The Most Beautiful Pilgrimage Sites in the World

23 places in 12 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Las Lajas Sanctuary

   Colombia · 7.6 km from Ipiales0.805° N 77.586° W

   

   In 1754 a woman named María Mueses de Quiñones was caught in a storm in the Guáitara canyon with her deaf-mute daughter Rosa. They sheltered in a cave, and María later told her neighbours that the Virgin Mary had appeared to her on the rock wall — and that in the same moment, her daughter, unable to hear or speak since birth, called out to her. Whatever happened in that cave, Ipiales took it seriously enough to build a chapel around it within the year, the first of several structures that have stood on the spot since.

   Did you know? The church rises about 100 metres from the canyon floor to the top of its tower, and the bridge it stands on is 50 metres high.

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2. 02 San Juan de Gaztelugatxe

   Gaztelugatxe

   Spain · 24.8 km from Bilbao43.447° N 2.785° W

   

   Off the rugged Biscay coast between Bermeo and Bakio, a steep, rocky islet rises out of the Atlantic, tethered to the mainland by a narrow stone bridge and crowned by a small hermitage dedicated to Saint John the Baptist. The approach is the spectacle: a stairway of 241 steps that zigzags along the spine of the rock, doubling back on itself over the surf, until it arrives at the chapel some 80 metres above the sea. Seen from the cliffs opposite, the whole ensemble — arches of the bridge, the thread of the path, the tiny building on the summit — looks more like a fortress than a place of worship.

   Did you know? In 1053 the Lord of Biscay gave the hermitage, then called Saint John of the Castle, to the monastery of San Juan de la Peña in distant Aragon.

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3. 03 Christ the Redeemer

   Cristo Redentor

   Brazil · 4.9 km from Rio de Janeiro22.952° S 43.210° W

   

   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.

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4. 04 Batalha Monastery

   Mosteiro da Batalha

   Portugal · 9 km from Leiria39.659° N 8.826° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Monastery of Batalha is a promise kept in stone. Before the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1385, King John I vowed a great church to the Virgin if Portugal defeated Castile; the victory secured the country's independence, and work began the following year. Officially Santa Maria da Vitória, the Dominican monastery took more than a century to build, through the reigns of seven kings and under some fifteen master builders, and became the burial church of the Aviz dynasty.

   Did you know? King Manuel I's motto, Leauté faray tam yaserei ("I will always be loyal"), is carved more than 200 times across the arches, vaults and pillars of the Unfinished Chapels.

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5. 05 Fushimi Inari-taisha

   Japan · 7.5 km from Kyoto34.967° N 135.773° E

   

   Fushimi Inari-taisha is best known for a single image: a path climbing a wooded hillside inside an unbroken tunnel of vermilion torii gates, glowing in the filtered light under the cedars. The gates — thousands of them along the mountain trails — are gifts. Businesses and individuals donate them in thanks or in hope, and each one carries the donor's name and the date inscribed on its back, so that the walk uphill reads the other way as a vast ledger of prayers for prosperity.

   Did you know? Shigeru Miyamoto has said the torii tunnels here, a short walk from Nintendo's Kyoto offices, inspired the flying-through-rings design of Star Fox.

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6. 06 Mount Kōya

   Japan · 38.3 km from Wakayama34.218° N 135.583° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Mount Kōya is not a single peak but a high basin in the mountains of Wakayama Prefecture, a plain at about 800 metres ringed by eight summits. In the early ninth century the monk Kūkai, known after his death as Kōbō Daishi, chose this remote upland as the centre for the esoteric Shingon school he had brought back from China, and Kōyasan grew into a temple town that is still wholly given over to religion. Around 120 sub-temples crowd its streets, many of them taking in overnight guests, and in 2004 the mountain was inscribed as part of the World Heritage site of sacred places and pilgrimage routes in the Kii Mountains.

