The Most Beautiful Cathedrals in the World
81 places in 27 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful cathedrals in the world are Milan Cathedral (Italy), Wawel Cathedral (Poland) and Bamberg Cathedral (Germany). The list covers 81 cathedrals in 27 countries. Italy has the most, with 15. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A cathedral is the seat of a bishop, but the great ones are something larger: the work of whole cities over generations, built to the limit of what stone and glass could do. What makes one world-class is the ambition of its structure — vaults that seem weightless, spires that were once the tallest things on Earth — together with the detail carved into it, from portals crowded with figures to floors inlaid with entire cosmologies.
The cathedrals here show how varied that ambition became. Milan Cathedral took nearly six centuries to complete and bristles with marble spires and statues. Rastrelli's Smolny Cathedral in Saint Petersburg is Baroque in white and blue, while Otranto Cathedral in Apulia spreads a twelfth-century mosaic Tree of Life across its floor. The Cathedral of Saint Demetrius in Vladimir is covered in white-stone carving, and Trogir's cathedral is known for the Romanesque portal by Master Radovan. Strasbourg Cathedral was once the tallest building in the world, Siena's striped marble interior stands on a pavement of inlaid scenes, and León Cathedral fills its walls with medieval stained glass.
Every cathedral here was chosen for how it looks and placed in order of beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the section also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
01 Milan Cathedral
Duomo di Milano
Italy · 1.3 km from Milan45.464° N 9.191° E
Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 4.0 Milan Cathedral took almost six centuries to finish. Work began in 1386 under Archbishop Antonio da Saluzzo, at a moment when his cousin Gian Galeazzo Visconti had just taken power in the city; the last bronze portal was inaugurated only on 6 January 1965. The site was chosen for continuity: it sits on the heart of Roman Mediolanum, and the remains of a fourth-century baptistery can still be visited beneath the square. Visconti gave the building works, the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo, the right to use marble from the Candoglia quarry, and marble from there faces the brick structure to this day.
Did you know? The gilded Madonnina, designed by Giuseppe Perego and raised in 1774, is a statue just over four metres tall made of hammered copper sheets on an iron frame.
02 Wawel Cathedral
Bazylika Archikatedralna św. Stanisława i św. Wacława w Krakowie
Poland · 1.8 km from Kraków50.055° N 19.935° E
Image by AdamHillTravel from Pixabay Wawel Cathedral, formally the Archcathedral Basilica of Saints Stanislaus and Wenceslaus, stands on Wawel Hill inside the royal castle complex of Kraków and is the closest thing Poland has to a national pantheon. From 1320 until the last coronation in 1764 it was the coronation church of Polish monarchs, and most of them are buried here. The present Gothic building is the third church on the site: the first cathedral was destroyed in 1038/39 and the second burned around 1305, and the current structure was consecrated in 1364 under Casimir the Great. Centuries of additions have wrapped it in chapels in every style from Romanesque to neo-Gothic.
03 Bamberg Cathedral
Bamberger Dom
Germany49.891° N 10.883° E
Ввласенко · CC BY-SA 3.0 Bamberg Cathedral, dedicated to Saints Peter and George, is the late Romanesque heart of the UNESCO World Heritage town of Bamberg in Upper Franconia. It was founded in 1002 by King Henry II, later Holy Roman Emperor, who made Bamberg his favourite residence and the seat of a new diocese, and was first consecrated in 1012. Two earlier cathedrals burned, in 1081 and 1185; the present building, with its four towers of about 81 m, went up under three bishops of the Andechs-Merania family and was consecrated in 1237. Because it took so long, it shows the shift from Romanesque in the eastern choir to early Gothic in the western choir and towers.
04 St. Stephen's Cathedral
Stephansdom
Austria · 1 km from Vienna48.208° N 16.373° E
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay St. Stephen's Cathedral is the centre of Vienna in every sense: the U-Bahn's central interchange lies beneath its square, and its south tower, known to the Viennese as the Steffl, dominates the old-town skyline at 136 metres. A parish church was dedicated here in 1147, in the presence of German nobles about to leave on the Second Crusade, and the Romanesque west front with its two towers and the Giant's Door survives from the rebuilding of the 13th century. Everything else is Gothic, started in the 14th century and pushed ahead by Duke Rudolf IV, who founded a chapter of canons long before Vienna had its own bishop; the diocese came only in 1469.
