The Most Beautiful Places in France
179 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in France are Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey, Verdon Gorge and Rocamadour. The list covers 179 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
France spans the Atlantic coast, the Alps and Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and the old volcanic uplands of the Massif Central, and on that ground it has built almost without pause for two thousand years. Roman Gaul left aqueducts and theatres, the Middle Ages invented the Gothic cathedral here, kings filled the Loire valley and the land around Paris with châteaux, and engineers kept building boldly long after.
The Pont du Gard, a three-tiered Roman aqueduct bridge from the first century, still spans the Gardon, and the Roman Theatre of Orange keeps its great stage wall almost intact. Château de Chambord crowds its roofline with chimneys and turrets around a famous double-spiral staircase, and the Palace of Versailles sets the Hall of Mirrors at the heart of an immense formal park. In Paris, the Louvre fills a former royal palace and its courtyard holds I. M. Pei's glass pyramid, while the Catacombs line old limestone quarries with the bones of millions of Parisians.
The landscapes are as varied. The Dune of Pilat, the tallest sand dune in Europe, rises between the Arcachon basin and a pine forest, and La Roque-Gageac clings to a cliff above the Dordogne. The cliffs of Pointe du Hoc still carry the craters of D-Day. The Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 World's Fair, and the Millau Viaduct, the tallest bridge in the world, show the same engineering nerve a century apart, and far away in the Pacific the jagged peaks of Moorea rise from a turquoise lagoon.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey | Abbey | |
| 2 | Verdon Gorge | Canyon | |
| 3 | Rocamadour | Most beautiful village | |
| 4 | Calanche de Piana | Rock formation | |
| 5 | Château de Chambord | Manor house | ✓ |
| 6 | Étretat Cliffs | Cliff | |
| 7 | Riquewihr | Most beautiful village | |
| 8 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | ✓ |
| 9 | Louvre Museum | Museum | |
| 10 | Catacombs of Paris | Catacombs | |
| 11 | Pont du Gard | Aqueduct | ✓ |
| 12 | Place de la Concorde | Square | |
| 13 | Dune of Pilat | Dune | |
| 14 | Palace of Versailles | Palace | ✓ |
| 15 | Millau Viaduct | Viaduct | |
| 16 | Pointe du Hoc | Battlefield | |
| 17 | Roman Theatre of Orange | Roman theatre | ✓ |
| 18 | La Roque-Gageac | Most beautiful village | |
| 19 | Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss | Sculpture | |
| 20 | Albi Cathedral | Fortified church | |
| 21 | Les Baux-de-Provence | Most beautiful village | |
| 22 | Saint-Cirq-Lapopie | Most beautiful village | |
| 23 | Arena of Nîmes | Amphitheatre | |
| 24 | Mont Blanc | Mountain | |
| 25 | Pont Saint-Bénézet | Bridge | ✓ |
| 26 | Cirque de Gavarnie | Cliff | |
| 27 | Arles Amphitheatre | Amphitheatre | ✓ |
| 28 | Musée d'Orsay | Museum | |
| 29 | Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg | Cathedral | |
| 30 | Aiguille du Midi | Scenic viewpoint |
01 Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey
Abbaye du Mont-Saint-Michel
France48.636° N 1.511° W
Zairon · CC BY-SA 4.0 The abbey is what turns Mont-Saint-Michel from a rocky islet in a tidal bay into one of the great silhouettes of Europe.
Did you know? Up to 700 prisoners worked in a straw-hat workshop installed in the abbey, and in 1834 it started a fire that damaged the buildings.
02 Verdon Gorge
Gorges du Verdon
France43.738° N 6.364° E
Image by ToNic-Pics from Pixabay Few colours in European landscape are as startling as the Verdon's. The river runs a milky turquoise-green through the bottom of a limestone canyon up to 700 m deep and about 25 km long, and the name itself is said to come from that colour; the tint comes from fine rock flour and minerals suspended in the water.
