The Most Beautiful Places in Europe
1,490 places in 47 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Europe are Geirangerfjord (Norway), Lofoten (Norway) and Plitvice Lakes National Park (Croatia). The list covers 1,490 places in 47 countries. Italy has the most, with 279. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Europe packs an extraordinary range of beauty into a small, crowded continent. Alpine and Mediterranean mountains, volcanic coasts and long glaciated valleys sit within a day's journey of one another, and almost every one of them has been lived in, fought over and built upon for thousands of years. Greek and Roman antiquity, the medieval church, royal courts and modern architecture all left work that is still standing, often in the same city.
Rome shows the depth of that history: the Colosseum and the Roman Forum stand at the centre of a capital still in use, and across the Tiber, in St Peter's Basilica, Michelangelo's Pietà is the only work he ever signed. In Provence, the three tiers of arches of the Pont du Gard carried water to Roman Nîmes, while beneath Paris the Catacombs hold the bones of millions moved from the city's old cemeteries. The Louvre, once a royal palace, is now the most visited art museum in the world.
Later ages add Milan Cathedral with its marble pinnacles, Schönbrunn Palace, the Habsburg summer residence in Vienna, and the titanium curves of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Nature is never far: Mount Vesuvius overlooks the Bay of Naples, Positano tumbles down the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast, and Mount Olympus, home of the Greek gods, rises within sight of the Aegean shore. Churches, castles and cathedrals are the commonest kinds here, but villages, bridges and rock formations hold their own.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Geirangerfjord | Fjord | Norway | ✓ |
| 2 | Lofoten | Island | Norway | |
| 3 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 4 | Lauterbrunnen | Most beautiful village | Switzerland | |
| 5 | São Miguel Island | Island | Portugal | |
| 6 | Bay of Kotor | Lake | Montenegro | |
| 7 | Hallstatt | Most beautiful village | Austria | |
| 8 | Isle of Skye | Island | United Kingdom | |
| 9 | Ionian Islands | Island | Greece | |
| 10 | Lake Ohrid | Lake | North Macedonia | ✓ |
| 11 | Colosseum | Archaeological site | Italy | |
| 12 | Mount Olympus | Mountain | Greece | |
| 13 | Louvre Museum | Museum | France | |
| 14 | Mount Vesuvius | Volcano | Italy | |
| 15 | Milan Cathedral | Cathedral | Italy | |
| 16 | Schönbrunn Palace | Palace | Austria | ✓ |
| 17 | Roman Forum | Archaeological site | Italy | |
| 18 | Positano | Most beautiful village | Italy | |
| 19 | Catacombs of Paris | Catacombs | France | |
| 20 | Pont du Gard | Aqueduct | France | ✓ |
| 21 | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao | Museum | Spain | |
| 22 | Pietà (Michelangelo) | Sculpture | Vatican City | |
| 23 | Castel Sant'Angelo | Castle | Italy | |
| 24 | Aqueduct of Segovia | Aqueduct | Spain | ✓ |
| 25 | Loreley | Cliff | Germany | |
| 26 | Trajan's Column | Sculpture | Italy | |
| 27 | La Scala | Opera house | Italy | |
| 28 | Butrint | Archaeological site | Albania | ✓ |
| 29 | Fernsehturm Berlin | Observation tower | Germany | |
| 30 | Lake Garda | Lake | Italy |
01 Geirangerfjord
Norway62.094° N 7.081° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ArvidO from Pixabay The Geirangerfjord is a narrow blade of water, about 15 km long, cut into the mountains of Sunnmøre in western Norway. It branches off the Sunnylvsfjorden, itself an arm of the long Storfjorden, and ends at the small village of Geiranger, where the Geirangelva river runs into it.
Did you know? Skageflå, perched about 250 metres above the water, was farmed from the Middle Ages until 1916 and was once among the richest goat farms around Geiranger.
02 Lofoten
Norway68.333° N 14.666° E
Lukas Beck · CC BY 4.0 Seen from the mainland around Bodø, Lofoten looks less like a chain of islands than a single serrated wall rising out of the Norwegian Sea — Norwegians even call it Lofotveggen, the Lofoten Wall.
Did you know? In August 1936 nine king penguins were released around Lofoten; they survived until at least 1944, and sightings were once mistaken for the extinct great auk.
03 Plitvice Lakes National Park
Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera
Croatia44.880° N 15.616° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Hobbyfotography from Pixabay The barriers that create Plitvice's sixteen terraced lakes are, in a very real sense, alive — or at least built by living things. As water flows over limestone, it releases dissolved carbon dioxide, which shifts the water's chemistry so that calcium carbonate starts crystallising out of solution.
