The Most Beautiful Places in Syria
9 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Syria are Krak des Chevaliers, Palmyra and Apamea. The list covers 9 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Syria has stood at the crossroads of the ancient world for millennia, between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Arabia. Caravan routes, Roman legions, Byzantine monks, Crusader orders and Islamic dynasties all passed through, and each built in the local limestone and basalt. The result is a country where Roman colonnades, early Christian basilicas, Crusader fortresses and great mosques can lie within a day's journey of one another.
Palmyra grew rich as an oasis city on the caravan trade, with a long colonnaded street, the Temple of Bel and tower tombs in the desert beyond; in the third century its queen Zenobia defied Rome. Apamea in the Orontes valley has one of the longest colonnaded avenues of the Roman world. At Bosra, a Roman theatre of black basalt survives almost complete, because later rulers wrapped it inside a fortress. The Church of Saint Simeon Stylites was built in the late fifth century around the pillar on which the ascetic Simeon had lived for decades.
The medieval centuries left fortresses of extraordinary scale. Krak des Chevaliers, held by the Knights Hospitaller, is a textbook concentric castle with two rings of walls on a hilltop. The Citadel of Salah Ed-Din is protected by a channel cut deep into the bedrock, with a single needle of rock left standing to carry its bridge. The Citadel of Aleppo rises on a great mound above the old city, entered by a fortified gate and bridge. In Damascus, the Umayyad Mosque of the early eighth century keeps golden mosaics of trees and palaces, and at Hama the great wooden norias turn in the Orontes.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Krak des Chevaliers | Castle | ✓ |
| 2 | Palmyra | Ruins | ✓ |
| 3 | Apamea | Archaeological site | |
| 4 | Roman Theatre at Bosra | Roman theatre | |
| 5 | Citadel of Aleppo | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 6 | Umayyad Mosque | Mosque | ✓ |
| 7 | Norias of Hama | Watermill | |
| 8 | Citadel of Salah Ed-Din | Castle | ✓ |
| 9 | Church of Saint Simeon Stylites | Archaeological site | ✓ |
01 Krak des Chevaliers
Syria · 38.9 km from Homs34.757° N 36.295° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Iyad from Pixabay Krak des Chevaliers sits on a 650-metre spur at the southern end of Syria's coastal mountains, watching over the Homs Gap, the one easy corridor between the port of Tripoli and the inland city of Homs.
Did you know? Of a garrison of around 2,000, only about 60 were knights of the order, lodged in the great round towers of the inner ward.
02 Palmyra
Syria · 1.2 km from Tadmur34.550° N 38.270° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by andrelambo from Pixabay Palmyra was a caravan city in an oasis of the Syrian Desert, about 215 km northeast of Damascus, and for three centuries it was one of the richest places in the Roman East.
Did you know? Many Palmyrene tombs contained mummies, embalmed by methods similar to those used in ancient Egypt.
03 Apamea
Syria35.417° N 36.400° E
Image by SLPix from Pixabay The Great Colonnade of Apamea runs for nearly two kilometres in a straight line from the north gate to the south gate of the ancient city, one of the longest colonnaded avenues of the Roman world. Many of its nine-metre columns are carved with spiral fluting, twisting up the shaft.
Did you know? During the revolt of Caecilius Bassus, Apamea held out against Julius Caesar's forces for three years until 46 BC.
04 Roman Theatre at Bosra
Syria · 21.8 km from Al-Suwayda32.518° N 36.482° E
Arian Zwegers · CC BY 2.0 Bosra, in the Hauran plain of southern Syria, was the northern capital of the Nabataeans and then, after Trajan annexed their kingdom in 106 AD, the capital of the Roman province of Arabia, a trading city on the road from Damascus to the Red Sea.
Did you know? In 1147 King Baldwin III of Jerusalem led a Crusader army to seize Bosra, but a Damascene garrison held the theatre-citadel and the attempt failed.
05 Citadel of Aleppo
Syria · 3.7 km from Aleppo36.199° N 37.163° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DianneKet78 from Pixabay The Citadel of Aleppo is a walled palace-fortress on a huge oval mound in the middle of the old city of Aleppo, in northern Syria, and one of the oldest and largest castles in the world. People have used the hill since at least the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, when a temple of the storm god Hadad stood on it.
Did you know? Both mosques on the summit began life as Byzantine churches and were converted into mosques in the early Islamic centuries.
06 Umayyad Mosque
Syria · 1.3 km from Damascus33.511° N 36.307° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SLPix from Pixabay The Umayyad Mosque, the Great Mosque of Damascus, stands in the old city on a site that has been holy for about three thousand years.
Did you know? The Dome of the Eagle over the prayer hall rises to about 36 metres.
07 Norias of Hama
Syria · 2.7 km from Hama35.135° N 36.753° E
Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0 Seventeen giant wooden wheels turn in the Orontes as it passes through Hama, lifting river water in small boxes set into their rims and tipping it into stone aqueducts high above the bank.
Did you know? Each water box holds between 4 and 12 litres, and the smaller wheels lift around 50,000 litres an hour.
08 Citadel of Salah Ed-Din
Syria · 25.9 km from Latakia35.596° N 36.057° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
LBM1948 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Citadel of Salah Ed-Din, known to the Crusaders as Saône and in Arabic also as Sahyun, occupies a narrow, wooded ridge between two deep ravines in the coastal mountains of north-western Syria.
Did you know? The traditional Arabic name, Sahyun, is the local form of Zion; the Byzantines knew the fortress as Sigon and the Franks as Saône.
09 Church of Saint Simeon Stylites
Syria · 33.5 km from Azaz36.334° N 36.844° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Frank Kidner · CC BY-SA 4.0 On a limestone ridge northwest of Aleppo stand the ruins of what was, for nearly half a century, the largest church in the Christian world. It was built around a single column.
Did you know? When Simeon fell ill, Emperor Theodosius II sent three bishops to beg him to come down and see doctors; he refused and recovered.
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 Syria?
- On our list, Krak des Chevaliers ranks first, followed by Palmyra and Apamea.
- Who was Simeon Stylites?
- Simeon Stylites was a fifth-century Syrian ascetic who spent decades living on top of a stone pillar near Aleppo. After his death in 459 a large church was built in the form of a cross around the base of his column.
- What are the norias of Hama?
- They are huge wooden water wheels on the Orontes River that lift water into aqueducts for the town and its fields. The tradition goes back many centuries, and the largest wheels are about twenty metres in diameter.
- Who built Krak des Chevaliers?
- The castle was taken over by the Knights Hospitaller in 1142, who rebuilt and greatly expanded it into the concentric fortress seen today. It fell to the Mamluk sultan Baibars in 1271.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Syria?
- In our collection, the places in Syria are most often archaeological sites (5), castles (3), mosques (1) and ruins (1).
- How many places are on this list in Syria?
- The list covers 9 places.