The Most Beautiful Cemeteries in the World
26 places in 17 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful cemeteries in the world are Giza pyramid complex (Egypt), Catacombs of Paris (France) and Valley of the Kings (Egypt). The list covers 26 cemeteries in 17 countries. Italy has the most, with 7. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A great cemetery is a landscape made by memory: paths, planting and sculpture laid out so the living can walk among the dead. Since the early nineteenth century the garden cemetery has treated burial grounds as parks, with avenues, hills and monuments; much older necropolises turned whole valleys and plateaus into cities of tombs. What lifts one above the rest is the way it holds a mood, solemn, tender or even cheerful, across a whole landscape.
The Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives faces the Old City of Jerusalem across the Kidron Valley and has been used for burial for thousands of years. The Merry Cemetery at Săpânța in Romania is known for its blue wooden crosses painted with scenes and verses about the lives of the dead. The Monumental Cemetery of Milan is an open-air gallery of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sculpture, and the Glasgow Necropolis covers a hill beside the city's cathedral. In Stockholm, Skogskyrkogården by Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz sets graves in a pine forest, while the Valley of the Kings holds the rock-cut tombs of New Kingdom pharaohs.
Every place here was picked for how it looks and ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a position on the map; separate pages open the section by country.
In this list
01 Giza pyramid complex
Egypt · 6.7 km from Giza29.976° N 31.133° E
Ricardo Liberato · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Giza plateau, on the edge of the Western Desert above modern Giza, holds the most famous group of monuments on Earth: the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, the Great Sphinx, and the temples, causeways and cemeteries that served them. All were built during Egypt's Fourth Dynasty, roughly 2600 to 2500 BC. Giza is the northernmost part of the Memphis necropolis, a World Heritage Site since 1979 that extends south through Abusir, Saqqara and Dahshur.
Did you know? The three great pyramids are aligned to the cardinal directions with an error of only about one-fifteenth of a degree.
02 Catacombs of Paris
Catacombes de Paris
France · 3.1 km from Paris48.834° N 2.332° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Twenty metres beneath the 14th arrondissement, in tunnels left by centuries of limestone quarrying, lie the bones of several million Parisians. The Catacombs of Paris are an ossuary created to empty the city's overflowing cemeteries, and the walk through them is one of the strangest in any European capital: a long, cool corridor of stone that suddenly turns into walls built entirely of skulls and long bones, stacked with a care that is almost decorative.
Did you know? The ossuary holds the remains of more than six million people, yet it occupies only a small part of the old quarry tunnels beneath Paris.
03 Valley of the Kings
Egypt · 6.5 km from Luxor25.740° N 32.602° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Freiheitsjunkie from Pixabay For nearly five centuries, from about 1539 to 1075 BC, the pharaohs of the New Kingdom were buried not under pyramids but in tombs cut deep into a dry valley on the west bank of the Nile opposite Thebes, modern Luxor. The valley lies beneath al-Qurn, a pyramid-shaped peak that may have been part of its appeal, and its hidden entrances were meant to defeat the robbers who had emptied the older royal tombs. Mortuary temples for the cult of the dead kings were built separately, down by the fields. Some 65 tombs and chambers are now known, from simple pits to KV5, the vast burial complex of the sons of Ramesses II, with more than 120 rooms.
Did you know? Workmen who cut and painted the royal tombs lived in the nearby village of Deir el-Medina, and their records include what may be history's first documented labour strike.
04 Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery
Israel · 3.5 km from Jerusalem31.774° N 35.243° E
Image by reijotelaranta from Pixabay The western slope of the Mount of Olives, facing the walls of Jerusalem's Old City across the Kidron Valley, is covered by one of the oldest and most important Jewish burial grounds in the world. Tens of thousands of flat limestone tombs — estimates run from about 70,000 to 150,000 — step down the hillside in pale terraces, so densely that from the Old City the slope looks almost like a single carved surface. Burials here reach back to the Second Temple period, and the cemetery as it now appears took shape from the 16th century onward.
Did you know? Menachem Begin chose this cemetery over Mount Herzl, where most Israeli leaders lie, to be buried beside his wife Aliza and two underground fighters.
