The Most Beautiful Places in India
90 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in India are Taj Mahal, Pangong Tso and Hampi. The list covers 90 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
India runs from the highest mountains on Earth to tropical coasts, and across that range more than two thousand years of building have left an extraordinary record. Buddhist monks carved monasteries into cliffs, Hindu dynasties raised temples of carved stone, the sultans and Mughals brought domes, minarets and gardens, and in the dry west communities dug deep stepwells down to the water table. Each religion and region left its own forms, often side by side.
Some monuments were not built but carved. At Ellora, the Kailasa Temple was cut downward from a single basalt cliff in the eighth century, and at Ajanta, Buddhist cave halls preserve murals painted over centuries. Konark's Sun Temple is shaped as the chariot of the sun god, with giant carved stone wheels, and Hampi spreads the ruins of the Vijayanagara capital across a landscape of granite boulders.
The Islamic and later layers are just as rich. The Taj Mahal, built by Shah Jahan as a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, is the most celebrated building of Mughal India, and Agra Fort stands upriver in red sandstone. In Delhi, the Qutb complex rises around a towering fluted minaret, and the Bahá'í Lotus Temple opens in marble petals. The Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar, the holiest shrine of Sikhism, glows with gold in its sacred pool, and Mumbai's Gateway of India faces the harbour. In the Himalaya, Nanda Devi is the highest mountain entirely within India, and the Valley of Flowers fills with alpine blooms in summer.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Taj Mahal | Mausoleum | ✓ |
| 2 | Pangong Tso | Lake | |
| 3 | Hampi | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 4 | Harmandir Sahib | Temple | |
| 5 | Umshiang Double-Decker Root Bridge | Bridge | |
| 6 | Chand Baori | Stepwell | |
| 7 | Lake Palace | Palace | |
| 8 | Kerala backwaters | Lake | |
| 9 | Nanda Devi | Mountain | |
| 10 | Gateway of India | Triumphal arch | |
| 11 | Kailasa Temple, Ellora | Rock-cut architecture | ✓ |
| 12 | Konark Sun Temple | Temple | ✓ |
| 13 | Valley of Flowers National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 14 | Qutb complex | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 15 | Agra Fort | Fort | ✓ |
| 16 | Lotus Temple | Temple | |
| 17 | Ajanta Caves | Rock-cut architecture | ✓ |
| 18 | Rani ki Vav | Stepwell | |
| 19 | Humayun's Tomb | Mausoleum | ✓ |
| 20 | Kanchenjunga | Mountain | |
| 21 | Amber Fort | Fortress | ✓ |
| 22 | Gwalior Fort | Fortress | |
| 23 | Jantar Mantar | Observatory | ✓ |
| 24 | Hawa Mahal | Palace | |
| 25 | Jog Falls | Waterfall | |
| 26 | Gurudongmar Lake | Lake | |
| 27 | Kedarnath Temple | Pilgrimage site | |
| 28 | Elephanta Caves | Rock-cut architecture | ✓ |
| 29 | Kalka–Shimla Railway | Heritage railway | ✓ |
| 30 | Mahabodhi Temple | Temple | ✓ |
01 Taj Mahal
India · 2.9 km from Agra27.175° N 78.042° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Taj_Mahal,_Agra,_India_edit2.jpg : Yann ; edited by King of Hearts derivative work: Jbarta ( talk ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 Shah Jahan began building this in 1631 as a tomb for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who had died giving birth to their fourteenth child.
Did you know? Calligraphy on the high gateway panels is written in slightly larger letters, so the script appears uniform in size when read from the ground.
02 Pangong Tso
India33.705° N 78.750° E
Image by divyaagrawal from Pixabay Pangong Tso is a long, narrow lake at about 4,300 metres on the border between western Tibet and Ladakh, one of the highest large lakes in the world.
Did you know? Old shorelines above the present water level, marked by a five-metre layer of mud and sand, show the lake has shrunk in recent geological time.
03 Hampi
India · 11.1 km from Hospet15.335° N 76.462° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Rajesh_Ram from Pixabay Hampi is what remains of Vijayanagara, capital of the last great Hindu empire of South India. From 1336 until 1565 the city spread along the Tungabhadra River, and by around 1500 it may have been the second-largest city in the world after Beijing, drawing merchants from Persia and Portuguese Goa.
