The Most Beautiful Clock Towers in the World
7 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful clock towers in the world are Spasskaya Tower (Russia), Zytglogge (Switzerland) and Clock Tower of Sighișoara (Romania). The list covers 7 clock towers in 6 countries. Russia has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A clock tower is where a town keeps its time in public. The finest ones are more than a dial on a shaft: they carry painted faces with zodiac rings and moon phases, bells that set the rhythm of a square, and mechanical figures that step out on the hour. They usually stand at a threshold, over a city gate, beside a cathedral or above a parliament, and their silhouette becomes the shorthand for the whole place.
The tower in Sighișoara rises over a medieval Saxon citadel in Transylvania, with a coloured tiled roof and carved figures that change with the days of the week. The Zytglogge in Bern began as a gate in the city walls and gained its astronomical clock in the 16th century. In Venice, two bronze figures strike the bell on St Mark's Clocktower above a blue and gold dial. Moscow's Spasskaya Tower, built in 1491 by Pietro Antonio Solari, keeps the Kremlin chimes, and the tower in Westminster, completed in 1859 to designs by Augustus Pugin, houses the bell known as Big Ben. The Leaning Tower of Nevyansk, raised by the Demidov family in the Urals, tilts noticeably off vertical.
The towers were chosen for how they look and are ranked by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a mark on the map, and the section also opens by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Spasskaya Tower | Clock tower | Russia | |
| 2 | Zytglogge | Clock tower | Switzerland | ✓ |
| 3 | Clock Tower of Sighișoara | Clock tower | Romania | |
| 4 | St Mark's Clocktower | Clock tower | Italy | |
| 5 | Prague Astronomical Clock | Clock tower | Czech Republic | |
| 6 | Big Ben | Clock tower | United Kingdom | |
| 7 | Leaning Tower of Nevyansk | Clock tower | Russia |
01 Spasskaya Tower
Russia · 0.5 km from Moscow55.752° N 37.621° E
Юрий Д.К. · CC BY 4.0 The Spasskaya Tower is the main tower of the Moscow Kremlin's eastern wall and the face that the Kremlin turns to Red Square: a fortified gate tower below, a tiered top with a hipped spire, the great clock, and a red star at the summit. Its height with the star is 71 metres. The lower part is the work of an Italian: Grand Prince Ivan III brought Pietro Antonio Solari from Milan, and a Latin inscription over the gate records that the tower was built in 1491. It was first named the Frolovskaya Tower after a Kremlin church that no longer exists.
Did you know? Each of the clock's four faces is 6.12 metres across, with a minute hand about 3.27 metres long and Roman numerals 72 cm tall.
02 Zytglogge
Switzerland · 3.8 km from Bern46.948° N 7.448° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Karlheinz Klingbeil · CC BY 4.0 The Zytglogge — Bernese dialect for "time bell" — is the tower that Bern tells time by, and has done for six hundred years. It began around 1218–1220 as the gate tower of the city's western wall, a squat structure only 16 m high. As Bern grew westward it lost its defensive role, was raised, served for a time as a women's prison, and burned out in the great fire of 1405. When it was rebuilt, a clock was installed above the gate along with a great bell, cast in 1405 by Johann Reber of Aarau, which still strikes the hours.
Did you know? The clock's calendar cannot cope with leap years, so every 29 February the date hand has to be reset by hand.
03 Clock Tower of Sighișoara
Turnul cu Ceas din Sighișoara
Romania46.219° N 24.793° E
Image by falco from Pixabay The Clock Tower of Sighișoara guards the main gate of the upper citadel of Sighișoara, a small medieval fortified town in Transylvania preserved with rare completeness and listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. It is about 64 metres tall and visible from almost everywhere in town. It began in the late 13th century as a simple gate tower of sandstone and river stone, with walls more than two metres thick at the base; two brick storeys, a balcony and a new roof were added in the 16th century, and after the great fire of 1676 three travelling craftsmen — Veit Gruber from Tyrol, Philip Bong of Salzburg and a carpenter recorded only as Valentinus "the foreigner" — built the present Baroque roof in a single season in 1677.