Did you know? Kozjak, the largest lake, is 47 metres deep, while Prošćansko, the highest of the large lakes, reaches 37 metres.
04 Lauterbrunnen
Switzerland46.600° N 7.909° E
Image by ELG21 from Pixabay Few valleys in the Alps show the work of ice as plainly as Lauterbrunnen. The glacier that once filled it carved a textbook U-shape: a flat floor rarely more than a kilometre wide, walled by limestone cliffs that rise sheer for up to a thousand metres.
Did you know? The place first appears in records in 1240 under the Latin name in claro fonte, meaning at the clear spring.
05 São Miguel Island
Portugal · 15.8 km from Ponta Delgada37.800° N 25.500° W
Image by Comanche0 from Pixabay São Miguel, the largest island of the Azores at about 760 km², is a string of volcanoes fused together in the middle of the Atlantic, and its nickname, Ilha Verde — the Green Island — describes what that ground has become: crater walls under pasture and forest, lakes lying in the floors of old calderas.
Did you know? Between 1439 and 1444, soon after settlement, an eruption at Sete Cidades reshaped the west; returning sailors found the coast transformed and pumice floating offshore.
06 Bay of Kotor
Бока Которска
Montenegro42.450° N 18.670° E
Image by VeleMarinkovic from Pixabay Guidebooks reach for the word "fjord" to describe Kotor's bay so often that it's become the default description, and geologically it's not quite right — this is Europe's southernmost inlet of its kind, but it wasn't carved by a glacier the way a true fjord is.
Did you know? Our Lady of the Rocks off Perast is an artificial islet, built up from stones and old ships loaded with rocks and sunk on the spot.
07 Hallstatt
Austria47.556° N 13.647° E
C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0 Hallstatt occupies a strip of land that barely exists.
Did you know? Iron Age miners hacked heart-shaped grooves into the rock to prise out slabs of salt; two surviving slabs weigh 12 and 42 kilograms.
08 Isle of Skye
United Kingdom57.350° N 6.300° W
Image by FrankyFromGermany from Pixabay Skye is shaped like a hand of rock spread out on the sea: a mountainous core, and from it a ring of peninsulas — Trotternish, Waternish, Duirinish, Minginish, Sleat — separated by sea lochs that cut so deep that nowhere on the island is more than about 8 km from salt water.
Did you know? Skye was under Norwegian rule until the 1266 Treaty of Perth, and Norse settlers erased every older place name except that of the island itself.
09 Ionian Islands
Επτάνησα
Greece37.800° N 20.700° E
Image by shogun from Pixabay Strung along the western coast of Greece, the Ionian Islands are the green counterpart to the bare Aegean: limestone mountains wooded with cypress, olive and fir, falling into a sea that shifts from deep blue to milky turquoise over pale pebble and marble.
Did you know? The Septinsular Republic of 1800 to 1807, under Russian and Ottoman protection, was the first Greek self-government of any kind since the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
10 Lake Ohrid
North Macedonia · 15.5 km from Pogradec41.033° N 20.717° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lake Ohrid is old in a way few lakes are.
Did you know? Around 40 percent of the water leaving the lake simply evaporates; the rest flows north via the Black Drin towards the Adriatic.
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 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.
13 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.
14 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.
15 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.
16 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.
17 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.
18 Positano
Italy · 25 km from Salerno40.628° N 14.482° E
Image by floydbarbel from Pixabay Positano is a village that falls down a mountain into the sea.
Did you know? A chain of medieval watchtowers, including the 13th-century Torre della Sponda, guarded Positano's coves against Saracen raids.
19 Catacombs of Paris
Catacombes de Paris
France · 3.1 km from Paris48.834° N 2.332° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Twenty metres beneath the 14th arrondissement, in tunnels left by centuries of limestone quarrying, lie the bones of several million Parisians.
Did you know? In 2004 police discovered a fully equipped secret cinema in the tunnels under the Trocadéro, complete with a screen, projector, seating and a bar.
20 Pont du Gard
France · 19.8 km from Nîmes43.947° N 4.535° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Sloopng from Pixabay In the 1st century AD the Roman colony of Nemausus, today's Nîmes, needed water and found it at a spring near Uzès.
Did you know? Coins found in the outflow at Nîmes suggest the aqueduct was built between about AD 40 and 60, in the reign of Claudius.
21 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Spain · 2.1 km from Bilbao43.269° N 2.934° W
Image by davidvives90 from Pixabay Frank Gehry's museum on the Nervión is the building that gave architecture a phrase: the "Bilbao effect", the idea that one daring cultural project can turn round a declining industrial city. In 1991 the Basque Government offered to pay for a Guggenheim museum on the run-down riverside port land, and the Solomon R.
