The Most Beautiful City Parks in the World

17 places in 9 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Park Güell

   Spain · 4 km from Barcelona41.414° N 2.153° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Park Güell was supposed to be a real estate project, and by that measure it was a total failure. In 1900 the industrialist Eusebi Güell hired Antoni Gaudí to lay out an exclusive gated community of sixty houses on a hillside above Barcelona, loosely modelled on the English garden-city idea Güell admired abroad. Gaudí finished the entrance pavilions, the grand staircase, the viaducts, and the market hall beneath the main terrace by 1907 — but only two houses out of sixty ever sold. The First World War killed what was left of the project in 1914, Güell died in 1918 having never recouped the investment, and his heirs eventually gave the failed development to Barcelona's city council, which opened it to the public as a municipal park in 1926.

   Did you know? Rain falling on the great terrace soaks through its unpaved surface into the columns and a cistern of about 1,200 cubic metres, and overflow pours from the dragon's mouth.

   More about Park Güell →

2. 02 Tuileries Garden

   Jardin des Tuileries

   France · 2.1 km from Paris48.864° N 2.326° E

   

   The Tuileries Garden stretches between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, 25.5 hectares of gravel walks, rows of trees, basins and statues laid out on the grand axis that Le Nôtre meant to carry on westward towards what became the Champs-Élysées. It takes its name from the tile works, tuileries, that stood here before Catherine de' Medici bought the land in 1564 to build a new palace and commissioned a Florentine, Bernard de Carnesse, to lay out an Italian Renaissance garden beside it.

   More about Tuileries Garden →

3. 03 Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe

   Germany · 7.2 km from Kassel51.317° N 9.400° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe climbs the whole eastern face of the Habichtswald above Kassel, and it was built to be read from the top down. At the crest, on the Karlsberg, stands the Hercules monument: a massive stone base topped by a pyramid, the whole about 40 metres high, and a copper statue of the demigod about 8.5 metres tall, a copy of the ancient Farnese Hercules made by the Augsburg goldsmith Johann Jacob Anthoni. Below it a staircase of water — the Great Cascade, some 350 metres long — drops straight toward the city, and at the foot of the slope the neoclassical Schloss Wilhelmshöhe closes the axis. Covering about 2.4 square kilometres, it is the largest hillside park in Europe.

   Did you know? The copper skin of the Hercules statue is made of hand-forged sheets only two to three millimetres thick, riveted over a wrought-iron skeleton.

   More about Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe →

4. 04 Central Park

   United States · 7.2 km from New York City40.782° N 73.966° W

   

   Central Park looks natural, but almost none of it is. Every hill, boulder outcrop, lake and winding path was engineered by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who won a design competition in 1858 with a plan called "Greensward" that treated 843 acres of swampy, rocky Manhattan bedrock as a blank canvas for staged wilderness. Olmsted came to landscape design almost by accident — he'd already tried newspaper journalism, farming and social commentary — after a trip to Birkenhead Park in England convinced him that a park could be a genuinely democratic public space rather than a private amenity for the wealthy. The stone used to build the park's bridges and walls was largely quarried on-site; the famous Sheep Meadow really did graze sheep until 1934, when they were removed partly out of fear that hungry New Yorkers during the Depression might eat them.

   Did you know? Clearing the rocky site reportedly took more gunpowder than was fired at the Battle of Gettysburg.

   More about Central Park →

5. 05 Jardin du Luxembourg

   France · 1.7 km from Paris48.847° N 2.337° E

   

   The Jardin du Luxembourg is the most Parisian of gardens, laid out in 1612 for Marie de' Medici, widow of Henry IV. The palace was designed by Salomon de Brosse and the gardens by Tommaso Francini, and today both belong to the French Senate, which sits in the palace. The garden covers some 23 hectares on the Left Bank, between Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter.

   Did you know? During the French Revolution the Luxembourg Palace became a prison holding about 800 detainees, among them Danton, Camille Desmoulins and the painter Jacques-Louis David.

   More about Jardin du Luxembourg →

6. 06 Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

   France · 3.3 km from Paris48.880° N 2.383° E

   

   Few city parks began life in such a grim place. For some five centuries the bare hill in north-eastern Paris carried the Gibbet of Montfaucon, where the bodies of the executed were left on display; after the Revolution the ground served as a rubbish tip, a knacker's yard for dead horses and a sewage dump, and its gypsum and limestone were quarried until the seams gave out in the late 1850s. The quarrymen also turned up fossils of Eocene mammals such as Palaeotherium. The name itself is usually traced to "Chauve-mont", the bald mount.

