The Most Beautiful Temples in Africa
9 places in 3 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful temples in Africa are Temple of Horus at Edfu (Egypt), Luxor Temple (Egypt) and Philae Temple Complex (Egypt). The list covers 9 temples in 3 countries. Egypt has the most, with 7. Last updated 13 October 2026.
No region on Earth built temples in stone as long or as ambitiously as the Nile valley. For roughly three thousand years, pharaohs and later Ptolemaic and Roman rulers raised sanctuaries along the river, decorating every surface with reliefs and hieroglyphs. The dry climate preserved painted ceilings, carved walls and whole temple precincts, and upstream in Sudan the kingdom of Kush adapted the same tradition in its own style.
Karnak, the great temple complex of Amun at Thebes, grew over some two thousand years and holds a hypostyle hall of 134 giant columns. Luxor Temple, begun by Amenhotep III and extended by Ramesses II, was once linked to Karnak by an avenue of sphinxes; one of its two obelisks now stands in Paris. The Temple of Horus at Edfu, completed under the Ptolemies, is the most completely preserved temple in Egypt. The temples of Philae, devoted to Isis, were dismantled and moved to a neighbouring island to save them from the rising waters behind the Aswan dams.
Other temples here are prized for their carving. Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of Ramesses III, records his battles with the Sea Peoples on its walls, and the Temple of Seti I at Abydos contains some of the finest reliefs of the New Kingdom along with a celebrated list of kings. The Temple of Khnum at Esna stands in a pit well below the modern town. At Naqa in Sudan, the Lion Temple of Apedemak shows Kushite gods in Egyptian form, while the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, modelled on St Peter's in Rome, is among the largest churches in the world.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Temple of Horus at Edfu | Temple | Egypt | |
| 2 | Luxor Temple | Archaeological site | Egypt | ✓ |
| 3 | Philae Temple Complex | Temple | Egypt | |
| 4 | Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro | Church building | Ivory Coast | |
| 5 | Karnak Temple Complex | Archaeological site | Egypt | ✓ |
| 6 | Naqa | Temple | Sudan | |
| 7 | Medinet Habu | Temple | Egypt | |
| 8 | Temple of Seti I, Abydos | Temple | Egypt | |
| 9 | Temple of Khnum | Temple | Egypt |
01 Temple of Horus at Edfu
Egypt24.978° N 32.873° E
Ad Meskens · CC BY-SA 3.0 It is also, by Egyptian standards, a young building. Work began on 23 August 237 BC under Ptolemy III Euergetes and was finished in 57 BC under Ptolemy XII Auletes - 180 years of construction by the Greek-speaking dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander, carried out entirely in the old pharaonic style. The plan is textbook: a pillared hall, two transverse halls, and at the back a barque sanctuary surrounded by chapels. In the sanctuary stands a polished granite shrine, or naos, of Nectanebo II, kept from an earlier temple on the same spot - one of the last native pharaohs, honoured inside a temple built by his successors' successors.
Did you know? By 1798, when French scholars identified the temple, only the tops of its pylons showed above the sand, and villagers had built houses over its grounds.
02 Luxor Temple
Egypt · 1.1 km from Luxor25.700° N 32.639° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay The temple was bound to Karnak, about 2.7 km to the north, by an avenue lined with human-headed sphinxes. Every year during the Opet festival the statue of Amun was brought in procession from Karnak to stay here with his consort Mut, and scholars now read the temple as a place devoted to the renewal of kingship, the divine power of the ruling pharaoh. Two obelisks once flanked the entrance; they were of unequal height but placed so that they appeared equal. One still stands. The other has stood in the Place de la Concorde in Paris since the nineteenth century.
Did you know? Centuries of houses and rubble had raised an artificial hill about 15 metres high over the temple, burying roughly three quarters of it.
03 Philae Temple Complex
Egypt · 7.5 km from Aswan24.022° N 32.884° E
Panegyrics of Granovetter · CC BY-SA 2.0 What you see today is a rescue. From 1902 the first Aswan dam left the island repeatedly flooded, and the High Dam would have drowned them for good. Between 1977 and 1980 an international campaign under UNESCO cut the buildings into roughly 40,000 blocks and rebuilt them on the neighbouring island of Agilkia, some 500 m away and on higher ground, reshaped to match the original contours. The result is so convincing that most visitors never notice the move.
Did you know? The same obelisk records a complaint by Philae's priests to Ptolemy VIII that visiting officials were living at the temple's expense.
04 Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro
Basilique Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix de Yamoussoukro
Ivory Coast · 2.5 km from Yamoussoukro6.811° N 5.297° W
Gregor Rom · CC BY-SA 4.0 It was the personal project of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the country's first president, who made his birthplace Yamoussoukro the capital in 1983 and wanted a monument to go with it. The Lebanese architect Pierre Fakhoury took St Peter's in the Vatican as his model — the dome and the encircled plaza — without copying it outright. Construction ran from 1985 to 1989, and Pope John Paul II consecrated the basilica in September 1990, on condition that a hospital be built nearby.
