The Most Beautiful Places in the World
3,198 places in 175 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in the world are Angkor Wat (Cambodia), Grand Canyon National Park (United States) and Ha Long Bay (Vietnam). The list covers 3,198 places in 175 countries. Italy has the most, with 279. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The world's most beautiful places come from two hands at once: the slow forces that raise mountains, carve gorges and pour rivers over cliffs, and the ambition of people who built temples, palaces and towers meant to outlast them. A list that mixes both shows how closely they rhyme. Pyramids imitate mountains, cathedrals imitate forests, and volcanoes and waterfalls have been sacred to the people who lived beside them long before anyone came to admire them.
On the human side, the Giza pyramid complex holds the only survivor of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the Colosseum still shows how Rome entertained fifty thousand spectators. The Louvre, a royal palace turned museum, keeps the Mona Lisa, and Mount Rushmore carries four American presidents carved into granite in the Black Hills. The 20th century added its own monuments: the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and Taipei 101, each in turn the tallest building in the world.
Nature answers with Victoria Falls on the Zambezi, a sheet of water so wide its spray is visible from far off, and the Cape of Good Hope, the rocky headland that sailors rounded on the way to the Indies. Mount Vesuvius, which buried Pompeii in AD 79, still overlooks the Bay of Naples. Mount Olympus was the home of the Greek gods, and the twin-peaked Mount Elbrus is the highest summit of the Caucasus. Churches, archaeological sites, rock formations and lakes are the commonest kinds here, and together they span every continent.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Angkor Wat | Archaeological site | Cambodia | ✓ |
| 2 | Grand Canyon National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 3 | Ha Long Bay | Protected area | Vietnam | |
| 4 | Great Barrier Reef | Coral reef | Australia | ✓ |
| 5 | Moraine Lake | Lake | Canada | |
| 6 | Wulingyuan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 7 | Deadvlei | Salt flat | Namibia | |
| 8 | Zhangye Danxia Geopark | Protected area | People's Republic of China | |
| 9 | Raja Ampat Islands | Coral reef | Indonesia | |
| 10 | Victoria Falls | Waterfall | Zambia | ✓ |
| 11 | Colosseum | Archaeological site | Italy | |
| 12 | Mount Elbrus | Mountain | Russia | |
| 13 | Mount Olympus | Mountain | Greece | |
| 14 | Louvre Museum | Museum | France | |
| 15 | Mount Rushmore | Monument | United States | |
| 16 | Taipei 101 | Skyscraper | Taiwan | |
| 17 | Cape of Good Hope | Cliff | South Africa | |
| 18 | Giza pyramid complex | Necropolis | Egypt | |
| 19 | Mount Vesuvius | Volcano | Italy | |
| 20 | Petronas Towers | Skyscraper | Malaysia | |
| 21 | Western Wall | Archaeological site | Palestine | |
| 22 | Uluru | Rock formation | Australia | |
| 23 | Niagara Falls | Waterfall | Canada | |
| 24 | Hoover Dam | Dam | United States | |
| 25 | Baalbek | Archaeological site | Lebanon | ✓ |
| 26 | Nazca Lines | Geoglyph | Peru | ✓ |
| 27 | Milan Cathedral | Cathedral | Italy | |
| 28 | Puncak Jaya | Mountain | Indonesia | |
| 29 | Schönbrunn Palace | Palace | Austria | ✓ |
| 30 | Roman Forum | Archaeological site | Italy |
01 Angkor Wat
Cambodia · 5.4 km from Siem Reap13.412° N 103.867° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by The_5ifth from Pixabay Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument on Earth and the one building every Cambodian knows. It appears on the national flag. King Suryavarman II commissioned it in the first half of the 12th century as the state temple of his capital, Yaśodharapura, and dedicated it to Vishnu.
Did you know? The bas-reliefs run counter-clockwise, the reverse of normal order, as in Brahmin funeral rites, which supports the idea that it was a royal tomb.
02 Grand Canyon National Park
United States36.055° N 112.122° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Filio from Pixabay Grand Canyon National Park protects a chasm that the Colorado River and its tributaries cut into the Colorado Plateau after the plateau was lifted.
Did you know? In 1540 Spanish soldiers guided by Hopi people tried to reach the river, got a third of the way down and reported rocks bigger than Seville's Giralda tower.