05 Merry Cemetery
Romania · 35.8 km from Baia Mare47.971° N 23.696° E
Chainwit. · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Merry Cemetery is cheerful on purpose, not by accident of tone. Starting in 1935, local woodcarver Stan Ioan Pătraș began replacing plain grave markers with tall carved oak crosses, each painted with a naive-style scene from the dead person's life or death and topped with a short rhymed epitaph, written in the first person in the blunt local dialect — often naming exactly the thing that would normally go unsaid at a funeral.
Did you know? Stan Ioan Pătraș began carving oak crosses at the age of 14, more than a decade before he wrote his first comic epitaph.
06 Monumental Cemetery of Milan
Cimitero monumentale di Milano
Italy · 2.4 km from Milan45.486° N 9.179° E
Paolobon140 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Milan's Cimitero Monumentale is less a graveyard than an open-air museum of sculpture, a city of marble temples, obelisks, chapels and statuary in which the families of industrial and bourgeois Milan competed to commission the most striking memorial. It was designed by the architect Carlo Maciachini to replace a number of small cemeteries then scattered around the city, and it opened in the mid-1860s. Covering about 25 hectares, it was laid out as a non-denominational cemetery, with separate areas for non-Catholic and Jewish burials; the Jewish section opened in 1872 and was enlarged in 1913.
Did you know? The ballet star Carla Fracci, who died in 2021, became the first woman to be entombed in the Famedio, the cemetery's hall of fame.
07 Vienna Central Cemetery
Wiener Zentralfriedhof
Austria · 7.9 km from Vienna48.151° N 16.438° E
Image by misterfarmer from Pixabay Vienna's Central Cemetery was planned for an empire that never arrived. In the 1860s the city fathers expected the capital of Austria-Hungary to reach four million people, and they set aside a vast flat tract in Simmering, far outside the town, big enough for generations of the dead. The Frankfurt landscape architects Karl Jonas Mylius and Alfred Friedrich Bluntschli won the design competition, and the cemetery opened on All Saints' Day 1874 — quietly, because the idea of burying all faiths in one ground had enraged conservative Catholics. Today it covers about 2.5 square kilometres, with some 330,000 graves and around three million people buried.
Did you know? By area it is the second-largest cemetery in Europe, surpassed only by Hamburg's Ohlsdorf Cemetery.
08 Père Lachaise Cemetery
France · 3 km from Paris48.861° N 2.394° E
Image by 139904 from Pixabay Père Lachaise is the largest cemetery in Paris, 44 hectares of tree-lined paths and closely packed tombs on a hillside in the 20th arrondissement, and more than a million people have been buried here. It opened in 1804 as the Cemetery of the East, one of several created outside the old city when the parish graveyards were closed, and takes its popular name from Père François de la Chaise, confessor to Louis XIV, who lived in a Jesuit house on the site. The neoclassical architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart laid it out on the model of an English landscape garden, making it the first garden cemetery in Paris.
Did you know? Chopin lies here, but not his heart: at his request his sister carried it to Warsaw in 1850, where it is sealed inside a pillar of the Holy Cross Church.
09 Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague
Czech Republic · 0.5 km from Prague50.090° N 14.417° E
Image by Nicolas-Debray from Pixabay The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague's Josefov is one of the most important Jewish burial grounds in Europe, and one of the most affecting places in the city. More than 12,000 tombstones stand here, packed so closely that they lean against one another in every direction. The cemetery was in use from the first half of the fifteenth century until 1787; the oldest surviving stone, of Avigdor Kara, is dated 1439. Because the ground could not be enlarged, new soil was laid over old graves and the stones raised to the surface, so that in places the dead lie in many layers.
Did you know? Far more people lie here than there are stones: estimates of the number of burials run to around 100,000.
10 Necropolis of Pantalica
Pantalica
Italy · 28.1 km from Syracuse37.133° N 14.983° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Danny Krull · CC BY-SA 2.0 In the limestone gorges of southeastern Sicily, thousands of small rectangular openings honeycomb the cliffs like the cells of a vast hive. Each is the mouth of a tomb cut into the rock between roughly the thirteenth and the seventh centuries BC. Pantalica was long thought to hold more than 5,000 such chambers; recent counts put the figure at just under 4,000, still enough to make it one of the largest rock-cut cemeteries in the Mediterranean. The setting is as striking as the tombs: a high plateau almost surrounded by the deep valleys of the Anapo and Calcinara rivers, thick with vegetation along the valley floors.
