Good evening

The French call it “la rentrée”, the return to normal life after the long summer break. The British tend to use the slightly more prosaic “back to school”, but whatever you choose to call it, for northern Europeans at least, the long, hot days of summer are behind us. Unless, of course, you choose to postpone the inevitable march of the seasons with a trip south.

If you are not tied to school holidays, the so-called shoulder season is one of the best times to travel – accommodation prices can drop by as much as 50% in popular Mediterranean resorts, the beaches are empty and, more importantly, the temperatures are far more manageable. This is no small consideration when Europe had one of its hottest summers on record this year (Spain logged its highest temperatures since records began in 1961).

We asked six of our writers to share some of their favourite late-summer escapes, from a “blissfully undeveloped” stretch of the Alentejo coastline in Portugal to the vertiginously-perched cliff-top town of Bonifacio in Corsica. Julian Hoffman chose the historic town of Konitsa in north-west Greece where the summer heat has “mellowed to a warm September glow – and soon autumn will begin to yellow and bronze the leaves of the canyon trees”. Mark Jones plumped for Comares, high in the Andalucian hills an hour’s drive north-east of Málaga. Far from winding down for the winter, these towns are coming back to life after the punishing heatwaves of high summer: “Gone is the ghost-town atmosphere of the remote pueblos blancos, where everyone stays indoors with the blinds down in the hot weather.”

Autumn is also the season of food festivals, olive harvest, fireworks displays and free events in many southern European regions. So if you’re not quite ready to put away your shorts and flip flops, eke out your summer with our guide to late season getaways.