Did you know? The three craftsmen who rebuilt the roof after the fire worked from March to September 1677 and were paid 650 florins.
04 St Mark's Clocktower
Torre dell'orologio
Italy · 0.5 km from Venice45.435° N 12.339° E
kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Clock Tower on the north side of Piazza San Marco in Venice is a Renaissance showpiece built both to tell the time and to proclaim the wealth of the Republic: it was set where its great dial could be seen from the lagoon. Its lower two storeys form a tall archway through which the Merceria, the main shopping street, leaves the square on its way to the Rialto — joining the political and religious centre of the city to its commercial heart. The tower was built in 1496–97, probably to a design by Mauro Codussi, and clock and tower were unveiled together on 1 February 1499.
Did you know? The Kroch high-rise in Leipzig, built in the late 1920s, was modelled on the Venice clock tower, complete with bronze bell-strikers on its roof.
05 Prague Astronomical Clock
Staroměstský orloj
Czech Republic · 0.2 km from Prague50.087° N 14.421° E
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay The Prague Orloj is a medieval astronomical clock set into the south wall of the Old Town Hall on Old Town Square, and it has been telling time, and a good deal more, since 1410. Its oldest parts, the clockwork and the astronomical dial, were made by the clockmaker Mikuláš of Kadaň with Jan Šindel, a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Charles University; the first written mention dates from 9 October 1410. Around 1490 a calendar dial was added below and the façade was dressed with Gothic sculpture. For centuries the clock was wrongly credited to a later master, Hanuš, and a legend retold by the writer Alois Jirásek holds that the city councillors had him blinded so he could never build another.
Did you know? Inside, the zodiac ring turns on a 365-tooth gear, the Sun's hand on a 366-tooth gear and the Moon's on a 379-tooth gear.
06 Big Ben
United Kingdom · 0.4 km from London51.501° N 0.125° W
Image by pemacallan from Pixabay Everyone calls the tower Big Ben, but that name actually belongs to the bell inside it — the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster — and the tower itself wasn't even called Elizabeth Tower until 2012, when it was renamed for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Before that it was simply the Clock Tower, which undersells what a fight it took to get built.
Did you know? The Great Bell cracked months after it first rang in 1859; instead of recasting it, workers turned it an eighth of a turn, and it still rings cracked.
07 Leaning Tower of Nevyansk
Russia · 0.5 km from Nevyansk57.490° N 60.223° E
Ludvig14 · CC BY-SA 4.0 In the centre of a small Urals town, a tall brick tower leans visibly to one side, while its upper tiers bend back towards the vertical in a gentle sabre curve. The Leaning Tower of Nevyansk, 57.5 metres high, was raised for the Demidovs, the iron-making dynasty that helped industrialise the Urals under Peter the Great. Nevyansk grew from an ironworks founded in 1700, which the tsar granted to Nikita Demidov together with vast tracts of land, and the tower became the family's emblem and the town's symbol, still shown on its coat of arms. The architect is unknown, and dates differ between accounts; most place construction in the 1720s, under Akinfiy Demidov.
Did you know? The chiming clock was originally set to play 18 English melodies, the repertoire it carried from its London maker.
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 clock tower in the world?
- On our list, Spasskaya Tower (Russia) ranks first, followed by Zytglogge (Switzerland) and Clock Tower of Sighișoara (Romania).
- Is Big Ben the clock or the tower?
- Big Ben is the name of the great bell inside the tower. The tower itself was renamed Elizabeth Tower in 2012.
- Which country has the most beautiful clock towers?
- In our collection, the most come from Russia (2), the Czech Republic (1) and Italy (1).
- How many clock towers are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 7 clock towers in 6 countries. Russia has the most, with 2.