Did you know? No trace survives of the prehistoric houses; Paolo Orsi argued the people lived in light huts of wood, reeds and straw that weather simply erased.
11 Catacombe dei Cappuccini
Italy · 1.9 km from Palermo38.112° N 13.339° E
Giacomo Palermo · CC BY-SA 4.0 Beneath the Capuchin friary in Palermo lies one of Europe's most unsettling burial places: corridors lined with the dressed, dried and upright bodies of Palermitans who died between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. The friars began digging crypts here at the end of the 1500s, when their cemetery had filled up, and in 1599 they preserved one of their own, Brother Silvestro of Gubbio, and laid him below ground. The method was simple: bodies were left to dry out on racks of terracotta pipes, then sometimes rinsed with vinegar, dressed and set in niches or glass-fronted cases. At first only friars were buried this way, but being preserved among the Capuchins soon became a mark of standing for the city's families.
Did you know? Brother Silvestro of Gubbio, the first friar laid here on 16 October 1599, still lies first on the left after the entrance.
12 Skogskyrkogården
Sweden · 5.7 km from Stockholm59.276° N 18.099° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Holger Ellgaard · CC BY-SA 3.0 Skogskyrkogården, the Woodland Cemetery in the south of Stockholm, changed how the twentieth century thought about burial. In 1915 two young architects, Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, won an international competition with a scheme called "Tallum", and they built it over the following decades on old gravel pits grown over with pine. Instead of paths lined with monuments, they made a landscape: graves set quietly among the trees, open meadows, and buildings that appear one by one as you walk. It opened in 1920 and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994.
Did you know? With about 100,000 graves it is the largest cemetery in Sweden by number of burials, and the second largest by area.
13 Catacomb of Priscilla
Catacombe di Priscilla
Italy · 4.2 km from Rome41.930° N 12.509° E
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain Beneath the Via Salaria, on the northern side of Rome, lies one of the richest of the city's early Christian cemeteries. The Catacomb of Priscilla was dug from an ancient quarry and grew into many kilometres of galleries on two levels, used for burials from the late second century into the fourth. In antiquity it was called the "Queen of the Catacombs" for the number of martyrs laid here, and the popes Marcellinus and Marcellus I were among those buried in it. Its name is traditionally linked to a Priscilla of the senatorial Acilii Glabriones family, whose name has been found in the underground rooms, though the question of who she was remains open.
14 San Michele Cemetery, Venice
San Michele
Italy · 1.3 km from Venice45.447° N 12.347° E
Image by NakNakNak from Pixabay Seen from the northern waterfront of Venice, San Michele is a low rectangle of pale brick walls with the dark spires of cypresses rising above them: an island given over entirely to the dead. It became the city's principal cemetery under Napoleonic rule, when a decree of 1807 ended burials within the crowded parishes of the historic centre; the first plan was drawn by Giannantonio Selva and the cemetery formally opened in 1813. In the 1830s the canal that separated it from neighbouring San Cristoforo della Pace was filled in, joining the two islands into the single enclosure seen today.
Did you know? In the 15th century the island's Camaldolese monastery was home to the monk Fra Mauro, who produced his celebrated world map of about 1450 here.
15 Recoleta Cemetery
Argentina · 4.4 km from Buenos Aires34.588° S 58.393° W
Image by dpkelly07 from Pixabay Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires is a city of the dead laid out like a city of the living: a grid of paved alleys lined with trees and some 4,700 above-ground vaults, many of them small chapels, temples and miniature palaces. Covering about 5.5 hectares in the elegant Recoleta district, it holds the tombs of presidents, generals, writers and scientists, and walking its lanes is a lesson in how Argentina's elite chose to be remembered — in marble, bronze and stained glass imported from Paris and Milan in the decades around 1900.
Did you know? It was inaugurated on 17 November 1822 under the name Cementerio del Norte, the Northern Cemetery.
16 Highgate Cemetery
United Kingdom · 7.5 km from London51.567° N 0.147° W
JohnArmagh · Public domain Highgate Cemetery climbs a south-facing hillside in north London just below the top of Highgate Hill, next to Waterlow Park. It opened in 1839 as one of the "Magnificent Seven" private cemeteries built around the edge of the city when the old churchyards had run out of room, and the architect Stephen Geary laid out the original western part. An eastern extension across Swain's Lane opened in 1860. Around 170,000 people lie in some 53,000 graves, and the grounds, long left to grow wild, are now as much woodland and nature reserve as burial ground. The cemetery is listed Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.