Did you know? The seated Narasimha monolith stands 6.7 metres high and originally showed the goddess Lakshmi beside him before the statue was badly damaged.
04 Harmandir Sahib
India · 2.6 km from Amritsar31.620° N 74.877° E
This picture has been taken by Oleg Yunakov . Contact e-mail: yunakov gmail.com . Image can be used in accordance with the terms of the СС-BY-SA license. Other photos can be seen here . · CC BY-SA 3.0 At the heart of Amritsar a two-storey shrine sheathed in gilded copper floats in the middle of a square pool, reached by a single marble causeway. This is the Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, the holiest gurdwara of Sikhism.
Did you know? Three old jujube trees survive in the courtyard; tradition says Baba Buddha sat under one of them while supervising the digging of the pool.
05 Umshiang Double-Decker Root Bridge
India25.251° N 91.672° E
Arup619pal · CC BY-SA 4.0 In the deep valleys below Cherrapunji, on the southern edge of the Shillong Plateau, the Khasi people do not build their bridges so much as grow them.
Did you know? Once mature, a strong root bridge can carry dozens of people at once, and under good care it may stay in use for several hundred years.
06 Chand Baori
India27.007° N 76.606° E
Chainwit. · CC BY-SA 4.0 Seen from its rim, Chand Baori barely looks like a well at all. It looks like an optical puzzle: three sides of a vast square pit are covered with thousands of narrow stone steps arranged in small zigzag flights, a crisscross pattern that drops thirteen levels towards a pool of green water at the bottom.
Did you know? The prison pit in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises drew on Chand Baori, although the scenes were not actually shot there.
07 Lake Palace
India · 5.7 km from Udaipur24.575° N 73.680° E
Image by 5350755 from Pixabay Seen from the shore of Lake Pichola in Udaipur, the Lake Palace seems to have no foundations at all: a low composition of white marble pavilions, terraces and domes that rises straight from the water.
Did you know? In the drought years from 1998 to 2005 the lakes of Udaipur reportedly dried out, leaving the palace standing on bare ground.
08 Kerala backwaters
India · 22.7 km from Kochi9.863° N 76.359° E
Image by alleppeyhouseboatclub from Pixabay Behind the long sandy shore of Kerala, on India's south-western Malabar Coast, lies a second, inland world of water. The backwaters are a maze of brackish lagoons, lakes, rivers and canals running parallel to the Arabian Sea for much of the length of the state, with hundreds of kilometres of navigable channels in all.
Did you know? The backwaters formed when barrier islands built by waves trapped rivers flowing down from the Western Ghats.
09 Nanda Devi
India30.374° N 79.971° E
No machine-readable author provided. Amir85~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY 2.5 Nanda Devi rises to 7,817 metres in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand: the highest summit standing wholly inside India, and second in the country only to Kangchenjunga, which sits on the border with Nepal. The figure matters less than the shape of the ground around it.
Did you know? Apart from the Rishi Gorge, every route into the Sanctuary crosses a high pass, and even the lowest of them lies at about 5,180 metres.
10 Gateway of India
India · 16.8 km from Mumbai18.922° N 72.835° E
Image by prabhdeep567 from Pixabay The strange thing about the Gateway of India is that its most famous moment — commemorating the arrival of King George V and Queen Mary in December 1911 — happened thirteen years before the monument itself was finished.
Did you know? Building the Gateway cost about 21 lakh rupees, roughly 2.1 million rupees in the money of its day.
11 Kailasa Temple, Ellora
India · 23.8 km from Aurangabad20.024° N 75.179° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by sachinkawale from Pixabay Most temples are built up from the ground. This one was made by removing everything around it.
Did you know? The main shrine closely follows the Virupaksha Temple at Pattadakal, itself modelled on the Kailasa temple at Kanchipuram, suggesting southern craftsmen worked here.
12 Konark Sun Temple
India · 21.7 km from Puri19.887° N 86.095° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Souravdas1987 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Sun Temple at Konark, on the coast of Odisha in eastern India, was built around 1250 by King Narasimhadeva I of the Eastern Ganga dynasty as a stone chariot for Surya, the sun god.
Did you know? Three kinds of stone were used: khondalite for most of the building, chlorite for door frames and some sculpture, and laterite for the platform core, none of them found nearby.