03 Ha Long Bay
Vietnam · 12.4 km from Hạ Long20.900° N 107.200° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xuanduongvan87 from Pixabay Nearly two thousand limestone islets rise straight out of the green water of Ha Long Bay, in Vietnam's far north-east, spread over some 1,550 square kilometres of the Gulf of Tonkin.
Did you know? Some 60 animal species found in and around the bay are endemic to it.
04 Great Barrier Reef
Australia · 37.6 km from Port Douglas16.400° S 145.800° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by alicia3690 from Pixabay At around 344,400 square kilometers and roughly 2,300 km long, the Great Barrier Reef isn't one reef so much as some 3,000 individual reefs and hundreds of islands strung together — a footprint about the size of Italy or Japan, and by most measures the largest living structure ever built by living organisms, coral…
Did you know? In places the reef lies up to 160 kilometres from the mainland, across a channel more than 60 metres deep.
05 Moraine Lake
Canada51.322° N 116.186° W
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Moraine Lake lies at about 1,884 metres in the Valley of the Ten Peaks in Banff National Park, a small lake of some 50 hectares held in a cirque of rock walls and glaciers. Its fame rests on its colour.
Did you know? The lake is fed almost entirely by melting snow and ice, so it only reaches its full level in mid to late June.
06 Wulingyuan
People's Republic of China29.346° N 110.467° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Vined from Pixabay Wulingyuan is a forest of stone. More than 3,000 pillars and peaks of quartz sandstone rise from the valleys of north-western Hunan, many of them over 200 metres tall. Between them run gorges, streams, pools and waterfalls.
Did you know? The Bailong Elevator climbs its 326 metres in about a minute and a half and was certified by Guinness in 2015 as the world's tallest outdoor lift.
07 Deadvlei
Namibia24.763° S 15.295° E
Image by kuloser from Pixabay Deadvlei is a white clay pan enclosed by some of the highest dunes on Earth, deep in the Namib Desert of western Namibia, and it holds one of the most unearthly scenes on the planet.
Did you know? The deep red of the surrounding dunes comes from iron oxide coating the sand grains, which grows stronger as the sand ages.
08 Zhangye Danxia Geopark
People's Republic of China · 27.5 km from Zhangye38.916° N 100.133° E
Image by eltonjohn1973 from Pixabay In the foothills of the Qilian Mountains, on the old Silk Road corridor of Gansu province in north-west China, the hills are painted in stripes. Bands of red, orange, yellow, cream and grey-green run across ridges and gullies, folded and tilted so that each hill carries its own pattern.
Did you know? The term danxia, meaning vermilion sunglow, was coined in 1928 and borrowed from a third-century poem by Cao Pi.
09 Raja Ampat Islands
Indonesia0.233° S 130.517° E
Image by Ady_Fauzan from Pixabay Raja Ampat is a scattering of more than 1,500 islands, cays and shoals off the northwestern tip of New Guinea, gathered around four large islands: Waigeo, Batanta, Salawati and Misool.
Did you know? The surrounding waters are visited by blue, Bryde's, Omura's and sperm whales, as well as dugongs, whale sharks and even orcas.
10 Victoria Falls
Zambia · 2 km from Victoria Falls17.925° S 25.858° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Jürgen_Bierlein from Pixabay The Zambezi reaches Victoria Falls as a broad, lazy river threaded with wooded islands, then drops in one sheer step into a crack in the basalt plateau. The curtain is about 1,708 metres wide and up to 108 metres deep at the centre.
Did you know? Under a full moon the spray can produce a lunar rainbow, or moonbow, alongside the daytime rainbows that gave the falls some of their older names.
11 Colosseum
Colosseo
Italy · 1.2 km from Rome41.890° N 12.492° E
Image by MARTINOPHUC from Pixabay The eighty-foot drop beneath the Colosseum's sand floor is where the real machinery of the show lived.
Did you know? Spectators were guided to their seats by numbered pottery tokens that matched one of the 80 ground-level entrances.
12 Mount Elbrus
Russia43.353° N 42.438° E
Image by vishstudio from Pixabay Elbrus is a volcano that stopped short of the main Caucasus ridge.
Did you know? Elbrus is the highest volcano in Eurasia and ranks as the tenth most topographically prominent peak on Earth.
13 Mount Olympus
Όλυμπος
Greece · 24.7 km from Katerini40.083° N 22.350° E
- biosphere reserve
Image by zremus from Pixabay Mount Olympus, the home of the gods in Greek myth, is also a real and demanding mountain: a massif of some 52 peaks rising almost straight from the Aegean coast, with its summit, Mytikas, at 2,918 metres — the highest point in Greece.
