The Most Beautiful Modern Sacred Places in the World
10 places in 9 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful modern sacred places in the world are Faisal Mosque (Pakistan), Kylemore Abbey (Ireland) and Christ the Redeemer (Brazil). The list covers 10 modern sacred places in 9 countries. Brazil has the most, with 2. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Twentieth-century sacred architecture had to answer an old question with new materials. Concrete, steel and new engineering allowed domes without columns and spaces flooded with light, while many newly independent nations wanted a great mosque or cathedral to stand for the country itself. Some of the finest results deliberately reach back to tradition; others break with it completely.
The Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, designed by Vedat Dalokay and completed in 1986, replaces the dome with a tent-like roof at the foot of the Margalla Hills. Casablanca's Hassan II Mosque stands partly over the Atlantic, its minaret among the tallest in the world. The Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi and the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat are clad in white marble and laid with vast hand-knotted carpets, and Brunei's Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque rises above an artificial lagoon with a replica royal barge.
Other traditions shaped the century too. The Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, rebuilt in 1907, is the largest mud-brick building in the world, replastered by the whole town each year. Christ the Redeemer has stood on Corcovado above Rio de Janeiro since 1931, and Oscar Niemeyer's Cathedral of Brasília gathers sixteen curved concrete columns into a crown of glass. In the west of Ireland, Kylemore Abbey, a Victorian castle beside a lake, has been home to Benedictine nuns since 1920.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Faisal Mosque | Mosque | Pakistan | |
| 2 | Kylemore Abbey | Abbey | Ireland | |
| 3 | Christ the Redeemer | Sculpture | Brazil | |
| 4 | Great Mosque of Djenné | Mosque | Mali | ✓ |
| 5 | Sheikh Zayed Mosque | Mosque | United Arab Emirates | |
| 6 | Hassan II Mosque | Mosque | Morocco | |
| 7 | Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque | Mosque | Oman | |
| 8 | Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque | Mosque | Brunei | |
| 9 | Cathedral of Brasília | Cathedral | Brazil | |
| 10 | Pisa Charterhouse | Carthusian monastery | Italy |
01 Faisal Mosque
Pakistan · 6 km from Islamabad33.730° N 73.037° E
Image by IdeasLeader from Pixabay The Faisal Mosque does not look like a mosque, and that was deliberate. In 1969 Pakistan held an international competition for a national mosque in its new capital, Islamabad. It drew more than forty entries from seventeen countries. The Turkish architect Vedat Dalokay won with a design that left out the dome altogether. In its place, eight sloping shells of concrete meet above the prayer hall like the folds of a desert tent. Four minarets about 90 metres high stand at the corners, slender as pencils. Construction ran from 1976 to 1986. The work was funded largely by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and after his death in 1975 the mosque and the avenue leading to it were named after him.
Did you know? Vedat Dalokay first drew a tent-like, domeless mosque for Ankara's Kocatepe competition in 1957; it won but was dropped after criticism, and a reworked version became the Faisal Mosque.
02 Kylemore Abbey
Ireland53.562° N 9.889° W
Image by uncutURBEX from Pixabay Kylemore is the odd one in this list: not a medieval foundation but a Victorian country house that became a monastery by accident of war. Mitchell Henry, a Manchester surgeon who inherited a linen fortune, built the neo-Gothic castle on the shore of Kylemore Lough between 1867 and 1871 as a home for his wife Margaret, after the couple had fallen for the valley on their honeymoon. Granite and limestone were shipped in and cut on site; contemporary accounts put the workforce at over a hundred men for four years, an enormous undertaking for what was, at heart, a private house in one of the remotest corners of Connemara.
Did you know? The Gothic church at Kylemore uses marble from all four Irish provinces: green Connemara, red Cork, black Kilkenny and grey Armagh.
03 Christ the Redeemer
Cristo Redentor
Brazil · 4.9 km from Rio de Janeiro22.952° S 43.210° W
Image by FlaviaPadula from Pixabay The statue is as much a French project as a Brazilian one. Engineer Heitor da Silva Costa won the 1922 competition to design it, then spent years in Europe developing the plans, where he brought on French sculptor Paul Landowski — who ended up designing the head and hands — while the face itself was modeled by a Romanian-born sculptor, Gheorghe Leonida. Three nationalities, working across two continents, to build Rio's most recognizable landmark.
Did you know? The statue is 30 metres tall on an 8-metre pedestal, its outstretched arms span 28 metres, and it weighs about 635 tonnes.
04 Great Mosque of Djenné
Mali · 0.8 km from Djenné13.905° N 4.556° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
BluesyPete · CC BY-SA 3.0 This is the largest mud-brick building on Earth, raised on a platform above the Bani River floodplain to keep it above the annual floodwaters. Its present form dates to a 1907 reconstruction, built on foundations going back to the 13th century. The walls are built from banco — a mix of clay, water, shea butter, baobab powder and rice husks — and the wooden beams (toron) bristling from every surface aren't decorative flourishes; they double as the scaffolding masons stand on to reach the upper walls during repairs.
Did you know? The spires crowning the three towers of the prayer wall are each topped with an ostrich egg.
