The Most Beautiful Squares in the World

25 places in 12 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Place de la Concorde

   France · 2.5 km from Paris48.866° N 2.321° E

   

   The Place de la Concorde is the largest square in Paris, 7.6 hectares of open ground at the eastern end of the Champs-Élysées, between the Tuileries Garden and the Seine. It began as a royal flattery. In 1748 the merchants of Paris commissioned an equestrian statue of Louis XV to celebrate his recovery from illness, and the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel laid out an octagonal square around it, finished by 1772 and ringed with a dry moat and balustrades. On the north side he built two identical palaces with classical façades modelled on Claude Perrault's front of the Louvre; the eastern one became the Hôtel de la Marine, the headquarters of the French navy.

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2. 02 Piazza Navona

   Italy · 0.7 km from Rome41.899° N 12.473° E

   

   Piazza Navona keeps the exact outline of a Roman racetrack. Emperor Domitian built a stadium here around 80 AD for athletic contests, the agones, and when the stands were quarried away after the fall of the empire the houses that replaced them simply followed the curve. The result is Rome's most theatrical public room: a long, narrow oval, closed at the northern end by a rounded turn, where the buildings stand where the spectators once sat.

   Did you know? Domitian's stadium seated about 30,000 spectators and was some 275 metres long, which is why the square is so stretched.

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3. 03 Main Market Square, Kraków

   Rynek Główny w Krakowie

   Poland · 1.5 km from Kraków50.062° N 19.937° E

   

   Kraków's Rynek Główny is a medieval square on a grand scale: about 3.8 hectares of open paving, often counted among the largest town squares of medieval Europe. Its geometry is older than any building on it. After the Mongol raid of 1241 laid the town waste, Kraków was refounded under Magdeburg law in 1257 on a regular grid, and the square was drawn as its centre, with three streets leaving each side at right angles. That plan has survived nearly eight centuries almost untouched, so walking in from any of the side streets you still arrive exactly where the thirteenth-century surveyors meant you to.

   Did you know? In 1364 King Casimir the Great hosted the Congress of Kraków here; according to legend, the feast given by the merchant Wierzynek lasted twenty-one days.

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4. 04 Piazza del Duomo, Pisa

   Piazza dei Miracoli

   Italy · 0.5 km from Pisa43.723° N 10.395° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Pisa's cathedral square is less a square than a lawn: a walled field on which four white marble buildings stand apart from one another like pieces set on a green cloth. The writer Gabriele D'Annunzio called it the meadow of miracles in a 1910 novel, and the name Piazza dei Miracoli has stuck. The buildings were paid for by the maritime wealth of the Pisan republic and together created the style known as Pisan Romanesque; UNESCO inscribed the whole ensemble in 1987.

   Did you know? Construction of the leaning tower stretched over about 177 years, with the seventh floor added in 1319 and the bells only in 1372.

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5. 05 Piazza del Campo

   Italy · 1.5 km from Siena43.318° N 11.331° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Piazza del Campo is a great tilted shell of red brick at the heart of Siena. Its fan of paving, divided by pale stone strips into nine segments, slopes down towards the Palazzo Pubblico, the Gothic town hall, whose slender brick tower, the Torre del Mangia, rises above the whole city. Around the curve, the palaces of Siena's old ruling families form a continuous wall of warm brick with matching rooflines, so that the square feels like an open-air theatre with the town hall as its stage. It is counted among the finest medieval squares in Europe and lies within the Historic Centre of Siena, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995.

   Did you know? In the Palio a horse that has thrown its jockey can still win, because the victory belongs to the contrada rather than the rider.

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6. 06 Place Vendôme

   France · 2 km from Paris48.867° N 2.329° E

   

   Place Vendôme is the most formal of Paris's royal squares, a piece of pure Louis XIV planning set between the Tuileries garden and the Opéra. Jules Hardouin-Mansart designed it at the end of the 17th century as a setting for the king: begun in 1698 as Place Louis-le-Grand, it was lined with identical façades before the buildings behind them existed, and its corners were cut across by pedimented fronts so that the rectangle, about 213 by 124 metres, reads as an octagon. Arcades at ground level, giant pilasters above and steep mansard roofs hold it together as a single piece of architecture, finished around 1720.

