The Most Beautiful Historic Gardens in the World

31 places in 15 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Boboli Gardens

   Giardino di Boboli

   Italy · 1.6 km from Florence43.765° N 11.250° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Florence is the city of the Medici, and the Boboli Gardens are where that family turned a hillside into a statement of power. Rising behind the Pitti Palace, the main residence of the grand dukes of Tuscany, the garden was begun in the mid-16th century for Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de' Medici. Niccolò Tribolo drew the first plan but died in 1550; Bartolomeo Ammannati carried the work on, with input from Giorgio Vasari, and Bernardo Buontalenti added sculpture and the most theatrical of the grottoes. It became one of the earliest and most imitated formal Italian gardens, and its mix of long axes, gravel avenues, stonework, statuary and fountains was copied by aristocratic gardens across Europe. Unusually for its day, it opened out to broad views of the city.

   Did you know? Despite their lavishness, the gardens were reserved for the Medici family, and no parties are known to have been held in them.

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2. 02 Fin Garden

   Iran · 19.5 km from Kashan33.946° N 51.373° E

   

   Fin Garden lies a few kilometres south-west of Kashan, on the edge of the desert plain, and it is the oldest Persian garden still standing in Iran. Laid out under Shah Abbas the Great and finished in 1590, it is a walled rectangle of about two and a quarter hectares, guarded by ramparts with round towers at the corners. Inside, everything is organised by water. Old trees line the axes, and straight stone channels run between them, widening into pools and narrowing again so that the flow speeds up and slows down as you walk beside it.

   Did you know? A severe earthquake in 1778 damaged the garden, and much of what stands today was rebuilt under the Zand and Qajar dynasties.

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3. 03 Generalife

   Spain · 1.3 km from Granada37.177° N 3.585° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Generalife was the country retreat of the Nasrid sultans of Granada, a palace of gardens and water set on the slope of the Cerro del Sol, a short walk uphill and to the east of the Alhambra. It was built in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, most likely under Muhammad II or Muhammad III, and an inscription gives it a poetic official name, the House of the Felicitous Kingdom. The everyday name probably comes from the Arabic jannat al-arif, whose meaning is still argued over: garden of the architect, of the artist, or of the mystic.

   Did you know? Water reaches the gardens through the Acequia Real, a channel drawing from the Darro River about 6 km east of the Alhambra.

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4. 04 Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild

   France · 5.7 km from Nice43.697° N 7.328° E

   

   On the narrow neck of land that joins Cap Ferrat to the Riviera coast, a rose-pink villa stands on the crest of the promontory with the sea on both sides, ringed by nine themed gardens. It was the creation of Baroness Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild (1864–1934), a member of the Rothschild banking family and wife of the banker Maurice Ephrussi, who had it built between 1907 and 1912 to designs by the French architect Aaron Messiah and named it Villa Île-de-France.

   Did you know? Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild won the plot on Cap Ferrat in competition with King Leopold II of Belgium, who wanted it to enlarge his neighbouring estate.

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5. 05 Herrenhausen Gardens

   Herrenhäuser Gärten

   Germany · 3 km from Hanover52.392° N 9.698° E

   

   The Great Garden at Herrenhausen is one of the most complete Baroque gardens in Europe: some fifty hectares of clipped hedges, geometric parterres, statues and water, laid out in strict symmetry and framed on three sides by a moat. At its centre the Great Fountain throws a jet that can reach around 80 metres under good conditions; already in the early eighteenth century, when it was first set going, it rose to about 35 metres and was the tallest fountain at any European court. Hedged garden rooms, a hedge theatre from the 1690s and triple rows of lime trees complete the picture of a princely pleasure ground built to impress.

   Did you know? The original Great Fountain was based on ideas of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and was first set going in 1719 during a visit by George I.

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6. 06 Stourhead

   United Kingdom · 31 km from Bath51.106° N 2.318° W

   

   Stourhead is a painting you can walk into. In the valley below his Palladian house in Wiltshire, the banker Henry Hoare II dammed a small stream to make a lake, and between 1741 and 1780 he arranged around it a sequence of temples, a grotto and bridges so that each turn of the path opens a new composed view. His models were the Italian landscapes of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and Gaspard Dughet; Hoare owned Claude's Aeneas at Delos, and the circuit of the lake is often read as a journey after Virgil's Aeneas, down into the underworld and out again.

   Did you know? The Stourton family held the estate for about 500 years before selling it in 1714; Henry Hoare bought it three years later.