05 Sheikh Zayed Mosque
United Arab Emirates · 12.5 km from Abu Dhabi24.412° N 54.474° E
Image by Mariakray from Pixabay The people who planned this mosque weren't going for one look — they wanted the whole story of Islamic architecture in a single building. Walk from the base of a minaret to its tip and you pass through three different empires: a square foundation drawn from Moroccan tradition, an octagonal midsection borrowed from the Mamluks of Cairo, and a cylindrical crown modeled on Ottoman minarets. The dome layout follows the floor plan of Lahore's Badshahi Mosque, a Mughal-era landmark, while the ornamental detail leans toward Persian and Moorish patterns. It reads less like a single architect's vision and more like a deliberate anthology of a millennium of mosque-building.
Did you know? Its courtyard, about 17,000 square metres of inlaid marble flowers, is considered the largest marble mosaic in the world.
06 Hassan II Mosque
Morocco · 1.5 km from Casablanca33.607° N 7.633° W
Image by postcardtrip from Pixabay King Hassan II built this mosque on a foundation that should not really exist: reclaimed land driven into the Atlantic, with roughly half the structure extending out over open water. The idea traces to a specific line in the Quran describing God's throne as resting upon water, and Hassan II was explicit about his reasoning — worshippers on solid ground should be able to look out at sky and ocean at the same time. Committing to that idea forced real engineering problems. Salt air corrodes most metals, so the doors were made of titanium instead. The reclaimed marine foundation alone needed 300,000 cubic metres of concrete and 40,000 tonnes of steel just to hold stable ground under a building of this size.
Did you know? About twelve million Moroccans contributed to the building fund, each receiving a receipt and certificate, and the smallest recorded donation was just 5 dirhams.
07 Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque
Oman · 1.1 km from Muscat23.584° N 58.389° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay In 1992 Sultan Qaboos directed that Oman should have a grand mosque, and it was built at Bawshar in greater Muscat in just under seven years: work began in December 1994 and the mosque was inaugurated on 4 May 2001. The design, by Quad Design with the architect Mohamed Makiya, avoids the flash one might expect of a Gulf landmark. Pale sandstone shipped from India, white marble and long shaded arcades give it a calm, almost monastic exterior, and the five minarets — a main tower of about 90 metres and four of about 45 metres at the corners — are slim and restrained.
Did you know? The mosque was inaugurated on 4 May 2001 to mark thirty years of Sultan Qaboos's reign, after a design competition held in 1993.
08 Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque
Brunei · 0.9 km from Bandar Seri Begawan4.890° N 114.939° E
Image by AdamHillTravel from Pixabay Few capitals are defined by a single building as completely as Bandar Seri Begawan is by the Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque. Its golden dome rises above a low, green river town, and from almost anywhere in the centre it is the fixed point the eye returns to. Work began in February 1954 and the mosque was opened on 26 September 1958, named after Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien III, the 28th ruler of Brunei, who sketched the first ideas for it himself. The Italian architect Rudolfo Nolli worked on the design with the firm Booty Edwards & Partners, and the result is an eclectic blend of Mughal forms, Italianate detail and Malay setting.
Did you know? The main chandelier measures about 15 feet across and weighs more than three tons.
09 Cathedral of Brasília
Catedral Metropolitana de Brasília
Brazil · 4.9 km from Brasília15.798° S 47.876° W
Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) · CC BY-SA 4.0 Oscar Niemeyer's cathedral for Brasília is hardly a building in the ordinary sense — more a crown of sixteen curved concrete ribs rising from a round base and gathering at the waist before flaring open again against the sky. The form is a hyperboloid, and the architect meant it as a gesture: hands raised together towards heaven. Seen from the Esplanada dos Ministérios, the monumental axis of the capital, it is one of the few buildings in the planned city that looks the same from every side, and one of the few religious buildings of the twentieth century that has become a national image.
Did you know? The four large bells in the bell tower were donated by Spanish residents of Brazil and cast in Miranda de Ebro, in northern Spain.
10 Pisa Charterhouse
Certosa di Pisa
Italy · 9.9 km from Pisa43.722° N 10.523° E
Gianni Careddu · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the foot of the Monte Pisano, among olive groves in a valley the monks called Val Graziosa, the graceful vale, lies one of the grandest monasteries of Tuscany. The Certosa di Calci, also known as the Pisa Charterhouse, opens onto a vast forecourt, with the Baroque church raised at the far end on a podium reached by a double staircase. Behind this ceremonial face stretches a whole silent town of cloisters, chapels, gardens and monks' houses.
Did you know? The Certosa di Calci was founded in 1366 under Francesco Moricotti, archbishop of Pisa.
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 are the most beautiful modern sacred places in the world?
- On our list, Faisal Mosque (Pakistan) ranks first, followed by Kylemore Abbey (Ireland) and Christ the Redeemer (Brazil).
- Which country has the most modern sacred places in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Brazil (2), Brunei (1) and Ireland (1).
- What is the largest mud-brick building in the world?
- The Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali. The present building dates from 1907, and the people of Djenné renew its mud plaster every year in a communal festival.
- How tall is Christ the Redeemer?
- The statue is about 30 metres tall and stands on a pedestal of about 8 metres, at the summit of Corcovado mountain in Rio de Janeiro. It was completed in 1931.
- Who designed the Cathedral of Brasília?
- Oscar Niemeyer. Its sixteen curved concrete columns rise from a circular base and are filled with glass, giving the cathedral its crown-like shape.
- How many modern sacred places are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 10 modern sacred places in 9 countries. Brazil has the most, with 2.