The Most Beautiful Sacred Places Seen on Screen in the World

34 places in 13 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Angkor Wat

   Cambodia · 5.4 km from Siem Reap13.412° N 103.867° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   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, Yaśodharapura, and dedicated it to Vishnu. It was most likely also intended as his mausoleum.

   Did you know? The temple was built from an estimated five to ten million sandstone blocks, the heaviest weighing about 1.5 tonnes.

   More about Angkor Wat →

2. 02 Valley of the Kings

   Egypt · 6.5 km from Luxor25.740° N 32.602° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   For nearly five centuries, from about 1539 to 1075 BC, the pharaohs of the New Kingdom were buried not under pyramids but in tombs cut deep into a dry valley on the west bank of the Nile opposite Thebes, modern Luxor. The valley lies beneath al-Qurn, a pyramid-shaped peak that may have been part of its appeal, and its hidden entrances were meant to defeat the robbers who had emptied the older royal tombs.

   Did you know? Workmen who cut and painted the royal tombs lived in the nearby village of Deir el-Medina, and their records include what may be history's first documented labour strike.

   More about Valley of the Kings →

3. 03 Hagia Sophia

   Ayasofya

   Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.980° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The building that stands today was put up in barely five years. In January 532 the Nika riots burned down the previous church on the site, and within weeks Emperor Justinian I had started a far more ambitious replacement, designed by two scholars rather than master masons: Anthemius of Tralles, a mathematician, and Isidore of Miletus, a geometer. It was dedicated in 537.

   Did you know? Envoys of the Kievan Rus' prince reported that inside they could not tell whether they were in heaven or on earth, a verdict tied to Rus' conversion to Orthodoxy.

   More about Hagia Sophia →

4. 04 Sultan Ahmed Mosque

   Turkey · 1.4 km from Istanbul41.005° N 28.977° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Sultan Ahmed I commissioned this at just 19 years old, and it was built between 1609 and 1616 — a low point in Ottoman fortunes, coming right after an unfavorable peace ended a long war with Persia. An imperial mosque of this scale was, among other things, a calculated show of confidence: proof the empire hadn't actually faltered. Ahmed died the year after it was finished, at 27.

   Did you know? The tile orders swallowed the entire İznik industry, and in 1613 the sultan banned making or selling tiles for anyone else until his were finished.

   More about Sultan Ahmed Mosque →

5. 05 San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

   Chiesa di San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

   Italy · 0.9 km from Rome41.902° N 12.491° E

   

   San Carlo is so small that it would get lost in most Roman churches: the whole building measures only about 20 by 12 metres. Yet into that cramped corner plot Francesco Borromini fitted one of the most inventive spaces of the Baroque, and it was his first independent commission.

   Did you know? Romans call it San Carlino, and its whole floor area is often said to fit inside one of the four piers that carry the dome of St Peter's.

   More about San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane →

6. 06 St. Vitus Cathedral

   Katedrála svatého Víta v Praze

   Czech Republic · 1.7 km from Prague50.091° N 14.401° E

   

   St Vitus Cathedral, formally dedicated to Saints Vitus, Wenceslaus and Adalbert, is the seat of the Archbishop of Prague and the largest and most important church in the Czech Republic. 8 m high, and holds the tombs of Bohemian kings and Holy Roman emperors. It is the third church on the spot: Duke Wenceslaus founded a rotunda here around 930, after obtaining a relic of St Vitus, and a Romanesque basilica followed.

   Did you know? The Zikmund bell in the great south tower, cast by Tomáš Jaroš in 1549, weighs about 16.5 tonnes and is the largest bell in the Czech Republic.

   More about St. Vitus Cathedral →

7. 07 Taj Mahal

   India · 2.9 km from Agra27.175° N 78.042° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Shah Jahan began building this in 1631 as a tomb for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who had died giving birth to their fourteenth child.

   Did you know? Its four minarets, each over 40 metres tall, lean slightly outward so that if one ever collapsed it would fall away from the tomb.

   More about Taj Mahal →

8. 08 Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg

   Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Strasbourg

   France · 0.2 km from Strasbourg48.582° N 7.751° E

   

   Strasbourg's cathedral is a building of one tower, and that asymmetry is its signature. The west front was begun in 1277, with Erwin von Steinbach credited as master builder until his death in 1318, and it was planned with two spires. Only the north one was ever built: an octagonal tower and openwork spire by Ulrich Ensingen and Johannes Hültz, finished in 1439.

