The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in Europe
109 places in 27 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments in Europe are Castel Sant'Angelo (Italy), Trajan's Column (Italy) and Fernsehturm Berlin (Germany). The list covers 109 squares, streets and monuments in 27 countries. Italy has the most, with 22. Last updated 14 October 2026.
European cities are layered: Roman monuments reused by medieval popes and princes, market squares laid out by merchant towns, Baroque fountains and staircases, iron towers of the industrial age and memorials to the wars of the 20th century, all standing within walking distance of one another. Public space here was designed to be lived in and looked at, and many squares still keep the shape of something older beneath them.
Rome alone spans much of that story. Castel Sant'Angelo began as the mausoleum of Hadrian and became a papal fortress; Trajan's Column winds a spiral frieze of the Dacian Wars around its shaft; the Arch of Constantine reuses reliefs from earlier imperial monuments; and Piazza Navona keeps the long oval of the Stadium of Domitian, with Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers at its centre. On the Atlantic coast of Galicia, the Tower of Hercules is a Roman lighthouse still in use.
Later centuries bring Kraków's Main Market Square with its Renaissance Cloth Hall, the Walhalla, a Doric hall of fame raised by Ludwig I of Bavaria above the Danube, and the Eiffel Tower, built in wrought iron for the 1889 World's Fair. Berlin contributes two contrasting landmarks: the Fernsehturm, the television tower with a steel sphere above Alexanderplatz, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of concrete stelae by Peter Eisenman. In Prague, the Dancing House by Frank Gehry and Vlado Milunić leans like a couple in mid-step beside the Vltava.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Castel Sant'Angelo | Castle | Italy | |
| 2 | Trajan's Column | Sculpture | Italy | |
| 3 | Fernsehturm Berlin | Observation tower | Germany | |
| 4 | Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe | War memorial | Germany | |
| 5 | Tower of Hercules | Fortified tower | Spain | ✓ |
| 6 | Place de la Concorde | Square | France | |
| 7 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | France | ✓ |
| 8 | Arch of Constantine | Triumphal arch | Italy | |
| 9 | Cave of Altamira | Cave | Spain | ✓ |
| 10 | Dancing House | Monument | Czech Republic | |
| 11 | Piazza Navona | Square | Italy | |
| 12 | Visoki Dečani | Monastery | Kosovo | ✓ |
| 13 | Walhalla, Donaustauf | Monument | Germany | |
| 14 | Main Market Square, Kraków | Square | Poland | |
| 15 | Zytglogge | Clock tower | Switzerland | ✓ |
| 16 | Column of Marcus Aurelius | Sculpture | Italy | |
| 17 | Vittoriano (Victor Emmanuel II Monument), Rome | Monument | Italy | |
| 18 | Trevi Fountain | Sculpture | Italy | |
| 19 | Aiguille du Midi | Scenic viewpoint | France | |
| 20 | Menin Gate, Ypres | War memorial | Belgium | |
| 21 | Spanish Steps | Stairs | Italy | |
| 22 | Triumphal Arch of Orange | Triumphal arch | France | ✓ |
| 23 | Piazza del Duomo, Pisa | Square | Italy | ✓ |
| 24 | Ilinden Memorial (Makedonium), Kruševo | War memorial | North Macedonia | |
| 25 | Douaumont Ossuary | War memorial | France | |
| 26 | Roque Nublo | Rock formation | Spain | |
| 27 | Dalsnibba | Scenic viewpoint | Norway | |
| 28 | Piazza del Campo | Square | Italy | ✓ |
| 29 | Galerie Vivienne | Covered passageway | France | |
| 30 | Metropol Parasol | Scenic viewpoint | Spain |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 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.
10 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.
11 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.
12 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.
13 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.
14 Main Market Square, Kraków
Rynek Główny w Krakowie
Poland · 1.5 km from Kraków50.062° N 19.937° E
Image by autokaremcom from Pixabay The square is not an empty frame but a room full of furniture. Down the middle runs the Cloth Hall, the Sukiennice, a long Gothic market hall rebuilt in the Renaissance style in 1555, when it gained its crest of an arcaded attic parapet lined with carved grotesque masks. Beside it stands the lone Town Hall Tower, all that remains of the old town hall.
Did you know? After a fire in 1555 the Cloth Hall was rebuilt by Giovanni il Mosca of Padua, while its arcades were added only in the nineteenth century.
