The Most Beautiful Places in North Rhine-Westphalia
9 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in North Rhine-Westphalia are Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, Externsteine and Cologne Cathedral. The list covers 9 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
North Rhine-Westphalia combines two Germanys in one state. Along the Rhine lies the old Catholic heartland of Cologne and Aachen, where Charlemagne ruled and medieval cathedral builders worked for centuries. To the north and east lies the Ruhr, the coal and steel engine of the industrial age, whose mines and ironworks have been turned since their closure into parks, museums and monuments. Few places treat a blast furnace and a Gothic choir as heritage of equal rank.
The sacred buildings span more than a thousand years. Aachen Cathedral grew around Charlemagne's octagonal Palatine Chapel, completed around 800, and was among the first sites in Germany to join the World Heritage list. Cologne Cathedral, begun in 1248 and finished only in 1880, lifts its twin spires over the Rhine. In the Teutoburg Forest, the Externsteine are tall sandstone pillars with a medieval relief of the Descent from the Cross carved into the rock, and in a field in the Eifel, Peter Zumthor's Bruder Klaus Field Chapel hides a blackened interior made by burning out the tree trunks used as its formwork.
The industrial sites have their own beauty. The Zollverein colliery in Essen, with its Bauhaus-influenced Shaft XII, is a World Heritage Site; at Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, a disused ironworks is lit in colour after dark; the Zollern colliery in Dortmund has a machine hall with an Art Nouveau portal, and Heimbach's power station is a Jugendstil hall in the hills. Augustusburg Palace in Brühl adds a rococo staircase by Balthasar Neumann.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord | Blast furnace | |
| 2 | Externsteine | Archaeological site | |
| 3 | Cologne Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 4 | Bruder Klaus Field Chapel | Wayside shrine | |
| 5 | Aachen Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 6 | Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex | Mine | ✓ |
| 7 | Zollern II/IV Colliery | Industrial heritage site | |
| 8 | Heimbach Hydroelectric Power Station | Hydroelectric power station | |
| 9 | Augustusburg Palace | Palace |
01 Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord
Germany · 6 km from Duisburg51.480° N 6.780° E
Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 For most of the twentieth century the ironworks at Meiderich, in the north of Duisburg, produced pig iron for the Thyssen empire; the furnaces ran from 1901 until 1985 and then fell silent, leaving behind a tangle of blast furnaces, ore bunkers, gas tanks and a badly polluted site.
Did you know? The German Alpine Club built a climbing garden in the old ore bunkers with around 400 routes, plus a via ferrata nicknamed Monte Thysso.
02 Externsteine
Germany · 32.1 km from Bielefeld51.869° N 8.918° E
Image by verstanderen from Pixabay The Externsteine are a row of sandstone towers rising abruptly out of the beech woods of the Teutoburg Forest near Horn-Bad Meinberg in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Did you know? In 1564 Hermann Hamelmann called the rocks rupes picarum, rock of the magpies, though linguists now link the name to an old word for a sharp ridge.
03 Cologne Cathedral
Kölner Dom
Germany · 1.3 km from Cologne50.941° N 6.958° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Sandeepdattaraju · CC BY-SA 4.0 Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden laid the foundation stone on 15 August 1248, and the building he began was meant for one purpose above all: to house the relics of the Three Magi, which Archbishop Rainald of Dassel had brought from Milan in 1164 as spoils of Frederick Barbarossa's war.
Did you know? An earthquake in 1992 shook loose a 400-kilogram finial from the gable of the south transept.
04 Bruder Klaus Field Chapel
Bruder-Klaus-Feldkapelle
Germany · 28.7 km from Bonn50.593° N 6.727° E
jda · CC BY-SA 3.0 From the road it looks like a grain silo or a lookout that somebody forgot to finish: a blunt, windowless block of pale concrete standing alone in a field above the village of Wachendorf, on the northern edge of the Eifel.
Did you know? The bronze half-figure of the saint stands on a stele that has a relic of Brother Klaus set into it.
05 Aachen Cathedral
Aachener Dom
Germany · 30 km from Maastricht50.775° N 6.084° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ThomasWolter from Pixabay At the heart of Aachen Cathedral is a building Charlemagne commissioned around 796 as the chapel of his palace, consecrated by Pope Leo III in 805. 5 metres across, ringed by a sixteen-sided ambulatory with a gallery above. For more than two hundred years no vault north of the Alps matched its span and height.
Did you know? The octagon's diameter equals the height of its dome, both laid out as 100 Carolingian feet, a ten-by-ten figure symbolising perfection.
06 Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex
Zeche Zollverein
Germany · 4.5 km from Essen51.486° N 7.044° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Jnabl from Pixabay Zollverein is often called the most beautiful coal mine in the world, and the phrase is less of a joke than it sounds.
Did you know? Shaft 12 and the older Shaft 2 reached roughly 1,000 metres underground, making Zollverein one of Germany's deepest collieries.
07 Zollern II/IV Colliery
Zeche Zollern
Germany · 8.1 km from Dortmund51.518° N 7.335° E
Image by KarinKarin from Pixabay Zollern II/IV in the Dortmund suburb of Bövinghausen was built as a showpiece.
Did you know? The headframe over shaft 2 came from the Wilhelmine Victoria colliery in Gelsenkirchen and the one over shaft 4 from Friedrich der Große in Herne, moved here in 1986–1988.
08 Heimbach Hydroelectric Power Station
Kraftwerk Heimbach
Germany50.629° N 6.452° E
Leonhard Lenz · CC0 A power station is rarely the most handsome building in a valley, but the one at Heimbach in the northern Eifel was designed to be exactly that.
Did you know? The Urft dam was designed under the hydraulic engineer Otto Intze and built from local slate and greywacke, rising 58.5 metres with a crest of 226 metres.
09 Augustusburg Palace
Augustusburg
Germany · 11.9 km from Cologne50.828° N 6.908° E
Martin Falbisoner · CC BY-SA 4.0 Augustusburg Palace is a masterpiece of early German rococo, a pale three-winged palace whose state rooms burst into colour behind a calm façade. Its showpiece is the grand staircase designed by Balthasar Neumann, a theatrical ascent of marble, jasper and stucco.
Did you know? Although work started in 1725, fitting out the palace dragged on until 1768, outliving its patron Clemens August, who died in 1761.
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 North Rhine-Westphalia?
- On our list, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord ranks first, followed by Externsteine and Cologne Cathedral.
- How long did it take to build Cologne Cathedral?
- Construction began in 1248 and stopped in the late Middle Ages, leaving the cathedral unfinished for centuries. Work resumed in the 19th century to the original plans, and the cathedral was completed in 1880.
- Why is Aachen Cathedral important?
- Its core is the Palatine Chapel built for Charlemagne around 800, where he was buried. German kings were crowned there for about six centuries, and in 1978 it became one of the first sites on the World Heritage list.
- What is the Zollverein Coal Mine?
- Zollverein in Essen was one of the largest coal mines in Europe until it closed in 1986. Its Shaft XII, built in a functional modernist style, earned it the nickname of the most beautiful coal mine in the world, and it became a World Heritage Site in 2001.
- What kinds of places are there to see in North Rhine-Westphalia?
- In our collection, the places in North Rhine-Westphalia are most often churches (2), cathedrals (2), wayside shrines (1) and palaces (1).
- How many places are on this list in North Rhine-Westphalia?
- The list covers 9 places.