Did you know? The stained glass contains more than two million pieces of antique glass, made in about eighteen months near Paris by a team of around seventy.
More about Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro →
05 Karnak Temple Complex
Egypt · 2.2 km from Luxor25.718° N 32.658° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nadkol19 from Pixabay The hall wasn't finished by one ruler with one plan. Work on it stretched across the reigns of at least four pharaohs — begun under Amenhotep III, carried forward by Seti I and his son Ramesses II, and only completed under Ramesses IV — meaning the building site itself outlasted several complete reigns and dynastic successions before the roof went on.
Did you know? Around thirty pharaohs added buildings, gates or decoration to the site over its long history.
06 Naqa
Sudan16.269° N 33.275° E
photo by: C Roner · CC BY-SA 1.0 The best-known building is the Temple of Apedemak, the lion-headed warrior god of Kush, regarded as a classic work of Kushite architecture. Its gateway shows King Natakamani and Queen Amanitore striking down captives with lions at their feet. Along the side walls Apedemak appears in company with Amun and Horus, and on the rear wall he is shown at his largest — three-headed and four-armed, receiving offerings from the royal pair — while elsewhere he emerges as a lion-headed serpent from a lotus flower.
Did you know? In 1999 excavators in the Amun temple's inner sanctuary found a further statue of Natakamani and a stela of Queen Amanishakheto bearing still-undeciphered Meroitic hieroglyphs.
07 Medinet Habu
Egypt · 5.4 km from Luxor25.720° N 32.601° E
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay Inside lies the reason the temple is famous: more than 7,000 square metres of carved walls. The walls carry the great record of the king's campaigns, including the battles of his eighth year against the "Sea Peoples" — ships locked together in a melee, warriors in feathered headdresses, ox-carts of migrating families. It is one of the few contemporary images of the upheavals that ended the Bronze Age world of the eastern Mediterranean. In the courts and colonnades beyond, the original paint survives on many reliefs and on decorated ceilings, so that parts of the temple still show the colours it was meant to be seen in.
Did you know? Some of the temple's stone was reused from the destroyed mortuary temple of Tausret, the last ruler of the Nineteenth Dynasty.
08 Temple of Seti I, Abydos
Egypt · 16.7 km from Girga26.183° N 31.917° E
Néfermaât · CC BY-SA 2.5 The plan is unusual. Instead of a single axis leading to one sanctuary, the temple has seven chapels side by side — for Osiris, Isis and Horus, for Amun-Re, Re-Horakhty and Ptah, and one for the deified Seti himself — and the building turns at a right angle into an L-shaped wing. In a corridor of that wing is the Abydos King List: 76 cartouches in three rows, a roll-call of the rulers Seti claimed as ancestors, from Menes to himself. What it leaves out is as telling as what it includes: Hatshepsut is absent, and so are Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and the other kings of the Amarna episode, erased from the official memory within a lifetime.
Did you know? The Osireion, about 57 by 13 metres, is now partly underwater, as groundwater has risen into its lower hall.
09 Temple of Khnum
Egypt · 0.7 km from Esna25.293° N 32.556° E
Hajor~commonswiki · CC BY-SA 3.0 Esna, a Nile town of Upper Egypt between Luxor and Aswan, worshipped Khnum alongside the goddesses Neith and Menhyt and the god Heka. A sanctuary stood here by the 18th Dynasty at the latest, and a new temple was raised under the Ptolemies in the 2nd century BC; its inner rooms have been lost or lie beneath the houses of the town. What survives is the great pronaos, the columned front hall, begun in the Roman period under Emperor Claudius and decorated over two centuries until the reign of Decius in the mid-3rd century AD.
Did you know? The cleaning uncovered a complete zodiac, from Aries to Pisces, together with the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars.
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 temples in Africa?
- On our list, Temple of Horus at Edfu (Egypt) ranks first, followed by Luxor Temple (Egypt) and Philae Temple Complex (Egypt).
- Which country has the most temples in Africa?
- In our collection, the most come from Egypt (7), Ivory Coast (1) and Sudan (1).
- Why was the Philae temple moved?
- After the Aswan Low Dam was built, the island of Philae was flooded for much of each year, and the High Dam would have submerged it permanently. In a UNESCO-led campaign in the 1970s the temples were cut into blocks and reassembled on nearby Agilkia Island.
- Which is the best-preserved temple in Egypt?
- The Temple of Horus at Edfu, built between 237 and 57 BC under the Ptolemies. It survives almost complete, with its pylon, courtyard, halls and roof intact.
- How many columns are in the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak?
- The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak has 134 sandstone columns arranged in 16 rows. The twelve central columns are the tallest, at about 21 metres.
- How many temples are on this list in Africa?
- The list covers 9 temples in 3 countries. Egypt has the most, with 7.