Did you know? Two iron bars set into the wall beside the main door are medieval Viennese ell standards, letting merchants check cloth lengths of 89.6 and 77.6 centimetres.
05 St. Vitus Cathedral
Katedrála svatého Víta v Praze
Czech Republic · 1.7 km from Prague50.091° N 14.401° E
Image by Duernsteiner from Pixabay St Vitus Cathedral, formally dedicated to Saints Vitus, Wenceslaus and Adalbert, is the seat of the Archbishop of Prague and the largest and most important church in the Czech Republic. It stands inside Prague Castle, 124 m long with a main tower 102.8 m high, and holds the tombs of Bohemian kings and Holy Roman emperors. It is the third church on the spot: Duke Wenceslaus founded a rotunda here around 930, after obtaining a relic of St Vitus, and a Romanesque basilica followed.
Did you know? The Zikmund bell in the great south tower, cast by Tomáš Jaroš in 1549, weighs about 16.5 tonnes and is the largest bell in the Czech Republic.
06 Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Strasbourg
France · 0.2 km from Strasbourg48.582° N 7.751° E
Image by jackmac34 from Pixabay Strasbourg's cathedral is a building of one tower, and that asymmetry is its signature. The west front was begun in 1277, with Erwin von Steinbach credited as master builder until his death in 1318, and it was planned with two spires. Only the north one was ever built: an octagonal tower and openwork spire by Ulrich Ensingen and Johannes Hültz, finished in 1439. At 142 metres it made the cathedral the tallest building in the world from 1647 until 1874, and it is still the tallest structure surviving entirely from the Middle Ages. The pink-brown Vosges sandstone gives the whole building its warm colour, and the spire is visible across the Alsace plain from the Vosges and from the Black Forest across the Rhine.
Did you know? In 1794 radical revolutionaries planned to pull down the spire as an insult to equality; citizens saved it by crowning it with a giant tin Phrygian cap.
07 Lincoln Cathedral
United Kingdom53.234° N 0.536° W
Image by TimHill from Pixabay The Victorian critic John Ruskin thought Lincoln Cathedral the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles, worth any two other English cathedrals, and on its ridge above the flat Lincolnshire countryside it is easy to see why he said it. The first cathedral was begun in 1072 by the Norman bishop Remigius and consecrated in 1092. An earthquake in 1185 split it, and of that building only the lower west front with its deep Romanesque arches survives. The rest was rebuilt from 1192 under Bishop Hugh of Avalon, later Saint Hugh, in Early English Gothic, and the work continued through the Decorated and Perpendicular phases.
Did you know? When Father Henry Willis's organ was inaugurated in 1898, the city power station was not yet finished, so soldiers of the Lincolnshire Regiment pumped its bellows by hand.
08 Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Israel · 2.2 km from Jerusalem31.778° N 35.230° E
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jlascar/ · CC BY 2.0 The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is not one building but a knot of them, grown over seventeen centuries on the spot that Christian tradition identifies as both Golgotha, the hill of the crucifixion, and the rock-cut tomb from which Jesus rose. The first church was built for the emperor Constantine between about 326 and 335, to designs by the architect Zenobius: a round Anastasis ("Resurrection") over the tomb and a basilica across a courtyard. Persian armies burned it in 614, the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered its destruction in 1009, and a Byzantine rebuilding followed in the 1040s.
Did you know? When the tomb was opened in 2016, mortar from just above the burial bed was dated to the mid-fourth century, consistent with the age of Constantine.
09 Nidaros Cathedral
Norway · 1.5 km from Trondheim63.427° N 10.397° E
Image by Michelle-Maria from Pixabay Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim is the northernmost medieval cathedral in the world and the national shrine of Norway. It stands over the burial place of King Olav II Haraldsson, who fell at the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030 and was soon venerated as Saint Olav, the patron of Norway. Work on a stone church over the grave began around 1070 under his nephew Olav Kyrre, and the present Romanesque and Gothic building was substantially complete by about 1300. It became the cathedral of a Catholic archdiocese in 1152 and has been Lutheran since the Reformation of 1537; Norwegian kings are still consecrated here.
Did you know? Only five medieval statues survived on the west front; rebuilding its sculpture took from 1905 to 1983 and involved a long line of sculptors.
