The Most Beautiful Temples in the World

95 places in 31 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Angkor Wat

   Cambodia · 5.4 km from Siem Reap13.412° N 103.867° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument on Earth and the one building every Cambodian knows. It appears on the national flag. King Suryavarman II commissioned it in the first half of the 12th century as the state temple of his capital, Yaśodharapura, and dedicated it to Vishnu. It was most likely also intended as his mausoleum. The work seems to have stopped at his death, which is why some reliefs were left unfinished. Unlike almost every other temple at Angkor, it faces west.

   Did you know? The temple was built from an estimated five to ten million sandstone blocks, the heaviest weighing about 1.5 tonnes.

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2. 02 Itsukushima Shrine

   Japan · 15.2 km from Hiroshima34.296° N 132.320° E

   

   Itsukushima Shrine is built not on the island of Miyajima but in front of it, on the tidal flats of a shallow bay in the Seto Inland Sea. Its vermilion halls stand on wooden posts, joined by long roofed corridors, and when the tide comes in the water slides beneath the floors until the whole complex seems to float, with the forested slopes of the island rising behind. Some two hundred metres out in the bay stands the great O-torii gate, one of the most familiar images of Japan. The island was long held so sacred that ordinary people were not meant to set foot on it, and the shrine was placed over the water so that pilgrims need not tread on holy ground; since 1878 no births or deaths are allowed near it.

   Did you know? The great torii weighs about 60 tonnes, and some 7 tonnes of stones packed inside its top beam help hold it steady against wind and waves.

   More about Itsukushima Shrine →

3. 03 Karlskirche

   Wiener Karlskirche

   Austria · 0.7 km from Vienna48.198° N 16.372° E

   

   Vienna's most theatrical church was born of a vow. In 1713, a year after the city's last great plague, Emperor Charles VI promised a church to his namesake Saint Charles Borromeo, the Counter-Reformation archbishop venerated as a helper of plague victims. Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach won the design competition against Hildebrandt and Galli-Bibiena; building started in 1716, and after the elder Fischer died in 1723 his son Joseph Emanuel carried the work to completion in 1737, trimming the drum of the dome and adding the attic storey along the way.

   Did you know? The dome is not circular but elliptical, so it looks smaller seen from the front entrance than from the side.

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4. 04 Prambanan Temple

   Indonesia · 13.2 km from Yogyakarta City7.752° S 110.491° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Local legend explains Prambanan's scale with a story dark enough that it kept people away for centuries: Prince Bandung Bondowoso wanted to marry Princess Roro Jonggrang, who agreed only if he could build a thousand temples in a single night. With the help of spirits he very nearly managed it — so she had the villagers light fires and pound rice to fake the approach of dawn, tricking the spirits into stopping short. Furious at being outwitted, he turned her to stone as the final, thousandth temple, and locals have long identified her statue with the image of Durga inside the main shrine.

   Did you know? An inscription dated 856 records that the builders diverted a river, now the Opak, away from the main shrine and levelled its old bed to make room for more temples.

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5. 05 Bulguksa

   South Korea · 12.4 km from Gyeongju35.790° N 129.332° E

   

   Bulguksa, on the wooded slopes of Mount Toham above Gyeongju, is the clearest surviving picture of how the kingdom of Silla imagined a Buddhist paradise on earth. A small temple stood here in the sixth century, but the complex that matters was begun in 751 by the chief minister Kim Daeseong and completed by the royal court in 774, after his death. Together with the Seokguram grotto higher up the same mountain, it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995.

   Did you know? In 1966 repairers found inside Seokgatap a Buddhist dharani sutra dated between 704 and 751, among the oldest woodblock prints known anywhere.

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6. 06 Parthenon

   Παρθενώνας

   Greece · 1.6 km from Athens37.972° N 23.727° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Parthenon looks perfectly straight only because almost nothing about it actually is. The platform it stands on curves gently upward toward the centre — rising about 10 centimetres over a 70-metre side, a ratio of roughly 1 in 700 — every column bulges very slightly partway up its height (a refinement called entasis) instead of tapering in a straight line, and the columns themselves lean fractionally inward rather than standing truly vertical. None of these corrections is visible to the eye on its own; together they're generally understood to counteract optical effects that would otherwise make a building built with mathematically straight lines look subtly warped or sagging.

   Did you know? On 26 September 1687 a Venetian mortar round hit gunpowder stored inside by the Ottoman garrison, and the blast killed about 300 people.