Did you know? Five dams were built on the Verdon between 1929 and 1975, turning stretches of the valley into reservoirs.
03 Rocamadour
France · 39.6 km from Brive-la-Gaillarde44.799° N 1.618° E
Dynamosquito from France · CC BY-SA 2.0 Rocamadour is stacked up a cliff.
Did you know? The Chapel of Notre-Dame had to be rebuilt in 1479 after a huge rock fell from the cliff and crushed it.
04 Calanche de Piana
Calanques de Piana
France42.325° N 8.629° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by jackmac34 from Pixabay On the west coast of Corsica, between the village of Piana and the little port of Porto, the mountains come down to the sea as a maze of red granite needles, towers and overhangs.
Did you know? In plan the calanche form a small V-shaped chain running from the Dardo cove on the Gulf of Porto to the Cavallaghju bridge, topping out at 698 metres.
05 Château de Chambord
France47.616° N 1.517° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by juliacasado1 from Pixabay Francis I commissioned this in 1519, at 25 years old, ostensibly as a hunting lodge — and then let it grow into a 440-room palace ringed by a wall roughly 32 kilometres long, enclosing what remains Europe's largest walled forest.
Did you know? By September 1526 some 1,800 workers were employed on the building site, and construction dragged on until 1547.
06 Étretat Cliffs
Site d'Étretat
France · 23.3 km from Le Havre49.706° N 0.195° E
Image by Safia_Pictures from Pixabay The cliffs of Étretat are the best-known stretch of the Alabaster Coast of Normandy, where the chalk plateau of the Pays de Caux ends abruptly in white walls up to about 90 metres high.
Did you know? The painter Eugène Isabey is credited with discovering Étretat as a subject for artists, spending six months painting there in 1820.
07 Riquewihr
France48.166° N 7.297° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Jean-Pol GRANDMONT · CC BY 4.0 Riquewihr is a walled wine village that has kept the look of the sixteenth century almost intact: half-timbered houses line a main street that climbs gently to the great gate tower at the top of the village.
Did you know? Riquewihr's escape from destruction in the Second World War is credited partly to its dead-end position.
08 Eiffel Tower
Tour Eiffel
France · 4.3 km from Paris48.858° N 2.294° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay The tower's basic shape wasn't originally Gustave Eiffel's idea at all.
Did you know? About 60 tonnes of paint are applied every seven years to protect it from rust, and it has been fully repainted at least 19 times.
09 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.
10 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.
11 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.
12 Place de la Concorde
France · 2.5 km from Paris48.866° N 2.321° E
Image by westcoast_dave from Pixabay 6 hectares of open ground at the eastern end of the Champs-Élysées, between the Tuileries Garden and the Seine. It began as a royal flattery.
13 Dune of Pilat
Dune du Pilat
France44.590° N 1.212° W
Image by weareaway from Pixabay At around 105 metres, the Dune of Pilat is the tallest sand dune in Europe, a single ridge stretching nearly three kilometres along the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux. But the number that matters more than its height is its speed: driven by onshore wind, the whole dune creeps inland by four to five metres every year.
Did you know? Until the 1930s the dune was known as Les Sabloneys; the modern name was popularised by the property developer Daniel Meller.
14 Palace of Versailles
Château de Versailles
France · 1.1 km from Versailles48.805° N 2.120° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SLPix from Pixabay Versailles began as a small brick-and-stone hunting lodge that Louis XIII built in 1623 amid marshes southwest of Paris, a building contemporaries mocked as a house of cards. His son turned it into the stage set of absolute monarchy.
Did you know? The Grand Canal is 1,500 metres long and 62 metres wide, and Louis XIV kept a fleet on it, including gondolas and gondoliers sent by the Doge of Venice.
15 Millau Viaduct
France44.080° N 3.022° E
Image by SchrijverijDrenthe from Pixabay The Millau Viaduct carries the A75 motorway across the gorge of the Tarn west of Millau, in the Aveyron department of southern France, and it is one of the most beautiful bridges built in our time.
