The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Squares, Streets and Monuments in the World
8 places in 4 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful 19th-century squares, streets and monuments in the world are Eiffel Tower (France), Statue of Liberty (United States) and Galerie Vivienne (France). The list covers 8 19th-century squares, streets and monuments in 4 countries. France has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The nineteenth century remade the city around the people who walked through it. Iron and glass let architects roof whole streets, producing the covered shopping arcades of Paris and their imitators abroad; the same materials allowed towers of a height masonry could never reach. Nations and empires, meanwhile, marked their identity with triumphal arches, clock towers and colossal statues, and the great international exhibitions gave engineers a stage on which to show what the new age could build.
The Eiffel Tower, raised for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, remained the tallest man-made structure in the world for four decades. Its engineer's firm also designed the internal iron framework of the Statue of Liberty, Bartholdi's copper colossus dedicated in New York Harbor in 1886. The Arc de Triomphe, commissioned by Napoleon after Austerlitz, was completed in 1836 at the head of the Champs-Élysées, and in London the clock tower housing Big Ben was finished in 1859 as part of the rebuilt Palace of Westminster.
The arcades show the same century at a gentler scale. Galerie Vivienne in Paris, opened in 1823, has a glass roof and mosaic floors, and the Passage Pommeraye in Nantes descends through three levels linked by a sculpted staircase. In Ohio the Cleveland Arcade of 1890 carried the idea across the Atlantic, wrapping five storeys of galleries under a vast glass skylight.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | France | ✓ |
| 2 | Statue of Liberty | Monument | United States | ✓ |
| 3 | Galerie Vivienne | Covered passageway | France | |
| 4 | Arc de Triomphe | Triumphal arch | France | |
| 5 | Big Ben | Clock tower | United Kingdom | |
| 6 | Palacio Episcopal de Astorga | Palace | Spain | ✓ |
| 7 | Passage Pommeraye | Covered passageway | France | |
| 8 | Cleveland Arcade | Covered passageway | United States |
01 Eiffel Tower
Tour Eiffel
France · 4.3 km from Paris48.858° N 2.294° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay The tower's basic shape wasn't originally Gustave Eiffel's idea at all. Two engineers working inside Eiffel's own company, Émile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, sketched the concept for an enormously tall iron tower in June 1884, intended as the centrepiece for the 1889 World's Fair marking the centenary of the French Revolution. Eiffel reportedly found Koechlin's earliest, bare-bones sketch unconvincing.
Did you know? According to a popular anecdote, Guy de Maupassant lunched at the tower daily because it was the one place in Paris he could not see it.
02 Statue of Liberty
United States · 5.5 km from New York City40.689° N 74.044° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by itou365 from Pixabay The name most people reach for is Bartholdi, and that's correct as far as it goes — Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi conceived the whole figure, from her raised torch to the broken chains at her feet, and sculpted the copper skin that visitors actually see, a figure standing some 46 metres from base to torch. What's murkier, and worth untangling, is who built what's actually holding her up.
Did you know? Her copper skin is only about 2.4 millimetres thick across the entire figure.
03 Galerie Vivienne
France · 1.4 km from Paris48.867° N 2.340° E
Mbzt · CC BY 3.0 The Galerie Vivienne is the most graceful of the covered passages of Paris, the glass-roofed shopping arcades that gave the city of the early nineteenth century somewhere to stroll dry-footed between the Palais-Royal, the Bourse and the Grands Boulevards. It runs for 176 m but is only about 3 m wide, and that narrowness is the point: under the glazed roof the light falls softly onto mosaic floors, carved shopfronts and the painted goddesses and nymphs that decorate the rotunda.
Did you know? The Japanese designer Kenzō Takada opened his first Paris boutique in the gallery and staged a fashion show there.