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7. 07 Kenroku-en

   Japan · 2 km from Kanazawa36.562° N 136.662° E

   

   Kenroku-en, beside the walls of Kanazawa Castle, is a stroll garden that took more than two centuries to reach its present form. It was the private garden of the Maeda, lords of the rich Kaga domain, and grew in stages: the Tatsumi water channel that still feeds its ponds was completed in 1632, the fifth lord Tsunanori laid out a lotus-pond garden on the slope in 1676, and after a fire in 1759 destroyed much of it, the eleventh lord Harunaga began rebuilding in 1774, with the twelfth and thirteenth lords giving it the shape it has today. It opened to the public on 7 May 1874.

   Did you know? The garden's famous fountain has no pump: water is pushed up purely by the pressure of a channel fed from the Sai River, which flows higher than the garden.

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8. 08 Shalamar Gardens

   Pakistan · 4.2 km from Lahore31.586° N 74.382° E

   

   Behind a high brick wall on the eastern edge of Lahore lies one of the great pleasure gardens of the Mughal emperors — a rectangle 658 metres long and 258 metres wide, laid out on three terraces that step down one after another, each four to five metres below the last, and alive with more than four hundred fountains. The Shalamar Gardens were built for the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and completed in 1642, about seventeen months after work began in 1641. In 1981 they were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with Lahore Fort as the fullest expression of Mughal garden design.

   Did you know? In 1999 the 375-year-old hydraulic tanks that fed the fountains were torn down to widen the Grand Trunk Road along the garden's southern edge.

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9. 09 Muskau Park

   Park Mużakowski

   Poland · 36.8 km from Cottbus51.548° N 14.723° E

   

   Muskau Park is a landscape that ignores a national border. The Lusatian Neisse runs straight through it, and since 1945 the river has divided Germany from Poland, leaving the castle and the formal approaches on the German bank and roughly two-thirds of the park on the Polish side. Yet seen from its terraces and bridges it reads as a single composition: wide meadows, stands of native trees, still water and long views that draw the river, the surrounding hills and even the small town of Bad Muskau into one picture. In 2004 UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site shared by both countries, recognising it as a masterpiece of the landscape park and a model for landscape architecture well beyond Europe.

   Did you know? Covering about 830 hectares, the park is the largest English-style landscape park in Central Europe.

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10. 10 Gardens of Versailles

    Jardin de Versailles

    France · 2 km from Versailles48.808° N 2.108° E

    

    The gardens of Versailles are less a garden than an argument about power, written in water, gravel and clipped green. They cover some 800 hectares west of the palace, and the core of them was shaped from the 1660s by André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV, working alongside the architect Louis Le Vau and the painter Charles Le Brun, the same team that had just built Vaux-le-Vicomte for the disgraced finance minister Nicolas Fouquet. The king opened his new gardens in 1664 with a week-long festival, and kept enlarging them for the rest of his reign, even writing a short guide to the prescribed route through them.

    Did you know? The Machine de Marly used 14 paddle wheels, each about 12 metres across, to drive more than 250 pumps lifting Seine water roughly 160 metres uphill.

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11. 11 Kōraku-en

    Japan · 1.7 km from Okayama34.668° N 133.935° E

    

    Kōraku-en spreads its lawns, ponds and pine-covered hillocks across an island in the Asahi River, with the black walls of Okayama Castle rising just beyond. It is one of the Three Great Gardens of Japan, alongside Kenroku-en in Kanazawa and Kairaku-en in Mito, and one of the finest surviving examples of a stroll garden designed for a feudal lord.

    Did you know? In 1956 the Chinese writer and statesman Guo Moruo, who had once studied in Okayama, presented the garden with a pair of red-crowned cranes, and cranes are still kept here.

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12. 12 Humble Administrator's Garden

    People's Republic of China31.326° N 120.624° E

    

    The Humble Administrator's Garden is the largest of the classical gardens of Suzhou and, for many, the finest: a landscape of water, rock, pavilions and galleries pressed into about five hectares in the middle of the old city. It was begun around 1513 by Wang Xianchen, an imperial envoy of the Ming dynasty who withdrew from office and built his retreat on the site of a ruined temple. He took the name from an essay by the Jin-dynasty writer Pan Yue on the idle life, which praises planting trees, watering one's garden and growing one's own food as the fitting occupation of a man out of office. For a former official the name was both modest and pointed: this garden was the only thing he now meant to administer.