   Did you know? In 1794 radical revolutionaries planned to pull down the spire as an insult to equality; citizens saved it by crowning it with a giant tin Phrygian cap.

   More about Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg →

9. 09 Lincoln Cathedral

   United Kingdom53.234° N 0.536° W

   

   The Victorian critic John Ruskin thought Lincoln Cathedral the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles, worth any two other English cathedrals, and on its ridge above the flat Lincolnshire countryside it is easy to see why he said it. The first cathedral was begun in 1072 by the Norman bishop Remigius and consecrated in 1092.

   Did you know? The cathedral stood in for Westminster Abbey in The Da Vinci Code after the abbey refused filming, and for Notre-Dame in Ridley Scott's Napoleon (2023).

   More about Lincoln Cathedral →

10. 10 Nidaros Cathedral

    Norway · 1.5 km from Trondheim63.427° N 10.397° E

    

    Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim is the northernmost medieval cathedral in the world and the national shrine of Norway. It stands over the burial place of King Olav II Haraldsson, who fell at the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030 and was soon venerated as Saint Olav, the patron of Norway.

    Did you know? Only five medieval statues survived on the west front; rebuilding its sculpture took from 1905 to 1983 and involved a long line of sculptors.

    More about Nidaros Cathedral →

11. 11 St Paul's Cathedral

    United Kingdom · 1.9 km from London51.514° N 0.098° W

    

    St Paul's Cathedral is Sir Christopher Wren's masterpiece and the building that gave London its skyline for three centuries. Its dome, rising 111 metres to the cross on Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London, was the tallest thing in London from 1710 to 1963.

    Did you know? The rebuilding was paid for largely by a special tax levied on coal arriving in London, not from the royal purse.

    More about St Paul's Cathedral →

12. 12 Canterbury Cathedral

    United Kingdom · 22.2 km from Dover51.280° N 1.083° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Canterbury Cathedral is the mother church of the Church of England and of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Augustine, sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the Anglo-Saxons, founded it in 597.

    Did you know? Henry VIII reputedly summoned the dead Becket on a charge of treason; when he failed to appear, his shrine's treasures were carted off in two chests and 26 carts.

    More about Canterbury Cathedral →

13. 13 Père Lachaise Cemetery

    France · 3 km from Paris48.861° N 2.394° E

    

    Père Lachaise is the largest cemetery in Paris, 44 hectares of tree-lined paths and closely packed tombs on a hillside in the 20th arrondissement, and more than a million people have been buried here.

    Did you know? Since 2014 a glass screen has guarded the lower part of Wilde's tomb from lipstick; Ireland's Office of Public Works paid for it as an Irish monument abroad.

    More about Père Lachaise Cemetery →

14. 14 Notre-Dame de Paris

    Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris

    France · 0.6 km from Paris48.853° N 2.350° E

    

    Bishop Maurice de Sully tore down the older cathedral on the Île de la Cité around 1160 and started again at a far larger scale. The first stone was laid in the spring of 1163, in the presence of King Louis VII and Pope Alexander III, and the high altar was consecrated in 1182.

    Did you know? Napoleon crowned himself Emperor inside the cathedral on 2 December 1804.

    More about Notre-Dame de Paris →

15. 15 Abbey of Fontenay

    Abbaye de Fontenay

    France47.640° N 4.389° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Fontenay is the Cistercian ideal almost untouched: a monastery founded by Bernard of Clairvaux in 1118 in a wooded Burgundy valley near Montbard, and still standing with nearly all of its 12th-century buildings. Bernard wanted an order stricter than Cîteaux itself, and the architecture shows it.

    Did you know? The abbey has served as a film location for Angélique, Marquise des Anges in 1964 and Cyrano de Bergerac in 1990.

    More about Abbey of Fontenay →

16. 16 Gloucester Cathedral

    United Kingdom51.867° N 2.247° W

    

    Gloucester Cathedral is best understood as two buildings wearing one skin. The heavy Norman church begun by Abbot Serlo in 1089 still stands underneath — you feel it in the squat round piers of the nave — but in the fourteenth century the monks wrapped its eastern half in a lattice of tall, thin Perpendicular tracery, as if a stone cage had been lowered over the Romanesque walls.