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7. 07 Patan Durbar Square

   Nepal · 1 km from Lalitpur27.673° N 85.326° E

   

   Patan, today officially Lalitpur, sits across the Bagmati River from Kathmandu and was for centuries a royal city in its own right, seat of Malla kings who filled their capital with temples. Its Durbar Square is the heart of that city: a long, open space where the old royal palace runs along one side and, facing it, a crowd of temples in brick, timber and stone stands so close together that their roofs seem to overlap. Most of what you see was built in the seventeenth century under kings such as Siddhi Narsingh Malla and his successors, and the square has been part of the Kathmandu Valley World Heritage site since 1979.

   Did you know? Tradition holds that King Siddhi Narsingh Malla saw Krishna and Radha standing before his palace one night and ordered the Krishna Mandir built on that very spot.

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8. 08 Saint Peter's Square

   Piazza San Pietro

   Vatican City · 2.1 km from Rome41.902° N 12.457° E

   

   St. Peter's Square is the great forecourt of St. Peter's Basilica, and one of the most successful pieces of urban theatre ever made. Gian Lorenzo Bernini designed it between 1667 and 1676 for Pope Alexander VII, with a simple brief: as many people as possible should be able to see the pope give his blessing, from the basilica facade or from a window of the Vatican Palace. His answer was a vast oval embraced by two curving colonnades, four columns deep, which in Bernini's own image are the motherly arms of the Church gathering in the faithful. He chose the plain Tuscan order so as not to compete with Carlo Maderno's facade, but used it on a colossal scale, and a crowd of statues of saints lines the balustrade above.

   Did you know? Two marble discs marked "Centro del colonnato" lie between the obelisk and the fountains; from either one, the four rows of columns line up and appear as a single row.

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9. 09 Place Stanislas, Nancy

   France · 1.7 km from Nancy48.694° N 6.183° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Place Stanislas in Nancy is one of the most complete squares of the eighteenth century anywhere in Europe: an open rectangle of about 125 by 106 metres, paved in pale ochre stone with darker diagonals, framed on every side by façades of the same height and rhythm, and closed at its corners by screens of gilded wrought iron. It was built between 1752 and 1756 to the designs of Emmanuel Héré, and inaugurated in November 1755 as Place Royale.

   Did you know? The original bronze statue of Louis XV was pulled down in 1792 and taken to Metz to be melted down for military use.

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10. 10 Place des Vosges

    France · 1 km from Paris48.856° N 2.366° E

    

    The Place des Vosges is the oldest planned square in Paris and still one of the most perfect: a square exactly 140 metres a side, closed on all four sides by houses of the same design, with a formal garden of lawns, gravel and clipped trees in the middle. It was built between 1605 and 1612 by order of Henri IV as the Place Royale, a new kind of urban space — not a market or a parvis, but a residential set piece where the nobility would live around an open stage. The king was assassinated in 1610 and never saw it finished; it was inaugurated in 1612 with a great equestrian carrousel celebrating the engagement of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria.

    Did you know? The square stands on the site of the Hôtel des Tournelles, where King Henri II was mortally wounded in the eye by a lance during a joust in 1559.

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11. 11 Grand-Place

    Belgium · 2 km from Brussels50.847° N 4.353° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Grand-Place, or Grote Markt in Dutch, is the central square of Brussels, and no other square in Europe is so completely enclosed by ornate buildings. It is a fully paved rectangle of about 68 by 110 m, surrounded on all sides by gilded guildhalls, a Gothic town hall and the neo-Gothic King's House. It began as a market on drained marshland in the 11th century and became the seat of city government in the 15th century. It was pedestrianised in 1990, and in 1998 it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

    Did you know? Jan van Essen and Hendrik Vos, the first martyrs of the Protestant Reformation, were burned at the stake on the square in 1523.

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12. 12 Red Square

    Russia · 0.4 km from Moscow55.754° N 37.620° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Red Square is a long rectangle — about 330 metres from end to end — laid along the eastern wall of the Moscow Kremlin, where the fortress had no river to protect it. That weakness is the square's origin: in the 1490s Ivan III ordered the ground outside the wall cleared of buildings to open a field of fire, and a deep moat was dug in front of the wall in the early sixteenth century. The cleared ground became Moscow's main market. The name, recorded from the 1660s, did not originally refer to the colour: the old Russian word krasnaya also meant "beautiful", and the space had earlier been known simply as Torg, the market, or Pozhar, the burnt place.

    Did you know? The square covers about 73,000 square metres, some 330 metres long and roughly 70 metres wide.

