The Best Last-Minute European Summer Holiday Destinations, Without the Crowds

Flight time: 2 hours from London. Best for: coastline without the Riviera crowds. Corsica gets overlooked in favour of its more famous French and Italian neighbours, which works entirely in your favour - fewer people means the granite coves stay quiet even in mid-August, and villas and flights here hold availability far longer than the Côte d'Azur or Amalfi. Ajaccio gives you a proper town with Napoleon's birthplace and a great good market. Hire a car; the interior mountain roads see almost no traffic at all.

Flight time: 2.5 hours from London to Corfu, plus a 1-hour ferry. Paxos has no airport, which keeps it several notches quieter than almost anywhere else in the Ionian - a deliberate deterrent that works. Gaios is a harbour town of pastel-shuttered houses and a small population, ringed by pine forest that runs straight down to the water. Boat trips to the neighbouring Antipaxos, home to two of the clearest beaches in Greece, feel like a well-kept secret rather than a queue.

Flight time: 2.5 hours from London to Split, plus a ferry or catamaran. While the rest of the Dalmatian coast fills up around Split and Hvar, Vis stays quiet almost on principle - it was a closed military island until the 1990s, and tourism never quite caught up with its neighbours. The extra ferry crossing puts off the crowds; what's left is a coastline of hidden coves, excellent local wine (try the Vugava), and a town where the harbourfront restaurants don't need booking three weeks ahead.

Flight time: Just shy of 3 hours from London to Faro or Lisbon, plus a drive of an hour and a half. This stretch of coast sits inside a protected natural park, which has kept it free of the development that's crept along the rest of the Algarve. Zambujeira do Mar is a single-street fishing village above dramatic, near-empty cliffs and beaches, with surf schools instead of sun-lounger rows. It's the Portugal that existed before the Algarve became a brand.

Flight time: 2 hours from London to Ljubljana. Best for: an Alpine lake without the Lake Como queues. Bled has a church on an island, a castle on a cliff, and turquoise water that looks digitally enhanced in every photo - and yet it still moves at a fraction of the pace of Italy's lakes, even in August. Row out to the island yourself rather than joining a tour boat, then head into Triglav National Park for empty hiking trails, glacial valleys and the Soča River running an improbable shade of green.

Flight time: 3 hours from London to Naples, plus a two-hour drive. Basilicata is the region Italy itself tends to forget, wedged between the much more famous Amalfi Coast and Puglia, and Maratea is its best-kept secret: cliffs, coves and a genuinely Italian pace, with a fraction of the visitors that descend on Positano an hour's flight away. A vast statue of Christ looks out over the bay from the hilltop above town - a cousin to the one in Rio. Cave city Matera makes a striking detour inland.

Flight time: 1 hour from London to Knock, plus an hour's drive. Achill sits off County Mayo, connected to the mainland by a bridge, and stays markedly quieter than the Wild Atlantic Way's more famous stops further south around Kerry and Dingle. Keem Bay is the payoff: a horseshoe of a beach dropping between two headlands, reached via a single cliffside road that keeps numbers naturally low. Basking sharks pass close to shore in summer, and the pubs in Keel do a Guinness that alone justifies the trip.

Flight time: 2 hours from London to Santander. Best for: green Atlantic coastline without the Costa del Sol crowds. Cantabria sits on Spain's northern coast, where the scenery turns dramatically green and hilly and the temperature stays several degrees cooler than the south - which is precisely why it hasn't been overrun in the same way. Santillana del Mar is a medieval town rather than a recreation of one, and Comillas has grand belle-époque villas and quiet beaches backed by cliffs. The Picos de Europa mountains sit close enough for a day trip that feels like an entirely different country.