    Did you know? The church began as a minster founded around 679 by Osric, King of the Hwicce, with his relative Kyneburg as its first abbess.

    More about Gloucester Cathedral →

17. 17 Basilica of Saint-Denis

    Basilique Saint-Denis

    France · 8.6 km from Paris48.936° N 2.360° E

    

    On the northern edge of Paris, in the town of Saint-Denis, stands the church where Gothic architecture was invented. Abbot Suger, adviser to Louis VI and Louis VII, rebuilt the old abbey church from about 1135, first with a new west front and then with a choir completed in 1144 that combined pointed arches, rib vaults and walls opened up for large windows into a new, light-filled whole.

    Did you know? In 2004 the mummified heart of the boy who would have been Louis XVII, confirmed by DNA testing, was sealed in a crystal vase in the crypt.

    More about Basilica of Saint-Denis →

18. 18 Salisbury Cathedral

    United Kingdom · 37.9 km from Bournemouth51.065° N 1.798° W

    

    Salisbury Cathedral was built in one go, which is rare for an English cathedral and is what gives it its calm. The foundation stones were laid in 1220 on open meadows by the rivers, after the clergy abandoned the cramped hilltop of Old Sarum a couple of miles to the north, and the nave, transepts and choir were complete by 1258. Only the cloister, the chapter house and, by 1330, the tower and spire were added later.

    Did you know? Because the water table beneath the meadows is so high, the cathedral rests on foundations only about four feet (1.2 m) deep.

    More about Salisbury Cathedral →

19. 19 Certosa di Pavia

    Italy · 24.3 km from Milan45.257° N 9.148° E

    

    Carthusian monks were meant to live in silence and plainness, which makes the Certosa di Pavia one of the great contradictions of Italian art: a charterhouse for a handful of hermits whose church front is among the most lavishly carved façades of the Renaissance.

    Did you know? In August 1946 the body of Benito Mussolini, stolen from a Milan cemetery months earlier, was discovered hidden inside the Certosa complex.

    More about Certosa di Pavia →

20. 20 St Mark's Basilica

    Basilica di San Marco

    Italy · 0.6 km from Venice45.434° N 12.340° E

    

    St Mark's is not a cathedral that grew out of a bishop's church; it was the private chapel of the Doge and the state sanctuary of the Venetian Republic, and it became the city's cathedral only in 1807. It was built to house the body of St Mark, which, according to medieval chronicles, two Venetian merchants took from Alexandria in 828.

    Did you know? According to tradition, the merchants smuggled St Mark's body out of Alexandria hidden under pork, which Muslim customs officials would not touch.

    More about St Mark's Basilica →

21. 21 Pashupatinath Temple

    Nepal · 3.5 km from Kathmandu27.710° N 85.349° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Pashupatinath is the most important Hindu temple in Nepal and one of the holiest Shiva shrines anywhere, the destination of pilgrims from across South Asia. It stands on the banks of the Bagmati river on the eastern side of Kathmandu, where a temple is recorded as early as 400 AD.

    Did you know? The name Pashupati means lord of animals, one of the epithets of Shiva, who is worshipped here as protector of all living beings.

    More about Pashupatinath Temple →

22. 22 León Cathedral

    Catedral de Santa María de Regla de León

    Spain · 2.2 km from León42.599° N 5.567° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    León's cathedral, Santa María de Regla, is the Spanish cathedral that went furthest in the Gothic dream of replacing walls with light. It has around 125 windows and about 1,800 square metres of stained glass, most of it made between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, one of the largest collections of medieval glass anywhere.

    Did you know? For centuries a dried hide over a door was said to be a mole that wrecked the builders' work by night; in the 1990s it proved a leatherback turtle shell.

    More about León Cathedral →

23. 23 Notre-Dame de Chartres

    Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres

    France48.448° N 1.488° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Chartres Cathedral stands in the old capital of the Beauce, about 80 km southwest of Paris, and it is one of the most complete and influential Gothic cathedrals in Europe. At least five churches stood on this site before it. On the night of 10 June 1194 fire destroyed most of the Romanesque cathedral, sparing only the crypt, the west towers and the west front.