04 Arc de Triomphe
Arc de triomphe de l'Étoile
France · 4.6 km from Paris48.874° N 2.295° E
ZeusUpsistos · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Arc de Triomphe is less a gateway than a hub: twelve avenues radiate from the traffic circle at Place Charles de Gaulle, and the arch sits at the centre of the star they form, closing the western end of the Champs-Élysées. It belongs to the long ceremonial line that runs from the Louvre to the Grande Arche at La Défense, and from its roof that axis is laid out like a diagram. Paris itself, a capital that has been redrawn by kings, emperors and prefects, rarely shows its planning as clearly as it does here.
Did you know? In 1810, with the arch barely above its foundations, Napoleon had a wooden mock-up of the finished monument put up for his entry into Paris with his new bride.
05 Big Ben
United Kingdom · 0.4 km from London51.501° N 0.125° W
Image by pemacallan from Pixabay Everyone calls the tower Big Ben, but that name actually belongs to the bell inside it — the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster — and the tower itself wasn't even called Elizabeth Tower until 2012, when it was renamed for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Before that it was simply the Clock Tower, which undersells what a fight it took to get built.
Did you know? The Great Bell cracked months after it first rang in 1859; instead of recasting it, workers turned it an eighth of a turn, and it still rings cracked.
06 Palacio Episcopal de Astorga
Spain42.458° N 6.056° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Elgamizzzz · CC BY-SA 4.0 In a small cathedral town of the Spanish meseta, Antoni Gaudí built a castle for a bishop. The Episcopal Palace of Astorga rises beside the cathedral like a building from a fairy tale: four round corner towers with pointed caps, a deep dry moat, a porch of three great flared arches and a skyline of pinnacles and chimneys, all in pale grey granite. It is one of only a handful of Gaudí buildings outside Catalonia.
Did you know? A fire destroyed the old episcopal palace of Astorga in 1886, prompting the commission to Gaudí.
07 Passage Pommeraye
France · 2.3 km from Nantes47.213° N 1.560° W
Julien Thibault · CC BY-SA 3.0 Nantes built its fortune on the Atlantic trade, and in the early 1840s the property developer Louis Pommeraye gambled on giving the city's merchants something Paris already had: a glass-roofed shopping arcade. The difficulty was the site. Between rue de la Fosse, down near the old port quarter, and rue Santeuil on the slope towards Place Graslin, the ground drops by more than nine metres. Architects Jean-Baptiste Buron and Hippolyte Durand-Gasselin turned that awkward fall into the passage's great idea, and the arcade opened in the summer of 1843.
Did you know? Louis Pommeraye poured his entire fortune and his wife's inheritance into the arcade, went bankrupt in 1849 and died the next year at 44, leaving seven orphans.
08 Cleveland Arcade
United States · 3.2 km from Cleveland41.500° N 81.690° W
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Step in from the traffic of Euclid Avenue and the street disappears behind you: a long, luminous hall rises five storeys to a glass roof, its walls lined with four tiers of balconies. Opened on 30 May 1890, the Cleveland Arcade — simply "the Arcade" to the city — is one of the earliest indoor shopping arcades in the United States, and one of the most complete survivals of the Victorian taste for streets under glass.
Did you know? The ironwork was supplied by the Detroit Bridge Company, which was run by Stephen V. Harkness, one of the Arcade's own financial backers.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful 19th-century squares, streets and monuments in the world?
- On our list, Eiffel Tower (France) ranks first, followed by Statue of Liberty (United States) and Galerie Vivienne (France).
- Which country has the most 19th-century squares, streets and monuments in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from France (4), the United States (2) and Spain (1).
- Why was the Eiffel Tower built?
- It was built as the entrance arch and centrepiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, held on the centenary of the French Revolution. It was originally meant to stand for only twenty years.
- What is a Paris passage?
- A passage couvert is a covered shopping street cut through a block of buildings and roofed with glass. Most were built in the first half of the nineteenth century, and Galerie Vivienne is among the best preserved.
- Is Big Ben the name of the tower?
- Strictly, Big Ben is the great bell inside the clock tower. The tower was renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012, but the name Big Ben is commonly used for the whole structure.
- How many 19th-century squares, streets and monuments are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 8 19th-century squares, streets and monuments in 4 countries. France has the most, with 4.