The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Squares, Streets and Monuments in Europe
6 places in 3 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful 19th-century squares, streets and monuments in Europe are Eiffel Tower (France), Galerie Vivienne (France) and Arc de Triomphe (France). The list covers 6 19th-century squares, streets and monuments in 3 countries. France has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Europe's nineteenth-century cities were rebuilt for crowds, commerce and national pride. Industrial iron and glass made it possible to roof entire streets and to raise towers of open metal lattice, while governments marked victories, constitutions and new parliaments with arches and clock towers designed to be seen from far away. Paris led the way, both in the covered arcades of the early century and in the grand exhibitions of its later decades, and other cities followed its example.
The Eiffel Tower is the century's culmination: built for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, it was dismissed by many artists at the time and became the emblem of the city within a generation. At the other end of the Champs-Élysées axis, the Arc de Triomphe, commissioned by Napoleon in 1806 and completed in 1836, carries reliefs of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and has sheltered the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier since 1921. In London the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, home of the bell called Big Ben, was completed in 1859 to designs by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin.
The arcades bring the same age down to human scale. Galerie Vivienne, opened in Paris in 1823, keeps its glass roof, mosaic floors and shopfronts, and in Nantes the Passage Pommeraye steps down a steep slope across three levels joined by a staircase lined with sculpture.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | France | ✓ |
| 2 | Galerie Vivienne | Covered passageway | France | |
| 3 | Arc de Triomphe | Triumphal arch | France | |
| 4 | Big Ben | Clock tower | United Kingdom | |
| 5 | Palacio Episcopal de Astorga | Palace | Spain | ✓ |
| 6 | Passage Pommeraye | Covered passageway | France |
01 Eiffel Tower
Tour Eiffel
France · 4.3 km from Paris48.858° N 2.294° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay What made the design work — visually, not structurally — was a third man: architect Stephen Sauvestre, brought in to soften the raw lattice engineering into something the public might actually love. Sauvestre added the sweeping stone-arched base, the glass-enclosed halls on the platforms, and the bulbous cupola at the summit — decorative flourishes with no structural purpose, but exactly what turned an engineer's calculation into an unmistakable monument. 5 million rivets — went up between January 1887 and March 1889 without a single worker dying, a remarkable safety record for ironwork at that height and era.
Did you know? In 1925 the con artist Victor Lustig twice 'sold' the Eiffel Tower to scrap dealers who believed it was about to be demolished.
02 Galerie Vivienne
France · 1.4 km from Paris48.867° N 2.340° E
Mbzt · CC BY 3.0 It was built in 1823 for Marchoux, president of the Chamber of Notaries, on the site of an old town house, to plans by the architect Delannoy, and opened in 1826 under its founder's name before taking the name of the street it opens onto. Delannoy chose a neoclassical, Pompeian-inspired décor, with half-moon windows framed by reliefs celebrating trade, and the floor mosaics are signed by Giandomenico Facchina and Mazzioli — geometric, restrained, and easy to miss if you are looking at the shop windows. A glazed rotunda with a hemispherical glass cupola marks the turn of the passage.
Did you know? In 1828 a Cosmorama, a show of painted views seen through lenses, moved here from the Palais-Royal.
03 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 Napoleon ordered the arch in 1806, after Austerlitz, to honour the armies of the Revolution and the Empire. Jean-François Chalgrin designed it on the model of the Arch of Titus in Rome, but the foundations alone took two years, Chalgrin died in 1811, and work stalled under the restored Bourbons. It was finally finished under Louis-Philippe and inaugurated in 1836. The result is enormous even by Parisian standards: 49.5 metres high, almost 45 metres wide and 22 metres deep, with a main vault more than 29 metres tall. In 1919 a pilot, Charles Godefroy, flew a biplane straight through it.
Did you know? The pilot first chosen to fly through the arch in 1919, Jean Navarre, was killed in a training crash, and Charles Godefroy made the flight instead.
04 Big Ben
United Kingdom · 0.4 km from London51.501° N 0.125° W
Image by pemacallan from Pixabay The tower exists because the old Palace of Westminster burned down almost completely on 16 October 1834. Charles Barry won the resulting design competition — 97 architects entered — with a grand Gothic Revival scheme for the whole rebuilt palace, and his 96-metre clock tower needed detailing his own training hadn't prepared him for, so he brought in Augustus Pugin specifically to handle it. It's Pugin's decorative work — the tracery, the ornament, the clock faces — that gives the tower its unmistakable Perpendicular Gothic silhouette, even though Barry held the overall commission.
Did you know? The first bell, cast in Stockton-on-Tees in 1856, cracked beyond repair during testing; its replacement took 18 hours to haul up to the belfry.
05 Palacio Episcopal de Astorga
Spain42.458° N 6.056° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Elgamizzzz · CC BY-SA 4.0 The old palace burned down in 1886. Bishop Joan Baptista Grau, who like Gaudí came from the Catalan town of Reus and had known him since his years in Tarragona, gave the commission to his friend. Busy in Barcelona with the Palau Güell and the early Sagrada Família, Gaudí first designed the building from photographs and drawings sent to him from Astorga. The first stone was laid on 24 June 1889, and Gaudí visited the works repeatedly, bringing Catalan craftsmen he trusted. It belongs to his neo-Gothic phase, when he was reworking medieval forms in his own way, and the ground plan is a Greek cross within a square, with the chapel projecting at the back like a small church with its own apse.
Did you know? The first stone of Gaudí's palace was laid on 24 June 1889, the bishop's name day.
06 Passage Pommeraye
France · 2.3 km from Nantes47.213° N 1.560° W
Julien Thibault · CC BY-SA 3.0 Instead of a single level corridor, the Passage Pommeraye stacks three galleries around a monumental central staircase, so the visitor descends through the building as if through a theatre set. Light pours in through glass roofs carried on cast-iron arches; the balustrades and ironwork came from the local Voruz foundry. Look up and the ornament keeps multiplying: allegorical statues by Jean Debay stand for Commerce, Industry, Agriculture, the Arts, the Sciences and maritime trade, a row of medallions by Guillaume Grootaërs portrays figures linked to the region, and two child figures of Day and Night flank the clock above the stairs.
Did you know? Jacques Demy filmed here three times, including a brief scene of about 25 seconds in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).
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 Europe?
- On our list, Eiffel Tower (France) ranks first, followed by Galerie Vivienne (France) and Arc de Triomphe (France).
- Which country has the most 19th-century squares, streets and monuments in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from France (4), Spain (1) and the United Kingdom (1).
- Who designed the Big Ben clock tower?
- The tower was designed by Augustus Pugin as part of Charles Barry's rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster after the fire of 1834. It was completed in 1859.
- What is under the Arc de Triomphe?
- Beneath the arch lies the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a French soldier of the First World War buried there in 1921. An eternal flame burns over the grave and is rekindled every evening.
- How many 19th-century squares, streets and monuments are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 6 19th-century squares, streets and monuments in 3 countries. France has the most, with 4.