The Most Beautiful Staircases in the World
13 places in 7 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful staircases in the world are Rani ki Vav (India), Spanish Steps (Italy) and Bramante Staircase (Vatican City). The list covers 13 staircases in 7 countries. Italy has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A staircase turns a change of level into an event. The great ones are shaped as much for the eye as for the foot: a double spiral that lets people ascend and descend without meeting, a Baroque cascade that climbs a hillside toward a church, a stepwell that descends into the earth in layers of carved stone. Their beauty lies in rhythm and in the way a whole building or slope is organised around movement.
Our list gathers stairs of very different kinds. The spiral staircase in the Vatican Museums winds down in a double helix beneath a glass roof. Rani ki Vav in Gujarat, an eleventh-century stepwell, descends through tiers of carved sculpture, and Chand Baori in Rajasthan drops into a deep square pit lined with zigzagging flights. The Spanish Steps in Rome climb from the Piazza di Spagna to the church of Trinità dei Monti, and in Caltagirone every riser of the stairway to Santa Maria del Monte is faced with painted ceramic tiles. The Scala Contarini del Bovolo in Venice coils up a palazzo in a tower of arches, and Livraria Lello in Porto curls its red staircase through a bookshop.
The places here were chosen for how they look and ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the collection also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rani ki Vav | Stepwell | India | |
| 2 | Spanish Steps | Stairs | Italy | |
| 3 | Bramante Staircase | Stairs | Vatican City | |
| 4 | Scala Sancta | Stairs | Italy | ✓ |
| 5 | King of Aragon's Staircase, Bonifacio | Stairs | France | |
| 6 | Livraria Lello | Stairs | Portugal | |
| 7 | Chand Baori | Stepwell | India | |
| 8 | Jacob's Ladder, Saint Helena | Stairs | United Kingdom | |
| 9 | Scala Regia (Vatican) | Stairs | Vatican City | |
| 10 | Escadaria Selarón | Stairs | Brazil | |
| 11 | Scala Contarini del Bovolo | Stairs | Italy | |
| 12 | Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, Caltagirone | Stairs | Italy | |
| 13 | Santuário de Nossa Senhora dos Remédios | Stairs | Portugal |
01 Rani ki Vav
India23.859° N 72.102° E
Kshitij Charania · CC BY-SA 4.0 Rani ki Vav, the "Queen's Stepwell" in Patan, Gujarat, is a well turned into an inverted temple. From ground level you see almost nothing; then a stone stair drops away in seven levels, about 65 metres long, 20 metres wide and 28 metres deep, through pillared pavilions and galleries crowded with carving, down to a circular shaft some 10 metres across. Descending it feels like entering a building upside down — each landing darker, cooler and more densely sculpted than the last.
Did you know? When Henry Cousens and James Burgess visited in the 1890s the stepwell was completely buried, with only the well shaft and a few pillars showing.
02 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 Spanish Steps are Rome's great outdoor staircase, climbing a steep 29-metre slope from the Piazza di Spagna to the church of Trinità dei Monti on the shoulder of the Pincian Hill. The idea is much older than the stairs: popes and French diplomats argued for generations about how to link the French church above with the square below, and a French diplomat's bequest of 1660 and Cardinal Mazarin's plans, which included an equestrian statue of Louis XIV, came to nothing. The design that was finally built came from a competition of 1717 won by Francesco de Sanctis. Work began with French money in 1721, and Pope Benedict XIII inaugurated the stairway for the Jubilee of 1725.
Did you know? In 1986 the opening of Italy's first McDonald's near the steps spurred Carlo Petrini and friends to found the group that grew into the Slow Food movement.
03 Bramante Staircase
Vatican City · 2.4 km from Rome41.906° N 12.454° E
Image by 16692474 from Pixabay Two spiral staircases in the Vatican Museums share Bramante's name, and they are four centuries apart. The original was built in 1505 by Donato Bramante inside a square tower of the Belvedere palace of Pope Innocent VIII. It is not really a staircase at all but a spiral ramp, with herringbone paving, gentle enough for pack animals and, according to tradition, for Pope Julius II to be carried up to his residence without leaving his carriage. Thirty-six granite columns ring the open core, and with each turn of the spiral the order of the columns changes, rising from Tuscan through Doric, Ionic and Corinthian to Composite at the top. The columns also slim as they climb, which makes the shaft look taller and lighter than it is. It is a textbook of classical architecture wound into a single coil.