10 Siena Cathedral
Duomo di Siena
Italy · 1.7 km from Siena43.318° N 11.329° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Anajim from Pixabay Siena's cathedral is the product of a city that wanted to outdo Florence and very nearly did. Built between about 1215 and 1263, it is clad inside and out in bands of white and dark green-black marble, the colours of Siena's black and white coat of arms, with red marble added on the facade. Giovanni Pisano designed the lower facade from around 1284, a stage set of prophets and philosophers; almost all the statues outside today are copies, with the originals in the cathedral museum. In 1339 the Sienese began an extension that would have turned the existing church into the transept of a far larger one, but the Black Death of 1348 stopped work. The walls of the unfinished nave still stand to the south of the cathedral, and one of them can be climbed by a narrow stair for a view over the city.
Did you know? A frieze of 172 papal busts from the 15th and 16th centuries runs around the nave and presbytery, from St Peter to Lucius III.
11 St Paul's Cathedral
United Kingdom · 1.9 km from London51.514° N 0.098° W
Image by adchimchaechill from Pixabay St Paul's Cathedral is Sir Christopher Wren's masterpiece and the building that gave London its skyline for three centuries. Its dome, rising 111 metres to the cross on Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London, was the tallest thing in London from 1710 to 1963. There has been a cathedral dedicated to St Paul on this site since 604; the present one was built after the Great Fire of 1666 gutted its Gothic predecessor, and it remains a working church with daily services as well as one of the city's great sights.
Did you know? The rebuilding was paid for largely by a special tax levied on coal arriving in London, not from the royal purse.
12 Burgos Cathedral
Catedral de Burgos
Spain · 2.3 km from Burgos42.341° N 3.704° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by MemoTravels from Pixabay Burgos Cathedral is the rare Gothic church that reads as a single signature on the skyline: two thirteenth-century towers crowned in the fifteenth century by openwork spires of stone lace, so fine that the sky shows through them. The first stone was laid on 20 June 1221 under King Ferdinand III and Bishop Maurice, on a plan that looked squarely to France — the west front recalls Paris and Reims, the interior elevation Bourges. It is also the only cathedral in Spain inscribed by UNESCO on its own, in 1984, rather than as part of a historic town.
Did you know? Since 1921 the remains of El Cid and his wife Jimena have lain beneath the crossing, brought from the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña.
13 Canterbury Cathedral
United Kingdom · 22.2 km from Dover51.280° N 1.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by WolfBlur from Pixabay Canterbury Cathedral is the mother church of the Church of England and of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Augustine, sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the Anglo-Saxons, founded it in 597. After a fire in 1067, the first Norman archbishop, Lanfranc, rebuilt it from 1070, and it has been growing and changing ever since, so that the building is a textbook of English church architecture from the Romanesque crypt to the soaring Perpendicular nave. It forms a World Heritage Site together with the ruins of St Augustine's Abbey and the ancient church of St Martin.
Did you know? Henry VIII reputedly summoned the dead Becket on a charge of treason; when he failed to appear, his shrine's treasures were carted off in two chests and 26 carts.
14 Notre-Dame de Paris
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris
France · 0.6 km from Paris48.853° N 2.350° E
Image by edmondlafoto from Pixabay Bishop Maurice de Sully tore down the older cathedral on the Île de la Cité around 1160 and started again at a far larger scale. The first stone was laid in the spring of 1163, in the presence of King Louis VII and Pope Alexander III, and the high altar was consecrated in 1182. The master builders of the early phases are anonymous, but later names survive: Jean de Chelles gave the north transept its portal and rose in the late 1240s, and Pierre de Montreuil did the same for the south transept from 1258. Work went on in stages until the mid-14th century, which is why the building reads as a textbook of French Gothic in motion, from the early rib vaults and flying buttresses to the thin, glass-heavy Rayonnant transept façades.
Did you know? Napoleon crowned himself Emperor inside the cathedral on 2 December 1804.
15 Seville Cathedral
Catedral de Santa María de la Sede de Sevilla
Spain · 2.4 km from Seville37.386° N 5.993° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JaimePF55 from Pixabay When Seville's cathedral chapter decided in July 1401 to replace the old mosque that had served as their church, they wanted a building with no equal. A later tradition gives them a bolder line: let us build a church so large that people will think us mad. By the time it was finished in the early 16th century, it was the largest cathedral in the world, taking the title from Hagia Sophia. The Gothic body alone is 126 metres long and 76 metres wide, with a central nave that rises to 42 metres, and it remains the largest Gothic cathedral anywhere.
Did you know? The Door of the Lizard is named after a stuffed crocodile that hangs from its ceiling.
