The Most Beautiful Places in Jerusalem
6 places ยท updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Jerusalem are Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery, Holyland Model of Jerusalem and Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The list covers 6 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Few cities carry as much meaning in so small a space as Jerusalem. Built on limestone hills at the edge of the Judaean Desert, its walled Old City is under a square kilometre in size, yet it holds places central to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, layered over three thousand years of building, destruction and rebuilding. The pale local stone, still required for new buildings, gives the whole city its golden tone at sunset.
The Western Wall is a surviving stretch of the retaining wall Herod the Great built around the Temple Mount, and the most important place of Jewish prayer. Above it the Dome of the Rock, completed in the late seventh century, is the oldest surviving major work of Islamic architecture, its octagon faced with tiles and crowned by a golden dome. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a maze of chapels shared by several Christian denominations, stands where tradition places the crucifixion and tomb of Jesus.
The city around them has its own landmarks. The Ottoman walls built under Suleiman the Magnificent in the 1530s still enclose the Old City with their gates and towers. Across the Kidron Valley, the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives has been used for burial for around three thousand years. The Holyland Model at the Israel Museum recreates the city of the Second Temple period at large scale, and in the hills to the west Avshalom Cave, found by quarrymen in 1968, is packed with stalactites and stalagmites.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery | Cemetery | |
| 2 | Holyland Model of Jerusalem | Miniature park | |
| 3 | Church of the Holy Sepulchre | Cathedral | |
| 4 | Walls of Jerusalem | City walls | โ |
| 5 | St. George's Monastery | Monastery | |
| 6 | Avshalom Cave | Cave |
01 Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery
Israel ยท 3.5 km from Jerusalem31.774ยฐ N 35.243ยฐ E
Image by reijotelaranta from Pixabay The western slope of the Mount of Olives, facing the walls of Jerusalem's Old City across the Kidron Valley, is covered by one of the oldest and most important Jewish burial grounds in the world.
Did you know? Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar, known as the Ohr ha-Chaim, an 18th-century commentator revered across the Jewish world, is buried here.
02 Holyland Model of Jerusalem
Israel ยท 0.7 km from Jerusalem31.773ยฐ N 35.202ยฐ E
Image by reijotelaranta from Pixabay Laid out on the open ground of the Israel Museum, this is Jerusalem as the historian Flavius Josephus described it: the city of the year 66 CE, four years before the Roman destruction of the Temple, reconstructed in stone at a scale of 1:50 over some 2,000 square metres.
Did you know? It was built in the early 1960s, when the Old City it depicts lay under Jordanian rule in a divided Jerusalem.
03 Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Israel ยท 2.2 km from Jerusalem31.778ยฐ N 35.230ยฐ E
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jlascar/ ยท CC BY 2.0 The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is not one building but a knot of them, grown over seventeen centuries on the spot that Christian tradition identifies as both Golgotha, the hill of the crucifixion, and the rock-cut tomb from which Jesus rose.
Did you know? Through a window behind an 11th-century apse you can see the rock of Calvary with a crack that tradition links to the earthquake at the crucifixion.
04 Walls of Jerusalem
Israel ยท 2 km from Jerusalem31.775ยฐ N 35.228ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
ืืืชื ืคืจืื 13:56, 4 December 2006 (UTC) ยท Public domain The walls that ring the Old City of Jerusalem enclose an area of about one square kilometre that holds sites sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Their line is ancient, but the stones you see today are mostly Ottoman.
Did you know? The old Jaffa Gate has an L-shaped passage, a medieval defensive layout that forced anyone coming through to turn a sharp corner.
05 St. George's Monastery
Israel ยท 20.8 km from Ramallah31.843ยฐ N 35.415ยฐ E
Yousef Odeh Photos ยท CC BY-SA 4.0 Halfway up the sheer wall of Wadi Qelt, a deep desert gorge in the Judaean Desert, the Monastery of St George of Choziba seems to grow out of the rock: a stack of chapels, cells and terraces clinging to the cliff, with irrigated gardens and olive trees watered by old aqueducts.
Did you know? According to an inscription, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II paid for further restoration in 1234, after Manuel I Komnenos.
06 Avshalom Cave
Israel ยท 17.5 km from Jerusalem31.756ยฐ N 35.023ยฐ E
Ricardo Tulio Gandelman from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ยท CC BY 2.0 Avshalom Cave, known to scientists as Soreq Cave and to most Israelis simply as the Stalactite Cave, is a single chamber in the Judean hills packed almost wall to wall with dripstone: curtains, straws, stalactites up to four metres long, and pillars where hanging and rising formations have finally met.
Did you know? Visitors descend about 150 steps from the hillside to the entrance, and the walkway inside adds around 140 more.
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 โ 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 Jerusalem?
- On our list, Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery ranks first, followed by Holyland Model of Jerusalem and Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
- Why is Jerusalem holy to three religions?
- For Judaism it is the site of the First and Second Temples; for Christianity it is where Jesus was crucified and buried according to the Gospels; for Islam the Temple Mount, known as Haram al-Sharif, is associated with Muhammad's Night Journey. The holy places of all three stand within a few hundred metres of each other in the Old City.
- Who built the walls of Jerusalem's Old City?
- The walls standing today were built between 1535 and 1542 on the orders of the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, largely following older lines. They run for about four kilometres and have several historic gates, including the Damascus and Jaffa Gates.
- What is the Western Wall?
- It is part of the western retaining wall of the platform Herod the Great expanded around the Second Temple in the first century BC. After the Temple's destruction in AD 70 it became the main place of Jewish prayer and pilgrimage.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Jerusalem?
- In our collection, the places in Jerusalem are most often caves (1), churches (1), cathedrals (1) and monasteries (1).
- How many places are on this list in Jerusalem?
- The list covers 6 places.