13 Valley of Flowers National Park
India30.730° N 79.618° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- biosphere reserve
Naresh Chandra · CC BY-SA 4.0 For a few weeks each summer, a high hanging valley in the Garhwal Himalaya turns into a sweep of alpine flowers.
Did you know? Several globally threatened plants grow here but not in neighbouring Nanda Devi National Park, among them the blue Himalayan poppy Meconopsis aculeata.
14 Qutb complex
India · 8.5 km from New Delhi28.524° N 77.185° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SuanlianTangpua from Pixabay The Qutb complex in Mehrauli, in the south of Delhi, is where the architecture of the Delhi Sultanate begins.
Did you know? Its inscription says it was raised as a standard of Vishnu on a hill called Vishnupada, in memory of a king named Chandra, usually identified with Chandragupta II.
15 Agra Fort
India · 1.1 km from Agra27.180° N 78.021° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by sarangib from Pixabay Agra Fort is the walled citadel from which the Mughal emperors ruled northern India for most of a century, and it is the key to understanding everything else in Agra, the Taj Mahal included.
Did you know? Akbar's rebuilding employed around 4,000 workers every day for eight years, from 1565 to 1573.
16 Lotus Temple
India · 7.7 km from New Delhi28.553° N 77.259° E
Image by harmeet9000 from Pixabay Before drawing a single line for this building, the architect Fariborz Sahba spent time travelling around India studying its temple traditions, and he kept running into the same motif across religions that otherwise shared almost nothing else visually: the lotus.
Did you know? About 10,000 square metres of marble were quarried on Mount Pentelicus in Greece, cut to shape in Italy and hung on stainless-steel brackets in Delhi.
17 Ajanta Caves
India20.553° N 75.700° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
No machine-readable author provided. Soman assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY 2.5 The Buddhist monks who carved these thirty caves into a horseshoe-shaped gorge weren't just after dramatic scenery — the site served as a monsoon retreat, a place where monks, pilgrims and travelling merchants sheltered during the rains, when travel across the region became difficult.
Did you know? The caves are hewn from layered basalt of the Deccan Traps, lava flows laid down by volcanic eruptions at the end of the Cretaceous period.
18 Rani ki Vav
India23.859° N 72.102° E
Kshitij Charania · CC BY-SA 4.0 Rani ki Vav, the "Queen's Stepwell" in Patan, Gujarat, is a well turned into an inverted temple.
Did you know? Its interlocking frame of pillars, beams and brackets was designed to absorb earthquake shocks, with 2-metre stone braces spanning the corridor against soil pressure.
19 Humayun's Tomb
India · 5 km from New Delhi28.593° N 77.251° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by karanpal41 from Pixabay Before the Taj Mahal there was Humayun's Tomb. Built in Delhi in the 1560s for the second Mughal emperor, it was the first great garden tomb on the Indian subcontinent and the first building there to use red sandstone on such a scale, and it set the pattern that the Mughals would refine for the next century.
Did you know? Its plan draws on Timurid models such as Gur-e Amir, the tomb of Humayun's ancestor Timur in Samarkand.
20 Kanchenjunga
India27.703° N 88.147° E
Image by labunhanglimboo from Pixabay Kangchenjunga, 8,586 m high, is the third-highest mountain on Earth and, until surveyors of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India completed their calculations in 1849, was believed to be the highest of all.
Did you know? In 1979 Doug Scott, Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker made the first ascent without bottled oxygen, opening a new route on the North Ridge.
21 Amber Fort
India · 8.1 km from Jaipur26.986° N 75.851° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SusanFleming from Pixabay Amber Fort — or Amer, after the town below it — was the seat of the Kachhwaha Rajput rulers until they moved to their newly planned city of Jaipur in 1727. The palace was begun under Raja Man Singh, expanded by Jai Singh I in the early 1600s, and extended further by his successors over the next 150 years.
Did you know? Raja Man Singh I began building the palace in 1592, and its core took about 25 years to complete.
22 Gwalior Fort
India · 3.4 km from Gwalior26.230° N 78.169° E
Abhishek Dwivedi · CC BY-SA 4.0 A sheer sandstone plateau about 3 km long rises abruptly from the plain of northern Madhya Pradesh, and its whole crown is walled.
Did you know? Raja Man Singh Tomar built the Gujari Mahal for his ninth wife, Mrignayani, a Gujar princess who asked for her own palace and water supply.