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7. 07 Konark Sun Temple

   India · 21.7 km from Puri19.887° N 86.095° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Sun Temple at Konark, on the coast of Odisha in eastern India, was built around 1250 by King Narasimhadeva I of the Eastern Ganga dynasty as a stone chariot for Surya, the sun god. The whole temple is carved as a vehicle: it rests on twenty-four elaborately carved stone wheels, each about three metres across, and was drawn by a team of seven stone horses, matching the seven horses of Surya's chariot in Hindu texts; the twelve pairs of wheels are read as the months of the year. It is the high point of the Kalinga style of temple architecture and has been a World Heritage Site since 1984.

   Did you know? According to legend, 1,200 craftsmen toiled for twelve years, and the master builder's 12-year-old son Dharmapada set the final crowning stone, then leapt to his death to shield them.

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8. 08 Harmandir Sahib

   India · 2.6 km from Amritsar31.620° N 74.877° E

   

   At the heart of Amritsar a two-storey shrine sheathed in gilded copper floats in the middle of a square pool, reached by a single marble causeway. This is the Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, the holiest gurdwara of Sikhism. The pool, the Amrit Sarovar, is roughly 150 m on each side and about 5 m deep, and it is ringed by a broad white-marble walkway that pilgrims walk clockwise before queuing at the Darshani Deori gateway to cross to the sanctum. The complex was deliberately set lower than the surrounding city, as a lesson in humility, and it has entrances on all four sides to signal that people of every faith and background are welcome.

   Did you know? The gilding is far more than a thin skin: roughly 400 kg of gold covers the dome and about 750 kg more sheathes the upper storey.

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9. 09 Tanah Lot

   Indonesia · 14.9 km from Denpasar8.621° S 115.087° E

   

   This shrine sits on a small offshore rock because, according to Balinese tradition, it was put there on purpose — moved, not built. The story credits the 16th-century wandering priest Dang Hyang Nirartha, who saw a light shining from the sea near the village of Beraban and came to meditate there. When the local chief tried to drive him off his meditation spot, Nirartha is said to have used spiritual power to relocate the rock itself out into the water, placing his shrine beyond reach and, in the same act, founding one link in a chain of sea temples meant to spiritually guard Bali's coastline — Tanah Lot is one of seven, positioned so that, according to belief, each temple should be visible from its neighbours.

   Did you know? Its name means roughly land in the sea in Balinese, describing a shrine that becomes an island whenever the tide comes in.

   More about Tanah Lot →

10. 10 Lotus Temple

    India · 7.7 km from New Delhi28.553° N 77.259° E

    

    Before drawing a single line for this building, the architect Fariborz Sahba spent time travelling around India studying its temple traditions, and he kept running into the same motif across religions that otherwise shared almost nothing else visually: the lotus. It appears in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Islamic art across the subcontinent, which made it, for a Bahá'í house of worship meant to welcome people of every faith, the rare symbol that didn't belong to any single one of them. Sahba read it as a fitting image for the Bahá'í idea that purity and unity can emerge out of a murky, divided past — a flower rising clean out of muddy water.

    Did you know? German structural engineer Fritz Leonhardt called it the Taj Mahal of the twentieth century, a label the building has carried ever since.

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11. 11 Potala Palace

    People's Republic of China · 2.2 km from Lhasa29.658° N 91.117° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The hill the palace stands on has been sacred longer than the palace itself. Tradition holds that in 637, Songtsen Gampo — the Tibetan king credited with unifying the plateau — built the first palace on this outcrop, known as Marpo Ri, or the Red Hill, to mark his marriage to the Chinese princess Wencheng. That original structure didn't survive: it was destroyed during the civil conflict that broke apart the Tibetan Tubo kingdom in the 9th century, and the hill sat largely bare of major construction for the better part of eight centuries.

    Did you know? Copper was poured into the foundations to help the palace withstand earthquakes, and its sloping walls are about 5 metres thick at the base.

    More about Potala Palace →

12. 12 Kiyomizu-dera

    Japan · 5.3 km from Kyoto34.995° N 135.785° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Kiyomizu-dera, the "Pure Water Temple", stands on the slopes of Mount Otowa on Kyoto's eastern edge. It is one of the few temples in the city older than Kyoto itself as a capital. Tradition dates its founding to 778, when a monk from Nara followed a dream to a waterfall on the mountain; the general Sakanoue no Tamuramaro later became its patron. It is devoted to Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. The main image is a hidden statue of the eleven-headed Kannon, shown only on rare occasions, and the temple is the sixteenth stop on the Saigoku pilgrimage to thirty-three Kannon temples. It is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site covering the historic monuments of ancient Kyoto.