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7. 07 Kedarnath Temple

   India30.733° N 79.067° E

   

   Kedarnath Temple stands at about 3,583 metres in the Garhwal Himalaya, a stone shrine set against a wall of snow peaks at the head of the Mandakini valley. It is one of the twelve jyotirlingas, the most sacred shrines of Shiva, and the highest of them all, and no road reaches it: pilgrims climb on foot for some 17 kilometres from Gaurikund.

   Did you know? The temple is built of massive, evenly cut grey stone slabs joined with iron clamps, with no mortar used in its construction.

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8. 08 St. Bartholomew's Church, Berchtesgaden

   St. Bartholomä

   Germany · 30 km from Salzburg47.545° N 12.973° E

   

   St. Bartholomä is a small pilgrimage church on the small Hirschau peninsula, halfway along the western shore of the Königssee in the Berchtesgaden Alps. Its red onion domes set against dark water and the huge east face of the Watzmann behind make it one of the classic images of the Bavarian Alps. There are no roads here: the lake is hemmed in by sheer rock walls, and the church can be reached only by boat or over the mountains.

   Did you know? In 1688 a boat carrying pilgrims across the Königssee capsized, and some 60 to 70 people drowned in the cold lake.

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9. 09 Batu Caves

   Malaysia · 10.8 km from Kuala Lumpur3.237° N 101.684° E

   

   Batu Caves are a set of limestone caverns inside a 325-metre tower of karst just 13 km north of Kuala Lumpur, and they are above all a place of worship. The largest cave shelters the Subramaniar Swamy temple dedicated to Murugan, reached by 272 concrete steps built in 1940 and repainted in bright colours in 2018. Beside the stairway stands a gold-painted statue of Murugan, about 43 metres tall, unveiled in 2006 and the tallest statue in Malaysia.

   Did you know? The giant Murugan statue took about 1,550 cubic metres of concrete, 350 tonnes of steel and 300 litres of gold paint imported from Thailand.

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10. 10 Hill of Crosses

    Kryžių kalnas

    Lithuania · 10.3 km from Šiauliai56.015° N 23.417° E

    

    Nobody recorded the day the first cross went up here, but the likeliest account ties it to the failed uprising of 1831 against Russian rule, when families who couldn't find or bury their dead began planting crosses on the site of an old fort instead — a place to mourn people the state had made it impossible to properly grieve. There is no cemetery here. Every cross, from that point on, has stood for someone rather than marked where they lie.

    Did you know? Pope John Paul II prayed at the hill on 7 September 1993, and the following year he sent a crucifix of his own, which now stands among the crosses.

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11. 11 Imam Reza Shrine

    Iran · 4.6 km from Mashhad36.288° N 59.616° E

    

    The Imam Reza Shrine in Mashhad is the burial place of Ali al-Rida, the eighth Imam of Twelver Shia Islam, who died in 818 and was laid to rest in the village of Sanabad beside the tomb of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid. A dome went up over the grave, and the city of Mashhad — the name means "place of martyrdom" — grew around it. Today the sanctuary is among the largest religious complexes in the world, a city within the city of courtyards, prayer halls, libraries and museums visited by tens of millions of pilgrims a year.

    Did you know? The shrine complex covers about 1.2 million square metres and can hold some 700,000 worshippers, making it one of the largest mosques in the world.

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12. 12 Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela

    Catedral Basílica Metropolitana de Santiago de Compostela

    Spain · 0.4 km from Santiago de Compostela42.881° N 8.544° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela is the end of the Way of St James, and for more than a thousand years pilgrims have walked across Europe to reach the tomb believed to hold the apostle James the Great. Tradition says the grave was rediscovered around 814, when a hermit saw lights over a forest; a chapel and then larger churches followed. In 997 the Córdoban commander al-Mansur burned the church but left the tomb alone. The present Romanesque cathedral was begun in 1075, largely in granite, on a plan similar to Saint-Sernin in Toulouse, and was consecrated in 1211. Later centuries wrapped it in Gothic and above all Baroque additions.

    Did you know? In 1499 the Botafumeiro flew out of the cathedral through a high window during a visit by Catherine of Aragon, without injuring anyone.

