The Most Beautiful Places in Siem Reap
6 places ยท updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Siem Reap are Angkor Wat, Bayon and Ta Prohm. The list covers 6 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Siem Reap province holds Angkor, the capital of the Khmer Empire, which dominated much of mainland Southeast Asia from the ninth to the fifteenth century. Its kings built in sandstone and laterite on the fertile plain north of the Tonlรฉ Sap lake, using vast reservoirs and canals to control water, and each ruler added a state temple of his own. The result is a landscape of temples scattered across forest and rice fields, spanning several centuries of style.
Angkor Wat, built in the twelfth century under Suryavarman II and dedicated to Vishnu, is the largest religious monument in the world, its five towers reflected in a moat and its galleries lined with long bas-reliefs. In the walled city of Angkor Thom, the Bayon of Jayavarman VII crowds dozens of towers carved with serene, smiling faces. At Ta Prohm, the jungle was deliberately left in place, and the roots of giant silk-cotton and strangler fig trees grip the walls and galleries.
Further out, Banteay Srei is a small tenth-century temple of pink sandstone, carved with ornament so fine and deep that it looks like wood. Kbal Spean, in the Kulen hills, is a riverbed carved with lingas and Hindu deities, so that the water flows over sacred images. Beng Mealea, a large twelfth-century temple, remains largely unrestored, with collapsed towers and blocks of stone heaped under the forest canopy.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Angkor Wat | Archaeological site | โ |
| 2 | Bayon | Archaeological site | โ |
| 3 | Ta Prohm | Ruins | โ |
| 4 | Banteay Srei | Temple | โ |
| 5 | Kbal Spean | Petroglyph | |
| 6 | Beng Mealea | Temple |
01 Angkor Wat
Cambodia ยท 5.4 km from Siem Reap13.412ยฐ N 103.867ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by The_5ifth from Pixabay Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument on Earth and the one building every Cambodian knows. It appears on the national flag. King Suryavarman II commissioned it in the first half of the 12th century as the state temple of his capital, Yaลodharapura, and dedicated it to Vishnu.
Did you know? The bas-reliefs run counter-clockwise, the reverse of normal order, as in Brahmin funeral rites, which supports the idea that it was a royal tomb.
02 Bayon
Cambodia ยท 8.3 km from Siem Reap13.441ยฐ N 103.859ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by patrickmoretti06 from Pixabay The Bayon stands at the exact centre of Angkor Thom, the walled capital built by King Jayavarman VII at the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th century, and it is the temple of faces.
Did you know? The main sanctuary once held a 3.6-metre Buddha sheltered by the hood of the serpent king Mucalinda, smashed when the Hindu king Jayavarman VIII took power.
03 Ta Prohm
Cambodia ยท 8.7 km from Siem Reap13.435ยฐ N 103.889ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Graham-H from Pixabay Ta Prohm was never meant to be a ruin โ it was meant to be a small city.
Did you know? The outermost wall encloses an area of about 1,000 by 650 metres, while the temple itself sits within five concentric rectangular enclosures.
04 Banteay Srei
Cambodia ยท 28.4 km from Siem Reap13.599ยฐ N 103.963ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay Banteay Srei is a small temple with an outsized reputation.
Did you know? The temple once stood at the heart of a town called Ishvarapura, whose outer gate is all that survives of a wall about 500 metres square.
05 Kbal Spean
Cambodia ยท 39.7 km from Siem Reap13.687ยฐ N 104.015ยฐ E
Prerit https://www.flickr.com/people/prerit/ ยท CC BY-SA 2.0 In the forested Kulen Hills northeast of Angkor, a small river runs over a bed of sandstone carved nearly a thousand years ago.
Did you know? One relief shows Lakshmi massaging the legs of Vishnu as he drifts on the serpent Ananta across the cosmic ocean of milk.
06 Beng Mealea
Cambodia13.476ยฐ N 104.238ยฐ E
ๆพๅฒกๆ่ณ ยท CC BY-SA 3.0 Beng Mealea is what Angkor might look like if no one had ever cleared it. Built in the early twelfth century, in the reign of Suryavarman II and in the same style as Angkor Wat, it was a temple on a grand scale: an outer gallery of about 181 by 152 metres, set in a moat more than a kilometre long and 45 metres wide.
Did you know? Though built as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu, its carvings also include some Buddhist motifs.
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 Siem Reap?
- On our list, Angkor Wat ranks first, followed by Bayon and Ta Prohm.
- Who built Angkor Wat?
- Angkor Wat was built in the first half of the twelfth century under the Khmer king Suryavarman II. It was originally dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu and later became a Buddhist temple.
- Whose faces are carved on the towers of the Bayon?
- The identity of the Bayon faces is not certain. They are most often interpreted as the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, and many scholars think they also resemble King Jayavarman VII, who built the temple.
- Why are there trees growing on Ta Prohm?
- When restoration work began at Angkor, conservators chose to leave Ta Prohm largely as it was found, with trees growing out of the ruins, to show how the jungle had reclaimed the temples.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Siem Reap?
- In our collection, the places in Siem Reap are most often temples (3), archaeological sites (3), ruins (1) and rock art sites (1).
- How many places are on this list in Siem Reap?
- The list covers 6 places.