The Most Beautiful Places in Uzbekistan
13 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Uzbekistan are Gur-e Amir, Shah-i-Zinda and Kalta Minor. The list covers 13 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Uzbekistan lies at the heart of the old Silk Road, and its oasis cities — Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva — grew rich on trade between China, Persia and the steppe. Timur and his descendants turned Samarkand into an imperial capital at the end of the 14th century, and the Timurid style they favoured, with turquoise domes, ribbed drums and walls sheathed in glazed tile, set a standard copied across Central Asia and India.
Samarkand holds the most famous ensemble. The Registan is framed by three madrasas whose portals face one another across the square, Gur-e Amir shelters the tomb of Timur beneath a fluted blue dome, and Shah-i-Zinda is a street of mausoleums climbing a hillside, each faced in a different pattern of tilework. Bibi-Khanym, Timur's great congregational mosque, was among the largest buildings of its age.
Bukhara is older and more austere. The 10th-century Samanid Mausoleum is built entirely of brick laid in intricate patterns, and the Kalyan Minaret of Po-i-Kalyan has stood since 1127. The Ark is the city's ancient fortress, the Bolo Haouz Mosque fronts a pool with slender painted wooden columns, and Chor Minor is a gatehouse crowned by four small turquoise domes. In Khiva, the stubby Kalta Minor minaret was left unfinished but is covered entirely in glazed tile. Further into the desert, the mud-brick fortresses of Ayaz-Kala recall ancient Khorezm, and the Nukus Museum keeps a remarkable collection of Soviet-era avant-garde art.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gur-e Amir | Mausoleum | ✓ |
| 2 | Shah-i-Zinda | Necropolis | ✓ |
| 3 | Kalta Minor | Mosque | |
| 4 | Samanid Mausoleum | Mausoleum | |
| 5 | Registan | Square | ✓ |
| 6 | Bolo Haouz Mosque | Mosque | |
| 7 | Bibi-Khanym Mosque | Mosque | |
| 8 | Po-i-Kalyan | Mosque | |
| 9 | Ark of Bukhara | Fortress | |
| 10 | Nukus Museum of Art | Museum | |
| 11 | Ayaz-Kala | Ruins | |
| 12 | Chor Minor | Mosque | |
| 13 | Juma Mosque, Khiva | Mosque |
01 Gur-e Amir
Uzbekistan · 3.2 km from Samarkand39.648° N 66.969° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Arina Pan · CC BY-SA 4.0 Gur-e Amir, "the Tomb of the Emir", is the mausoleum of Timur, the Turco-Mongol conqueror known in the West as Tamerlane, in his capital Samarkand.
Did you know? Gerasimov's study of the skeleton put Timur's height at about 172 cm, tall for a man of his time.
02 Shah-i-Zinda
Uzbekistan · 3.8 km from Samarkand39.663° N 66.988° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay Shah-i-Zinda is less a single monument than a street of the dead: a narrow lane climbing the slope south of the old Afrosiyob hill in Samarkand, lined on both sides by mausoleums whose portals are sheathed in glazed tilework.
Did you know? The cenotaph over the grave of Qutham ibn Abbas, made in the 1380s, carries Quranic verses written in gold and the year 57 AH, 676–677 AD.
03 Kalta Minor
Uzbekistan · 1.4 km from Khiva41.378° N 60.358° E
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay Squat, broad and sheathed from base to top in glazed tiles of turquoise, green, blue and white, Kalta Minor is the most recognisable silhouette inside the walls of Khiva — and it owes its fame to the fact that it was never finished. Its name means "short minaret" in Uzbek.
Did you know? Besides Kok Minar, the blue minaret, it was also honoured with the name Ulli Minar, the great minaret.
04 Samanid Mausoleum
Uzbekistan · 2.5 km from Bukhara39.777° N 64.401° E
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay In a quiet park on the western edge of old Bukhara stands a small cube of brick that ranks among the most important buildings of the Islamic world.
Did you know? Excavators found three male burials inside; only one could be identified from an inscription, and the other two remain unknown.
05 Registan
Uzbekistan · 3.1 km from Samarkand39.655° N 66.976° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC0 Three tiled façades stand on three sides of an open rectangle, each one dominated by a towering portal and flanked by minarets, and the effect is less of a square than of a stage set built at the scale of a city.
Did you know? The great Persian poet and mystic Jami studied at the Ulugh Beg madrasa.