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13. 13 Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte

    Santuário do Bom Jesus do Monte

    Portugal · 3.7 km from Braga41.555° N 8.377° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Above Braga, on a wooded hill at Tenões, a monumental staircase zigzags up through the trees for 116 metres to a church at the top. Bom Jesus do Monte is less a church than a climb turned into architecture: a Baroque Via Sacra in which the pilgrim's ascent is the whole point. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019, and its design was copied from Lamego in Portugal to Congonhas in Brazil.

    Did you know? Each fountain of the Five Senses stairway shows a figure spouting water from the relevant organ: from the eyes, the ears, the nose and the mouth.

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14. 14 Mount Osore

    Japan41.279° N 141.120° E

    

    Mount Osore, Osorezan, "the fearsome mountain", is a volcanic caldera at the heart of the Shimokita Peninsula, the axe-shaped northern tip of Honshu in Aomori Prefecture. Inside it lies a landscape that Japanese tradition has long identified as a gateway to the afterlife: bare grey rock stained yellow with sulphur, steaming vents, the smell of volcanic gas, and beyond them Lake Usori, a caldera lake with highly acidic water. A small brook running into the lake is likened to the Sanzu, the river that souls of the dead must cross.

    Did you know? Gold-rich deposits found in the hot-spring sediments at Osorezan contain more than 400 grams of gold per tonne in places, among the highest grades known anywhere.

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15. 15 Santa Maria dell'Isola Monastery

    Santuario di Santa Maria dell'Isola

    Italy · 17.9 km from Vibo Valentia38.680° N 15.896° E

    

    Below the cliff-top old town of Tropea, on Calabria's Tyrrhenian coast, a small church crowns a sandstone rock that was once entirely surrounded by the sea, which is why the place is still called the island. The pale facade, the central bell tower and the pinnacles stand against open water and sky, and a stairway cut into the rock around 1810 climbs from the beach to the church door.

    Did you know? The sanctuary still belongs to the Benedictine Abbey of Montecassino, which has held it for close to a thousand years.

    More about Santa Maria dell'Isola Monastery →

16. 16 Sanctuary of Oropa

    Santuario di Oropa

    Italy45.628° N 7.979° E

    

    High in a natural amphitheatre of the Biellese Alps, at roughly 1,160 metres, the Sanctuary of Oropa is less a single church than a small mountain town built for the Virgin. Two basilicas, arcaded courtyards, former royal apartments and long pilgrim wings climb the slope in stages, and the whole ensemble is crowned by a great domed church that can be seen from the plain around Biella. Each year it still receives pilgrims in their hundreds of thousands.

    Did you know? The Black Madonna of Oropa is a wooden statue dated by scholars to around 1300 and attributed to a sculptor from the Aosta Valley.

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17. 17 Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua

    Basilica di Sant'Antonio di Padova

    Italy · 34.3 km from Venice45.401° N 11.881° E

    

    Padua calls it simply "il Santo", and the basilica built over the tomb of St Anthony is one of the great pilgrimage churches of Europe. Its skyline is unforgettable and unlike anything else in Italy: a cluster of domes, raised high on drums in the manner of St Mark's in Venice, crowd together above a brick body of gables, buttresses and slender belfries that recall minarets. Work began around 1232, only a year after the Franciscan preacher's death, and was essentially finished by 1310, but the building kept growing for another century and a half, so that a Romanesque and Byzantine core carries Gothic aisles and a French-style ring of nine radiating chapels around the apse. The broad brick façade, with its deep recesses and arcaded gallery, looks onto a square where Donatello's bronze equestrian statue of the condottiero Gattamelata stands on its tall plinth.

