The Most Beautiful Places in Apulia
8 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Apulia are Castel del Monte, Sanctuary of Saint Michael the Archangel and Otranto Cathedral. The list covers 8 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Apulia, the heel of Italy, is a long limestone land between the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea. Water sinks through its plateau of the Murge into caves, so stone was always at hand and wood was scarce: farmers built in dry stone, and Lecce carved its soft, honey-coloured limestone into exuberant baroque. Greek colonists, Byzantines, Normans and the emperor Frederick II all left their mark on the region.
Castel del Monte, raised for Frederick II in the 1240s on a hill above the Murge, is an octagon with eight octagonal towers, and its purpose has been debated ever since. In Alberobello the trulli, whitewashed houses with conical roofs of stacked stone, fill whole streets.
Otranto Cathedral has a vast twelfth-century floor mosaic centred on a Tree of Life, peopled with biblical figures, animals and even King Arthur. The Basilica di Santa Croce in Lecce shows how far local carvers could push the stone, with a façade crowded with fruit, beasts and figures. Underground, the Castellana Caves, explored from 1938, lead through galleries of stalactites to the brilliant white chamber called the Grotta Bianca.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Castel del Monte | Castle | ✓ |
| 2 | Sanctuary of Saint Michael the Archangel | Church building | ✓ |
| 3 | Otranto Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 4 | Basilica di Santa Croce | Church building | |
| 5 | Castellana Caves | Show cave | |
| 6 | Trani Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 7 | The Trulli of Alberobello | Trullo | |
| 8 | La Poesia | Cave |
01 Castel del Monte
Italy · 26.1 km from Barletta41.085° N 16.271° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Jack78 from Pixabay Seen from the surrounding countryside of northern Apulia, Castel del Monte looks less like a fortress than a stone crown set on a hilltop 540 metres up. Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, had it built in the 1240s; a document of 1240 already orders work on it.
Did you know? A letter Frederick II sent from Gubbio in January 1240 orders building materials for a castle at Santa Maria del Monte, the site's original name.
02 Sanctuary of Saint Michael the Archangel
Santuario di San Michele Arcangelo
Italy41.708° N 15.955° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC0 This is a church inside a mountain.
03 Otranto Cathedral
Cattedrale di Otranto
Italy · 37.5 km from Lecce40.146° N 18.491° E
User:MatthiasKabel · CC BY 2.5 The whole floor of Otranto Cathedral is a picture book in stone. A single mosaic of the 12th century spreads across the nave, the aisles, the presbytery and the apse, and it is one of the finest medieval pavements to have come down to us.
Did you know? The Martyrs of Otranto, killed by Ottoman troops on 14 August 1480, were canonised by Pope Francis in 2013.
04 Basilica di Santa Croce
Italy · 2.1 km from Lecce40.355° N 18.173° E
Image by guy_dugas from Pixabay The facade of Santa Croce is the showpiece of Lecce's Baroque: a wall of soft local limestone carved so densely with figures, foliage and beasts that it reads almost like embroidery.
Did you know? The church keeps a relic venerated as a fragment of the True Cross, which explains its dedication to the Holy Cross.
05 Castellana Caves
Grotte di Castellana
Italy · 35.2 km from Bari40.876° N 17.149° E
Alessandro e Damiano · CC BY 4.0 The Castellana Caves exist on record because of a job that had nothing to do with finding them. In January 1938, the Provincial Tourist Board of Bari brought in Franco Anelli, a speleologist from the Italian Institute of Speleology, simply to assess some already-known local caves for their tourism potential.
Did you know? Formations have earned names such as the Owl, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Capitoline She-Wolf, and one passage is likened to a tiny Grand Canyon.
06 Trani Cathedral
Cattedrale di Trani
Italy · 13.1 km from Barletta41.282° N 16.419° E
Image by Jack78 from Pixabay Trani Cathedral stands in a strikingly open position just a few metres from the Adriatic, a pale mass of stone with its tall bell tower rising beside the west front.
Did you know? Since 2012 a bronze replica of Barisano da Trani's doors has stood in the portal, protecting the 12th-century originals.
07 The Trulli of Alberobello
Trulli di Alberobello
Italy · 30.4 km from Taranto40.782° N 17.237° E
Image by GiuseppeDio from Pixabay Walk up into the Rione Monti district of Alberobello and the town turns into something from a fable: lane after lane of small whitewashed houses crowned with grey stone cones, rising in rows up the hillside. These are the trulli, and nowhere else is there a whole living town district built of them.
Did you know? Each cone has two skins: an inner vault of limestone blocks and an outer layer of slabs tilted slightly outward so that rain runs off.
08 La Poesia
Grotta della Poesia
Italy · 25.2 km from Lecce40.286° N 18.430° E
Psymark · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the low limestone coast of the Salento, the Grotta della Poesia is a natural pool of startling clarity: a near-elliptical basin of turquoise sea water, open to the sky and walled by pale rock, linked to the Adriatic by an underwater passage.
Did you know? Excavations at Roca have also turned up gold discs that researchers interpret as sun symbols.
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 Apulia?
- On our list, Castel del Monte ranks first, followed by Sanctuary of Saint Michael the Archangel and Otranto Cathedral.
- What are the trulli of Alberobello?
- Trulli are dry-stone houses with conical roofs made of corbelled limestone slabs, built without mortar. Alberobello has whole neighbourhoods of them and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- Why is Castel del Monte octagonal?
- No one knows for certain. Built for Frederick II in the 1240s, it lacks a moat and many defensive features, and the symbolic meaning of its strict octagonal plan is still debated by historians.
- What is Lecce stone?
- Lecce stone is a soft, fine-grained limestone from the Salento that is easy to carve when freshly quarried. It made possible the richly decorated baroque façades for which Lecce is known.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Apulia?
- In our collection, the places in Apulia are most often caves (2), churches (2), cathedrals (2) and show caves (1).
- How many places are on this list in Apulia?
- The list covers 8 places.