16 Gloucester Cathedral
United Kingdom51.867° N 2.247° W
Geni · CC BY-SA 4.0 Gloucester Cathedral is best understood as two buildings wearing one skin. The heavy Norman church begun by Abbot Serlo in 1089 still stands underneath — you feel it in the squat round piers of the nave — but in the fourteenth century the monks wrapped its eastern half in a lattice of tall, thin Perpendicular tracery, as if a stone cage had been lowered over the Romanesque walls. The money for that makeover came largely from one tomb: Edward II, murdered at nearby Berkeley Castle in 1327, was buried here under an elaborate canopied shrine, and the abbey's fortunes rose with the pilgrims and royal gifts that followed.
Did you know? The church began as a minster founded around 679 by Osric, King of the Hwicce, with his relative Kyneburg as its first abbess.
17 Otranto Cathedral
Cattedrale di Otranto
Italy · 37.5 km from Lecce40.146° N 18.491° E
User:MatthiasKabel · CC BY 2.5 The whole floor of Otranto Cathedral is a picture book in stone. A single mosaic of the 12th century spreads across the nave, the aisles, the presbytery and the apse, and it is one of the finest medieval pavements to have come down to us. Along a vast Tree of Life it gathers scenes from the Old Testament, figures from chivalric romance, beasts from medieval bestiaries, the building of the Tower of Babel, and Alexander the Great rising into the sky on a seat drawn by two griffins, an episode from the Alexander Romance that was popular across medieval Europe and the Byzantine world. The mosaic was commissioned by Jonatas, the first Latin archbishop of Otranto, and laid between 1163 and 1165 by a workshop led by Pantaleon, a monk from the Basilian monastery of San Nicola di Casole a few kilometres south of the town.
Did you know? One figure in the floor mosaic, labelled Rex Arturus, is King Arthur riding a goat, among the earliest known images of Arthur anywhere.
18 Saint Isaac's Cathedral
Russia · 0.9 km from Saint Petersburg59.934° N 30.306° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Florstein ( Telegram: WikiPhoto.Space ) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The gilded dome of Saint Isaac's rises 101.5 metres over the square that bears its name, and on a clear day it is the reference point for half of central Saint Petersburg. The building is the fourth church on the site, commissioned by Alexander I and entrusted to Auguste de Montferrand, a French-born architect trained in the studio of Charles Percier. Construction ran from 1818 to 1858; Montferrand died within about a month of the consecration, having given four decades of his career to a single commission. The result is late Neoclassicism on an imperial scale: a Greek-cross plan, four identical octastyle porticoes, a central dome on a tall colonnaded drum and four smaller cupolas.
Did you know? The cathedral is dedicated to Saint Isaac of Dalmatia because Peter the Great was born on that saint's feast day.
19 Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral
Catedral Metropolitana de la Ciudad de México
Mexico · 1.1 km from Mexico City19.434° N 99.133° W
Image by JorgeCharcot from Pixabay Mexico's great cathedral grew slowly on the north side of the Zócalo, on ground that had been the sacred precinct of Aztec Tenochtitlan. The first small church, built in the 1520s partly with stone from the destroyed temples, soon seemed unworthy of the capital of New Spain. Its replacement, planned by the Spanish architect Claudio de Arciniega after the cathedrals of Jaén and Valladolid, was begun in 1573 and finished only in 1813. Nearly two and a half centuries of building mean that the cathedral reads like a textbook of colonial architecture: Renaissance and Gothic vaults inside, Baroque portals, and towers and a dome completed in the Neoclassical spirit by José Damián Ortiz de Castro and then Manuel Tolsá.
Did you know? The two towers hold 25 bells; the heaviest, Santa María de Guadalupe, was hung in 1793 and weighs about 13,000 kilograms.
20 Saint Sophia Cathedral
Софійський собор
Ukraine · 1.9 km from Kyiv50.453° N 30.514° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Rbrechko · CC BY-SA 4.0 Saint Sophia in Kyiv is the great surviving monument of Kyivan Rus', the medieval state from which Ukraine traces its history, and one of the largest churches built anywhere in Europe in the eleventh century. From outside it reads as a Ukrainian Baroque building, but that is a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century shell added in rebuildings paid for by Metropolitan Petro Mohyla and later Hetman Ivan Mazepa. Inside, the eleventh-century church survives almost intact, with the largest ensemble of original mosaics and frescoes of its age in the world. UNESCO listed it in 1990 together with the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra.