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13. 13 Naqsh-e Jahan Square

    Iran · 5.2 km from Isfahan32.658° N 51.677° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Naqsh-e Jahan Square — "Image of the World" — is the great public room of Isfahan, a rectangle roughly 560 metres long and 160 metres wide laid out between 1598 and 1629 when Shah Abbas I moved the Safavid capital here. It was the centrepiece of a complete remaking of the city, planned under the scholar Shaykh Bahai, and it is still enclosed by an unbroken two-storey arcade of shops, so that the four great buildings set into its sides appear as jewels in a single frame.

    Did you know? Stone polo goalposts from the Safavid era still stand at the north and south ends of the square.

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14. 14 Registan

    Uzbekistan · 3.1 km from Samarkand39.655° N 66.976° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    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. The name comes from Persian and means roughly "place of sand": this was the market and meeting ground at the heart of Samarkand, where crowds once gathered to hear royal proclamations announced with blasts on long copper horns, and where public executions were carried out.

    Did you know? A Kufic inscription on Ulugh Beg's portal boasts that it is twice as high as the sky and heavy enough to slow the Earth's spin.

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15. 15 Palace Square

    Russia · 0.2 km from Saint Petersburg59.939° N 30.315° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Palace Square is where St Petersburg performed its role as imperial capital, and later where that empire came apart. The square takes its name from the Winter Palace, the Baroque residence of the tsars rebuilt between 1754 and 1762 in white and turquoise, which fills its northern side. Opposite, the vast curved facade of the General Staff Building (1819–1829), designed by Carlo Rossi, closes the square in an Empire-style arc; Alexander I intended the ensemble as a monument to the victory over Napoleon, and the building's double triumphal arch, crowned by a Roman-style quadriga, frames the approach from Nevsky Prospekt. Alexander Bryullov's Guards Corps Headquarters (1837–1843) completes the eastern side, while the west opens towards Admiralty Square, so that Palace Square becomes part of a continuous chain of open spaces along the Neva.

    Did you know? In 1924 the Soviet government decreed that the angel on the Alexander Column be replaced with a statue of Lenin; after a year of debate the idea was dropped.

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16. 16 Piazza del Campidoglio

    Italy · 0.5 km from Rome41.893° N 12.483° E

    

    On the summit of the Capitoline, the smallest and most sacred of Rome's hills, Michelangelo made one of the first great squares of the modern world. Pope Paul III commissioned him in the 1530s to give order to a muddle of medieval buildings before the expected visit of Emperor Charles V, and the artist answered with a complete piece of stage design: a trapezoid space enclosed by three palaces, entered up a ramp, with a single ancient statue at its centre. He also turned the hill around. The Capitol had faced the Forum, the heart of ancient Rome; Michelangelo's square looks the other way, towards the city of the popes and St Peter's.

    Did you know? Before Michelangelo's redesign the neglected hilltop was nicknamed the "goat hill", because goats were grazed there among the ruins.

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17. 17 Praça do Comércio, Lisbon

    Portugal · 2.1 km from Lisbon38.708° N 9.136° W

    

    Lisbon's grandest square opens directly onto the Tagus estuary, a vast arcaded courtyard of yellow façades with one side left open to the water. Praça do Comércio, still widely called Terreiro do Paço, the Palace Yard, covers roughly 175 by 175 metres, making it one of the largest squares in Portugal, and it was built as a deliberate statement of a city rising again after catastrophe.

    Did you know? The bronze horse of José I's statue tramples snakes beneath its hooves, a symbolic image of the king overcoming his enemies.

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18. 18 Plaza de España

    Spain · 3.2 km from Seville37.377° N 5.987° W

    

    Seville built the Plaza de España to impress the Spanish-speaking world, and a century later it still does. It was the showpiece of the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929, laid out on the edge of the María Luisa Park by the Sevillian architect Aníbal González, who began work in 1914. When he left the project in 1926 others carried it to completion, among them Vicente Traver, and the ensemble was inaugurated in the spring of 1929. The result is a vast half-ellipse of exposed brick opening towards the park, covering around five hectares, its two arms ending in tall towers that give the whole a baroque silhouette.

    Did you know? The two towers that close the arms of the half-ellipse each rise about 70 metres.

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19. 19 Piazza dell'Anfiteatro

    Italy · 16.3 km from Pisa43.845° N 10.506° E

    

    From the air, Lucca's Piazza dell'Anfiteatro reads like a fingerprint of Roman engineering: a closed oval of tall, pastel-coloured houses whose curving back walls trace exactly the line of the arena that stood here almost two thousand years ago. Standing in the middle, there are no straight streets in sight — only a continuous ring of façades, shutters and ground-floor shops, broken by four arched passages at the ends of the ellipse. A cross cut into a paving stone marks the centre, where the axes between the four gateways meet.

    Did you know? The Roman amphitheatre measured roughly 107 by 79 metres overall, around an arena of about 67 by 39 metres.

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20. 20 Piazza della Signoria

    Italy · 1.2 km from Florence43.770° N 11.256° E

    

    For more than seven centuries the Piazza della Signoria has been the political stage of Florence, and it still looks the part. The square took shape from 1268, when the victorious Guelphs razed the houses of their Ghibelline enemies and deliberately left the ground empty, which explains its irregular, angled outline: it is a space made by demolition rather than design. Excavations in the 1980s found older layers beneath the paving, including remains of Roman buildings from the colony of Florentia.

    Did you know? Michelangelo's original David stood outside the Palazzo Vecchio from 1504 until 1873, when it was moved indoors to the Accademia gallery.

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21. 21 Place de la Bourse

    France · 2.4 km from Bordeaux44.841° N 0.570° W

    

    A long run of pale stone facades opens straight onto the Garonne, and in front of it a thin sheet of water lying on the paving doubles every pilaster and roofline. The Place de la Bourse in Bordeaux was the first royal square in France to be laid out open to a river rather than enclosed by buildings, and it set the tone for the long eighteenth-century waterfront that still defines the city.

    Did you know? The Miroir d'eau holds only about two centimetres of water spread over granite slabs, just enough to turn the paving into a reflecting surface.

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22. 22 Plaza Mayor

    Plaza Mayor de Salamanca

    Spain · 0.8 km from Salamanca40.965° N 5.664° W

    

    The Plaza Mayor of Salamanca is an enclosed baroque square of golden sandstone, ringed on all four sides by arcades and three tiers of balconies, so that standing in the middle feels like being inside a single great building. At dusk the stone, quarried at nearby Villamayor, takes on the warm glow that earned Salamanca the nickname La Dorada, "the Golden City". The philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, who held a daily gathering on the terrace of the square's Café Novelty, described it as an irregular quadrilateral that is nonetheless astonishingly harmonious.

    Did you know? Bullfights were staged in the square for about a century after it was finished, continuing until the mid-nineteenth century.

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23. 23 Bhaktapur Durbar Square

    Nepal · 9.4 km from Lalitpur27.672° N 85.428° E

    

    Brick palaces with carved wooden windows, a gilded gateway, stone temples guarded by animals and multi-roofed pagodas crowd the old royal square of Bhaktapur, once counted the largest and grandest of the three Malla-era palace squares of the Kathmandu Valley. For about four centuries the square was the seat of power in the city: first of the Malla kings of Nepal, then, from the fifteenth century, of the independent Kingdom of Bhaktapur, until the city fell to the Gorkhali forces in 1769.

    Did you know? A palace window in the square, displayed in 1706, is recorded as the first use of glass panes in a window anywhere in Nepal.

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24. 24 Great Market

    Rynek Wielki

    Poland50.717° N 23.252° E

    

    The Great Market Square of Zamość is a perfect square, 100 m on each side, enclosed by arcaded houses painted in strong colours and dominated by a Mannerist town hall whose fan-shaped double staircase spills out onto the paving. It is the centrepiece of one of the most complete Renaissance towns in Europe, a city planned on paper and built in a single sweep at the end of the 16th century.

    Did you know? Two main axes cross the town plan through the Great Market Square, about 600 metres long from east to west and 400 metres from north to south.

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25. 25 Náměstí Zachariáše z Hradce

    Czech Republic · 25.8 km from Jihlava49.184° N 15.454° E

    

    The main square of Telč is a long plaza lined on both sides by burghers' houses that stand gable to gable, each with an arcaded ground floor and a tall decorative front, no two quite alike. Overlooked by a Renaissance château and set between fishponds in the Křižanov Highlands of Moravia, it is a remarkably well-conserved ensemble of Renaissance and Baroque houses, and the heart of a town inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1992.

    Did you know? According to local tradition, the founding of Telč is linked to a victory of the Moravian prince Otto II over the Bohemian Břetislav in 1099.

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