies, but Outdoorsy takes care of all the insurances so you can be certain of a safe and worriless journey.

When renting an RV or camper, keep in mind that in several European countries the road toll depends on the size of your vehicle. You might find a great deal on a 10-meter camper, but the tolls could turn out to be a disaster for your budget.

We’ve already mentioned this in the introduction, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a food enthusiast, a wine connoisseur, an art lover, a culture fan or an architecture admirer, you’ll find all that in Europe.

Discovering a place on our own is always a lot of fun, but if we really want to dive into the local culture or learn about a place’s history, guided tours are quite a must. And a lot of fun as well.

Free walking tours are popular all over the world and also in Europe, you’ll find one of those tours at lots of tourist highlights. The principle is easy. The tour itself is completely free and the guide will always be a local person talking about his or her city. In the end, you are expected to give the guide a voluntary tip. Although you’re technically not obliged to tip, it’s the only way how this cool system can keep existing. Different places often have their own free walking tour company, Sandemans is the most popular around Europe.

Another great website to find (paid) tours is Get Your Guide. This one doesn’t only provide tours but often also skip the line tickets for popular shows and tourist highlights.

The only thing left for us is to wish you an amazing naturist road trip through Europe. We hope that you’ll have a great time. When you take these planning tips into account, very little can go wrong.