    Did you know? The stone screen around the choir holds about 200 statues arranged in 41 scenes from the lives of Christ and the Virgin.

    More about Notre-Dame de Chartres →

24. 24 Wells Cathedral

    United Kingdom · 27 km from Bristol51.210° N 2.644° W

    

    Wells is a small market city, and its cathedral is out of all proportion to it. Begun around 1175, it was designed from the start in the new pointed style, and the architectural historian John Harvey called it the first truly Gothic building in Europe. It became a cathedral in the thirteenth century after a long tug-of-war between Wells, Bath and Glastonbury, which is why the bishop is still "of Bath and Wells".

    Did you know? The west front is about 45 metres wide and 30 metres high.

    More about Wells Cathedral →

25. 25 Süleymaniye Mosque

    Turkey · 0.9 km from Istanbul41.016° N 28.964° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Süleymaniye crowns Istanbul's Third Hill, and from the water its silhouette — a great central dome shouldered by cascading half-domes and four slender minarets — is one of the defining outlines of the old city's skyline. It was built for Suleiman the Magnificent by his chief architect Mimar Sinan; the inscription over the entrance gives 1550 for the foundation and 1557 for the inauguration.

    Did you know? Sinan is said to have channelled the smoke of the mosque's oil lamps into a chamber above the entrance, where the soot was gathered and turned into calligraphers' ink.

    More about Süleymaniye Mosque →

26. 26 Cologne Cathedral

    Kölner Dom

    Germany · 1.3 km from Cologne50.941° N 6.958° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    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. The ground plan and the proportions of the nave follow Amiens closely.

    Did you know? On 6 March 1945 American tanks fought a German Panther in the square beside the cathedral, a duel caught on film.

    More about Cologne Cathedral →

27. 27 Swayambhunath

    Nepal · 2.5 km from Kathmandu27.715° N 85.290° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Swayambhunath crowns a wooded hill just west of Kathmandu, and from almost anywhere in the valley you can see its white dome and gilded spire, painted on all four sides with the half-closed eyes of the Buddha. For the Newar Buddhists of the valley it is one of their three holiest sites, for Tibetan Buddhists second only to Boudhanath, and Hindus worship here too.

    Did you know? According to local legend, the temple's monkeys descended from lice in the long hair of the bodhisattva Manjushri.

    More about Swayambhunath →

28. 28 Westminster Abbey

    United Kingdom · 0.7 km from London51.499° N 0.127° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Westminster Abbey, formally the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter at Westminster, has been the setting of English and British coronations since 1066: forty monarchs have been crowned here, eighteen are buried here, and at least sixteen royal weddings have taken place since 1100. The site began as a Benedictine monastery founded around 959 on Thorney Island, then an island in the Thames.

    Did you know? David Hockney designed a 2018 window celebrating Elizabeth II, a blossoming Yorkshire hawthorn scene, on an iPad to mimic light passing through glass.

    More about Westminster Abbey →

29. 29 Highgate Cemetery

    United Kingdom · 7.5 km from London51.567° N 0.147° W

    

    Highgate Cemetery climbs a south-facing hillside in north London just below the top of Highgate Hill, next to Waterlow Park. It opened in 1839 as one of the "Magnificent Seven" private cemeteries built around the edge of the city when the old churchyards had run out of room, and the architect Stephen Geary laid out the original western part. An eastern extension across Swain's Lane opened in 1860.

    Did you know? Its overgrown Gothic atmosphere drew horror film-makers, and it appears in Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) and Tales from the Crypt (1972).

    More about Highgate Cemetery →

30. 30 Ely Cathedral

    United Kingdom · 24.2 km from Cambridge52.399° N 0.264° E

    

    Ely Cathedral is called the Ship of the Fens, and on the flat land of Cambridgeshire you understand why: its towers are visible for miles across the drained fields, riding above the little city like a hull on water. It began as an abbey founded in 672 by St Etheldreda, an East Anglian princess, whose shrine drew pilgrims for centuries.

    Did you know? Its stone came from Barnack quarries owned by Peterborough Abbey, reportedly paid for with 8,000 eels a year.

    More about Ely Cathedral →