Did you know? Each mast was driven out along the deck lying flat, joined into one piece and then tilted upright in a single operation.
16 Pointe du Hoc
France49.398° N 0.989° W
Myrabella · CC BY-SA 3.0 5 km west of the centre of Omaha Beach. It is a place where the landscape itself tells the story. The grassy top is still pitted with deep bomb craters, and between them lie the broken concrete casemates, gun pits and an observation bunker that the German army built into the Atlantic Wall in 1943 and 1944.
Did you know? The battleship USS Texas and the destroyers USS Satterlee and HMS Talybont were among the ships that shelled the clifftop.
17 Roman Theatre of Orange
Théâtre antique d'Orange
France44.136° N 4.809° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by fietzfotos from Pixabay The Roman Theatre of Orange is one of the best-preserved Roman theatres anywhere, and its great stage wall still stands to its full original height. It was built early in the 1st century AD under Augustus for the Roman colony of Arausio, founded by veterans of the Second Legion.
Did you know? In the Middle Ages the Princes of Orange turned the stage building into a fortified outpost of their castle on the hill above.
18 La Roque-Gageac
France44.826° N 1.183° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Manfred Heyde · CC BY-SA 3.0 La Roque-Gageac is built into its cliff, not just below it.
Did you know? The name joins the Occitan word for rock or stronghold with Gageac, from a Gallo-Roman estate of a man named Gaius.
19 Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss
Psyché ranimée par le baiser de l'Amour
France · 1.1 km from Paris48.860° N 2.338° E
Jean-Pol GRANDMONT · CC BY 4.0 Antonio Canova caught the instant just before a kiss: Cupid, wings still spread as if he had only now alighted, cradles the head of Psyche, who rises from a deathlike sleep and lifts her arms to circle his face.
Did you know? The fateful jar Psyche opened lies on the rock beside her, a small clue to the story from The Golden Ass.
20 Albi Cathedral
Cathédrale Sainte-Cécile d'Albi
France43.928° N 2.143° E
ByacC · CC BY-SA 3.0 The cathedral of Sainte-Cécile rises over Albi like a fortress of red brick: sheer, massive walls with a military air and a bell tower some 78 metres high. It is claimed to be the largest brick building in the world, and its severity is intentional.
Did you know? In 1693 the centre of the Last Judgement was cut away to open a chapel, so the figures of Christ the Judge and the Archangel Michael are missing.
21 Les Baux-de-Provence
France · 37.1 km from Nîmes43.744° N 4.795° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Image by gillag from Pixabay Les Baux-de-Provence occupies a bare limestone spur in the Alpilles hills, and the village and the ruined castle above it seem to grow out of the rock itself. From the edge of the plateau the view runs south across the plains, where olive groves fill the valley.
Did you know? The quarry projections began in 1976 under the name Cathédrale d'Images, long before the site became Carrières de Lumières.
22 Saint-Cirq-Lapopie
France44.464° N 1.670° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Benjamin Smith · CC BY-SA 4.0 Saint-Cirq-Lapopie clings to a cliff about 100 metres above the Lot river, its stone houses and brown-tiled roofs stepping up the rock towards a fortified church and the scattered ruins of castles on the summit. Across the water a cirque of pale limestone cliffs closes the view.
Did you know? Henri Martin's two paintings of the village, made around 1920, introduced it to the art world and to the first tourists.
23 Arena of Nîmes
Arènes de Nîmes
France · 0.9 km from Nîmes43.835° N 4.360° E
Krzysztof Golik · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Roman amphitheatre of Nîmes rises straight out of the city's streets, an oval 133 metres long and 101 wide, its outer wall 21 metres high and pierced by two storeys of sixty arches.
Did you know? François Truffaut shot scenes of his short film Les Mistons here in 1957, before he became a leading director of the French New Wave.
24 Mont Blanc
France · 36.6 km from Aosta45.833° N 6.865° E
Image by Rianne_SchillerMclean from Pixabay Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in the Alps and in Europe outside the Caucasus, standing on the border between France and Italy. Its exact height is a moving target, because the summit is a cap of snow and ice that thickens and thins with the weather.
