If rural settlements today are, in the main, Potemkin villages, perhaps they are skirted by Potemkin hunts.
But the relative isolation this harsh landscape affords also means the fishing villages, hill villages and maritime towns built on and under these slopes have been able to hold on to their charm and beauty as stubbornly as they've clung on to the mountains on which they're so precariously built.
It's taken a starring role in Gladiator, Rules of Engagement, Alexander and Babel The kasbahs, Berber villages and otherworldly sandscapes are the key draw.
They had been buried already, in the sand, far from the villages in which they had names and their personalities were known.
For those who have been, we often do not have vaccination cards as they fled from burning villages," says the 27-year-old nurse.
The horticultural interest at this one-and-a-half-acre tourist attraction is what lies between the six model villages: a miniature landscape of farms, fields, woods, lakes and rolling hills planted with more than 3,000 shrubs and trees.
This summer, I spent nearly a month in Greece, rehearsing my play Six Seeds for performances by American actors, in Greek, in four mountain villages.
But it is the family business Party Pieces, launched by Carole Middleton from their home in one of Berkshire's prettier villages, which founded the family's wealth and gave their daughter entry into higher social circles.
The fear of the people who handle corpses is not limited to rural villages in faraway lands Though we despise the undertaker, we know why we need them.
Only when we approached Garamur, one of the island's two big villages, did he smile and announce, "you have reached your destination", in his best satnav-ese.
Its own patrol, in a line of three huge, mine-protected vehicles called MRAPs, rolls in from the surrounding villages.
