The Most Beautiful Places in Cambodia
9 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Cambodia are Angkor Wat, Bayon and Preah Vihear Temple. The list covers 9 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Cambodia's great monuments grew out of the Khmer Empire, which from the ninth century built its capitals on the plains north of the Tonlé Sap lake. Sandstone quarried in the Kulen hills and floated down by canal let its kings raise temple-mountains modelled on Mount Meru, wrapped in bas-reliefs and moats, and the monsoon forest that later swallowed many of them gave the ruins the look they have today.
Angkor Wat, built for Suryavarman II in the early twelfth century and dedicated to Vishnu, is the largest of them, its five towers mirrored in the surrounding moat. Nearby, the Bayon of Jayavarman VII crowds its towers with serene carved faces, while at Ta Prohm silk-cotton and strangler fig roots have been left to grip the galleries. Banteay Srei, small and finely carved in pink sandstone, shows how delicate Khmer stonework could be.
Further afield, Preah Vihear sits on the edge of a cliff in the Dângrêk Mountains, Koh Ker preserves a short-lived tenth-century capital with its stepped pyramid, and Beng Mealea lies collapsed and overgrown in the forest. Kbal Spean adds a riverbed carved with lingas and Hindu deities, and Sambor Prei Kuk takes the story back to pre-Angkorian brick sanctuaries.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Angkor Wat | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 2 | Bayon | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 3 | Preah Vihear Temple | Temple | ✓ |
| 4 | Koh Ker | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 5 | Ta Prohm | Ruins | ✓ |
| 6 | Banteay Srei | Temple | ✓ |
| 7 | Kbal Spean | Petroglyph | |
| 8 | Sambor Prei Kuk | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 9 | Beng Mealea | Temple |
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 Bayon
Cambodia · 8.3 km from Siem Reap13.441° N 103.859° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by patrickmoretti06 from Pixabay The Bayon stands at the exact centre of Angkor Thom, the walled capital built by King Jayavarman VII at the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th century, and it is the temple of faces.
Did you know? The main sanctuary once held a 3.6-metre Buddha sheltered by the hood of the serpent king Mucalinda, smashed when the Hindu king Jayavarman VIII took power.
03 Preah Vihear Temple
Cambodia14.391° N 104.680° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
PsamatheM · CC BY-SA 4.0 Preah Vihear is a temple built on the edge of the world as the Khmer knew it.
Did you know? A stele inscribed around 1120 records that the royal guru Divakarapandita gave the temple a golden dancing Shiva and lined its floor with bronze plates.
04 Koh Ker
Cambodia13.783° N 104.533° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
PsamatheM · CC BY-SA 4.0 Rising out of the forest of northern Cambodia, the seven-tiered pyramid of Prang at Koh Ker stands 36 metres high on a base about 62 metres square, a stepped mountain of stone that once carried a colossal linga at its summit.
Did you know? At Prasat Balang a linga about two metres tall, weighing several tons, was carved together with its pedestal directly out of the bedrock where it stands.
05 Ta Prohm
Cambodia · 8.7 km from Siem Reap13.435° N 103.889° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Graham-H from Pixabay Ta Prohm was never meant to be a ruin — it was meant to be a small city.
Did you know? The outermost wall encloses an area of about 1,000 by 650 metres, while the temple itself sits within five concentric rectangular enclosures.
06 Banteay Srei
Cambodia · 28.4 km from Siem Reap13.599° N 103.963° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay Banteay Srei is a small temple with an outsized reputation.
Did you know? The temple once stood at the heart of a town called Ishvarapura, whose outer gate is all that survives of a wall about 500 metres square.
07 Kbal Spean
Cambodia · 39.7 km from Siem Reap13.687° N 104.015° E
Prerit https://www.flickr.com/people/prerit/ · CC BY-SA 2.0 In the forested Kulen Hills northeast of Angkor, a small river runs over a bed of sandstone carved nearly a thousand years ago.
Did you know? One relief shows Lakshmi massaging the legs of Vishnu as he drifts on the serpent Ananta across the cosmic ocean of milk.
08 Sambor Prei Kuk
Cambodia · 23.7 km from Kampong Thom12.867° N 105.040° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
PsamatheM · CC BY-SA 4.0 Sambor Prei Kuk is a forest of brick temples, scattered among the trees of central Cambodia, that predates Angkor by several centuries. Under its ancient name, Isanapura, it was the capital of the Chenla kingdom, and many of its sanctuaries were built in the 7th century.
Did you know? Twenty-three inscriptions have been found at the site, including a linga inscription dated to 627 AD.
09 Beng Mealea
Cambodia13.476° N 104.238° E
松岡明芳 · CC BY-SA 3.0 Beng Mealea is what Angkor might look like if no one had ever cleared it. Built in the early twelfth century, in the reign of Suryavarman II and in the same style as Angkor Wat, it was a temple on a grand scale: an outer gallery of about 181 by 152 metres, set in a moat more than a kilometre long and 45 metres wide.
Did you know? Though built as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu, its carvings also include some Buddhist motifs.
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 Cambodia?
- On our list, Angkor Wat ranks first, followed by Bayon and Preah Vihear Temple.
- Who built Angkor Wat?
- Angkor Wat was built for the Khmer king Suryavarman II in the first half of the twelfth century. It was dedicated to Vishnu and later became a Buddhist temple.
- Why are there trees growing on Ta Prohm?
- When the Angkor temples were cleared in the twentieth century, Ta Prohm was deliberately left largely as it was found, so silk-cotton and strangler fig trees still grow out of its walls and galleries.
- What is Sambor Prei Kuk?
- Sambor Prei Kuk is the site of Ishanapura, a capital of the pre-Angkorian Chenla kingdom in the seventh century, known for its brick temples. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Cambodia?
- In our collection, the places in Cambodia are most often archaeological sites (6), temples (4), ruins (1) and rock art sites (1).
- How many places are on this list in Cambodia?
- The list covers 9 places.