06 Bolo Haouz Mosque
Uzbekistan · 1.9 km from Bukhara39.778° N 64.407° E
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay Twenty slender wooden columns, so tall and thin they seem barely able to carry the painted ceiling above them, give the Bolo Haouz Mosque its unmistakable silhouette, and their reflection in the pool in front completes the picture.
Did you know? Even after the Bolshevik takeover of Bukhara, the building continued to serve as a Friday mosque through the 1920s.
07 Bibi-Khanym Mosque
Uzbekistan · 3.2 km from Samarkand39.661° N 66.980° E
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay The Bibi-Khanym Mosque was meant to be the greatest mosque in the world, and for a while it may have been.
Did you know? Timur, finding the entrance portal too low on his return in 1404, ordered it pulled down and rebuilt in haste.
08 Po-i-Kalyan
Uzbekistan · 1.4 km from Bukhara39.776° N 64.414° E
Официальный веб-сайт Агентства культурного наследия Республики Узбекистан · CC BY 4.0 Po-i-Kalyan is the religious heart of old Bukhara: a square framed by a vast Friday mosque on one side and a working madrasa on the other, with a single brick tower rising between them. That tower, the Kalyan Minaret, was commissioned by the Karakhanid ruler Arslan Khan and completed in 1127.
Did you know? Archaeologists dug 13 metres down beside the minaret without reaching the bottom of its brick foundation.
09 Ark of Bukhara
Uzbekistan · 1.7 km from Bukhara39.778° N 64.410° E
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay The Ark is Bukhara's citadel: an artificial hill with steep earthen walls 16 to 20 metres high that rises out of the flat city like a ship.
Did you know? Bukhara's first mosque was built inside the Ark by the Arabs in 713, on the site of a pre-Islamic temple.
10 Nukus Museum of Art
Uzbekistan · 0.5 km from Nukus42.466° N 59.614° E
Ayzadarich · CC0 In Nukus, a provincial capital in the far west of Uzbekistan close to the shrinking Aral Sea, hangs one of the world's largest collections of Soviet avant-garde art.
Did you know? Its holdings of Alexander Volkov, around a hundred paintings, are the largest of any museum in the world.
11 Ayaz-Kala
Uzbekistan42.010° N 61.027° E
Bernard Gagnon · CC0 On a bare hill some hundred metres above the edge of the Kyzylkum Desert, the mud-brick walls of Ayaz-Kala still trace a near-perfect rectangle against the sky. South-west of it, on a lower conical hill, sit the remains of a later palace, and close by lies a third, even larger enclosure.
Did you know? Ayaz-Kala 1 seems to have been garrisoned until about the 1st century CE and may have sheltered local people as a refuge into the early Middle Ages.
12 Chor Minor
Uzbekistan · 0.6 km from Bukhara39.775° N 64.427° E
ElenaLitera · CC BY-SA 4.0 Four squat towers crowned with sky-blue domes rise from a small brick gatehouse hidden among the houses of old Bukhara, and the building's Persian name, Chor Minor, simply means "four minarets".
Did you know? Some writers suggest the gatehouse may have been inspired by the Charminar of Hyderabad in India, built more than two centuries earlier in 1591.
13 Juma Mosque, Khiva
Uzbekistan · 1.5 km from Khiva41.378° N 60.360° E
Adam Harangozó · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Juma (Friday) Mosque of Khiva is a building without a façade worth speaking of — a long, flat-roofed brick box in the middle of Itchan Kala, the walled inner city — and inside it is a forest.
Did you know? Four columns bear inscriptions in naskh script and closely match the columns of the Bagbanly mosque, another Khivan monument.
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 Uzbekistan?
- On our list, Gur-e Amir ranks first, followed by Shah-i-Zinda and Kalta Minor.
- Who is buried in Gur-e Amir?
- Timur (Tamerlane) lies there together with several of his descendants, including his sons Shah Rukh and Miran Shah and his grandson, the astronomer-ruler Ulugh Beg.
- Why was Kalta Minor never finished?
- The minaret was begun in Khiva in the 1850s under Muhammad Amin Khan, who died in 1855; construction stopped with his death, leaving a wide, short tower.
- What is the Nukus Museum famous for?
- It holds the collection assembled by Igor Savitsky, who gathered thousands of works by Soviet avant-garde artists that were banned or ignored at the time, along with the art of Karakalpakstan.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Uzbekistan?
- In our collection, the places in Uzbekistan are most often mosques (6), mausoleums (2), forts (1) and fortresses (1).
- How many places are on this list in Uzbekistan?
- The list covers 13 places.