The Most Beautiful Canals in the World
8 places in 8 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful canals in the world are Pontcysyllte Aqueduct (United Kingdom), Corinth Canal (Greece) and Canal du Midi (France). The list covers 8 canals in 8 countries. Denmark has the most, with 1. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A canal is water made to go where nature never sent it, and the beautiful ones show both the ambition and the patience behind that. Some are straight cuts through rock; others follow the land in long, tree-lined curves, rise on steps of locks, or become the streets of a city where houses stand with their feet in the water. Their beauty lies in the meeting of still water with stone, trees and reflected facades.
The range here is wide. The Corinth Canal, opened in 1893, slices through the Greek isthmus between sheer walls of rock barely wider than a ship. Pierre-Paul Riquet's Canal du Midi, completed in 1681, links the Garonne to the Mediterranean under avenues of plane trees. On Poland's Elbląg Canal, boats leave the water and ride on rail carriages over grassy hills. Amsterdam's seventeenth-century Canal Ring, the Grand Canal of Venice and Copenhagen's Nyhavn are canals as urban life, lined with merchant houses and palaces. Telford's Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and the Magdeburg Water Bridge lift canals over valleys and rivers.
The canals were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map; the section also opens by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pontcysyllte Aqueduct | Aqueduct | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 2 | Corinth Canal | Canal | Greece | |
| 3 | Canal du Midi | Canal | France | ✓ |
| 4 | Magdeburg Canal Bridge | Aqueduct | Germany | |
| 5 | Grand Canal | Canal | Italy | |
| 6 | Elbląg Canal | Canal | Poland | |
| 7 | Nyhavn | Canal | Denmark | |
| 8 | Amsterdam Canal Ring | Canal | Kingdom of the Netherlands |
01 Pontcysyllte Aqueduct
United Kingdom · 27.1 km from Chester52.970° N 3.088° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Adrian Pingstone · Public domain Thomas Telford did something no engineer had dared before: instead of a stone trough lined with clay — the only way anyone had carried a canal across a valley until then — he cast the whole watertight channel out of iron plates, 3.7 metres wide and 1.7 metres deep, and hung it 38 metres above the River Dee on eighteen hollow stone piers that taper toward the top to shed weight. He'd tested the idea on a smaller scale at Longdon-on-Tern first, then bet the Ellesmere Canal Company's money on it here. Sealing the iron joints was its own invention: the joints between the iron plates were packed with Welsh flannel soaked in a white-lead paste, then bolted tight — homely materials for a structure of such daring.
Did you know? The mortar of the stone piers was mixed from lime, water and ox blood.
02 Corinth Canal
Διώρυγα της Κορίνθου
Greece37.927° N 22.995° E
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay Emperor Nero personally struck the first blow with a golden pick in 67 AD, then put 6,000 Jewish prisoners of war to work digging trenches forty to fifty metres wide from both coasts at once, plus a separate crew boring test shafts down the ridge to check the rock. In roughly ten weeks they cut about 700 metres of the eventual channel — a tenth of the total distance — before Nero was declared an enemy of the state and killed. Work stopped, and nobody with both the money and the nerve tried again for eighteen centuries.
Did you know? Instead of digging, the ancient Corinthians built the Diolkos, a paved stone trackway on which whole ships were hauled overland across the isthmus.
03 Canal du Midi
France · 2.7 km from Toulouse43.611° N 1.418° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by rauschenberger from Pixabay Between 1666 and 1681, under Louis XIV and with the backing of his minister Colbert, Pierre-Paul Riquet built a waterway 240 km long from Toulouse to the Étang de Thau on the Mediterranean. Together with the later Garonne Lateral Canal it gave France a water route from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean that avoided the long sea passage round Spain. It is one of the oldest canals in Europe still in use, and its builders solved problems that had defeated planners since Roman times.
Did you know? The dream of linking the two seas is old: in 1516 Francis I had Leonardo da Vinci survey a route from Toulouse towards Carcassonne.