    Did you know? Of the 234 recorded jumps from the stage in the Edo period, about 85 percent of the jumpers survived.

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13. 13 Temple of Heaven

    People's Republic of China · 2.4 km from Beijing39.882° N 116.407° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Temple of Heaven is less a single temple than a walled ceremonial landscape in the south of central Beijing, laid out so that architecture itself would read as a statement about the cosmos. It was begun under the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty, the same ruler who built the Forbidden City, with construction dated to 1406–1420. For more than four centuries the emperor, as the Son of Heaven, came here in procession to offer sacrifices and to pray for good harvests and favourable weather; ordinary people were barred from watching. The complex took its present name in 1534 under the Jiajing Emperor, and its layout was largely settled by the mid-18th century after rebuilding under the Qing.

    Did you know? The Circular Mound Altar is paved in nine rings of stone around a single central slab, starting with nine slabs and ending with 81 in the outermost ring.

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14. 14 Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary

    Vietnam · 35.5 km from Da Nang15.763° N 108.124° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    In a green valley about two kilometres across, ringed by two ranges of hills in central Vietnam, stand the ruined red-brick towers of Mỹ Sơn, the great religious centre of the kingdom of Champa. For roughly a thousand years, from the 4th to the 13th century, Cham kings built and rebuilt temples here, most of them dedicated to Shiva. The sanctuary began under King Bhadravarman I, who reigned around 380–413 and consecrated a shrine to the god as Bhadreshvara, a name that joined his own to the deity's.

    Did you know? King Bhadravarman's founding stele begs later kings not to destroy his gift, warning that a destroyer would inherit the founder's bad deeds.

    More about Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary →

15. 15 Temple of Horus at Edfu

    Egypt24.978° N 32.873° E

    

    The Temple of Horus at Edfu is one of the best-preserved temples to survive from ancient Egypt, and walking into it is the closest one can come to entering a working Egyptian sanctuary rather than a ruin. Its pylon rises about 36 metres, and the carved walls carry the visitor from the gateway all the way to the holy of holies. It owes this state partly to time: over the centuries it was buried under some 12 metres of sand and river silt, until the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette began clearing it in 1860.

    Did you know? The temple's Greek name was Apollonopolis Magna, because the Greeks identified Horus, its falcon god, with Apollo.

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16. 16 Borobudur Temple

    Indonesia · 15.5 km from Magelang7.608° S 110.204° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Borobudur was assembled from an estimated two million stone blocks without any mortar — the blocks are cut and interlocked so precisely that the structure holds together on fit alone, carrying 2,672 relief panels and 504 Buddha statues up a stepped pyramid nine centuries before anyone had a name for engineering tolerances. Walking it as intended means circling clockwise, level by level, reading the reliefs in sequence like turning the pages of a stone book that narrates the path toward enlightenment as you climb.

    Did you know? In 1885 engineers found that the base hides an older foot carved with 160 reliefs on karma, later encased behind a new stone skirt for reasons still debated.

    More about Borobudur Temple →

17. 17 Tōdai-ji Temple

    Japan · 35.3 km from Ōtsu34.689° N 135.840° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Emperor Shōmu ordered this temple built in 743, and it wasn't primarily an act of devotion for its own sake — Japan had just been through smallpox epidemics, famine, and a failed rebellion, and Shōmu's response was to commission a nationwide network of provincial temples with this one, in the capital, as the head of the entire system. A single enormous bronze Buddha at the centre of it was meant to function as something like a spiritual capstone holding the whole troubled country together.

    Did you know? X-ray examination found a human tooth, pearls, mirrors, swords and jewels hidden inside the Great Buddha's knee, believed to be relics connected with Emperor Shōmu.

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18. 18 Temple of the Tooth

    Sri Lanka · 3.5 km from Kandy7.294° N 80.641° E

    

    The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, Sri Dalada Maligawa, is the most revered shrine of Sri Lanka's Buddhists: within its innermost chamber, enclosed in seven golden caskets set with gems, is kept a tooth believed to be that of the Buddha. The temple stands within the former royal palace complex of the Kingdom of Kandy, its buildings rising behind a moat and a long lakeside wall pierced with niches for coconut-oil lamps, and since 1988 it has been at the heart of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Sacred City of Kandy.

    Did you know? Every Wednesday the relic is ritually bathed with scented water and flowers, and the water, believed to heal, is shared among those present.

