Virginia's Safest City Of 2025 Showcases The Beauty Of Shenandoah Valley Within A College Town

In Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, near the West Virginia border, you'll find Bridgewater, a mountain town with one of the most scenic backyards in the nation. Known as the home of the private liberal arts college, Bridgewater College, and the award-winning Bluestone Vineyard, Bridgewater makes headlines for another accolade: its safety. Home security review platform SafeWise has named it the safest city in Virginia for 2025.

SafeWise looked at FBI crime statistics data to determine the safest and most dangerous cities in each state. Explaining Bridgewater's ranking, SafeWise writes, "Bridgewater is back in the No. 1 spot after falling to No. 4 the previous year." To get specific, the town's violent crime rate for 2025 was 0.2 crimes per 1,000 people (compared to 0.8 in 2024), and its property crime rate for 2025 was 4.5 (compared to 6.8 in 2024).

Bridgewater has made several other SafeWise lists over the years, including ranking No. 72 in the country in the 2021 ranking of the 100 safest small towns in America (via Daily News Record). It was the only town in Virginia to make the list.

Bridgewater is located in the Shenandoah Valley, a picturesque region in Virginia and West Virginia between the Blue Ridge Mountains and Allegheny Mountains. It's located a short drive away from several other scenic locales, including the charming college city of Harrisonburg. From major hubs like Washington, D.C., and Richmond (Virginia's entertaining and historic capital city), you can reach the town in about two hours by car.

With a population of less than 7,000, Bridgewater's small-town charm is apparent. In a vignette posted on the town's website, resident Dawn Kern writes, "Bridgewater is known by many to be a friendly town and for those of us who are residents, we can recite several reasons why it is a wonderful community in which to live." You can enjoy the region's beauty within the town on three easy hikes that are perfect for walking, running, or having a picnic lunch in nature.

While many residents are happy with Bridgewater's approach to safety, others have criticized the town's surveillance. According to WHRO Public Media, Bridgewater's five Flock cameras capture images of over 60,000 vehicles every month, and these images were accessed by outside law enforcement agencies nearly 7 million times over the 12-month period from June 2024 to June 2025. This mass amount of collection has made some residents uneasy within their safe community.