The Most Beautiful Mosques in Iran
8 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful mosques in Iran are Shah Mosque, Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque and Jameh Mosque of Isfahan. The list covers 8 mosques. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Iran gave the mosque several of its defining forms. The iwan, a vaulted hall open on one side, was arranged in fours around a courtyard to create the classic Persian mosque plan; the double-shelled dome let architects build high outside and intimate inside; and tilework, from cut-tile mosaic to painted haft-rangi panels, turned whole buildings into colour. Muqarnas, the honeycomb vaulting that dissolves corners into light, reached some of its finest expression here.
Isfahan holds three of the greatest examples. The Jameh Mosque grew over many centuries into the model of the four-iwan plan, while on Naqsh-e Jahan Square the Safavid Shah Mosque spreads blue tile over every surface and the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, built for the royal court, has no courtyard or minaret at all, only a dome whose colour shifts with the light.
Shiraz brings very different moods: the Nasir-ol-Molk Mosque, built in the late nineteenth century, fills its prayer hall with coloured light through stained-glass windows, the Vakil Mosque of the Zand period lines its hall with carved spiral columns, and the shrine of Shah Cheragh glitters with mirror mosaic. The Jameh Mosque of Yazd raises a tall portal flanked by slender minarets over the old desert city, and the Agha Bozorg Mosque in Kashan sets its courtyard below street level.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shah Mosque | Mosque | |
| 2 | Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque | Mosque | |
| 3 | Jameh Mosque of Isfahan | Mosque | ✓ |
| 4 | Shah Cheragh shrine | Mosque | |
| 5 | Nasir-ol-Molk Mosque | Mosque | |
| 6 | Vakil Mosque | Mosque | |
| 7 | Jameh Mosque of Yazd | Mosque | |
| 8 | Agha Bozorg Mosque | Mosque |
01 Shah Mosque
Iran · 5.6 km from Isfahan32.655° N 51.678° E
Citypeek · CC BY-SA 2.5 The tilework is what people remember afterward. Isfahan's craftsmen used a haft rangi — seven-colour — technique that let them fire large glazed panels rather than assembling thousands of individual small tiles, which sped up decoration across a huge surface without sacrificing detail. Blue dominates the palette, chosen deliberately to give the interior a sense of open sky rather than enclosure. The mosque and the square around it are recognised together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Did you know? The dome is known for its acoustics: its echo carries a voice throughout the prayer hall beneath it.
02 Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque
Iran · 5.3 km from Isfahan32.657° N 51.679° E
Image by engelbachm from Pixabay The genius of the building is in how it handles the entrance. The square was laid out without regard to the direction of Mecca, so the mosque had to turn: you enter through a portal on the square, then follow a dim corridor that bends at an angle before opening, without warning, into the prayer hall already correctly oriented. The effect is theatrical. Out of the half-light the whole interior of the dome appears at once, a web of tiled medallions diminishing towards the crown, where a motif known as the peacock catches the light filtering through the high windows. Every surface is covered in polychrome tilework, arabesques and floral patterns in blues, whites and yellows.
Did you know? Sheikh Lotfollah never took part in building it; the scholar lived on the site and was probably among its first prayer leaders, paid by the royal household.
03 Jameh Mosque of Isfahan
Iran · 3.8 km from Isfahan32.670° N 51.685° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Hamidespanani · CC BY-SA 4.0 The mosque is a working place of worship; visitors are expected to dress modestly.
Did you know? Under the Buyids in the 10th and 11th centuries an arcade of brick piers with polylobed profiles was added around the courtyard.
04 Shah Cheragh shrine
Iran · 3.4 km from Shiraz29.610° N 52.543° E
Mohamed sadegh golbadi · CC BY-SA 4.0 Shah Cheragh is above all a living place of pilgrimage, one of the most important in Iran, and much of its beauty lies in that: families sitting in the courtyard, pilgrims touching the silver screen, the glitter of the mirror halls reflected in thousands of faces. A small museum on the site, founded in 1925, keeps ceramics and other finds. Visitors of other faiths are generally welcomed with a guide; women are asked to wear a chador, which is lent at the entrance.