Did you know? The name of the highest summit, Mytikas, means 'nose' in Greek.
14 Louvre Museum
Musée du Louvre
France · 1.3 km from Paris48.861° N 2.336° E
Image by designerpoint from Pixabay The Louvre is less a building than a stack of eight centuries. Philip II began a fortress here in the late 12th century to guard Paris from the west, and its lower walls can still be seen in the museum's basement. Charles V turned the fortress into a residence.
Did you know? After a visitor threw a rock at the Mona Lisa in December 1956, chipping a speck of paint near the elbow, it has been kept behind bulletproof glass.
15 Mount Rushmore
United States · 29 km from Rapid City43.879° N 103.459° W
Dean Franklin · Public domain The four faces on Mount Rushmore were not the original plan.
Did you know? Each of the four presidential heads is about 60 feet, or 18 metres, tall.
16 Taipei 101
Taiwan · 0.4 km from Taipei25.034° N 121.565° E
Image by george17168 from Pixabay The single most photographed part of Taipei 101 isn't visible from the street. Between the 87th and 92nd floors hangs a bright yellow steel sphere weighing 660 tonnes — the largest tuned mass damper ever installed in a building, and one of the few designed to be seen rather than hidden.
Did you know? During construction in March 2002 an earthquake toppled two cranes from the 56th floor, killing five people.
17 Cape of Good Hope
South Africa34.358° S 18.472° E
Image by sharonang from Pixabay At the end of the Cape Peninsula, a ridge of Table Mountain sandstone drops into the Atlantic in a jumble of dark rock and surf.
Did you know? The meeting point of the warm Agulhas Current and the cold Benguela Current shifts back and forth between Cape Agulhas and Cape Point.
18 Giza pyramid complex
Egypt · 6.7 km from Giza29.976° N 31.133° E
Ricardo Liberato · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Giza plateau, on the edge of the Western Desert above modern Giza, holds the most famous group of monuments on Earth: the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, the Great Sphinx, and the temples, causeways and cemeteries that served them. All were built during Egypt's Fourth Dynasty, roughly 2600 to 2500 BC.
Did you know? Workers cut the softer limestone with copper tools, but wore down hard granite with abrasive sand and powders before finishing it with copper.
19 Mount Vesuvius
Vesuvio
Italy · 15.8 km from Naples40.823° N 14.429° E
Image by stostank from Pixabay Vesuvius rises from the shore of the Gulf of Naples about 9 km east of the city, and its profile explains its history.
Did you know? Near Nola in 2001, archaeologists found thousands of human footprints left by villagers fleeing north from an eruption about 3,800 years ago.
20 Petronas Towers
Malaysia · 3.2 km from Kuala Lumpur3.158° N 101.712° E
Image by Pexels from Pixabay 9 metres. The Argentine-American architect César Pelli designed them for the Malaysian state oil company. He deliberately drew on Islamic geometry: each tower's floor plan is an eight-pointed star made of two overlapping squares, with rounded lobes fitted into the angles to gain office space.
Did you know? The skybridge weighs about 750 tonnes and is considered the highest two-storey bridge in the world.
21 Western Wall
Palestine · 2.6 km from Jerusalem31.777° N 35.234° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 3.0 What stands in the plaza today isn't a wall of the Temple itself — it's the western retaining wall of the platform the Temple sat on, part of a vast expansion Herod the Great ordered around 19 BCE to turn the Temple Mount into the largest religious platform anywhere in the ancient world.
Did you know? At its southern end, Robinson's Arch once carried a monumental staircase as wide as a modern four-lane road up onto the Temple Mount.
22 Uluru
Australia25.345° S 131.036° E
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay 4 km around its base. That makes it one of the most recognisable landforms on the continent. Geologists call it an inselberg: an isolated remnant that outlasted the rock around it because it has almost no joints or bedding partings for erosion to exploit.
Did you know? In Pitjantjatjara, Uluṟu is a proper name with no other meaning, though senior traditional owners also use it as a family name.
23 Niagara Falls
Canada · 3.2 km from Niagara Falls43.080° N 79.071° W
Image by NeilMorrell from Pixabay Niagara Falls hasn't stayed in one place. When the ice sheets retreated around 12,000 years ago and Lake Erie's outflow first cut through the Niagara Escarpment, the falls formed roughly 11 kilometres downstream from where they stand today, near what's now Lewiston and Queenston.