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19. 19 Ġgantija

    Malta · 27.5 km from Valletta36.047° N 14.269° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Ġgantija stands on the edge of the Xagħra plateau on Gozo, the second island of the Maltese archipelago, and it is the oldest of the megalithic temples that make up the Maltese World Heritage listing. Its two temples were raised around 3600 BC, which puts them centuries ahead of the Egyptian pyramids. The name means "place of giants", and Gozitan folklore explains the colossal blocks with a giantess called Sansuna who, the story goes, lived on broad beans and honey and carried the stones here with a baby on her shoulder.

    Did you know? Ġgantija is regarded as the second-oldest surviving human-built religious structure in the world, younger only than Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.

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20. 20 Kinkaku-ji Temple

    Japan · 2 km from Kyoto35.039° N 135.728° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The ground this pavilion stands on was a private retirement estate before it was ever a temple. In 1397 the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu bought a villa here that had belonged to a court aristocrat and rebuilt it into a lavish complex called Kitayama-dono, where he lived out his retirement from actual rule while continuing to run the country informally from the sidelines. Only after his death, and per his own wishes, was the villa converted into the Zen temple it remains today — the golden pavilion visitors see was originally built for a man to relax in, not to pray in.

    Did you know? Each of the three floors is built in a different style: a Heian aristocrat's residence below, a samurai house in the middle and a Zen Buddhist hall at the top.

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21. 21 Wat Rong Khun

    Thailand · 11.7 km from Chiang Rai19.824° N 99.763° E

    

    Wat Rong Khun, the White Temple, is a working Buddhist temple and at the same time the life's work of one artist. The original temple on this site south of Chiang Rai had fallen into disrepair when Chalermchai Kositpipat, a painter born in Chiang Rai province and named a National Artist of Thailand in 2011, took it on. He designed and rebuilt it with his own money, opened it to visitors in 1997, and has kept adding to it ever since, with work on the complex expected to continue until around 2070. He has said that only death can stop his dream, not the project. Under the dazzle the main hall is a plain structure of concrete and timber; what makes it shimmer is a skin of white plaster set with countless small pieces of mirrored glass, so that in the sun the whole building flashes like frost.

    Did you know? Chalermchai Kositpipat was 42 when he began rebuilding the temple in 1997, and has spent more than 40 million baht of his own money on it.

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22. 22 Mahabodhi Temple

    India · 11.5 km from Gaya24.696° N 84.991° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Mahabodhi Temple marks the place where, in Buddhist tradition, Siddhartha Gautama sat beneath a fig tree and attained enlightenment, and for Buddhists it is the holiest site on earth. The tree growing on the west side of the temple today is venerated as a descendant of that original Bodhi tree, and at its foot lies the Vajrasana, the Diamond Throne, a stone seat thought to have been placed by the emperor Ashoka around 250 BC. Pilgrims from across the Buddhist world come to meditate and pray around it.

    Did you know? The 2013 gilding of the tower used roughly 280–290 kg of gold donated by the Thai king and Thai devotees, yet covered only its topmost section.

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23. 23 Luxor Temple

    Egypt · 1.1 km from Luxor25.700° N 32.639° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Luxor Temple rises on the east bank of the Nile in the middle of modern Luxor, ancient Thebes, and it is the one great temple of Egypt that sits inside a living town. The ancient Egyptians called it ipet resyt, the southern sanctuary. Its core was built around 1400 BC under Amenhotep III of the 18th Dynasty, whose sun court and great colonnade are among the most beautiful spaces of the New Kingdom; Tutankhamun and above all Ramesses II added to it, and Ramesses gave it the massive entrance pylon fronted by his colossal seated statues. Alexander the Great, too, left a chapel deep inside.

    Did you know? In 1989 workers testing groundwater beneath Amenhotep III's sun court uncovered a buried cache of 26 superb statues of gods and kings, now in the Luxor Museum.

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24. 24 Basilica of San Clemente, Rome

    Basilica di San Clemente al Laterano

    Italy · 1.7 km from Rome41.889° N 12.498° E

    

    Few buildings show the layering of Rome as plainly as San Clemente. A staircase inside the church leads down through roughly two thousand years: from a twelfth-century basilica to the church that preceded it, and from there to Roman rooms of the first and second centuries, including a sanctuary of the god Mithras. The whole complex lies a short distance east of the Colosseum.

    Did you know? Besides Pope Clement I, the church claims relics of St Ignatius of Antioch, an early bishop martyred in Rome.