Did you know? The silver screen around Ahmad's grave was installed in 1827-28, during repairs under Qajar rule.
05 Nasir-ol-Molk Mosque
Iran · 3.2 km from Shiraz29.609° N 52.548° E
Image by engelbachm from Pixabay The winter prayer hall on the west side of the courtyard is entered through seven wooden doors worked in geometric lattice. Inside, two rows of six columns divide the space into bays under tiled vaults, and the wall facing the courtyard is filled with coloured glass set in wooden frames. The mosque stands in the old Gowd-e Araban quarter of central Shiraz, close to the shrine of Shah Cheragh, and is still administered by the endowment founded by the Nasir ol-Molk family. It was added to Iran's national heritage list in 1955.
Did you know? The names of the architect Mohammad Hasan Memar and the tile-maker Mohammad Reza Kashi-Saz are recorded in the tilework of the mosque itself.
06 Vakil Mosque
Iran · 3 km from Shiraz29.614° N 52.545° E
Image by mostafa_meraji from Pixabay Shiraz, the capital of Fars province in southern Iran, is known as a city of poets and gardens: Hafez and Saadi are buried here, and its historic centre is still shaped by the monuments of the Zand period. The Vakil Mosque stands at the heart of that ensemble, a few steps from the bazaar's long vaulted arcades.
Did you know? The mosque is also known as the Soltani, or Sultan's, Mosque.
07 Jameh Mosque of Yazd
Iran · 2.1 km from Yazd31.901° N 54.369° E
Ebrahimlotfi · CC BY-SA 4.0 Step out of the sanctuary and the long courtyard, with its plain brick arcades, makes a calm counterpoint to the tilework. Yazd itself, a city of sun-baked mud brick, wind-catcher towers and narrow covered lanes on the edge of the desert, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2017 as the Historic City of Yazd, and the mosque is its spiritual centre. In the late afternoon, when the sun turns the portal gold and the alleys around it fill with shade, the building feels exactly like what it has always been: the heart of an old desert town.
Did you know? Tradition credits the first mosque on the site to the Saffarid ruler Amr ibn al-Layth in the 9th century.
08 Agha Bozorg Mosque
Iran · 12.5 km from Kashan33.978° N 51.445° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 The prayer hall at the south-east end is an octagonal domed chamber surrounded on three sides by an ambulatory, with a pillared hall of twenty columns to one side and smaller open courts beyond. The building has been on Iran's National Heritage List since 1951. Kashan, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Iran, lies on the edge of the Dasht-e Kavir desert at the foot of the Karkas Mountains and is known for its Qajar merchants' houses and the Fin Garden, part of the UNESCO-listed Persian Gardens.
Did you know? The earth dug out to create the sunken courtyard was reused as building material, so most of the bricks came from the construction site itself.
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 mosques in Iran?
- On our list, Shah Mosque ranks first, followed by Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque and Jameh Mosque of Isfahan.
- What is a four-iwan mosque?
- It is a plan in which four vaulted halls, or iwans, open onto a central courtyard, one on each side. The Jameh Mosque of Isfahan is the classic example, and the plan spread across Iran and Central Asia.
- Why is the Nasir-ol-Molk Mosque called the Pink Mosque?
- Its tilework uses an unusual amount of pink and rose tones. In the morning, sunlight passes through its stained-glass windows and casts coloured patterns across the carpets and columns of the prayer hall.
- Why does the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque have no minaret?
- It was built in the early seventeenth century as a private mosque for the Safavid royal court rather than for public congregations, so it needed neither a courtyard nor a minaret for the call to prayer.
- How many mosques are on this list in Iran?
- The list covers 8 mosques.