Did you know? The modern double-helix staircase was inaugurated on 7 December 1932 as part of a new entrance to the Vatican Museums built for Pope Pius XI.
04 Scala Sancta
Scala Santa
Italy · 2.4 km from Rome41.887° N 12.507° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Miguel Hermoso Cuesta · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Scala Sancta, or Holy Stairs, is a flight of 28 marble steps in Rome which Catholic tradition holds are the steps of Pontius Pilate's praetorium in Jerusalem, climbed by Christ on the way to his trial. Medieval legend says that St Helena, mother of Constantine, brought them to Rome around 326. In the Middle Ages they were known as the Scala Pilati and led up to the old papal palace at the Lateran. When Pope Sixtus V rebuilt the Lateran in 1589, his architect Domenico Fontana put up the present building to house them: five parallel staircases leading up from a portico, with the holy stairs in the middle. Each step was moved in procession to its new position.
05 King of Aragon's Staircase, Bonifacio
Escalier du roi d'Aragon
France41.386° N 9.156° E
Myrabella · CC BY-SA 3.0 Bonifacio stands on a narrow blade of white limestone at the southern tip of Corsica, its houses pressed right up to the edge of cliffs that drop sheer into the sea. Cut diagonally down the face of those cliffs is a single stairway of 189 steps. Seen from a boat in the strait below, it shows as a thin dark slash across the pale rock; seen from its top, it is a vertiginous chute that descends about 53 metres at an angle close to 45 degrees, in places no more than 80 centimetres wide.
Did you know? Bonifacio's defenders during the 1420 siege numbered only about 250 Genoese, facing an Aragonese fleet reported at 31 ships and 23 galleys.
06 Livraria Lello
Portugal · 0.8 km from Porto41.147° N 8.615° W
Bene Riobó · CC BY-SA 4.0 Behind a narrow white facade on Rua das Carmelitas, a short walk from the Clérigos Tower, Porto hides one of the most theatrical interiors in the Iberian book trade. The shop is small, but everything in it is pulled upwards: tall dark shelves climbing to the ceiling, a gallery running around the upper floor, and at the centre a staircase that does not so much connect the two levels as perform between them — a forked, curving flight in deep red, splitting and rejoining as it rises, its carved balustrades as intricate as the bookcases around it.
Did you know? The 8-by-3.5-metre skylight above the staircase is made of 55 glass panels and was designed by the Dutch-born artist Gerardus Samuel van Krieken.
07 Chand Baori
India27.007° N 76.606° E
Chainwit. · CC BY-SA 4.0 Seen from its rim, Chand Baori barely looks like a well at all. It looks like an optical puzzle: three sides of a vast square pit are covered with thousands of narrow stone steps arranged in small zigzag flights, a crisscross pattern that drops thirteen levels towards a pool of green water at the bottom. Around 3,500 steps make up the pattern, and the eye never quite settles on where one flight ends and the next begins. It is one of the deepest and most photographed stepwells in India, and one of the oldest still standing.
Did you know? The stepwell plunges about 30 metres into the ground, which places it among the deepest and largest stepwells in India.
08 Jacob's Ladder, Saint Helena
Jacob's Ladder
United Kingdom15.926° S 5.719° W
Luke McKernan · CC BY-SA 2.0 Jacob's Ladder is a staircase that climbs straight up a mountainside. From the edge of Jamestown, the small capital of the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, 699 steps run in an unbroken line up the steep flank of Ladder Hill, rising 183 metres over a length of about 280 metres. The angle of climb varies between 39 and 41 degrees, so steep that from the bottom the top seems to hang above the town, and from the top the houses of Jamestown appear laid out in the narrow valley below like a map, with the ocean beyond.
Did you know? At its steepest the slope reaches a gradient of about 87 per cent, meaning the staircase gains almost a metre of height for every metre it advances.