15 Zytglogge
Switzerland · 3.8 km from Bern46.948° N 7.448° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Karlheinz Klingbeil · CC BY 4.0 5 m high with a sweeping late-Gothic spire, dates largely from a Baroque remodelling of 1770–1771, and the facades carry large clock faces on both sides. The west face bears Victor Surbek's 1929 fresco "Beginning of Time". The real attraction is on the east side, towards the old town: an astronomical clock in the form of an astrolabe, whose dial shows the hour, the day of the week, the month, the sign of the zodiac and the phase of the moon.
Did you know? As a 14th-century women's prison, the tower held women convicted of sexual relations with priests.
16 Column of Marcus Aurelius
Colonna di Marco Aurelio
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.901° N 12.480° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 The relief spirals 21 times around the shaft. It begins with the army crossing the Danube and then follows the campaigns in scene after scene. Compared with Trajan's Column, the carving is cut deeper, with more drilling and stronger contrasts of light and shadow, and the heads are enlarged so that expressions can be read from below.
17 Vittoriano (Victor Emmanuel II Monument), Rome
Vittoriano
Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.895° N 12.483° E
Image by serghei_topor from Pixabay Sacconi drew on Hellenistic sanctuaries such as the Altar of Pergamon, and the monument works like a sequence of ascending platforms. At its centre, the bronze equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel II by Enrico Chiaradia rides above the Altare della Patria, the Altar of the Fatherland, where the goddess Roma, carved by Angelo Zanelli stands at the heart of the composition.
Did you know? Clearing the site meant demolishing the Aracoeli convent along with the sixteenth-century Tower of Paul III.
18 Trevi Fountain
Fontana di Trevi
Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.901° N 12.483° E
Image by jdegheest from Pixabay The fountain as you see it today took decades longer than expected to build. Pope Clement XII opened a design competition in 1730; Nicola Salvi won it, broke ground in 1732, and died in 1751 before the work was done — it was finally finished by Giuseppe Pannini in 1762.
Did you know? The colossal central figure of Oceanus was carved by Pietro Bracci.
19 Aiguille du Midi
France · 36.8 km from Aosta45.879° N 6.888° E
Image by Simon from Pixabay The cable car that makes this possible was first proposed around 1909 but did not open until 1955, when it was the highest cable car in the world, a title it held for about two decades. It still has the greatest vertical rise of any cable car: from Chamonix at 1,035 metres to the top station at 3,777 metres, the rest of the way to the summit by lift.
Did you know? At its opening its upper section, about 3 kilometres without a single pylon, made it the highest and longest cable car in the world.
20 Menin Gate, Ypres
Menenpoort
Belgium · 25.9 km from Lille50.852° N 2.891° E
FrDr · CC BY-SA 4.0 The gate stands where the road left the walled town for Menin and the battlefields beyond, the route taken by hundreds of thousands of soldiers marching into the Ypres Salient during the First World War. Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield as a monumental arch with a long barrel-vaulted hall, it was built by the Imperial War Graves Commission and unveiled by Field Marshal Herbert Plumer on 24 July 1927.
Did you know? Two stone lions that flanked the old town gateway before the war were given to Australia in 1936 and now guard the Australian War Memorial.
21 Spanish Steps
Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti
Italy · 0.9 km from Rome41.906° N 12.483° E
Image by Leonhard_Niederwimmer from Pixabay The staircase takes the idea of terraced garden steps and inflates it to the scale of a city. More than 130 travertine steps split, curve, gather on landings and divide again, so that the view changes at every turn and the church at the top seems to grow as you approach.
Did you know? The divided, symmetrical flights borrow from Bramante's stairs for the Belvedere Courtyard and Michelangelo's shaped steps in the Laurentian Library vestibule.
22 Triumphal Arch of Orange
Arc antique d'Orange
France44.142° N 4.805° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Xavier D'ABRIGEON · CC BY-SA 4.0 Its date is still debated. Current research that accepts the evidence of its inscription places it in the reign of Augustus, built to honour the veterans of the Gallic Wars and the Second Legion; it was later rededicated under Tiberius to celebrate the victories of Germanicus on the Rhine, with an inscription to the emperor in AD 27.
Did you know? A single bronze letter L from the lost dedication was found in the 19th century and then mislaid; only the fixing holes survive.
23 Piazza del Duomo, Pisa
Piazza dei Miracoli
Italy · 0.5 km from Pisa43.723° N 10.395° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Pauline_17 from Pixabay The cathedral came first, begun in 1064 to designs by the architect Buscheto, whose tomb is set into the facade. Its front is layered with open arcaded galleries, and worshippers have traditionally entered not through the main doors but through the Porta di San Ranieri facing the tower, whose bronze panels Bonanno Pisano made around 1180.