23 Jantar Mantar
India · 1.7 km from Jaipur26.925° N 75.825° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Gerd Eichmann · CC BY-SA 4.0 Jaipur's Jantar Mantar looks at first like a playground of giant abstract sculptures: ramps, bowls, arcs and walls of masonry and marble spread across a courtyard next to the City Palace. Each shape is in fact a precise astronomical instrument.
Did you know? The Shastansh Yantra uses a darkened chamber where a pinhole image of the noon sun lets an observer measure the sun's diameter.
24 Hawa Mahal
India · 1.9 km from Jaipur26.924° N 75.827° E
Image by Anilsharma26 from Pixabay The Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, is in effect a stone screen five storeys high. Built in 1799 by Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh, grandson of Jaipur's founder Jai Singh II, and designed by Lal Chand Ustad, it rises about 15 metres above a busy street in the walled old city.
Did you know? Behind the plain rear wall, the chambers were finished with coloured marble, inlaid panels and gilding, and fountains stood in the rooms.
25 Jog Falls
India14.230° N 74.813° E
Nikhilb239 · CC BY-SA 4.0 In the Western Ghats of Karnataka, the Sharavathi River reaches the edge of a gorge and falls about 253 metres in four separate streams, which local tradition has named Raja, Rani, Roarer and Rocket.
Did you know? Above the falls the river runs over a rocky bed roughly 250 yards wide, and the waterfall spreads across an average width of about 470 metres.
26 Gurudongmar Lake
India28.020° N 88.710° E
Original: Yoghya Derivative work: UnpetitproleX · CC BY-SA 4.0 Far up in the north of Sikkim, a few kilometres short of the border with Tibet, Gurudongmar Lake lies in a bare, wind-scoured basin well above 5,000 metres.
Did you know? Gurudongmar is one of the headwater lakes of the Teesta River, draining into it through the neighbouring Tso Lhamo lake.
27 Kedarnath Temple
India30.733° N 79.067° E
Shivam Kumar 766 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Kedarnath Temple stands at about 3,583 metres in the Garhwal Himalaya, a stone shrine set against a wall of snow peaks at the head of the Mandakini valley.
Did you know? Kedarnath is also one of the 275 Paadal Petra Sthalams, Shiva shrines praised in the Tamil hymns of the Tevaram.
28 Elephanta Caves
India · 13 km from Mumbai18.963° N 72.931° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Udaykumar PR · CC BY 3.0 The Elephanta Caves are cut into a small hilly island in Mumbai Harbour, some 11 km across the water from the Gateway of India.
Did you know? The north-facing main entrance is unusual for a Shiva temple, and its modest size conceals the scale of the hall behind it.
29 Kalka–Shimla Railway
India · 0.8 km from Shimla31.105° N 77.173° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by wreindl from Pixabay The Kalka–Shimla Railway climbs from the plains of northern India to Shimla, the summer capital of British India, on a narrow track just 762 millimetres wide.
Did you know? The line crosses close to a thousand bridges and viaducts, most of them built of stone arches.
30 Mahabodhi Temple
India · 11.5 km from Gaya24.696° N 84.991° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Sumitsurai · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Mahabodhi Temple marks the place where, in Buddhist tradition, Siddhartha Gautama sat beneath a fig tree and attained enlightenment, and for Buddhists it is the holiest site on earth.
Did you know? The Chinese pilgrim Faxian, visiting in the 5th century, recorded three monasteries standing around the temple.
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 India?
- On our list, Taj Mahal ranks first, followed by Pangong Tso and Hampi.
- How was the Kailasa Temple at Ellora built?
- The temple was carved from a single basalt cliff, working downward from the top, in the eighth century under the Rashtrakuta dynasty. Rather than assembling stones, the builders removed rock to leave the temple, its courtyard and its sculptures standing.
- Who built the Taj Mahal and why?
- The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan commissioned the Taj Mahal in Agra as a mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631. Built of white marble inlaid with stone, it was largely completed by the mid-seventeenth century.
- What is a stepwell?
- A stepwell is a well reached by long flights of steps descending to the water, often lined with carved galleries and pavilions. They were built mainly in western India, especially Gujarat and Rajasthan, to store water through the dry season.
- What kinds of places are there to see in India?
- In our collection, the places in India are most often temples (14), mausoleums (9), lakes (8) and fortresses (6).
- How many places are on this list in India?
- The list covers 90 places.