Did you know? In 1862 Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried a handwritten book of his poems beside his wife Elizabeth Siddal; in 1869 he had her coffin opened to retrieve it.
17 Necropolis of stecci at Radimlja, the historic site
Nekropola Radimlja
Bosnia and Herzegovina · 29.9 km from Mostar43.093° N 17.923° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Joanne Goldby from Birmingham, UK · CC BY-SA 2.0 Stećci — massive carved medieval tombstones — are found only in the western Balkans, and Radimlja, in the Vidovo field just outside Stolac in Herzegovina, is the most celebrated site where they can be seen. In 2016 it was included in the World Heritage listing of stećci cemeteries shared by Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia.
Did you know? The epitaphs name three stonemasons, Miogost, Bolašin Bogačić and Ratko Brativonić, and Miogost described himself simply as a smith.
More about Necropolis of stecci at Radimlja, the historic site →
18 Glasgow Necropolis
United Kingdom · 0.5 km from Glasgow55.863° N 4.231° W
瑞丽江的河水 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On a hill just east of Glasgow Cathedral, the Necropolis crowds the skyline with obelisks, temples, columns and mausolea, a Victorian city of the dead set deliberately above the living one. The Merchants' House of Glasgow began planning it in 1831, looking to the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris as a model for a landscaped garden cemetery, and it opened officially in 1833. The hill was already crowned by a monument to the reformer John Knox, raised in 1825, and the whole design grew around it.
Did you know? The first person buried on the hill, in 1832, was a Jewish jeweller named Joseph Levi, a year before the Necropolis officially opened.
19 Mirogoj Cemetery
Mirogoj
Croatia · 2.3 km from Zagreb45.836° N 15.984° E
Image by GoranH from Pixabay Mirogoj is less a cemetery on the edge of Zagreb than a walled city of the dead laid out as a park. Its entrance is a long, pale wall of arcades crowned by a row of green copper cupolas, with the church of Christ the King at the centre, and behind it tree-lined avenues, lawns and ivy run between tens of thousands of graves. The land once belonged to the linguist and national reformer Ljudevit Gaj and was bought by the city after his death; the cemetery was opened on 6 November 1876, and its present form is the work of the architect Hermann Bollé.
Did you know? More than 300,000 people have been laid to rest at Mirogoj, in only about 60,000 graves and tombs.
20 Tombs of the Kings, Paphos
Τάφοι των Βασιλέων
Cyprus · 2.8 km from Paphos34.776° N 32.405° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay The Tombs of the Kings is a large necropolis on the coast just north of Paphos harbour, where the dead of Hellenistic and Roman Paphos were buried in chambers cut out of the solid rock. Despite the name, no kings lie here. The tombs belonged to the town's aristocracy and high officials, and the grandeur of the largest of them gave the site its name. They were used from the 4th century BC until the 3rd century AD, when Paphos was the capital of Cyprus under Ptolemaic and then Roman rule.
Did you know? The name is doubly misleading: by the time these tombs were cut, the old city-kingdoms of Cyprus had already ceased to exist.
21 Western Xia Imperial Tombs
People's Republic of China · 25.1 km from Yinchuan38.435° N 105.987° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Thebrainchamber1 · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the foot of the Helan Mountains, on the dry plain west of Yinchuan, a line of great earthen mounds rises from the steppe like weathered beehives. They are the tombs of the emperors of Western Xia, a state founded by the Tangut people that ruled much of northwest China from 1038 until its destruction by Genghis Khan's Mongols in 1227. The burial ground covers some 50 square kilometres and holds nine imperial mausoleums and around 250 tombs of relatives and officials, strung over about 12 km along the mountain foothills. In 2025 UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List as the Xixia Imperial Tombs.
Did you know? Chinese writers often call the site the "Pyramids of the East", a nickname earned by its tall, tapering earthen mounds rising from the plain.