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25. 25 St Andrew's Church, Kyiv

    Андріївська церква

    Ukraine · 2.6 km from Kyiv50.459° N 30.518° E

    

    St Andrew's Church crowns a steep hill above the old Podil district of Kyiv, its green-and-gold silhouette visible from the river and from far along the Andriyivskyy Descent, the winding cobbled street named after it. It is one of the finest buildings of the Baroque in Ukraine. Empress Elizabeth of Russia ordered it in 1744; the design came from Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the Italian-born court architect also responsible for the Winter Palace, and construction was directed on site by Ivan Michurin. The exterior went up between 1747 and 1754, while the interior was not completed until 1767.

    Did you know? Empress Elizabeth laid the first three foundation stones herself on 9 September 1744, as part of plans for a summer residence in Kyiv.

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26. 26 Modhera Sun Temple

    India23.584° N 72.133° E

    

    The Sun Temple at Modhera is one of the great stone compositions of medieval India, built for Surya, the sun god, under the Chaulukya kings of Gujarat. An inscription dates the shrine to 1026–27, in the reign of Bhima I, and the open assembly hall in front of it was added later in the same century. Worship here stopped long ago, which leaves the building as a pure piece of architecture: a sequence of three linked elements laid out along a single east–west axis, on the bank of the little Pushpavati river.

    Did you know? The only date on the temple, 1026–27, is carved upside down on a block of the sanctum wall, a sign that the shrine was wrecked and rebuilt.

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27. 27 Wat Chaiwatthanaram

    Thailand · 3.3 km from Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya14.343° N 100.542° E

    

    On the west bank of the Chao Phraya, just outside the old island city of Ayutthaya, a tall Khmer-style tower rises from a square platform ringed by smaller towers and a gallery of crowned stupas. Wat Chaiwatthanaram was founded in 1630 by King Prasat Thong as the first great temple of his reign, on land associated with his mother's residence; the name can be read as "temple of the long reign and glorious era". Its silhouette, reflected at evening in the river, is one of the most recognisable images of the old Siamese capital.

    Did you know? Prince Damrong suggested the temple celebrated Ayutthaya's victory over the Cambodian capital of Longvek, which would explain its Khmer look.

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28. 28 Besakih

    Indonesia · 39.8 km from Denpasar8.374° S 115.452° E

    

    High on the southwestern flank of Gunung Agung, Bali's tallest and most sacred volcano, Besakih rises in tier after tier of black-thatched shrines, stepped courtyards and carved stone gateways. Known as the mother temple of the island, it is regarded as the most important, the largest and the holiest sanctuary of Balinese Hinduism. The complex stands nearly 1,000 metres up the mountain, in the village of Besakih in Karangasem Regency, so that on clear days the summit of Agung looms directly above the roofs while the view opens south toward the sea.

    Did you know? In March 1963 the Eka Dasa Rudra, a great purification rite meant to be held roughly once a century, was under way at Besakih when Mount Agung erupted.

    More about Besakih →

29. 29 Philae Temple Complex

    Egypt · 7.5 km from Aswan24.022° N 32.884° E

    

    Philae is where the religion of the pharaohs made its last stand. The temple of Isis on this small island above the First Cataract of the Nile drew pilgrims from Egypt, Nubia and the Greek world for centuries, and it outlived paganism almost everywhere else: the last known inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs was carved here in AD 394, and the last known Demotic one in 452. According to Procopius the temple was officially closed on the orders of Emperor Justinian around 537.

    Did you know? An obelisk from Philae, taken to England by William John Bankes, carried royal names in Greek and hieroglyphs that helped scholars decipher Egyptian signs.

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30. 30 Pura Ulun Danu Bratan

    Indonesia · 18.9 km from Singaraja8.271° S 115.167° E

    

    High in the Bedugul highlands of central Bali, at around 1,200 metres above the sea, Pura Ulun Danu Beratan stands at the edge of Lake Beratan in the village of Candikuning, and when the water is high its lakeside shrines seem to rise straight out of it. On still mornings, when mist rolls off the surrounding hills and the water turns to glass, the tiered roofs seem to hover above their own reflections, and this image of the temple has become one of the best known in Indonesia, printed on an earlier 50,000-rupiah banknote. The cool, damp air up here is a world away from the coast, and the lake-and-mountain setting is as much a part of the temple as its architecture.

    Did you know? Lake Beratan fills part of the Bratan caldera, an ancient collapsed volcano that also holds the neighbouring lakes Buyan and Tamblingan.

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