    Did you know? The garden holds 48 buildings, 101 inscribed tablets, 40 steles and 21 trees classed as precious old specimens.

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13. 13 Villa d'Este

    Italy · 27.1 km from Rome41.962° N 12.796° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Villa d'Este is less a palace with a garden than a machine for turning a river into theatre. Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este, son of the Duke of Ferrara and a grandson of Lucrezia Borgia, commissioned it in 1560, and the antiquarian Pirro Ligorio devised its programme of myth and allegory while the engineer Alberto Galvani built it. The work ran until the cardinal's death in 1572. The rooms of the villa, frescoed in those same years, are handsome, but they serve mainly as a balcony: the real composition begins when you step onto the terrace and look down the slope below.

    Did you know? The cardinal's builders stripped marble and statues from the ruins of Hadrian's Villa nearby to furnish the garden.

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14. 14 Ryōan-ji Temple

    Japan · 2.7 km from Kyoto35.034° N 135.718° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Fifteen stones, a rectangle of raked white gravel, a little moss and an old clay wall: the rock garden of Ryōan-ji is one of the most famous gardens in Japan, and one of the smallest. It measures about 25 by 10 metres and is meant to be seen sitting on the veranda of the abbot's quarters, from where no one can see all fifteen stones at once; wherever you sit, at least one remains hidden. It is one of the finest surviving examples of kare-sansui, the dry landscape garden of Zen temples, and part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto World Heritage Site.

    Did you know? The name Ryōan-ji is usually translated as the Temple of the Dragon at Peace.

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15. 15 Shalimar Bagh, Srinagar

    India · 9.8 km from Srinagar34.150° N 74.873° E

    

    Shalimar Bagh lies at the foot of the Zabarwan range on the north-eastern side of Dal Lake in a series of terraces, with water running down the middle of it all. The Mughal emperor Jahangir laid it out in 1619 for his wife Nur Jahan, who loved Kashmir and made the long journey up from the plains many times; in 1630 his son Shah Jahan had his governor Zafar Khan extend it. The famous Persian couplet about Kashmir, "If there is a paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here", is often associated with this garden in particular.

    Did you know? Jahangir did not start from scratch: in 1619 he enlarged an older garden that already stood on the site.

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16. 16 Bahá'í Terraces

    Israel · 1.2 km from Haifa32.814° N 34.987° E

    

    The Bahá'í Terraces climb the northern slope of Mount Carmel in Haifa as a single straight ribbon of garden, about a kilometre long, from the edge of the old German Colony up to the ridge of the mountain. There are nineteen terraces: nine below and nine above a central one that carries the golden-domed Shrine of the Báb, resting place of the forerunner of the Bahá'í Faith. Seen from the bottom, the gardens lead the eye straight up the hill to the dome; seen from the top, they fall away toward the port and the curve of the bay.

    Did you know? More than 1,500 steps climb the terraces, and the gardens cover about 200,000 square metres of the mountainside.

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17. 17 Butchart Gardens

    Canada · 17.1 km from Victoria48.565° N 123.469° W

    

    The Butchart Gardens began as a hole in the ground. Robert Pim Butchart, a cement manufacturer from Ontario, came to Tod Inlet on the Saanich Peninsula of Vancouver Island for its limestone, and in 1904 he and his wife Jennie settled beside the quarry that fed his works. When the stone ran out, Jennie Butchart decided to make a garden of what was left. From 1909 tons of topsoil were brought in by horse and cart to build beds on the bare rock, ivy was tucked into the crevices of the grey quarry walls, and by 1921 the worked-out quarry had become the Sunken Garden, the heart of the place to this day.

    Did you know? Jennie Butchart had trained in chemistry and worked as a chemist for her husband's cement company before she ever turned to gardening.

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18. 18 Garden of Ninfa

    Giardino di Ninfa

    Italy41.578° N 12.950° E

    

    Ninfa is a garden grown inside the ruins of a medieval town. In the Middle Ages this was a prosperous place on the route of the Appian Way, with more than 150 houses, churches, mills, bridges, a castle and a town hall inside a wall about 1.4 km long. A pope, Alexander III, was crowned here in 1159; twelve years later Frederick Barbarossa's army sacked and burned it. The Caetani family tried to revive the town in the sixteenth century, but the spreading Pontine marshes and malaria emptied it again, and by the eighteenth century its last mill had fallen silent.