22 Catacombs of Domitilla
Catacombe di Domitilla
Italy · 4.8 km from Rome41.859° N 12.506° E
Anonymous Unknown author · Public domain Beneath the fields and lanes south of Rome's ancient walls, the volcanic tuff is threaded with one of the largest underground cemeteries of the early Church. The Catacombs of Domitilla run for kilometres through narrow corridors stacked on four levels, their walls lined with tier upon tier of empty burial niches, and they open, unusually, into a church: a three-aisled basilica sunk half below ground into the cemetery itself. Few places convey so directly how the first Christian communities of the city buried and remembered their dead.
Did you know? The Catacombs of Domitilla are among the largest underground cemeteries in Rome, with galleries on four levels.
23 Okunoin Cemetery, Mount Kōya
Japan34.218° N 135.605° E
Image by yamabon from Pixabay Okunoin is the innermost sanctuary of Mount Kōya, the mountain monastery founded by the monk Kūkai, known posthumously as Kōbō Daishi. According to Shingon belief, Kūkai did not die in 835 but entered eternal meditation in his mausoleum here, where he awaits the coming of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future. Because of that belief, generations of Japanese of every rank have wanted their remains or a memorial placed near him, and the result is the largest cemetery in Japan, with more than two hundred thousand graves and monuments.
Did you know? According to legend, anyone who looks into the Sugatami well and cannot see their reflection will die within three years.
24 Bonaventure Cemetery
United States · 6.9 km from Savannah32.047° N 81.044° W
User:Frogwhite (Carmen Cordelia) · Public domain Avenues of old live oaks hung with Spanish moss shade the graves of Bonaventure, a cemetery on a bluff above the Wilmington River just east of Savannah, Georgia. Marble angels, family plots behind iron railings and Victorian monuments sit in a half-light of grey moss and green leaves, and the place has drawn writers, painters and photographers for more than 150 years.
Did you know? The marble statue of six-year-old Gracie Watson, who died in 1889, was carved by John Walz from a photograph and is one of Georgia's few grave monuments in exact likeness.
25 Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno
Cimitero monumentale di Staglieno
Italy · 2.7 km from Genoa44.430° N 8.950° E
Image by OudsidEscape from Pixabay Staglieno is less a graveyard than a city of marble built by nineteenth-century Genoa for its dead. Planned first by Carlo Barabino and, after his death in 1835, carried through by Giovanni Battista Resasco, it opened on 2 January 1851 on the slopes of the Bisagno valley. Today it stretches over more than a square kilometre and holds well over a hundred thousand graves, which places it among the largest cemeteries in Europe. Its logic follows the Napoleonic reform of burial that pushed cemeteries out of churches and town centres, but Genoa turned the rule into a showpiece of civic pride.
Did you know? Caterina Campodonico, a poor street seller of nut necklaces, spent her life savings on a lifelike statue of herself by Lorenzo Orengo.
26 Hanging Coffins of Sagada
Philippines17.081° N 120.906° E
Aldrin J. Garces (ag) · CC BY-SA 3.0 High on the limestone walls of Echo Valley, in the mountains of northern Luzon, wooden coffins are fixed to the rock: resting on ledges, wedged into crevices or laid on beams driven into the cliff face, some of them stacked one above another. They belong to the Kankanaey people of Sagada, a town set in a valley about 1,500 metres up in the Cordillera Central, among limestone ridges, caves and rice terraces. In the nearby Lumiang Cave older coffins are stacked inside, in the same tradition carried underground.
Did you know? Hanging coffins are a minority custom: most Kankanaey coffins were tucked into crevices or stacked inside limestone caves, placed according to status and cause of death.
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 cemetery in the world?
- On our list, Giza pyramid complex (Egypt) ranks first, followed by Catacombs of Paris (France) and Valley of the Kings (Egypt).
- Which country has the most beautiful cemeteries?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (7), Egypt (2) and France (2).
- Why is the Merry Cemetery called merry?
- Its oak crosses are painted in bright blue with naive pictures and short, often humorous verses about the people buried beneath, a tradition begun by the local carver Stan Ioan Pătraș.
- What is a garden cemetery?
- A cemetery designed as a landscaped park, with winding paths, trees and monuments. Père Lachaise in Paris, opened in 1804, is usually named as the first of its kind.
- How many cemeteries are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 26 cemeteries in 17 countries. Italy has the most, with 7.