The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in Spain
13 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments in Spain are Tower of Hercules, Cave of Altamira and Roque Nublo. The list covers 13 squares, streets and monuments. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Spain's monuments record a long succession of peoples: Romans on the Atlantic coast, Muslim rulers whose palaces and gardens were reused by Christian kings, Gothic cathedral builders, Habsburg town planners and 20th-century architects who rethought public space. Add the volcanic islands of the Canaries, and the range runs from Roman stone to lava rock.
The Tower of Hercules at A Coruña is the only Roman lighthouse still working. In Zaragoza the Aljafería was built in the 11th century as the palace of an Islamic ruler and later became a residence of the kings of Aragon, and in Seville the Royal Alcázar layers Mudéjar courts, tiles and gardens. León Cathedral is famous for its stained glass, which fills so much of the walls that the interior seems made of light.
The squares range across centuries. Madrid's Plaza Mayor, completed in the 17th century, encloses an arcaded rectangle around an equestrian statue of Philip III. Seville's Plaza de España, built for the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929, curves around a canal with tiled alcoves for the provinces of Spain, and the same city's Metropol Parasol spreads a vast timber canopy over a square of the old town. In Córdoba, the narrow Calleja de las Flores frames the bell tower of the Mezquita between whitewashed walls hung with flowerpots. On Gran Canaria, Roque Nublo stands as a volcanic monolith above the island's centre, and on Lanzarote César Manrique's Mirador del Río is built into a cliff facing the island of La Graciosa.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tower of Hercules | Fortified tower | ✓ |
| 2 | Cave of Altamira | Cave | ✓ |
| 3 | Roque Nublo | Rock formation | |
| 4 | Metropol Parasol | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 5 | León Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 6 | Aljafería | Palace | ✓ |
| 7 | Plaza de España | Square | |
| 8 | Royal Alcázar of Seville | Palace | ✓ |
| 9 | Palacio Episcopal de Astorga | Palace | ✓ |
| 10 | Mirador del Río | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 11 | Antequera Dolmens Site | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 12 | Plaza Mayor | Square | |
| 13 | Calleja de las Flores | Pedestrian street |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 León Cathedral
Catedral de Santa María de Regla de León
Spain · 2.2 km from León42.599° N 5.567° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TerapiasNaturales from Pixabay The site has been sacred and royal for a very long time. The Roman Seventh Legion built baths here, whose remains lie beneath the floor; the baths became a palace, and in the tenth century King Ordoño II gave it up for the first cathedral after a victory over the Moors; his tomb is still inside. A Romanesque church followed in the eleventh century.
Did you know? The walnut choir stalls, carved between 1461 and 1481, are among the oldest in Spain and include satirical everyday scenes.
06 Aljafería
Spain · 0.9 km from Zaragoza41.656° N 0.897° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Pixels4Free from Pixabay Behind a severe ring of walls and towers the palace opens onto the Patio de Santa Isabel, a courtyard with pools and porticoes where the taifa architects pushed the arch to its limits. Mixtilinear and multilobed arches cross and interlace until they read more like lace than masonry, and the plaster is carved into dense geometric and vegetal patterns.
Did you know? The Troubadour Tower could originally be entered only through a small raised door reached by a portable ladder.
07 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.
08 Royal Alcázar of Seville
Spain · 2.5 km from Seville37.384° N 5.991° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Danor from Pixabay The site began as a fortress around 913–914, under the Umayyad rulers of al-Andalus. Later Islamic dynasties enlarged it, and the Almohads, who made Seville their capital in the twelfth century, built a whole cluster of palaces here.
Did you know? The courtyard's Renaissance upper storey was added for Charles V between 1540 and 1572, to designs by Luis de Vega.
09 Palacio Episcopal de Astorga
Spain42.458° N 6.056° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Elgamizzzz · CC BY-SA 4.0 The old palace burned down in 1886. Bishop Joan Baptista Grau, who like Gaudí came from the Catalan town of Reus and had known him since his years in Tarragona, gave the commission to his friend. Busy in Barcelona with the Palau Güell and the early Sagrada Família, Gaudí first designed the building from photographs and drawings sent to him from Astorga.
Did you know? Although built as a bishop's residence, the palace was never actually lived in by a bishop.
10 Mirador del Río
Spain · 27.8 km from Arrecife29.214° N 13.481° W
Image by lapping from Pixabay What those eyes look onto is El Río, the strait that separates Lanzarote from La Graciosa, about two kilometres wide. The small island lies spread out below, and on clear days the view runs on past it to the islets of Montaña Clara and Roque del Oeste and, furthest out, Alegranza, together the Chinijo Archipelago. At the foot of the cliff lies one of the oldest salt marshes in the Canary Islands.
Did you know? Lamps in the café take their shapes from the prickly pear cactus, alongside a symbolic mural on the café wall.
11 Antequera Dolmens Site
Spain · 35.5 km from Málaga37.023° N 4.548° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ELG21 from Pixabay The second dolmen, Viera, stands only some 70 metres from Menga: a long, narrow corridor of upright slabs leading to a small square chamber, aligned, like most European dolmens, toward the rising sun. The third monument, the Tholos of El Romeral, belongs to a later age and a different tradition.
Did you know? The Antequera Dolmens Site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016.
12 Plaza Mayor
Plaza Mayor de Salamanca
Spain · 0.8 km from Salamanca40.965° N 5.664° W
muffinn from Worcester, UK · CC BY 2.0 The square replaced a much larger, informal marketplace that had grown up outside a gate in the town walls next to the church of San Martín. Pushed by the royal magistrate Rodrigo Caballero, the city decided to build a regular plaza in the manner of Madrid's, and the design went to the architect Alberto de Churriguera, of the family that gave its name to the exuberant Spanish late-baroque style.
Did you know? For the square's 250th anniversary in 2005, nine new medallions were carved on the city-hall side, including allegories of Spain's First and Second Republics.
13 Calleja de las Flores
Spain · 0.8 km from Córdoba37.880° N 4.780° W
Jorge Franganillo · CC BY 4.0 The alley began life as part of an old Cordoban courtyard house, the kind of inward-looking patio the city is known for, and only gradually became a public passage. Local memory credits a neighbour named Felisa with hanging the first flowerpots on the walls in September 1939.
Did you know? The cobbled paving of today replaced plain cement slabs, and a capital from the caliphal period was set at the corner where the lane begins.
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 Spain?
- On our list, Tower of Hercules ranks first, followed by Cave of Altamira and Roque Nublo.
- Why is it called the Tower of Hercules?
- A legend says Hercules defeated the giant Geryon on this spot and buried his head there, ordering a city to be built over it. The tower itself is a Roman lighthouse, and the legend appears on the coat of arms of A Coruña.
- What do the alcoves of Seville's Plaza de España represent?
- Each of the tiled benches around the plaza represents a province of Spain, with a painted map and a scene from its history. The plaza was designed by Aníbal González for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition.
- Who designed the Mirador del Río?
- The Lanzarote artist and architect César Manrique built it into the Risco de Famara cliff in the 1970s, on the site of an old gun battery, so that it almost disappears into the rock.
- How many squares, streets and monuments are on this list in Spain?
- The list covers 13 squares, streets and monuments.