Did you know? Two Air India airliners crashed into the massif, in 1950 and 1966; the second killed Homi Bhabha, father of India's nuclear programme.
25 Pont Saint-Bénézet
Pont d'Avignon
France · 39 km from Nîmes43.954° N 4.805° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Rolf Kranz · CC BY-SA 4.0 The bridge in the nursery song ends in mid-river. Four stone arches leave the Avignon bank of the Rhône and simply stop, with a small chapel perched on one of the piers and the far shore out of reach. What remains is a fragment of a crossing that once ran for about 900 metres to Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.
Did you know? Wood found under the surviving piers was radiocarbon-dated to AD 290–530, feeding a long debate over whether a Roman bridge stood here first.
26 Cirque de Gavarnie
France42.695° N 0.009° W
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the head of a quiet Pyrenean valley the mountains stop being slopes and become architecture.
Did you know? In hard winters the Grande Cascade can freeze solid, and the frozen falls of the cirque then become a destination for ice climbers.
27 Arles Amphitheatre
Arènes d'Arles
France · 28.3 km from Nîmes43.678° N 4.631° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
PierreSelim · CC BY 3.0 In the middle of Arles, the old Roman amphitheatre still dominates the city, its two tiers of arches curving around an oval arena. Built around AD 90, shortly after the Colosseum in Rome, it is about 136 metres long and 109 metres wide and held some twenty thousand spectators for gladiatorial combats and animal hunts.
Did you know? When King Francis I visited Arles in 1516 he was dismayed to find so grand a building in such a wretched state.
28 Musée d'Orsay
France · 2 km from Paris48.860° N 2.327° E
Image by jpnanterre from Pixabay The Musée d'Orsay lives in a railway station, and the building is half the experience. The Gare d'Orsay was built on the Left Bank for the Paris–Orléans railway in time for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, designed by Victor Laloux with Lucien Magne and Émile Bénard.
Did you know? Installing about 2,000 paintings and 600 sculptures for the opening took six months.
29 Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Strasbourg
France · 0.2 km from Strasbourg48.582° N 7.751° E
Image by jackmac34 from Pixabay Strasbourg's cathedral is a building of one tower, and that asymmetry is its signature. The west front was begun in 1277, with Erwin von Steinbach credited as master builder until his death in 1318, and it was planned with two spires.
Did you know? The cathedral's first astronomical clock, installed around 1352, featured three mechanical kings who bowed before the infant Jesus at noon.
30 Aiguille du Midi
France · 36.8 km from Aosta45.879° N 6.888° E
Image by Simon from Pixabay The Aiguille du Midi is a 3,842-metre rock needle in the Mont Blanc massif, and one of the few places in the Alps where anyone can stand face to face with the high mountains without climbing. Its name means "needle of midday".
Did you know? The present cable car was built in about five years by the Turin entrepreneur Dino Lora Totino and opened in 1955.
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 France?
- On our list, Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey ranks first, followed by Verdon Gorge and Rocamadour.
- How old is the Pont du Gard?
- The Pont du Gard was built in the first century AD as part of an aqueduct carrying water about 50 kilometres to the Roman city of Nîmes. It is the highest of all surviving Roman aqueduct bridges.
- What is in the Catacombs of Paris?
- The Catacombs are an ossuary in former limestone quarries beneath the city, where the remains of millions of people were moved from overcrowded Paris cemeteries from the late eighteenth century. The bones are stacked in patterned walls along the tunnels.
- What is special about the staircase at Château de Chambord?
- It is a double-helix staircase: two spiral flights wind around the same central core, so people going up and coming down can see each other without meeting. It forms the centre of the château's keep.
- What kinds of places are there to see in France?
- In our collection, the places in France are most often churches (19), caves (10), villages (10) and cathedrals (9).
- How many places are on this list in France?
- The list covers 179 places.