The Most Beautiful Places in Bosnia and Herzegovina
11 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Bosnia and Herzegovina are Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque, Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge and Stari Most. The list covers 11 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country of limestone. The Dinaric karst swallows rain and returns it as cold, clear springs and rivers in shades of emerald, and where that water drops over the tufa it has built itself, it forms waterfalls. Across this landscape lie four centuries of Ottoman building and, older still, the carved medieval tombstones called stećci, so that river, bridge and town are rarely far apart.
Two bridges stand at the heart of it. Stari Most in Mostar throws a single stone arch over the Neretva; first completed in 1566, it was destroyed in 1993 and rebuilt in the original way in 2004. In Višegrad, the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge, designed by Mimar Sinan, crosses the Drina on eleven arches and gave Ivo Andrić the subject of his novel. In Sarajevo, the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque of the 1530s remains the city's central Ottoman landmark.
The water is just as present. Kravica spreads into a wide amphitheatre of tufa cascades, the Buna emerges fully formed from a cliff at Blagaj beside a dervish house, and in Jajce the Pliva falls straight into the Vrbas in the middle of town, with wooden watermills upstream. Počitelj climbs a hillside above the Neretva as a walled Ottoman village, Radimlja near Stolac gathers carved stećci in one field, and at Tjentište a modernist monument recalls the Second World War battle of the Sutjeska.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque | Mosque | |
| 2 | Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge | Bridge | ✓ |
| 3 | Stari Most | Bridge | ✓ |
| 4 | Kravica Waterfall | Waterfall | |
| 5 | Počitelj | Most beautiful village | |
| 6 | Necropolis of stecci at Radimlja, the historic site | Necropolis | ✓ |
| 7 | Vrelo Bune (Buna Spring), Blagaj | Karst spring | |
| 8 | Tara River | River | |
| 9 | Valley of Heroes, Tjentište (Sutjeska Memorial) | War memorial | |
| 10 | Pliva Waterfall | Waterfall | |
| 11 | Pliva River Watermills | Watermill |
01 Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque
Bosnia and Herzegovina · 3.8 km from Sarajevo43.859° N 18.429° E
Yann Forget · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque stands at the heart of Baščaršija, the old Ottoman market quarter of Sarajevo, its great dome and a single monumental minaret rising above a courtyard shaded by centuries-old lime trees.
Did you know? Restoration after the war replaced the faded Austro-Hungarian decoration with a new interior by the Bosnian calligrapher Hazim Numanagić, completed around 2002.
02 Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge
Bosnia and Herzegovina43.782° N 19.288° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Pudelek (Marcin Szala) · CC BY-SA 3.0 The bridge at Višegrad carries eleven stone arches across the green Drina in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it is one of the masterpieces of Ottoman engineering.
Did you know? The stone was quarried at Banja, about 5 kilometres downstream on the right bank of the Drina.
03 Stari Most
Bosnia and Herzegovina · 1.5 km from Mostar43.337° N 17.815° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by MarcelDominic from Pixabay The Old Bridge of Mostar, Stari Most, springs across the green Neretva in a single, steeply humped stone arch about 30 m long and 4 m wide, some 24 m above the summer water.
Did you know? Rebuilding began on 7 June 2001 and cost about 15.5 million US dollars, shared by the World Bank, UNESCO, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and several countries.
04 Kravica Waterfall
Kravica
Bosnia and Herzegovina · 27.6 km from Mostar43.156° N 17.608° E
Image by mtomicphotography from Pixabay Kravica is a broad amphitheatre of falling water in the karst country of Herzegovina. The Trebižat River, after crossing a dry, stony landscape, spills over a curved barrier of tufa about 25 metres high in many separate streams and curtains, into a wide green pool roughly 120 metres across.
Did you know? The Trebižat has a second tufa waterfall, Koćuša, roughly 20 km upstream of Kravica.
05 Počitelj
Bosnia and Herzegovina · 25.1 km from Mostar43.133° N 17.733° E
Image by MarcelDominic from Pixabay Stone houses climb a steep hillside above the river Neretva in tiers, rising to a fortress with a tall tower and walls that run down the slope.
