The Most Beautiful Places in Laos
9 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Laos are Pak Ou Caves, Kuang Si Falls and Plain of Jars. The list covers 9 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Laos is a landlocked country of forested limestone mountains drained by the Mekong, and both its nature and its heritage follow the river. Limestone dissolved by monsoon rain gives it caves, underground rivers and mineral-rich waterfalls; the Mekong, meanwhile, carried Khmer temple builders, Lao kings and Buddhist monks, whose stupas and monasteries still mark the old royal towns along its banks.
In and around Luang Prabang, the Pak Ou Caves are two caverns in a cliff above the Mekong filled with thousands of Buddha images left by pilgrims, while Kuang Si Falls tumble through a series of milky turquoise pools in the forest. In the town itself, Wat Xieng Thong is the classic Luang Prabang temple, its roofs sweeping almost to the ground. Vientiane offers Pha That Luang, the great golden stupa that serves as a national symbol, and, on the edge of the city, Buddha Park, a mid-twentieth-century garden of concrete Buddhist and Hindu sculptures.
Farther afield the sites become stranger and older. On the Plain of Jars in Xieng Khouang, thousands of large stone jars lie scattered across hills and meadows, remnants of an Iron Age culture whose purpose is still debated. Vat Phou in the south is a Khmer temple complex climbing the slope of a mountain whose summit resembles a natural lingam. Tham Kong Lo is a river cave where boats travel for kilometres through total darkness under a limestone mountain, and near the Cambodian border Khone Phapheng Falls is a broad, thundering cascade where the Mekong breaks over a rocky ledge.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pak Ou Caves | Cave | |
| 2 | Kuang Si Falls | Waterfall | |
| 3 | Plain of Jars | Megalith | ✓ |
| 4 | Vat Phou | Ruins | ✓ |
| 5 | Pha That Luang | Stupa | |
| 6 | Tham Kong Lo | Cave | |
| 7 | Wat Xieng Thong | Temple | |
| 8 | Buddha Park | Sculpture garden | |
| 9 | Khone Phapheng Falls | Waterfall |
01 Pak Ou Caves
Laos · 19.6 km from Luang Prabang20.049° N 102.210° E
CEphoto, Uwe Aranas · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Pak Ou Caves are two openings in a cliff on the west bank of the Mekong, close to where the Ou River flows into it. The name means "mouth of the Ou". Tham Ting, the lower cave, sits just above the water line. Tham Theung, the upper cave, lies higher up the rock face.
Did you know? Folk tradition holds that the caves were once home to a river spirit, worshipped here before the site became a Buddhist shrine around the 15th century.
02 Kuang Si Falls
Laos · 21.7 km from Luang Prabang19.749° N 101.992° E
Basile Morin · CC BY-SA 4.0 The turquoise that makes Kuang Si look almost artificial is a straightforward chemistry lesson: the stream picks up dissolved limestone upstream, and as it cascades and aerates over each tier the calcium carbonate comes back out of solution, coating rocks and roots in pale travertine and suspending fine mineral…
Did you know? The stream feeding the falls rises roughly 10 km upstream, at the foot of mountains once farmed by Hmong and Khmu villages.
03 Plain of Jars
Laos · 5.1 km from Phonsavan19.431° N 103.153° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Plain of Jars is scattered across the Xiangkhoang Plateau in northern Laos: thousands of great stone vessels standing on hillsides and ridges, in clusters from a single jar to several hundred.
Did you know? Quarries near Jar Sites 2 and 3 still hold half-carved jars embedded in the bedrock, abandoned mid-way through their shaping.
04 Vat Phou
Laos · 6.7 km from Champasak14.849° N 105.816° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Basile Morin · CC BY-SA 4.0 Vat Phou is the oldest and most sacred of the great Khmer sanctuaries, and it is laid out like a lesson in how sacred geography works.
Did you know? The nearby city of Shrestapura is among the earliest known planned cities in Southeast Asia and is regarded as the cradle of the Chenla state.
05 Pha That Luang
Laos · 3.8 km from Vientiane17.976° N 102.634° E
Jialiang Gao www.peace-on-earth.org · CC BY-SA 3.0 Pha That Luang, the Great Sacred Stupa, rises a few kilometres from the centre of Vientiane as a mountain of gold: a tapering central spire some 45 metres high, set on a broad stepped base and surrounded by a forest of slender, gilded secondary spires.
Did you know? The cloister walls around the stupa hold Lao and Khmer sculptures, among them a figure of the Khmer king Jayavarman VII.
06 Tham Kong Lo
Laos17.956° N 104.761° E
Alexander Blecher, blecher.info , all 452 pictures , overview · CC BY-SA 4.0 Tham Kong Lo, also spelled Konglor, is a river cave that you pass through by boat. 5 km later, making this one of the longest river passages through a cave anywhere.
Did you know? The main river passage has no fixed lighting, so the crossing is made in darkness by headlamp, while a dry side chamber of formations is lit electrically.
07 Wat Xieng Thong
Laos · 1.4 km from Luang Prabang19.898° N 102.143° E
Basile Morin · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the tip of the Luang Prabang peninsula, where the Nam Khan runs into the Mekong, stands the monastery that most people regard as the finest expression of the Luang Prabang style of temple building.
Did you know? The gilded miniature pagodas along the roof ridge, called dok so fa, signal rank: the more numerous and elaborate they are, the more important the monastery.
08 Buddha Park
Laos · 4.7 km from Nong Khai17.912° N 102.765° E
Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 4.0 On a meadow beside the Mekong, a short way downriver from Vientiane, some two hundred concrete gods, demons, animals and Buddhas crowd together in a park that looks centuries old but was begun in 1958. Its Lao name, Xieng Khuan, is usually translated as "spirit city".
Did you know? Although usually reserved for monks, the title Luang Pu, 'venerable grandfather', was applied to Bunleua even though he was technically a layman.
09 Khone Phapheng Falls
Laos13.960° N 105.987° E
Basile Morin · CC BY-SA 4.0 Khone Phapheng is where the Mekong breaks. Just above the Cambodian border in southern Laos, the river spreads into Si Phan Don, the "Four Thousand Islands", a maze of islets, rock bars and channels. It then drops over a long series of ledges known together as the Khone Falls.
Did you know? For its first four years the island railway was temporary, its track lifted behind each train and laid again in front of it.
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 Laos?
- On our list, Pak Ou Caves ranks first, followed by Kuang Si Falls and Plain of Jars.
- What were the stone jars on the Plain of Jars used for?
- Most archaeologists link the jars to funerary practices of an Iron Age people, since human remains and burial goods have been found around them. The sites were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2019.
- Why is the water at Kuang Si Falls turquoise?
- The stream flows through limestone and carries a lot of dissolved calcium carbonate. Fine mineral particles scatter light and give the pools their milky blue colour, and the same minerals build the travertine terraces that hold them.
- What is Tham Kong Lo?
- Tham Kong Lo is a cave in central Laos through which the Nam Hinboun River flows for several kilometres under a limestone mountain. Visitors cross it by boat from one side of the mountain to the other.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Laos?
- In our collection, the places in Laos are most often caves (2), waterfalls (2), temples (1) and ruins (1).
- How many places are on this list in Laos?
- The list covers 9 places.