   Did you know? The Gibbet of Montfaucon stood on the site from the 13th century until 1760, so executions were part of this landscape for roughly five hundred years.

   More about Parc des Buttes-Chaumont →

7. 07 Stanley Park

   Canada · 3 km from Vancouver49.300° N 123.140° W

   

   Stanley Park is a peninsula of forest attached to the edge of downtown Vancouver — some 405 hectares of cedar, fir and hemlock almost entirely surrounded by sea, with the glass towers of the West End on one side and the mountains of the North Shore on the other. It opened as a public park on 27 September 1888 and was named after Lord Stanley, then Governor General of Canada. Around half a million trees grow here, some of them hundreds of years old and taller than 70 metres, and the contrast between that dark coastal rainforest and the city a few minutes' walk away is what makes the park so unusual among the great urban parks of the world.

   Did you know? At about 405 hectares, Stanley Park is roughly a fifth larger than New York's Central Park.

   More about Stanley Park →

8. 08 Yu Garden

   People's Republic of China · 5.2 km from Shanghai31.229° N 121.487° E

   

   Yu Garden exists because a son wanted his aging parents to have something to look at. Pan Yunduan, a Ming-dynasty governor of Sichuan Province, began building it in 1559 specifically so his father could enjoy a garden in old age — an act of filial devotion, one of the core Confucian virtues, made permanent in stone and water. What should have been a modest project turned into an eighteen-year obsession: Pan kept expanding and refining the design well past any reasonable budget, and by the time it was finished in 1577, the family fortune that paid for it was largely gone. The garden's name, fittingly, translates to something like "Garden of Peace and Comfort" — the ambition, at least, succeeded even if the finances didn't.

   Did you know? The garden's name uses the character yu, meaning to please and satisfy one's parents.

   More about Yu Garden →

9. 09 Gardens by the Bay

   Singapore · 1.8 km from Singapore1.283° N 103.865° E

   

   The eighteen Supertrees at Gardens by the Bay look like sculpture, but they're closer to infrastructure disguised as sculpture. Each one is a reinforced-concrete trunk, 25 to 50 metres tall, wrapped in a steel frame and dressed with planting panels holding some of the more than 162,900 plants — over 200 species of bromeliads, orchids, ferns and flowering climbers — spread across a vegetative surface nearly eight times larger than the trees' actual footprint on the ground. That's the visible part.

   Did you know? The Flower Dome was listed by Guinness World Records in 2015 as the largest glass greenhouse in the world, covering 1.2 hectares without a single interior column.

   More about Gardens by the Bay →

10. 10 El Retiro Park

    Parque del Retiro

    Spain · 1.5 km from Madrid40.415° N 3.684° W

    

    El Retiro began as a royal escape. In the 1630s the Count-Duke of Olivares gave Philip IV land on the eastern edge of Madrid for a second palace, the Buen Retiro — the "good retreat" — and its gardens were laid out by Cosimo Lotti, who had worked on the Boboli Gardens in Florence. For much of the Spanish Golden Age it was the stage of court life, with plays and later Italian operas performed among its ponds and canals. Most of the palace was destroyed during the Peninsular War, when French troops built a citadel in the grounds; two buildings survive, the Casón del Buen Retiro and the Hall of Realms. In 1868, after the revolution that toppled Isabella II, the park passed to the city, and it has been Madrid's great public garden ever since.

    Did you know? The park holds more than 19,000 trees of about 167 species, and horse chestnuts alone make up roughly a third of them.

    More about El Retiro Park →

11. 11 Shinjuku Gyoen

    Japan · 3.5 km from Tokyo35.687° N 139.711° E

    

    Shinjuku Gyoen is a 58-hectare garden set right against the towers of Shinjuku, with a perimeter of about three and a half kilometres, and its charm is the sudden drop in noise once you pass the gate. The ground has been a garden for more than two centuries. In 1590 Tokugawa Ieyasu gave the land to the Naitō, a daimyo family, as the site of their Edo residence, and their garden was completed in 1772. After the Meiji Restoration it became an imperial botanical garden in 1879, and in 1906 it was remade as an imperial garden, opening that May in the presence of Emperor Meiji.