Did you know? The old town fills a natural karst amphitheatre that faces west over the Neretva, which is why its houses rise in such regular tiers.
06 Necropolis of stecci at Radimlja, the historic site
Nekropola Radimlja
Bosnia and Herzegovina · 29.9 km from Mostar43.093° N 17.923° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Joanne Goldby from Birmingham, UK · CC BY-SA 2.0 Stećci — massive carved medieval tombstones — are found only in the western Balkans, and Radimlja, in the Vidovo field just outside Stolac in Herzegovina, is the most celebrated site where they can be seen.
Did you know? The core of the cemetery is three large chests made at the end of the 14th century, two of them richly carved in low relief.
More about Necropolis of stecci at Radimlja, the historic site →
07 Vrelo Bune (Buna Spring), Blagaj
Vrelo Bune
Bosnia and Herzegovina · 12.4 km from Mostar43.257° N 17.904° E
Julian Nyča · CC BY-SA 3.0 At Blagaj, a few kilometres south-east of Mostar, a sheer limestone wall about 200 metres high rises straight out of the valley floor, and at its foot a whole river is born.
Did you know? Four historic bridges once crossed the short Buna; the five-arched Karađoz-beg bridge in Blagaj, built before 1570, has spans that widen toward the centre.
08 Tara River
Tara
Bosnia and Herzegovina43.348° N 18.839° E
Mazbln · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Tara is the river that carved the deepest canyon in Europe.
Did you know? The bridge's wartime story inspired the 1969 Yugoslav film Most (The Bridge) and a 1956 Dutch novel by A. den Doolaard.
09 Valley of Heroes, Tjentište (Sutjeska Memorial)
Memorijalni kompleks Tjentište
Bosnia and Herzegovina43.312° N 18.672° E
JankoSam · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the bottom of the Sutjeska valley, surrounded by the forested mountains of eastern Bosnia, two great walls of faceted concrete split apart as though something had burst through them.
Did you know? A marble plaque beneath the sculpture records that 3,301 fighters of the Sutjeska battle rest in the ossuary in front of it.
More about Valley of Heroes, Tjentište (Sutjeska Memorial) →
10 Pliva Waterfall
Pliva
Bosnia and Herzegovina44.338° N 17.271° E
Image by fotos1992 from Pixabay In the middle of Jajce, a medieval royal town in central Bosnia, the Pliva River throws itself over a wall of travertine straight into the Vrbas, so that one of the country's best-known waterfalls drops right beneath the houses and the fortress of the old town.
Did you know? The flow over the waterfall is regulated: about 3 cubic metres per second is kept as a biological minimum for the river.
11 Pliva River Watermills
Bosnia and Herzegovina44.347° N 17.227° E
Martin Brož · CC BY 3.0 Where the Pliva river spills from one lake into the next, a cluster of small wooden huts sits right in the current, with water rushing beneath and between them.
Did you know? The Pliva rises at about 1,227 metres near Šipovo and carries an average of about three cubic metres of water per second near Jajce.
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 Bosnia and Herzegovina?
- On our list, Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque ranks first, followed by Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge and Stari Most.
- Who designed the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge in Višegrad?
- It was designed by the Ottoman court architect Mimar Sinan for the grand vizier Mehmed Paša Sokolović and completed in the 1570s. It is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
- What are stećci?
- Stećci are monumental medieval tombstones carved from limestone, many decorated with reliefs of spirals, figures and hunting scenes. Necropolises in Bosnia and Herzegovina and neighbouring countries were jointly inscribed by UNESCO in 2016.
- Why are Bosnian rivers so green and clear?
- Most rivers in the country rise from karst springs, where water has filtered through limestone and carries very little sediment. Dissolved minerals and the white riverbeds give the water its emerald colour.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Bosnia and Herzegovina?
- In our collection, the places in Bosnia and Herzegovina are most often waterfalls (2), bridges (2), karst springs (1) and rivers (1).
- How many places are on this list in Bosnia and Herzegovina?
- The list covers 11 places.