Analytical empirical potential energy surfaces describing the van der Waals interaction between rare-gas atoms and cyclopropane are presented. The functional form is based on pairwise Lennard-Jones-type potentials which have been widely used to describe rare-gas-benzene complexes, also studied in this work in order to check our theoretical method and for comparison. The parameters have been chosen in order to accurately fit the high resolution microwave spectra recently reported by Xu and Jäger [J. Chem. Phys. 106, 7968 (1997)]. The observed splitting in the microwave spectra of Ne-cyclopropane, associated with rotational tunneling, is well reproduced. Moreover, such tunneling is also important for complexes of Ar and Kr in excited van der Waals states. These phenomena involve a high delocalization of the wave functions and, therefore, intermolecular spectroscopy techniques would provide a good check of the potential energy surface over a broad region of the configuration space.