The Most Beautiful Places in Lithuania
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Lithuania are Trakai Island Castle, Church of St. Anne, Vilnius and Hill of Crosses. The list covers 5 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Lithuania is a low land of lakes, pine forest and glacial hills, left behind when the ice sheets retreated from the Baltic. Its history gives that quiet landscape unusual depth: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the last state in Europe to accept Christianity, at the end of the 14th century, and then grew into one of the largest countries on the continent. Its builders worked in red brick, the material of the Baltic Gothic, and later Vilnius became a centre of a richly decorated late Baroque, so that castles, churches and monasteries carry most of the country's beauty.
Trakai Island Castle stands in Lake Galvė, a red-brick fortress of the Grand Dukes reached by wooden bridges and rebuilt in the 20th century from its ruins. In Vilnius, the Church of St. Anne is a small masterpiece of Flamboyant Gothic, its whole facade made of moulded brick in dozens of profiles, while the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul looks plain from outside and is filled inside with thousands of white stucco figures by Italian craftsmen.
Near Kaunas, Pažaislis Monastery brings Italian Baroque to the banks of a reservoir, with a domed church and painted interiors made for the Camaldolese order. The Hill of Crosses outside Šiauliai is something else entirely: a low mound covered by crosses, rosaries and statues of every size, left by pilgrims and visitors over generations and rebuilt each time it was cleared.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Trakai Island Castle | Castle | |
| 2 | Church of St. Anne, Vilnius | Church building | |
| 3 | Hill of Crosses | Pilgrimage site | |
| 4 | Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Vilnius | Church building | |
| 5 | Pažaislis Monastery | Monastery |
01 Trakai Island Castle
Lithuania · 25 km from Vilnius54.653° N 24.933° E
Image by anaterate from Pixabay Few castles make their setting do so much of the work. Trakai's red-brick fortress fills most of an island in Lake Galvė, a lake with 21 islands in the lake country west of Vilnius, and it is reached on foot over a footbridge.
Did you know? King Jogaila of Poland, cousin of Vytautas, visited the castle thirteen times between 1413 and 1430.
02 Church of St. Anne, Vilnius
Vilniaus Šv. Onos bažnyčia
Lithuania · 1.5 km from Vilnius54.683° N 25.293° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay Few buildings make so much of plain brick as St. Anne's in Vilnius. Its narrow facade is a lattice of slender pillars, pointed arches and tracery, all built from 33 different shapes of fired clay brick and painted red, so that the whole front seems to rise like a carved screen.
Did you know? The art historian Vladas Drėma argued that the facade echoes the Columns of Gediminas, an ancient Lithuanian heraldic symbol.
03 Hill of Crosses
Kryžių kalnas
Lithuania · 10.3 km from Šiauliai56.015° N 23.417° E
Diliff · CC BY-SA 3.0 Nobody recorded the day the first cross went up here, but the likeliest account ties it to the failed uprising of 1831 against Russian rule, when families who couldn't find or bury their dead began planting crosses on the site of an old fort instead — a place to mourn people the state had made it impossible to properly…
Did you know? Counts show the hill's growth: about 130 crosses in 1900, more than 400 by 1938, and roughly 55,000 by 1990.
04 Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Vilnius
Vilniaus Šv. apaštalų Petro ir Povilo bažnyčia
Lithuania · 1.4 km from Vilnius54.694° N 25.306° E
Scotch Mist · CC BY-SA 4.0 Step inside the church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Vilnius and almost nothing is left plain: walls, vaults and the dome are covered in white stucco, with more than two thousand figures, garlands, saints, angels and symbolic scenes moulded across the interior.
Did you know? The original dark, gilded high altar was moved to the church in Daugai in 1766 and never replaced, leaving a painting by Franciszek Smuglewicz instead.
05 Pažaislis Monastery
Pažaislio vienuolynas
Lithuania · 12.3 km from Kaunas54.876° N 24.022° E
Augustas Didžgalvis · CC BY-SA 4.0 Pažaislis is Italian Baroque transplanted to the forests of Lithuania: a church with a curving, concave facade and twin towers, crowned by a hexagonal dome some 53 metres high, set within a walled monastic enclave on a wooded rise above the Kaunas Reservoir.
Did you know? A chalice set with more than a thousand gemstones, including some 400 diamonds, 300 rubies and 200 emeralds, was reportedly taken by the Orthodox monks.
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 Lithuania?
- On our list, Trakai Island Castle ranks first, followed by Church of St. Anne, Vilnius and Hill of Crosses.
- Why is Trakai Castle on an island?
- The castle was built in the late 14th and early 15th centuries by the Grand Dukes Kęstutis and Vytautas, and the island in Lake Galvė gave it natural protection against attack. It later lost its military role, fell into ruin and was reconstructed in the 20th century.
- Why are there so many crosses on the Hill of Crosses?
- People have left crosses on the hill since at least the 19th century, often in memory of the dead and of uprisings. During the Soviet period the hill was bulldozed several times, and each time crosses reappeared, which turned it into a symbol of faith and persistence.
- When did Lithuania become Christian?
- Lithuania was officially baptised in 1387 under Grand Duke Jogaila, and Samogitia followed in the early 15th century. That makes it the last country in Europe to convert from paganism.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Lithuania?
- In our collection, the places in Lithuania are most often churches (2), monasteries (1), pilgrimage sites (1) and castles (1).
- How many places are on this list in Lithuania?
- The list covers 5 places.