    Did you know? Shinjuku Gyoen is the main setting of Makoto Shinkai's 2013 animated film The Garden of Words, much of it drawn from his own photographs of the park.

    More about Shinjuku Gyoen →

12. 12 Frogner Park

    Norway · 2.8 km from Oslo59.927° N 10.701° E

    

    Frogner Park in Oslo's West End is a 45-hectare city park with an old manor, a rose garden and sports grounds, but people come for one thing it contains: the Vigeland installation, 212 sculptures in bronze and granite made by Gustav Vigeland between 1924 and 1943 and set out along a single axis. It is often described as the largest sculpture park made by one artist anywhere, and with between one and two million visitors a year it is Norway's most visited attraction. The figures are all nude and all human: children, lovers, the old, families, people fighting, embracing and falling asleep.

    Did you know? In 2009 Frogner Park became the first park in Norway to be protected under the national Heritage Act.

    More about Frogner Park →

13. 13 Hitachi Seaside Park

    Japan · 10.5 km from Mito36.401° N 140.591° E

    

    For a few weeks each spring, a low hill on the Pacific coast of Ibaraki turns entirely sky-blue. Miharashi Hill in Hitachi Seaside Park is planted with several million nemophila, the small "baby blue eyes" flower, and when they peak, usually from late April into mid-May, the blue runs from the foot of the slope over the crown so evenly that hill and sky seem to merge. In autumn the same hill changes character completely: it is covered in rounded bushes of kochia, which turn from green to a vivid red, usually best in early to mid October.

    Did you know? The famous blue hill is surprisingly recent: nemophila were first planted on Miharashi Hill only in 2002, eleven years after the park opened.

    More about Hitachi Seaside Park →

14. 14 Farm Tomita

    Japan · 37.5 km from Asahikawa43.419° N 142.427° E

    

    In high summer the gentle slopes of Farm Tomita turn violet, row after row of lavender running towards the Tokachi volcanic range on the horizon, while next to them long parallel bands of other flowers stripe the hillside in contrasting colours. The farm, in the Furano basin of central Hokkaido, kept the region's lavender alive when almost everyone else gave it up, and it is now one of the most visited places on the island.

    Did you know? At the height of the Furano lavender boom, the district distilled about five tonnes of lavender oil a year.

    More about Farm Tomita →

15. 15 Ashikaga Flower Park

    Japan36.315° N 139.522° E

    

    Under a single trellis the size of a small square, a curtain of lilac-purple flowers hangs so thickly that the branches holding it up disappear. The great wisteria of Ashikaga Flower Park is a pair of Japanese wisteria vines whose trained branches have been joined into one canopy covering about 2,000 square metres, said to be the largest wisteria trellis in Japan, and in a good spring each vine carries around 160,000 flower clusters. Together with a long-tressed wisteria whose racemes can reach 1.8 metres, a double-flowered dark purple variety and a tunnel of white wisteria, the old vines are protected as natural monuments of Tochigi Prefecture.

    Did you know? Moving the great wisteria took about three years of preparation before the vines were carried roughly 20 km on trailers in February 1996.

    More about Ashikaga Flower Park →

16. 16 Kawachi Wisteria Garden

    Japan · 5 km from Kitakyūshū33.832° N 130.792° E

    

    For a few weeks each spring, Kawachi Wisteria Garden turns into tunnels of hanging flowers: long trellised passages where clusters of wisteria droop overhead in graded shades of white, pink, lilac and deep violet, so dense that the light inside takes on their colour. The two tunnels, about 80 and 110 metres long, are the garden's signature, joined by a wisteria dome and a great open trellis whose oldest vines are more than a century old.

    Did you know? The garden's story starts with a vine from a valley flooded for the Kawachi Reservoir, transplanted here as the 'first tree' and now over 120 years old.

    More about Kawachi Wisteria Garden →

17. 17 Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark

    People's Republic of China40.531° N 93.064° E

    • UNESCO Global Geopark

    

    Northwest of the old Jade Gate, where the Silk Road left China for the western deserts, wind has carved a dry lakebed into a fleet of clay ridges. Long, keel-shaped mounds stand in rows across the gravel plain, all pointing the same way, like ships moored in a sea that disappeared long ago. At dusk their shadows stretch across the desert and the place earns its local name, Devil City.

    Did you know? The field gets only about 15 millimetres of rain a year, so wind, not water, does almost all of the sculpting.

    More about Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark →