The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in the World
173 places in 48 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments in the world are Taj Mahal (India), Naqsh-e Jahan Square (Iran) and Chand Baori (India). The list covers 173 squares, streets and monuments in 48 countries. Italy has the most, with 22. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Squares, streets and monuments are where a city shows its character in the open air. A great square is a room without a roof, framed by facades and given a centre by a tower, a fountain or a statue. A monument condenses a person, an event or a loss into one form that can be read from across a street. Viewpoints belong here too: the places a city or a mountain range is meant to be seen from, where the whole layout suddenly makes sense.
Among the places here is the Zytglogge in Bern, a medieval gate tower whose astronomical clock has marked the hours for five centuries. The Main Market Square in Kraków, with its Cloth Hall, is one of the largest medieval squares in Europe. The Colossi of Memnon have watched over Thebes since the reign of Amenhotep III, while Habitat 67 in Montreal and the field of stelae of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin belong to modern times.
The places here were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the section also opens into separate pages by country and by type, from squares and stairs to clock towers and memorials.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Taj Mahal | Mausoleum | India | ✓ |
| 2 | Naqsh-e Jahan Square | Square | Iran | ✓ |
| 3 | Chand Baori | Stepwell | India | |
| 4 | Plaza de España | Square | Spain | |
| 5 | Registan | Square | Uzbekistan | ✓ |
| 6 | Grand-Place | Square | Belgium | ✓ |
| 7 | Hungarian Parliament Building | Monument | Hungary | |
| 8 | Patan Durbar Square | Square | Nepal | |
| 9 | Piazza del Campo | Square | Italy | ✓ |
| 10 | Leshan Giant Buddha | Sculpture | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 11 | Mount Rushmore | Monument | United States | |
| 12 | Castel Sant'Angelo | Castle | Italy | |
| 13 | Trajan's Column | Sculpture | Italy | |
| 14 | Fernsehturm Berlin | Observation tower | Germany | |
| 15 | Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe | War memorial | Germany | |
| 16 | Gateway of India | Triumphal arch | India | |
| 17 | Tower of Hercules | Fortified tower | Spain | ✓ |
| 18 | Place de la Concorde | Square | France | |
| 19 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | France | ✓ |
| 20 | Arch of Constantine | Triumphal arch | Italy | |
| 21 | Cave of Altamira | Cave | Spain | ✓ |
| 22 | Dancing House | Monument | Czech Republic | |
| 23 | Space Needle | Observation tower | United States | |
| 24 | Colossi of Memnon | Sculpture | Egypt | |
| 25 | Hiroshima Peace Memorial | War memorial | Japan | ✓ |
| 26 | Piazza Navona | Square | Italy | |
| 27 | Visoki Dečani | Monastery | Kosovo | ✓ |
| 28 | Walhalla, Donaustauf | Monument | Germany | |
| 29 | Terracotta Army | Archaeological site | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 30 | Habitat 67 | Monument | Canada |
01 Taj Mahal
India · 2.9 km from Agra27.175° N 78.042° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Taj_Mahal,_Agra,_India_edit2.jpg : Yann ; edited by King of Hearts derivative work: Jbarta ( talk ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 One story that does not hold up: the popular claim that Shah Jahan had the masons' hands cut off, or the architect blinded, afterward so the design could never be copied.
Did you know? Craftsmen inlaid 28 kinds of precious and semi-precious stone into the white marble using the pietra dura technique.
02 Naqsh-e Jahan Square
Iran · 5.2 km from Isfahan32.658° N 51.677° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Amir Pashaei · CC BY-SA 4.0 Each side holds something different. To the south stands the Shah Mosque, the vast Friday mosque with the largest dome in the city; its entrance faces the square, but the building behind it swings round at an angle to face Mecca, a turn you make almost without noticing as you pass through the portal. On the east side is the smaller Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, the first of the four to be built and intended as the royal court's private mosque.
Did you know? In Safavid times a water channel ran along all four sides of the square, bordered by stone walkways.
03 Chand Baori
India27.007° N 76.606° E
Chainwit. · CC BY-SA 4.0 Stepwells were the answer of dry western India to a hard problem — how to reach water whose level swung wildly between monsoon and drought. Rather than lower a bucket, you walked down to it, and the deep shaded well also stayed several degrees cooler than the air above, making it a place to gather in summer heat.
Did you know? Besides The Fall, the well has served as a location for Indian films including Paheli, Bhool Bhulaiyaa and Bhoomi.
04 Plaza de España
Spain · 3.2 km from Seville37.377° N 5.987° W
Image by AdamHillTravel from Pixabay The style is Spanish Regionalism at full volume — Renaissance and Baroque revival, neo-Mudéjar brickwork and a touch of the 1920s mixed without apology — but the real subject is Seville's own ceramics.
Did you know? During the Spanish Civil War, rooms in the basement of the building were used as prisons.
05 Registan
Uzbekistan · 3.1 km from Samarkand39.655° N 66.976° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC0 The oldest of the three buildings, on the western side, is the madrasa of Ulugh Beg, raised between 1417 and 1420 by Timur's grandson, the ruler-astronomer who is said to have lectured there himself. Its great arched portal is covered with geometric ornament in glazed brick and mosaic, and in the fifteenth century it counted among the leading places of learning in the Muslim East.
Did you know? The Ulugh Beg madrasa measures about 56 by 81 metres, with a minaret some 33 metres high at each corner and around fifty student cells.
06 Grand-Place
Belgium · 2 km from Brussels50.847° N 4.353° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay On the south side stands the Town Hall, built in stages between 1401 and 1455. 7 m gilded statue of St Michael slaying the devil. Opposite, the King's House was built for the dukes of Brabant, although no king ever lived there; its Dutch name, Broodhuis or "bread house", recalls the bread market that stood on the site. Its present form is a romantic neo-Gothic rebuilding of 1874–96, and it houses the Brussels City Museum.
Did you know? The 1853 demolition of the Star guildhall to make way for a horse tram shocked Brussels, prompting mayor Charles Buls to restore the whole square.
07 Hungarian Parliament Building
Országház
Hungary · 2.8 km from Budapest47.507° N 19.046° E
Image by Hermann from Pixabay The design came from an international competition won by Imre Steindl. His Gothic Revival scheme, symmetrical and crowned by a Renaissance Revival dome, was chosen partly because it echoed the Palace of Westminster in London, a sign of the parliamentary ambitions of a nation that had recently won self-government within the Habsburg monarchy; Steindl also drew on Vienna's neo-Gothic City Hall.
Did you know? The gold used in the decoration is 22 to 23 carat, and there are 90 statues on the outside walls and 152 inside.
08 Patan Durbar Square
Nepal · 1 km from Lalitpur27.673° N 85.326° E
Image by 10914001 from Pixabay Look first at the Krishna Mandir, built in the seventeenth century under Siddhi Narsingh Malla. Unlike the pagoda roofs around it, it is a stone temple in the shikhara style, a cluster of small pavilions climbing to a central spire, and the friezes along its upper storeys narrate scenes from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in tiny carved figures.
Did you know? The Taleju temple, shrine of the Malla kings' personal goddess, was built in 1640 and rebuilt in 1667 after a fire.
09 Piazza del Campo
Italy · 1.5 km from Siena43.318° N 11.331° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Zotx from Pixabay The square grew from an open space on a slope where the three hill communities that merged to form Siena met. It served as market, meeting place and arena long before it was formalised. Medieval Siena was a rich, self-governing city-state and Florence's great rival, and its government made the Campo a statement of civic pride.
Did you know? The tower is said to have been built to the same height as Siena Cathedral, a sign that civic and church power stood as equals.
10 Leshan Giant Buddha
People's Republic of China · 4.4 km from Leshan29.547° N 103.769° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by christels from Pixabay The statue was begun in the early eighth century by a monk named Hai Tong, who hoped the Buddha's presence would calm the currents that wrecked boats at the confluence. Tradition says that when funding for the work was threatened, he gouged out his own eyes to prove his sincerity.
Did you know? Seen from the river, the hills around the statue are said to form the outline of a reclining Buddha more than a kilometre long.
11 Mount Rushmore
United States · 29 km from Rapid City43.879° N 103.459° W
Dean Franklin · Public domain The scale of the physical work is easy to understate. Borglum and his son Lincoln oversaw roughly 400 workers, many of them former miners, over fourteen years from 1927 to 1941. They used dynamite to remove the bulk of the rock, then switched to jackhammers and hand tools for the finer carving, ultimately blasting and chiselling away about 450,000 tons of granite to reveal the faces underneath.
Did you know? The granite is so hard that it is estimated to erode only about one inch every 10,000 years.
12 Castel Sant'Angelo
Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.903° N 12.466° E
Image by rainhard2 from Pixabay Its current name comes from a specific legend: in 590 CE, during a plague, Pope Gregory the Great is said to have seen the Archangel Michael appear on the summit sheathing his sword — read as a sign the epidemic was ending. A statue of the angel has stood on top ever since, and the building has cycled through duty as papal residence, state prison, and now museum, on top of its original job as a tomb.
Did you know? When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, looters scattered the imperial urns and their ashes.
13 Trajan's Column
Colonna Traiana
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.896° N 12.484° E
Raffaele pagani · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes the column unique is the frieze: a single band of relief about 190 m long that winds 23 times around the shaft, carrying 155 scenes and more than 2,600 figures. The lower half tells the first war, the upper half the second, separated by a winged Victory writing on a shield. Surprisingly little of it is battle.
Did you know? Of the 224 trees carved on the frieze, 48 are shown being chopped down, an image scholars read as a symbol of conquest.
14 Fernsehturm Berlin
Berliner Fernsehturm
Germany · 0.7 km from Berlin52.521° N 13.409° E
Image by BernardoUPloud from Pixabay The sphere produced an unintended joke. When the sun strikes its tiled stainless-steel skin, the reflection forms a bright Greek cross, and Berliners nicknamed it the "Pope's Revenge", a divine answer to a state that had stripped crosses from churches.
Did you know? A new antenna tip fitted in 1997 added three metres to the tower, bringing it from 365 to its present 368 metres.
15 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas
Germany · 1.8 km from Berlin52.514° N 13.379° E
Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 The design is by the New York architect Peter Eisenman. It grew out of a second competition in 1997, originally as a joint entry with the sculptor Richard Serra, who later withdrew. The Bundestag voted for it in June 1999 after a decade of public argument that began with a citizens' initiative led by the journalist Lea Rosh and the historian Eberhard Jäckel.
Did you know? Construction cost roughly 25 million euros, and over 3.5 million people visited in the first year.
16 Gateway of India
India · 16.8 km from Mumbai18.922° N 72.835° E
Image by prabhdeep567 from Pixabay Architect George Wittet designed it in the Indo-Saracenic style, deliberately fusing Gothic structural bones with Hindu- and Islamic-derived surface ornament — a visual argument, intentional or not, about what British rule in India was supposed to look like. It took until 1924 to complete, using yellow basalt quarried locally and reinforced concrete, with a central dome rising 26 metres on four turrets.
Did you know? The central dome measures about 15 metres across, and halls on either side of the arch can each hold around 600 people.
17 Tower of Hercules
Torre de Hércules
Spain · 6.3 km from A Coruña43.386° N 8.406° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez (Lmbuga) · CC BY-SA 3.0 What's easy to miss standing in front of it is that you're looking at two buildings stacked on top of each other.
Did you know? The 18th-century restoration was carried out by the naval engineer Eustaquio Giannini, and UNESCO later singled it out as exemplary for protecting the Roman core.
18 Place de la Concorde
France · 2.5 km from Paris48.866° N 2.321° E
Image by westcoast_dave from Pixabay The Revolution gave the square its darkest chapter. The king's statue was pulled down in 1792 and melted, the square was renamed Place de la Révolution, and the guillotine was set up here. Louis XVI was executed on the square in January 1793 and Marie Antoinette that October; Danton, Lavoisier and Robespierre followed. Of about 2,500 people guillotined in Paris during the Revolution, some 1,100 died here.
19 Eiffel Tower
Tour Eiffel
France · 4.3 km from Paris48.858° N 2.294° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay What made the design work — visually, not structurally — was a third man: architect Stephen Sauvestre, brought in to soften the raw lattice engineering into something the public might actually love.
Did you know? It was the tallest human-made structure on Earth for 41 years, until New York's Chrysler Building was completed in 1930.
20 Arch of Constantine
Arco di Costantino
Italy · 1.2 km from Rome41.890° N 12.491° E
Image by TreptowerAlex from Pixabay The arch is a collage. Much of its sculpture was taken from earlier monuments to three of the best-remembered emperors of the 2nd century: Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. Their faces were recut as Constantine's.
Did you know? In 1534 Lorenzino de' Medici hacked heads off some of the arch's statues, and the scandal got him expelled from Rome.
21 Cave of Altamira
Cueva de Altamira
Spain · 25.7 km from Santander43.383° N 4.117° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by janeb13 from Pixabay The Polychrome Ceiling of the main hall shows a herd of extinct steppe bison in red and black, together with horses, a large doe and possibly a boar. The painters used charcoal, ochre and haematite, thinning the pigments to create shading, and placed each animal so that the natural bulges of the rock became its shoulders and flanks, giving the figures a sculptural volume.
22 Dancing House
Tančící dům
Czech Republic · 1.4 km from Prague50.076° N 14.414° E
Image by pierre9x6 from Pixabay The site has its own history. An apartment building stood here until it was destroyed in the American bombing of Prague in 1945, and the plot lay empty for decades. Next door lived the family of Václav Havel; Milunić, his neighbour, had discussed an idea for the gap as early as 1986, and after the Velvet Revolution made Havel president, the project gained momentum.
Did you know? The building has nine floors above ground and two underground, with almost 3,800 square metres of interior space.
23 Space Needle
United States · 3.4 km from Seattle47.620° N 122.349° W
Image by Sebastian_127 from Pixabay The tower was built to withstand winds of 200 mph and very strong earthquakes, and it rode out the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. The saucer at the top held revolving restaurants for decades. A renovation completed in 2018 replaced the observation windows with floor-to-ceiling glass, closer to the original 1962 sketches, and created the Loupe, an indoor deck with a revolving glass floor that looks straight down the structure.
Did you know? The saucer's revolving restaurant was balanced so finely that a single small electric motor of under one kilowatt could turn it.
24 Colossi of Memnon
Egypt · 4.6 km from Luxor25.721° N 32.611° E
MusikAnimal · CC BY-SA 4.0 An earthquake in 27 BC cracked the northern statue across the waist, and not long afterward it started making a sound each morning around sunrise — most likely dew evaporating through the newly fractured stone as the day warmed.
Did you know? Exactly 107 ancient inscriptions survive on the statues: 61 in Greek, 45 in Latin and one bilingual, dated between about AD 20 and 250.
25 Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Japan · 1.3 km from Hiroshima34.396° N 132.454° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
DXR · CC BY-SA 4.0 After the war, many in Hiroshima wanted the ruin cleared away; others argued it should remain as a memorial. As the Peace Memorial Park took shape around it between 1950 and 1964, the Dome stayed, and in 1966 the city council resolved to preserve it permanently. The mayor, Shinzo Hamai, raised money in Japan and abroad, at one point collecting donations on the streets of Tokyo.
Did you know? When it opened, Hiroshima was a city of mostly two-storey wooden houses, so Letzel's large building immediately became a striking landmark.
26 Piazza Navona
Italy · 0.7 km from Rome41.899° N 12.473° E
Krzysztof Golik · CC BY-SA 4.0 The square as we see it is the work of one papacy. Innocent X, whose family palace faced the arena, turned it into a Baroque showpiece in the mid-seventeenth century. At the centre rises Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers of 1651, crowned by the Obelisk of Domitian, which was brought over in pieces from the Circus of Maxentius.
Did you know? Bernini's four river gods stand for the Nile, Danube, Ganges and Río de la Plata, the continents reached by papal authority.
27 Visoki Dečani
Manastiri i Deçanit
Kosovo · 13.1 km from Pejë42.547° N 20.266° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Pudelek (Marcin Szala) · CC BY-SA 3.0 Vito brought the Romanesque and Gothic habits of the Adriatic coast to an Orthodox commission. The walls are laid in alternating bands of pale and pinkish marble, and the portals, windows and capitals carry carved sculpture of a kind rarely seen on Byzantine-rite churches. Inside, the plan is a five-aisled nave with a three-part iconostasis and a spacious narthex, and nearly every surface is painted.
Did you know? The craftsmen who built the monastery were jointly given a village near Prizren, still called Manastirica, where many of them settled.
28 Walhalla, Donaustauf
Walhalla
Germany · 7.7 km from Regensburg49.031° N 12.224° E
SimonWaldherr · CC BY-SA 4.0 The name comes from Norse myth, where Valhalla is the hall of fallen heroes, and the interior carries the idea through. The hall, clad in marble inside and out, holds about 130 busts and 65 plaques commemorating figures spanning two thousand years, beginning with Arminius, victor over the Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest.
Did you know? At the opening on 18 October 1842 there were 96 busts plus 64 plaques for people of whom no reliable likeness survived.
29 Terracotta Army
People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by artemtation from Pixabay What makes the find keep giving up new detail is that no two soldiers are alike. Heads were sculpted separately from the mass-produced bodies, which let craftsmen vary hairstyle, facial features, ear shape and expression figure by figure across a workforce of thousands — more than 8,000 figures are believed to exist in total, of which just over 2,000 have been excavated from three pits so far, leaving an estimated 6,000 still underground.
Did you know? Legs were built much like terracotta drainage pipes, and heads, arms and torsos were made separately before assembly.
30 Habitat 67
Canada · 3.2 km from Montreal45.500° N 73.544° W
Image by ifinnsson from Pixabay The complex was built as a pavilion and housing showcase for Expo 67, the World's Fair held in Montreal from April to October 1967. 3 by 3 metres. Combined in different ways, they originally formed 158 apartments, now 146 homes of varying sizes, rising up to twelve storeys. Each home has at least one private garden terrace laid out on the roof of the unit below, and the stacking leaves gaps through which light and views pass between the blocks.
Did you know? Every apartment was originally fitted with a moulded plastic bathroom and a modular kitchen, in keeping with the idea of factory-made housing.
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 is the most beautiful square in Europe?
- Among squares in Europe on our list, Place de la Concorde (France) ranks first, followed by Piazza Navona (Italy) and Main Market Square, Kraków (Poland).
- Which country has the most beautiful squares and monuments?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (22), France (16) and the United States (14).
- What does Zytglogge mean?
- Zytglogge is Bernese German for "time bell". The tower was once a city gate of Bern and carries an astronomical clock from the early sixteenth century.
- How many squares, streets and monuments are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 173 squares, streets and monuments in 48 countries. Italy has the most, with 22.