The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Squares in the World
8 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed squares in the world are Piazza del Duomo, Pisa (Italy), Piazza del Campo (Italy) and Place Stanislas, Nancy (France). The list covers 8 UNESCO-listed squares in 6 countries. Italy has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A great square is a city's living room, and UNESCO tends to recognise the ones where centuries of civic, religious and royal ambition meet in a single space. Their beauty lies less in any one building than in the ensemble: façades built to answer one another, paving that shapes how people gather, and a scale chosen to impress merchants, pilgrims or subjects. From the communes of medieval Italy to Safavid Persia and imperial Russia, these squares were designed as statements of who ran the city.
Pisa's Piazza del Duomo sets the cathedral, baptistery and leaning bell tower in white marble on a green lawn, while Siena's Piazza del Campo slopes in a shell shape toward the town hall and hosts the Palio horse race. Nancy's Place Stanislas, laid out in the 1750s, frames its pavilions with gilded wrought-iron gates, and Brussels' Grand-Place surrounds a Gothic town hall with richly carved guildhalls.
Further east the scale grows. Isfahan's Naqsh-e Jahan Square, built under Shah Abbas I, is lined by two great mosques and the Ali Qapu palace, and Samarkand's Registan faces three tiled madrasas across its open court. Moscow's Red Square stretches between the Kremlin walls and the onion domes of St Basil's Cathedral, and St Petersburg's Palace Square sweeps from the Winter Palace to the curving General Staff Building around the Alexander Column.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Piazza del Duomo, Pisa | Square | Italy | ✓ |
| 2 | Piazza del Campo | Square | Italy | ✓ |
| 3 | Place Stanislas, Nancy | Square | France | ✓ |
| 4 | Grand-Place | Square | Belgium | ✓ |
| 5 | Red Square | Square | Russia | ✓ |
| 6 | Naqsh-e Jahan Square | Square | Iran | ✓ |
| 7 | Registan | Square | Uzbekistan | ✓ |
| 8 | Palace Square | Square | Russia | ✓ |
01 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 Pisa's cathedral square is less a square than a lawn: a walled field on which four white marble buildings stand apart from one another like pieces set on a green cloth. The writer Gabriele D'Annunzio called it the meadow of miracles in a 1910 novel, and the name Piazza dei Miracoli has stuck.
Did you know? Construction of the leaning tower stretched over about 177 years, with the seventh floor added in 1319 and the bells only in 1372.
02 Piazza del Campo
Italy · 1.5 km from Siena43.318° N 11.331° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Zotx from Pixabay Piazza del Campo is a great tilted shell of red brick at the heart of Siena. Its fan of paving, divided by pale stone strips into nine segments, slopes down towards the Palazzo Pubblico, the Gothic town hall, whose slender brick tower, the Torre del Mangia, rises above the whole city.
Did you know? In the Palio a horse that has thrown its jockey can still win, because the victory belongs to the contrada rather than the rider.
03 Place Stanislas, Nancy
France · 1.7 km from Nancy48.694° N 6.183° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Nicolas Cornet · CC BY-SA 4.0 Place Stanislas in Nancy is one of the most complete squares of the eighteenth century anywhere in Europe: an open rectangle of about 125 by 106 metres, paved in pale ochre stone with darker diagonals, framed on every side by façades of the same height and rhythm, and closed at its corners by screens of gilded wrought iron.
Did you know? The original bronze statue of Louis XV was pulled down in 1792 and taken to Metz to be melted down for military use.
04 Grand-Place
Belgium · 2 km from Brussels50.847° N 4.353° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay The Grand-Place, or Grote Markt in Dutch, is the central square of Brussels, and no other square in Europe is so completely enclosed by ornate buildings. It is a fully paved rectangle of about 68 by 110 m, surrounded on all sides by gilded guildhalls, a Gothic town hall and the neo-Gothic King's House.
Did you know? The Ommegang pageant re-enacts the 1549 Joyous Entry of Emperor Charles V and his son Philip, and has been on UNESCO's intangible heritage list since 2019.
05 Red Square
Russia · 0.4 km from Moscow55.754° N 37.620° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by joneybrain from Pixabay Red Square is a long rectangle — about 330 metres from end to end — laid along the eastern wall of the Moscow Kremlin, where the fortress had no river to protect it. That weakness is the square's origin: in the 1490s Ivan III ordered the ground outside the wall cleared of buildings to open a field of fire, and a deep moat was dug in front of the wall in the early sixteenth century.
Did you know? The square covers about 73,000 square metres, some 330 metres long and roughly 70 metres wide.
06 Naqsh-e Jahan Square
Iran · 5.2 km from Isfahan32.658° N 51.677° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Amir Pashaei · CC BY-SA 4.0 Naqsh-e Jahan Square — "Image of the World" — is the great public room of Isfahan, a rectangle roughly 560 metres long and 160 metres wide laid out between 1598 and 1629 when Shah Abbas I moved the Safavid capital here.
Did you know? It was inscribed by UNESCO in 1979, among the very first World Heritage Sites in Iran.
07 Registan
Uzbekistan · 3.1 km from Samarkand39.655° N 66.976° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC0 Three tiled façades stand on three sides of an open rectangle, each one dominated by a towering portal and flanked by minarets, and the effect is less of a square than of a stage set built at the scale of a city.
Did you know? A Kufic inscription on Ulugh Beg's portal boasts that it is twice as high as the sky and heavy enough to slow the Earth's spin.
08 Palace Square
Russia · 0.2 km from Saint Petersburg59.939° N 30.315° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 Palace Square is where St Petersburg performed its role as imperial capital, and later where that empire came apart. The square takes its name from the Winter Palace, the Baroque residence of the tsars rebuilt between 1754 and 1762 in white and turquoise, which fills its northern side.
Did you know? In 1924 the Soviet government decreed that the angel on the Alexander Column be replaced with a statue of Lenin; after a year of debate the idea was dropped.
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 UNESCO-listed squares in the world?
- On our list, Piazza del Duomo, Pisa (Italy) ranks first, followed by Piazza del Campo (Italy) and Place Stanislas, Nancy (France).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed squares in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (2), Russia (2) and Belgium (1).
- Why is it called Red Square?
- The name comes from the Russian word krasnaya, which once meant 'beautiful' as well as 'red'. It long predates the Soviet era and has nothing to do with the colour of the Kremlin walls.
- What is the Palio di Siena?
- A bareback horse race run around the Piazza del Campo twice each summer, on 2 July and 16 August, between riders representing the city's contrade, or districts.
- How many madrasas stand on the Registan?
- Three: the Ulugh Beg Madrasa from the 15th century, and the Sher-Dor and Tilya-Kori madrasas added in the 17th century, all faced with glazed tilework.
- How many UNESCO-listed squares are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 8 UNESCO-listed squares in 6 countries. Italy has the most, with 2.