04 Magdeburg Canal Bridge
Kanalbrücke Magdeburg
Germany · 12.3 km from Magdeburg52.230° N 11.696° E
Olivier Cleynen · CC BY 4.0 The idea of joining the Mittellandkanal and the Elbe-Havel Canal directly over the Elbe River goes back to 1919, and by 1938 the anchor points and the Rothensee boat lift next to it were already built — then the Second World War stopped everything, and the divided, communist East German government afterward had no reason to finish a project designed to speed trade with the West. It sat half-built for roughly sixty years, a Cold War casualty nobody had the money or the incentive to complete.
Did you know? At 918 metres, it is the longest canal bridge in Europe, with about 690 metres crossing the floodplain and 228 metres spanning the river itself.
05 Grand Canal
Canal Grande
Italy · 0.8 km from Venice45.442° N 12.326° E
Image by garten-gg from Pixabay It isn't really a canal — it's a river Venice never had to dig. The Grand Canal follows the bed of what was once a channel carrying mainland water into the lagoon, and the city grew up along its curve rather than cutting it through solid ground. That accident of geography set the S-shape that every gondolier and vaporetto captain still navigates today.
Did you know? For centuries the Rialto was the only bridge across the Grand Canal; the next crossings were not built until the 19th century.
06 Elbląg Canal
Kanał Elbląski
Poland · 19.2 km from Elbląg54.024° N 19.598° E
Bybbisch94 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the Elbląg Canal in northern Poland, boats leave the water and travel overland. Along a stretch of about ten kilometres the route has to climb roughly a hundred metres, too much for ordinary locks, and so vessels are floated onto wheeled cradles and hauled up grassy slopes on rails, then lowered into the next reach of water. The spectacle of a passenger boat gliding across a meadow has made the canal one of the best-known works of 19th-century engineering in Europe.
Did you know? Building the canal lowered several lakes along the route, with Lakes Sambród and Piniewo dropping by more than five metres.
07 Nyhavn
Denmark · 1.8 km from Copenhagen55.680° N 12.590° E
kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0 Nyhavn — "New Harbour" — is a short, straight cut of water that runs about 450 metres from Kongens Nytorv, Copenhagen's grand royal square, to the Inner Harbour. King Christian V had it dug between 1670 and 1675, and the labour came from Danish soldiers and Swedish prisoners taken in the war of 1658–1660. The idea was practical: give ships a way from the open sea right up to the old city, where cargo and the day's fish could be unloaded at the square.
Did you know? Hans Christian Andersen wrote his first fairy tales, including The Tinderbox and The Princess and the Pea, while lodging at Nyhavn 20; they were published in 1835.
08 Amsterdam Canal Ring
Amsterdamse grachten
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.3 km from Amsterdam52.365° N 4.888° E
Image by Rianne_SchillerMclean from Pixabay The canal ring of Amsterdam is one of the great pieces of planned city-making in Europe. In 1613 the city began digging a set of concentric waterways around its medieval core, and three of them, the Herengracht, the Keizersgracht and the Prinsengracht, became the grand arcs that still define the centre. The north-western sector was finished by about 1625; the southern and eastern arcs followed after 1664. The result was not a picturesque accident but a deliberate plan for a merchant city: water for transport and drainage, parcels of land for houses and warehouses, radial streets and smaller canals tying the rings together. In 2010 the seventeenth-century canal ring was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Did you know? Before the expansion of 1613, the Singel served as Amsterdam's defensive city moat from about 1480 to 1585.
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 is the most beautiful canal in the world?
- On our list, Pontcysyllte Aqueduct (United Kingdom) ranks first, followed by Corinth Canal (Greece) and Canal du Midi (France).
- Why was the Corinth Canal built?
- It was cut through the narrow Isthmus of Corinth so that ships could pass between the Gulf of Corinth and the Saronic Gulf without sailing around the Peloponnese. The idea dates back to antiquity, but the canal was only completed in 1893.
- Who built the Canal du Midi?
- The Canal du Midi was conceived and built by Pierre-Paul Riquet between 1666 and 1681. It links Toulouse to the Mediterranean and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- How do boats cross the hills on the Elbląg Canal?
- On a section of the Elbląg Canal in Poland, boats are carried over land on rail-mounted cradles along inclined planes, pulled by cables driven by water power instead of passing through locks.
- How many canals are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 8 canals in 8 countries. Denmark has the most, with 1.