09 Scala Regia (Vatican)
Scala Regia
Vatican City · 2.2 km from Rome41.903° N 12.455° E
Sailko · CC BY 3.0 The Scala Regia is the ceremonial staircase of the Vatican, linking the Apostolic Palace with St Peter's Basilica, and one of the cleverest pieces of architecture of the Roman Baroque. A stair had stood here since the early sixteenth century, built by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, but when Gian Lorenzo Bernini was asked to rebuild it for Pope Alexander VII, between 1663 and 1666, he was handed an awkward strip of ground: narrow, sloping, and squeezed between the church and the palace, with walls that were not parallel but drew closer together as they climbed.
Did you know? Bernini's Constantine was never meant for the staircase: begun in 1654, it was first planned as a free-standing statue inside St Peter's Basilica itself.
10 Escadaria Selarón
Brazil · 3.5 km from Rio de Janeiro22.915° S 43.179° W
Donatas Dabravolskas · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Escadaria Selarón is a public stairway turned into one man's life work. It climbs 215 steps and about 125 metres from the Rua Joaquim Silva in Lapa up towards the Santa Teresa hill in central Rio de Janeiro, and every riser, wall and landing is covered in fragments of tile, ceramic and mirror. The Chilean-born painter and ceramist Jorge Selarón, who had travelled and worked in dozens of countries before settling in Rio in 1983, began in 1990 by repairing the dilapidated steps in front of his house. He started with shards in blue, green and yellow — the colours of the Brazilian flag — and neighbours laughed at him.
Did you know? Before covering the stairway, Selarón claimed to have sold more than 25,000 portraits since 1977, every one showing the same pregnant woman.
11 Scala Contarini del Bovolo
Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo
Italy · 0.4 km from Venice45.435° N 12.335° E
Didier Descouens · CC BY-SA 4.0 Venice has grander staircases hidden behind palace doors, but none that turns itself inside out the way this one does. Tucked into a narrow calle near Campo Manin in the San Marco sestiere, the Contarini palace wears its stair on the outside: a slender cylindrical tower wrapped in a spiral of open arcades, each loggia climbing a little higher than the one before until the whole thing ends in a belvedere above the rooftops. Venetians called the shape a bovolo — a snail shell — and the nickname stuck so firmly that it became part of the family's name.
Did you know? In 1859 the astronomer Wilhelm Tempel used the stair's belvedere as an observing post and discovered the Merope Nebula in the Pleiades from it.
12 Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, Caltagirone
Scalinata di Santa Maria del Monte
Italy · 39.4 km from Ragusa37.239° N 14.512° E
No machine-readable author provided. Gmelfi assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain Caltagirone, a hill town in the interior of south-eastern Sicily, is known above all for its ceramics, and its great stairway is where that craft goes on public display. Laid out in 1606 under the direction of Giuseppe Giacalone, the Scala di Santa Maria del Monte climbs more than 130 metres from the lower town straight up to the church of Santa Maria del Monte at the top of the hill. It originally had 150 steps; a remodelling in 1844 left the 142 that are climbed today.
Did you know? The tiles were designed by Antonino Ragona, who gathered and adapted Sicilian motifs spanning the 10th to the 20th century.
More about Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, Caltagirone →
13 Santuário de Nossa Senhora dos Remédios
Portugal · 23.4 km from Vila Real41.092° N 7.816° W
Peregrino27 · CC BY 2.0 Above the town of Lamego in northern Portugal, a monumental stairway of 686 granite steps climbs the hillside of Monte de Santo Estêvão in nine flights to the church of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios. Seen from the town below, the zigzagging ramps, white walls and grey stone balustrades form one of the most theatrical pieces of baroque scenography in the country, a staircase designed as much to be looked at as to be climbed.
Did you know? In the Courtyard of the Kings, an obelisk about 15 metres high rises from a fountain, carried on the shoulders of four giant atlantes.
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 staircase in the world?
- On our list, Rani ki Vav (India) ranks first, followed by Spanish Steps (Italy) and Bramante Staircase (Vatican City).
- Which country has the most beautiful staircases?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (4), India (2) and Portugal (2).
- What is a stepwell?
- A stepwell is a well or reservoir reached by long flights of steps descending to the water, a form developed in western India. Rani ki Vav in Gujarat and Chand Baori in Rajasthan are among the best-known examples.
- What is a double-helix staircase?
- It is a staircase with two intertwined spirals, so people going up and people going down never cross paths. The Bramante Staircase in the Vatican is a famous example.
- How many staircases are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 13 staircases in 7 countries. Italy has the most, with 4.