    Did you know? The name Ninfa probably comes from a classical nymphaeum, a shrine to water nymphs that stood on an island in the small lake.

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19. 19 Villa del Balbianello

    Italy · 19.7 km from Como45.965° N 9.202° E

    

    Villa del Balbianello occupies the tip of the Dosso d'Avedo, a wooded spur that pushes out into the south-western arm of Lake Como near Lenno. Because the promontory is almost an island, the garden has water on three sides, and every terrace looks down onto the lake rather than across a lawn. The planting is famous for its disciplined clipping: a great holm oak trained into a broad umbrella, hedges and climbers shaped into green architecture, flowering terraces stepping down to the private landing stage. Few gardens anywhere make so much of so little level ground.

    Did you know? Guido Monzino had the great holm oak clipped into an umbrella so he could see Monte Legnone from his study; gardeners still trim it in climbing harnesses.

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20. 20 Ritsurin Garden

    Japan · 1.7 km from Takamatsu34.330° N 134.044° E

    

    Ritsurin Garden in Takamatsu is the largest of Japan's daimyo gardens, and among the most refined: some 75 hectares of stroll garden laid out at the foot of Mount Shiun, whose wooded slope was taken into the design as a living backdrop. Six ponds and thirteen artificial hills are arranged so that the view recomposes itself at every bend of the path, and the Japanese saying applied to it is that each step brings a new scene. The garden is a national Special Place of Scenic Beauty and holds three stars in the Michelin Green Guide to Japan.

    Did you know? The name Ritsurin means 'chestnut grove', although it is sculpted pines, not chestnuts, that dominate the garden today.

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21. 21 Shazdeh Garden

    Iran · 36.3 km from Kerman30.024° N 57.282° E

    

    Out in the semi-desert south-east of Kerman, at the foot of the mountains, a high wall encloses a long rectangle of green: Bagh-e Shazdeh, the Prince's Garden. Through the gate the ground rises in a series of broad steps towards a two-storey pavilion, and down the central axis water spills from basin to basin in a chain of small cascades and fountains, all driven by nothing more than the fall of the land. It is a true oasis — a rigidly geometric island of trees set against bare, dry ground — and since 2011 it has been one of the nine gardens inscribed together by UNESCO as the Persian Garden.

    Did you know? The garden lies at the foot of the mountains south-east of Kerman, at an elevation of roughly 2,000 metres.

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22. 22 Wörlitzer Park

    Germany51.848° N 12.423° E

    

    Wörlitz Park is a garden built to teach as much as to delight. Across meadows, lakes and canals on the edge of the Elbe floodplain, its paths lead from a Neoclassical country house to a Gothic Revival villa, a small Pantheon, a synagogue shaped like a Roman temple and, on a rocky island, an artificial Vesuvius that could be made to appear to erupt with staged light, sound and water effects. Bridges and paths connect the separate garden areas, spread over about 112 hectares, and the views are arranged so that buildings, water and farmland appear one after another like scenes in a sequence.

    Did you know? The Iron Bridge of 1791 was the first cast-iron bridge in Germany and on the whole European continent, a scaled-down copy of the Iron Bridge at Coalbrookdale in England.

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23. 23 Villa Lante

    Italy42.426° N 12.155° E

    

    Villa Lante is a garden in which water tells the story. On a hillside above the village of Bagnaia, a stream is caught at the top of the slope and led down through a sequence of terraces, each with its own fountain and its own mood: it bursts from the Fountain of the Deluge and its grottoes, trickles along a stone channel carved in the form of a crayfish, spills over a basin flanked by reclining river gods, and finally comes to rest in a broad square parterre of pools. There, in the Fontana dei Mori, four life-sized Moorish figures hold aloft the arms of the Montalto family above a pair of lions.

    Did you know? The garden was laid out on an existing walled hunting ground, known in Italian as a barco.

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24. 24 Monet's House and Gardens, Giverny

    Fondation Claude-Monet

    France49.075° N 1.536° E

    

    Few gardens in the world were made so deliberately to be painted. When Claude Monet came upon Giverny from a train window in the spring of 1883, it was a village of fewer than three hundred people on the Epte, just across the Seine from Vernon. He rented a long pink farmhouse with grey shutters known as Le Pressoir, the cider press, painted the shutters green, and began turning the orchard in front of it into the flower garden now called the Clos Normand. He bought the property in 1890 and kept reshaping it for the rest of his life, eventually employing half a dozen gardeners and growing some seventy species, with a man in a small boat whose only job was to keep the lily pond and its leaves clean.