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18. 18 Madonna della Corona Sanctuary (Spiazzi)

    Santuario della Madonna della Corona

    Italy · 25.5 km from Verona45.650° N 10.856° E

    

    The Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Crown, the Madonna della Corona, seems to hang in mid-air. It is built into a sheer limestone wall on the eastern flank of Monte Baldo, at 774 metres, with a vertical drop below it to the valley of the Adige and an overhang of rock above it like a lid, so that from a distance the white church looks wedged into a crack of the mountain. Few places of pilgrimage make their setting so much a part of the devotion: the whole approach is a walk along the cliff, and the view from the terrace falls straight down to the river and the road far below.

    Did you know? The traditional pilgrim path from Brentino in the valley climbs more than 1,500 steps to reach the sanctuary.

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19. 19 Basilica Shrine of Our Lady of Mondovi

    Santuario di Vicoforte

    Italy44.363° N 7.863° E

    

    The Sanctuary of Vicoforte, near Mondovì in Piedmont, is crowned by the largest elliptical dome in the world: an oval shell about 37 metres long and 25 metres wide on its axes, rising to some 74 metres above the floor. Inside, the whole vault is covered with a single continuous fresco cycle of more than six thousand square metres, so that standing beneath it one looks up into an unbroken painted sky.

    Did you know? When the elliptical dome was finished, Francesco Gallo is said to have removed the scaffolding himself, because nobody else believed it would stand.

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20. 20 Taung Kalat

    Myanmar20.913° N 95.209° E

    

    Rising abruptly from the dry plains of central Myanmar, Taung Kalat is a sheer-sided volcanic plug — the hardened throat of an old vent from the Mount Popa volcano — standing about 225 metres above its surroundings, with a gilded Buddhist monastery balanced on its crown. From a distance the whole thing looks improbable: a single column of rock with a cap of golden stupas and white pavilions, framed by the larger, forested bulk of Mount Popa behind it, a dormant stratovolcano that climbs to 1,518 metres.

    Did you know? The name Taung Kalat means pedestal hill, and its gilded summit stands about 657 metres above sea level.

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21. 21 Shatrunjaya

    India21.468° N 71.800° E

    

    Shatrunjaya is a hill covered in temples. On the summit and ridges above the town of Palitana in Gujarat stand almost 900 Jain shrines, from tiny niches to large temples with carved spires, packed so closely that from a distance the crest looks like a city of carved stone. Pilgrims reach them by climbing around 3,500 stone steps up the hillside, and at the top the temples are gathered within walled enclosures, each a world of courtyards, pillared halls and images of the Tirthankaras, the spiritual teachers of Jainism.

    Did you know? In 2014, after a hunger strike by about 200 Jain monks, Palitana became widely described as the world's first vegetarian city, with meat, fish and eggs banned from sale.

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22. 22 Kyaiktiyo Pagoda

    Myanmar17.484° N 97.098° E

    

    Kyaiktiyo, better known as the Golden Rock, is a granite boulder perched on the very edge of a ledge near the summit of Mount Kyaiktiyo in Mon State, southern Myanmar, at about 1,100 metres above sea level. The boulder is roughly 7.6 metres high and some 15 metres around; it rests on a sloping rock shelf with a tiny area of contact, and about half of it overhangs a sheer drop into the valley. On top sits a small stupa about 7 metres tall. Covered in layer upon layer of gold leaf pressed on by pilgrims, the whole mass glows, and it looks permanently on the point of rolling away.

    Did you know? The forested slopes around the shrine became the Kyaikhtiyo Wildlife Sanctuary in 2001, protecting about 156 square kilometres of evergreen and mixed deciduous forest.

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23. 23 Sefa-utaki

    Japan · 15.8 km from Naha26.173° N 127.827° E

    

    Sēfa-utaki is a sacred grove on the Chinen Peninsula in the south of Okinawa Island, where paths lead through dense subtropical forest to worship places set against towering limestone rocks. Its innermost and most prestigious area is Sangūi, originally an open space walled by rock on three sides, where three places of worship are concentrated and from which the eye travels across the sea to Kudaka Island.

    Did you know? Sēfa means highest rank, so the popular name amounts to the greatest of all utaki; its formal sacred name is Kimigatake, Nushigatake no Ibi.

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