Did you know? Between half and three-quarters of the Niagara River is diverted through tunnels to hydroelectric plants before it ever reaches the brink.
24 Hoover Dam
United States · 9.4 km from Boulder City36.016° N 114.738° W
Image by MrUweS from Pixabay Hoover Dam plugs the Black Canyon of the Colorado River on the border between Nevada and Arizona, a curved wall of concrete standing 726 feet (about 221 metres) from its foundation rock to the roadway on its crest. 25 million cubic yards went into the dam alone.
Did you know? In the summer of 1931, with daytime highs averaging around 49 °C, sixteen workers and nearby residents died of heat prostration in a single month.
25 Baalbek
Lebanon · 33 km from Zahlé34.006° N 36.209° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by djedj from Pixabay Nowhere else did Rome build on quite this scale. On a hill in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, where the city of Heliopolis once worshipped a local storm god under the name of Jupiter, the imperial architects raised a sanctuary on a platform whose retaining walls are made of single stones.
Did you know? Inscriptions to the god of Heliopolis have turned up as far away as Athens, Rome, Gaul and near Hadrian's Wall in Britain.
26 Nazca Lines
Líneas de Nazca
Peru · 25.6 km from Nasca14.697° S 75.135° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by monikawl999 from Pixabay Maria Reiche, a German mathematician, spent roughly forty years on foot in the Peruvian desert measuring, mapping and defending the Nazca Lines from a rented broom cupboard of a house nearby, and it was her work that popularized the idea that the lines formed a giant celestial calendar — tracking solstices, marking the…
Did you know? More than 70 of the figures depict animals, including a spider, fish, heron, lizard, dog and cat, alongside a human figure.
27 Milan Cathedral
Duomo di Milano
Italy · 1.3 km from Milan45.464° N 9.191° E
Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 4.0 Milan Cathedral took almost six centuries to finish. Work began in 1386 under Archbishop Antonio da Saluzzo, at a moment when his cousin Gian Galeazzo Visconti had just taken power in the city; the last bronze portal was inaugurated only on 6 January 1965.
Did you know? A meridian line laid in the floor in 1786 by Brera Observatory astronomers uses a hole 24 metres up to fix solar noon to within seconds.
28 Puncak Jaya
Indonesia4.083° S 137.183° E
Alfindra Primaldhi · CC BY 2.0 At 4,884 m, Puncak Jaya — also called Carstensz Pyramid, and Nemangkawi Ninggok, "peak of the white arrow", in the language of the Amungme people — is the highest mountain in Indonesia, the highest on any island on Earth and, for climbers who count New Guinea with Australia, the Oceania entry among the Seven Summits.
Did you know? In 1936, when ice still covered about 13 square kilometres of the massif, glacier-capped Ngga Pulu was probably the true summit, over 4,900 metres high.
29 Schönbrunn Palace
Schloss Schönbrunn
Austria · 4.3 km from Vienna48.185° N 16.312° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Sekau67 from Pixabay Schönbrunn was the summer residence of the Habsburgs, and it grew from a hunting ground.
Did you know? The Roman Ruin was built from scratch in 1778 as a deliberately crumbling folly and was originally called the Ruin of Carthage.
30 Roman Forum
Foro Romano
Italy · 0.7 km from Rome41.892° N 12.485° E
Image by jensjunge from Pixabay The Roman Forum fills a small valley between the Palatine and Capitoline hills that was once a marsh.
Did you know? The Temple of Saturn doubled as the state treasury, holding vaults for public funds and private deposits.
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 places in the world?
- On our list, Angkor Wat (Cambodia) ranks first, followed by Grand Canyon National Park (United States) and Ha Long Bay (Vietnam).
- Which country has the most places in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (279), the United States (228) and France (179).
- Which of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still exists?
- Only the Great Pyramid of Giza survives. The other six, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, were destroyed or have vanished.
- Why is Victoria Falls called the largest waterfall in the world?
- Victoria Falls is neither the highest nor the widest waterfall, but its width of about 1.7 kilometres combined with a drop of over 100 metres makes it the largest single sheet of falling water on Earth.
- When was the Colosseum built?
- The Colosseum was begun under the emperor Vespasian around AD 70 and inaugurated by his son Titus in AD 80. It could hold an estimated 50,000 spectators.
- How many places are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 3,198 places in 175 countries. Italy has the most, with 279.