Did you know? The mosaics are thought to be the work of a team of about eight craftsmen, none of whose names have survived.
21 Basilica of Saint-Denis
Basilique Saint-Denis
France · 8.6 km from Paris48.936° N 2.360° E
Zairon · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the northern edge of Paris, in the town of Saint-Denis, stands the church where Gothic architecture was invented. Abbot Suger, adviser to Louis VI and Louis VII, rebuilt the old abbey church from about 1135, first with a new west front and then with a choir completed in 1144 that combined pointed arches, rib vaults and walls opened up for large windows into a new, light-filled whole. It is widely regarded as the first fully Gothic structure. A century later the master builder Pierre de Montreuil rebuilt the nave and transepts in the Rayonnant style. The site is far older: a Gallo-Roman cemetery where tradition places the burial of St Denis, the first bishop of Paris, martyred around 250.
Did you know? In 2004 the mummified heart of the boy who would have been Louis XVII, confirmed by DNA testing, was sealed in a crystal vase in the crypt.
22 Salisbury Cathedral
United Kingdom · 37.9 km from Bournemouth51.065° N 1.798° W
Image by diego_torres from Pixabay Salisbury Cathedral was built in one go, which is rare for an English cathedral and is what gives it its calm. The foundation stones were laid in 1220 on open meadows by the rivers, after the clergy abandoned the cramped hilltop of Old Sarum a couple of miles to the north, and the nave, transepts and choir were complete by 1258. Only the cloister, the chapter house and, by 1330, the tower and spire were added later. The result is the fullest single statement of Early English Gothic, with its tall lancet windows and a unity of style unusual in medieval England.
Did you know? Because the water table beneath the meadows is so high, the cathedral rests on foundations only about four feet (1.2 m) deep.
23 St Mark's Basilica
Basilica di San Marco
Italy · 0.6 km from Venice45.434° N 12.340° E
Image by NakNakNak from Pixabay St Mark's is not a cathedral that grew out of a bishop's church; it was the private chapel of the Doge and the state sanctuary of the Venetian Republic, and it became the city's cathedral only in 1807. It was built to house the body of St Mark, which, according to medieval chronicles, two Venetian merchants took from Alexandria in 828. The present church, the third on the site, was begun around 1063 and dedicated in 1094. Its model was the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, a domed cross-shaped church, adapted to the cramped site and to the ceremonies of the Venetian state. Over the following centuries the brick shell was covered with marble, columns and sculpture, much of it spoils from Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade of 1204.
Did you know? According to tradition, the merchants smuggled St Mark's body out of Alexandria hidden under pork, which Muslim customs officials would not touch.
24 Etchmiadzin Cathedral
Armenia · 16.6 km from Ashtarak40.162° N 44.291° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Marcin Konsek · CC BY-SA 4.0 Etchmiadzin is the mother church of the Armenian Apostolic Church and has a strong claim to being the oldest cathedral in the world. Armenian tradition places its founding between 301 and 303, just after King Tiridates III made Armenia the first state to adopt Christianity. According to the chronicler Agathangelos, Gregory the Illuminator saw a vision of a figure descending from heaven and striking the ground with a golden hammer to mark where the church should rise; later tradition identified the figure with Christ, and the name Etchmiadzin — roughly "the Only-Begotten descended" — comes from that story, though it only came into use in the 15th century. Excavations in the 1950s found an Urartian stele and traces of a pagan fire altar beneath the main altar.
Did you know? The bell tower once held a bell inscribed with a Tibetan Buddhist mantra, noted by travellers throughout the nineteenth century; it vanished after its removal in the late 1930s.
25 Speyer Cathedral
Speyerer Dom
Germany · 20.5 km from Mannheim49.317° N 8.443° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by PhotoEnduro from Pixabay Speyer Cathedral was built as a statement of imperial power. In 1025 the Salian emperor Conrad II ordered what was meant to be the largest church in the Christian West, in a Rhineland town of perhaps 500 people, and to serve as his tomb. Work began in 1030 on a rise beside the Rhine safe from floods, using red sandstone from the Palatinate Forest. Conrad was buried in the unfinished building in 1039 and his son Henry III in 1056. The first church was consecrated in 1061. Around 1090 his grandson Henry IV, then locked in the Investiture Controversy with Pope Gregory VII, rebuilt it on a bigger scale: the nave was raised by 5 m and covered with a groin vault, one of the great engineering feats of Romanesque building. At 134 m long, the finished cathedral was one of the largest buildings of its time, and with Cluny Abbey in ruins it is today the largest Romanesque church that survives.
