The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Pakistan
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful sacred places in Pakistan are Faisal Mosque, Badshahi Mosque and Wazir Khan Mosque. The list covers 5 sacred places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Pakistan's sacred buildings span the meeting of Persian, Central Asian and Indian traditions along the Indus. Sufi saints drew pilgrims to Multan and Sindh, where builders developed brilliant glazed tilework, and Lahore became one of the great Mughal cities, with mosques of red sandstone, marble and painted plaster.
The Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, designed by the Turkish architect Vedat Dalokay, replaces domes with a tent-like concrete shell beneath the Margalla Hills. Lahore's Badshahi Mosque, completed under Aurangzeb in 1673, encloses one of the largest courtyards of any mosque. The nearby Wazir Khan Mosque, built under Shah Jahan, is covered almost entirely in tile mosaic and fresco. In Multan, the 14th-century Tomb of Shah Rukn-e-Alam rises in octagonal brick banded with blue glaze, and the Shah Jahan Mosque in Thatta repeats its blue and white tiles beneath a field of brick domes.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Faisal Mosque | Mosque | |
| 2 | Badshahi Mosque | Mosque | |
| 3 | Wazir Khan Mosque | Mosque | |
| 4 | Tomb of Shah Rukn-e-Alam | Mausoleum | |
| 5 | Shah Jahan Mosque, Thatta | Mosque |
01 Faisal Mosque
Pakistan · 6 km from Islamabad33.730° N 73.037° E
Image by IdeasLeader from Pixabay The setting is part of the design. The mosque stands at the northern end of the city, at the foot of the Margalla Hills, and its white form stands against the green slopes. Inside, the main hall is lined with white marble and lit by a huge chandelier in the Turkish style.
Did you know? The building cost more than 130 million Saudi riyals, and Pakistani engineers and workers carried out the construction.
02 Badshahi Mosque
Pakistan · 4.7 km from Lahore31.588° N 74.309° E
Image by tayyab3425 from Pixabay Aurangzeb broke with Lahore's own tradition of mosques clad in glazed Persian-style tilework, such as the nearby Wazir Khan Mosque. Instead he followed the model of his father's Jama Masjid in Delhi on a larger scale: red sandstone carved and inlaid with white marble. A flight of 22 steps leads to a two-storey gateway decorated with carved panels and a muqarnas vault, with the emperor's full name inlaid in marble above the arch.
Did you know? Right next to the mosque stands the Samadhi of Ranjit Singh, built from 1839 by his son Kharak Singh as a memorial to the Sikh maharaja.
03 Wazir Khan Mosque
Pakistan · 3.3 km from Lahore31.583° N 74.323° E
Shahbaz Aslam · CC BY-SA 4.0 What sets it apart is surface. Almost every face is covered with kashi-kari, the Punjabi mosaic of glazed tile, in blues, yellows, greens and ochres, forming flowering vines, cypresses and bands of Arabic and Persian calligraphy. Indoors the walls and vaults carry painted frescoes that fuse imperial Mughal motifs with local Punjabi taste, and the building contains early examples of muqarnas vaulting in the Mughal repertoire.
Did you know? A Persian inscription at the gate addresses farmers, reminding them that whatever is sown in this world will be harvested in the next.
04 Tomb of Shah Rukn-e-Alam
Pakistan · 1.8 km from Multan30.199° N 71.471° E
Yaarahmadd · CC BY-SA 4.0 The building was raised by Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq while he was still governor of Dipalpur, probably as his own tomb, before he became sultan of Delhi. His son, Muhammad bin Tughluq, later gave it to the descendants of Rukn-e-Alam, a 14th-century Sufi saint of the Suhrawardi order, whose remains were moved here in 1330 from the shrine of his grandfather Bahauddin Zakariya nearby. The structure rises in three tiers to a height of about 35 metres.
Did you know? The walls of the lower octagon are about four feet thick.
05 Shah Jahan Mosque, Thatta
Shah Jahan Mosque
Pakistan24.747° N 67.928° E
Asultanahmad · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes the building extraordinary is its surface. Thatta's mosque carries what is often described as the most elaborate display of tilework in South Asia: cobalt blue, turquoise, manganese violet and white tiles laid in geometric and floral fields across the arcades and domes.
Did you know? Unlike the tiles in Lahore, where each tile carries one colour, many tiles here combine several colours, a Persian Kashani influence.
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 sacred places in Pakistan?
- On our list, Faisal Mosque ranks first, followed by Badshahi Mosque and Wazir Khan Mosque.
- Who designed the Faisal Mosque?
- The Turkish architect Vedat Dalokay, whose design was inspired by a Bedouin tent. It is named after King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who supported its construction.
- Who built the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore?
- The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, who completed it in 1673 opposite the Lahore Fort. It is built of red sandstone with marble domes.
- How many sacred places are on this list in Pakistan?
- The list covers 5 sacred places.