Did you know? When it opened, its exhibition space was larger than that of the Guggenheim's New York and Venice collections combined.
22 Pietà (Michelangelo)
Pietà vaticana
Vatican City · 2.4 km from Rome41.902° N 12.453° E
Michelangelo · CC BY-SA 2.0 Michelangelo was in his early twenties when he carved the Pietà, and it made his name.
Did you know? The group measures about 174 cm high and 195 cm wide, carved from a single block of Carrara marble.
23 Castel Sant'Angelo
Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.903° N 12.466° E
Image by rainhard2 from Pixabay Hadrian started building his own tomb in 123 CE and didn't live to see it finished — it was completed in 139 under his successor Antoninus Pius, a cylindrical drum of a monument meant to hold the ashes of an emperor and his family for eternity. Eternity lasted about three centuries as a mausoleum.
Did you know? The last emperor known to have been interred here was Caracalla, in 217.
24 Aqueduct of Segovia
Acueducto de Segovia
Spain40.948° N 4.118° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0 The aqueduct does not stand at the edge of Segovia; it walks straight through it. 5 m above the street, and people pass beneath arches that have carried water, or at least the channel for it, since the Roman period.
Did you know? The water ran in a U-shaped channel only about half a metre deep cut along the very top of the arches.
25 Loreley
Germany · 25.2 km from Koblenz50.139° N 7.729° E
Image by Katzenfee50 from Pixabay Above a tight bend of the Rhine near Sankt Goarshausen, a slate cliff rises 132 metres almost straight out of the water.
Did you know? Vineyards belonging to the Counts of Katzenelnbogen are recorded on the rock as early as 1395.
26 Trajan's Column
Colonna Traiana
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.896° N 12.484° E
Raffaele pagani · CC BY-SA 4.0 Trajan's Column is a 30-metre marble shaft, 35 m with its pedestal, that has stood in Trajan's Forum just north of the Roman Forum since it was dedicated on 12 May 113.
Did you know? Ancient coins suggest the column was first topped by a figure that was probably an eagle, before a statue of Trajan took its place.
27 La Scala
Teatro alla Scala
Italy · 1.2 km from Milan45.468° N 9.189° E
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay La Scala in Milan is, for many, simply the opera house — the place where a singer's career is made or broken.
Did you know? Puccini's Turandot, left unfinished at the composer's death, received its first performance at La Scala in 1926.
28 Butrint
Albania · 13.4 km from Saranda39.757° N 20.017° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Robs123 from Pixabay Butrint sits on a hill above the Vivari Channel, close to the Straits of Corfu, and in one walk you pass through some 2,500 years of Mediterranean history: a Greek theatre, Roman baths, a Byzantine baptistery, a Venetian fortress and the castle of Ali Pasha.
Did you know? The defensive wall of around 380 BC had bastions and five gates.
29 Fernsehturm Berlin
Berliner Fernsehturm
Germany · 0.7 km from Berlin52.521° N 13.409° E
Image by BernardoUPloud from Pixabay The Fernsehturm rises 368 metres from the centre of Berlin, the tallest structure in Germany and visible from almost every district of the city.
Did you know? The restaurant originally made one full turn an hour; since the renovation of 1997 it rotates twice as fast, once every 30 minutes.
30 Lake Garda
Lago di Garda
Italy · 33.1 km from Verona45.633° N 10.667° E
Image by Leonhard_Niederwimmer from Pixabay Lake Garda is the largest lake in Italy and the most varied of the great Alpine lakes. Its shape explains its character: in the north it is a narrow fjord of deep water squeezed between steep mountains, while in the south it opens into a broad basin fringed by gentle morainic hills, vineyards and olive groves.
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 Europe?
- On our list, Geirangerfjord (Norway) ranks first, followed by Lofoten (Norway) and Plitvice Lakes National Park (Croatia).
- Which country has the most places in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (279), France (179) and the United Kingdom (154).
- Is Mount Vesuvius still active?
- Yes. Vesuvius is an active volcano; its last eruption was in 1944, and it is closely monitored because of the dense population around the Bay of Naples.
- How old is the Pont du Gard?
- The Pont du Gard was built in the 1st century AD as part of an aqueduct carrying water to the Roman city of Nemausus, now Nîmes. It is the tallest of all surviving Roman aqueduct bridges.
- How many people are buried in the Catacombs of Paris?
- The Catacombs hold the remains of around six million people, transferred from overcrowded Paris cemeteries from the late 18th century into former limestone quarries.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Europe?
- In our collection, the places in Europe are most often churches (142), castles (81), cathedrals (65) and archaeological sites (60).
- How many places are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 1,490 places in 47 countries. Italy has the most, with 279.