Did you know? In the cathedral square stands the Domnapf, a huge stone bowl that each new bishop had to fill with wine for the townspeople to drink.
26 Reims Cathedral
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Reims
France · 0.5 km from Reims49.254° N 4.034° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay Reims held the coronation of the French monarchy for six centuries, from Louis VIII in 1223 to Charles X in 1825 — twenty-five coronations in total. The most loaded of them was Charles VII's in 1429, staged there specifically because Joan of Arc had pushed the campaign that reached Reims, not because it was the safest or most convenient option; the location itself was proof of a military and political argument, not just a religious formality.
Did you know? Reims Cathedral carries roughly 2,300 carved statues, one of the largest sculptural programmes of any Gothic church in Europe.
27 Modena Cathedral
Duomo di Modena
Italy · 0.6 km from Modena44.646° N 10.925° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Ermaf62 from Pixabay Modena Cathedral is one of the key buildings of European Romanesque, and it is unusual in that we know the names of the two men who made it: the architect Lanfranco and the sculptor Wiligelmus. Begun in 1099 over the grave of the city's patron, St Geminianus, and consecrated by Pope Lucius III in 1184, it stands on Piazza Grande beside its bell tower, the Ghirlandina. Cathedral, tower and square together form a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
28 Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia
Свети Александър Невски
Bulgaria · 1.9 km from Sofia42.696° N 23.333° E
Image by Michael_Kastelic from Pixabay The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral is Sofia's great gilded landmark and the cathedral church of the Patriarch of Bulgaria. It was conceived as a memorial to the Russian soldiers who died in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, the war that ended Ottoman rule over Bulgaria, and it bears the name of the medieval Russian prince and saint Alexander Nevsky. The foundation stone was laid in 1882, but most of the building went up between 1904 and 1912 to designs by the Russian architect Alexander Pomerantsev; the church was consecrated only in 1924. During the First World War, when Bulgaria and Russia were on opposite sides, it briefly carried the names of Saints Cyril and Methodius instead.
Did you know? The foundation stone was laid on 3 March 1882, four years to the day after the Treaty of San Stefano that restored a Bulgarian state.
29 León Cathedral
Catedral de Santa María de Regla de León
Spain · 2.2 km from León42.599° N 5.567° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TerapiasNaturales from Pixabay León's cathedral, Santa María de Regla, is the Spanish cathedral that went furthest in the Gothic dream of replacing walls with light. It has around 125 windows and about 1,800 square metres of stained glass, most of it made between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, one of the largest collections of medieval glass anywhere. On a sunny day the interior is washed in moving colour, and that effect, rather than any single work of art, is the reason to come. Its nickname, Pulchra Leonina, "the beautiful one of León", goes back centuries.
Did you know? For centuries a dried hide over a door was said to be a mole that wrecked the builders' work by night; in the 1990s it proved a leatherback turtle shell.
30 Roskilde Cathedral
Roskilde Domkirke
Denmark · 0.8 km from Roskilde55.643° N 12.080° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Kurt Spalinger-Røes · CC BY 3.0 Roskilde Cathedral is both a building and a family vault for an entire royal line. Since the fifteenth century it has been the main burial church of Denmark's monarchs. Each generation added its own chapel, in the style of its own time, so a walk around the brick church passes through almost eight hundred years of European architecture. Its twin spires, added by King Christian IV in 1633, rise above the rooftops of the old town.
Did you know? A granite pillar in the Chapel of the Magi records the heights of visiting kings: Peter the Great, measured in 1716, is the tallest mark, Chulalongkorn of Siam the shortest.
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 cathedral in the world?
- On our list, Milan Cathedral (Italy) ranks first, followed by Wawel Cathedral (Poland) and Bamberg Cathedral (Germany).
- Which country has the most beautiful cathedrals?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (15), Spain (10) and France (9).
- How long did it take to build Milan Cathedral?
- Construction began in 1386, and the cathedral was declared complete only in the twentieth century, nearly six centuries later.
- Which cathedral was once the tallest building in the world?
- Strasbourg Cathedral held that title for more than two centuries thanks to its spire. Lincoln Cathedral, also in our collection, held it earlier, until its central spire collapsed in the sixteenth century.
- How many cathedrals are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 81 cathedrals in 27 countries. Italy has the most, with 15.