Did you know? Cimabue's head of Saint John in the apse mosaic was his last known work before his death in Pisa.
24 Ilinden Memorial (Makedonium), Kruševo
Споменик „Илинден“
North Macedonia · 38.3 km from Bitola41.377° N 21.248° E
Марјан Петковски · CC BY-SA 3.0 It commemorates two moments of Macedonian history. The first is the Ilinden Uprising against Ottoman rule, launched on 2 August 1903, the feast of St Elijah, during which insurgents proclaimed the short-lived Kruševo Republic in this town; it lasted less than two weeks before being crushed. The second is the partisan struggle of the Second World War.
Did you know? The four great windows of the dome each look towards a place tied to the uprising, among them the Sliva memorial, Mečkin Kamen and the Pelagonia plain.
25 Douaumont Ossuary
Ossuaire de Douaumont
France49.208° N 5.424° E
Image by Signalschwarz from Pixabay The idea came from Charles Ginisty, Bishop of Verdun, who wanted a resting place for the remains that were being found across the battlefield in the years after the war. The building was designed by the architects Léon Azéma, Max Edrei and Jacques Hardy and inaugurated on 7 August 1932 by President Albert Lebrun.
Did you know? Before the permanent monument, a wooden hut served as a provisional ossuary on the battlefield from 1919.
26 Roque Nublo
Spain · 23 km from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria27.971° N 15.613° W
Image by WunschbrunnenEla from Pixabay That texture tells how it was made. 4 million years ago. Softer material around it has washed away over the ages, leaving the hardened core standing alone, with smaller companions nearby: the slender Roque del Fraile, "the Friar", and the rounded formation called La Rana, "the Frog". Long before hikers arrived, the island's pre-Hispanic inhabitants treated the rock as a place of worship.
Did you know? Since 2019 the rock has been part of the UNESCO cultural landscape of Risco Caído and the Sacred Mountains of Gran Canaria.
27 Dalsnibba
Norway62.049° N 7.269° E
Image by IK3 from Pixabay The summit plateau has an austere beauty of its own. Snow lingers here well into summer, and to the south-east lies Djupvatnet, a lake cupped in the bare rock. Across the valley the Blåbreen glacier shows white against dark mountainsides. Since the Geiranger Skywalk was built at the top, visitors can stand on a platform of open steel grating with glass rails, projecting over a drop of about 500 metres.
Did you know? The road was formally opened in July 1948 by transport minister Nils Langhelle, timed with the visit of Stella Polaris, the first tourist ship to reach Geiranger after the war.
28 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.
29 Galerie Vivienne
France · 1.4 km from Paris48.867° N 2.340° E
Mbzt · CC BY 3.0 It was built in 1823 for Marchoux, president of the Chamber of Notaries, on the site of an old town house, to plans by the architect Delannoy, and opened in 1826 under its founder's name before taking the name of the street it opens onto.
Did you know? The floor and reliefs use emblems of commerce such as caducei, anchors, cornucopias, laurel wreaths and sheaves of wheat.
30 Metropol Parasol
Spain · 1.7 km from Seville37.393° N 5.992° W
Anual · CC BY-SA 4.0 , who won an international competition held in 2004 against 65 rival entries. Its history is bound up with the square itself. A market hall stood on the Plaza de la Encarnación from the nineteenth century until it was demolished in the mid-twentieth, and the site then lay empty for decades. In 1990 work on a new market and car park uncovered Roman and Moorish remains, halting the project.
Did you know? Work on an earlier car park scheme was halted in the 1990s after some 14 million euros had been spent, once Roman and Moorish ruins appeared.
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 squares, streets and monuments in Europe?
- On our list, Castel Sant'Angelo (Italy) ranks first, followed by Trajan's Column (Italy) and Fernsehturm Berlin (Germany).
- Which country has the most squares, streets and monuments in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (22), France (16) and Spain (13).
- Why is Piazza Navona in Rome oval?
- The square follows the outline of the Stadium of Domitian, built in the 1st century AD for athletic contests. Houses were later built on the stadium's seating, preserving its long rounded shape.
- What was Castel Sant'Angelo originally?
- It was built as the mausoleum of Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century AD. Popes later turned it into a fortress and refuge linked to the Vatican by a fortified passage.
- Is the Tower of Hercules still a working lighthouse?
- Yes. The Roman lighthouse at A Coruña, dating from the 1st or 2nd century AD and refaced in the 18th century, is the oldest Roman lighthouse still in use and a UNESCO World Heritage site.
- How many squares, streets and monuments are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 109 squares, streets and monuments in 27 countries. Italy has the most, with 22.