    Did you know? Monet moved to Giverny partly because he faced eviction from his rented house in Poissy over unpaid rent.

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25. 25 Château de Villandry

    France · 14.7 km from Tours47.341° N 0.514° E

    

    Villandry is remembered less for its house than for what lies in front of it: the most famous formal garden in the Loire Valley, laid out on terraces in the valley of the Cher, close to the Loire. Seen from the upper terrace, the ground below becomes a geometric carpet of clipped box, coloured beds, gravel paths and water. It is a garden to be read from above, like a page of a Renaissance pattern book.

    Did you know? The kitchen garden alone is outlined by 52,728 box plants, adding up to more than seven kilometres of clipped hedging.

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26. 26 Sissinghurst Castle Garden

    United Kingdom51.116° N 0.582° E

    

    A slender Elizabethan tower of rose-red brick rises from the Weald of Kent, and around it lies a sequence of walled and hedged enclosures, each planted as a separate room. Sissinghurst Castle Garden was made from 1930 onwards by the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West and her husband, the diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson, and it became one of the most influential gardens of the 20th century. Nicolson drew the plan, a frame of long axial walks closed by focal points, while Sackville-West did the planting; she described it as small geometric gardens opening off the walks the way rooms open off the corridors of a great house. The garden is listed Grade I on England's register of historic parks and gardens.

    Did you know? The famous White Garden had a practical side too: its pale blooms caught the dusk light as Vita and Harold walked from their bedrooms to dinner in another building.

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27. 27 Sítio Roberto Burle Marx

    Brazil · 31.5 km from Nova Iguaçu23.024° S 43.545° W

    

    Ranks of bromeliads, philodendrons and palms collected from across Brazil's forests grow at the foot of a forested hill on the western edge of Rio de Janeiro, arranged with a painter's eye for colour and mass. This was the home and living laboratory of Roberto Burle Marx, the landscape architect who gave modern Brazil its gardens, and the Sítio Roberto Burle Marx in Barra de Guaratiba holds one of the world's most important collections of tropical and subtropical plants, more than 3,500 species. In 2021 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List for its modernist design and its role in environmental and cultural conservation.

    Did you know? The facade of the studio building is the granite front of a neoclassical townhouse demolished in central Rio, which Burle Marx salvaged and rebuilt here.

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28. 28 Longwood Gardens

    United States39.871° N 75.675° W

    

    Longwood Gardens is the grand estate garden of an American industrialist, scaled up into one of the most ambitious horticultural displays in the United States. Across more than 1,100 acres of the Brandywine Valley it combines woodland, meadow and formal gardens with a vast glasshouse complex and a series of fountain gardens in which water is choreographed with light and music. Some 1.6 million people came in 2023 alone.

    Did you know? The pipes of the Longwood organ filled fourteen railway freight cars, and a 72-horsepower blower is needed to supply its wind.

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29. 29 Tōfuku-ji Temple

    Japan · 6.7 km from Kyoto34.976° N 135.774° E

    

    Tōfuku-ji is a great Zen monastery in southeastern Kyoto, but it is its gardens and its ravine of maples that most people come to see. Around the abbot's quarters, the Hōjō, lie four gardens laid out in 1939 by Mirei Shigemori, the most original Japanese garden designer of the 20th century; it was his first major commission, and the moss garden in particular became a landmark of the modern renewal of Japanese garden art. The temple calls the ensemble the Garden of the Eight Aspects, with a separate composition on each of the four sides of the building, mixing raked gravel, stone and moss in an unmistakably modern geometry.

    Did you know? Shigemori built the abbot's east garden as the Big Dipper, using seven leftover cylindrical foundation stones from the temple's medieval latrine building.

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30. 30 Gardens of Marqueyssac

    Jardins de Marqueyssac

    France44.824° N 1.163° E

    

    Some 150,000 box shrubs, more than a century old and clipped by hand into soft, rolling mounds, cover a rocky spur high above the Dordogne, and walking among them feels like crossing a green sea frozen mid-swell. The Gardens of Marqueyssac, at Vézac in the Périgord Noir, are a romantic and picturesque park of 22 hectares, with more than 6 km of shaded paths, belvederes, rockeries, small cascades and dry-stone huts, laid out around a modest château.

    Did you know? The estate was first developed in the late 17th century by Bertrand Vernet de Marqueyssac, a counsellor to King Louis XIV, who acquired it in 1692.

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