The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Squares, Streets and Monuments in the World
33 places in 19 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed squares, streets and monuments in the world are Tower of Hercules (Spain), Eiffel Tower (France) and Cave of Altamira (Spain). The list covers 33 UNESCO-listed squares, streets and monuments in 19 countries. Spain has the most, with 7. Last updated 14 October 2026.
UNESCO rarely lists a single statue or tower on its own; monuments usually enter the World Heritage List as the core of a historic centre, a sacred complex or a city's riverside. That changes how they are seen: a clock tower is valued together with the arcaded streets around it, a minaret with the mosque ruins at its foot. The monuments here are the focal points of such places, and the listing is a sign that the setting has survived along with the landmark.
The Eiffel Tower is part of the listed banks of the Seine in Paris, and the Zytglogge, Bern's medieval clock tower, anchors the old town of the Swiss capital. The Piazza del Duomo in Pisa sets cathedral, baptistery and leaning campanile on one lawn. Qutb Minar in Delhi, a fluted tower of red sandstone some 73 metres high, rises over the ruins of the first mosque complex of the Delhi Sultanate, and the Taj Mahal in Agra stands in its walled garden on the Yamuna.
Other monuments here are listed for what they witness. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial, the skeletal Genbaku Dome, is the building left standing nearest the 1945 blast. The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France unveiled in 1886, holds its torch over New York Harbor. In Spain the Tower of Hercules is the oldest Roman lighthouse still in use, and in Mexico the Avenue of the Dead at Teotihuacan runs between the pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. Visoki Dečani, a 14th-century Serbian Orthodox monastery, preserves an extensive cycle of medieval frescoes.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tower of Hercules | Fortified tower | Spain | ✓ |
| 2 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | France | ✓ |
| 3 | Cave of Altamira | Cave | Spain | ✓ |
| 4 | Hiroshima Peace Memorial | War memorial | Japan | ✓ |
| 5 | Visoki Dečani | Monastery | Kosovo | ✓ |
| 6 | Terracotta Army | Archaeological site | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 7 | Zytglogge | Clock tower | Switzerland | ✓ |
| 8 | Teotihuacan | Archaeological site | Mexico | ✓ |
| 9 | Qutb complex | Archaeological site | India | ✓ |
| 10 | Statue of Liberty | Monument | United States | ✓ |
| 11 | Taj Mahal | Mausoleum | India | ✓ |
| 12 | Triumphal Arch of Orange | Triumphal arch | France | ✓ |
| 13 | Piazza del Duomo, Pisa | Square | Italy | ✓ |
| 14 | Piazza del Campo | Square | Italy | ✓ |
| 15 | Göbekli Tepe | Archaeological site | Turkey | ✓ |
| 16 | Place Stanislas, Nancy | Square | France | ✓ |
| 17 | Grand-Place | Square | Belgium | ✓ |
| 18 | Red Square | Square | Russia | ✓ |
| 19 | Naqsh-e Jahan Square | Square | Iran | ✓ |
| 20 | Registan | Square | Uzbekistan | ✓ |
| 21 | León Cathedral | Cathedral | Spain | ✓ |
| 22 | Plain of Jars | Megalith | Laos | ✓ |
| 23 | Palace Square | Square | Russia | ✓ |
| 24 | Igel Column | Archaeological site | Germany | ✓ |
| 25 | Maiden Tower | Monument | Azerbaijan | ✓ |
| 26 | Scala Sancta | Stairs | Italy | ✓ |
| 27 | Leshan Giant Buddha | Sculpture | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 28 | Aljafería | Palace | Spain | ✓ |
| 29 | Hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni | Archaeological site | Malta | ✓ |
| 30 | Royal Alcázar of Seville | Palace | Spain | ✓ |
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 There were dozens of lighthouses like this one once, scattered around the edges of the Roman world. There is exactly one left that still works.
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 Eiffel Tower
Tour Eiffel
France · 4.3 km from Paris48.858° N 2.294° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay The tower's basic shape wasn't originally Gustave Eiffel's idea at all. Two engineers working inside Eiffel's own company, Émile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, sketched the concept for an enormously tall iron tower in June 1884, intended as the centrepiece for the 1889 World's Fair marking the centenary of the French Revolution. Eiffel reportedly found Koechlin's earliest, bare-bones sketch unconvincing.
Did you know? According to a popular anecdote, Guy de Maupassant lunched at the tower daily because it was the one place in Paris he could not see it.
03 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 Cave of Altamira, near Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, holds some of the finest Palaeolithic art in the world, and no other cave in northern Spain has such complex and crowded painting. The cave is about 270 m long, a series of passages in the limestone of Mount Vispieres.
04 Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Japan · 1.3 km from Hiroshima34.396° N 132.454° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
DXR · CC BY-SA 4.0 The building now known across the world as the Atomic Bomb Dome was completed in April 1915 as an exhibition hall for the products of Hiroshima Prefecture. Its designer, the Czech architect Jan Letzel, gave it a distinctive dome that made it a landmark on the riverbank next to the Aioi Bridge.
Did you know? The bomb's aiming point was the T-shaped Aioi Bridge nearby, but it missed by about 240 metres and burst above Shima Hospital.
05 Visoki Dečani
Manastiri i Deçanit
Kosovo · 13.1 km from Pejë42.547° N 20.266° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Pudelek (Marcin Szala) · CC BY-SA 3.0 Visoki Dečani is a Serbian Orthodox monastery at the foot of the mountains on the western edge of Kosovo, and its church is the largest surviving medieval church in the Balkans. King Stefan Dečanski began it in 1327 as his own burial church; he died in 1331 before it was finished, and his son Stefan Dušan completed the work.
Did you know? A carved inscription over the south portal names the builder as Fra Vita, a Franciscan friar from Kotor, and says the church took eight years to build.
06 Terracotta Army
People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by artemtation from Pixabay The farmer who found the Terracotta Army wasn't looking for it. In March 1974, Yang Zhifa, his five brothers and a neighbor were digging a well during a drought, hoping only for water, when at about three metres down they hit a layer of charcoal and reddened soil, and past four metres one of them pulled up a life-sized pottery head.
Did you know? The paint on the figures is so fragile that, once exposed to Xi'an's dry air, its lacquer base can curl within seconds and flake off in minutes.
07 Zytglogge
Switzerland · 3.8 km from Bern46.948° N 7.448° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Karlheinz Klingbeil · CC BY 4.0 The Zytglogge — Bernese dialect for "time bell" — is the tower that Bern tells time by, and has done for six hundred years. It began around 1218–1220 as the gate tower of the city's western wall, a squat structure only 16 m high. As Bern grew westward it lost its defensive role, was raised, served for a time as a women's prison, and burned out in the great fire of 1405.
Did you know? The clock's calendar cannot cope with leap years, so every 29 February the date hand has to be reset by hand.
08 Teotihuacan
Mexico · 30.8 km from Zumpango19.692° N 98.844° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JordiMA1587 from Pixabay Long before the Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico, Teotihuacan was already a ruin they could only guess about. The Nahuatl name they gave it is usually translated as the place where the gods were born, and in their cosmology it was here that the present sun had been created.
Did you know? About 17 metres beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, archaeologists found a miniature mountain landscape with tiny pools of liquid mercury standing in for lakes.
09 Qutb complex
India · 8.5 km from New Delhi28.524° N 77.185° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SuanlianTangpua from Pixabay The Qutb complex in Mehrauli, in the south of Delhi, is where the architecture of the Delhi Sultanate begins.
Did you know? Phosphorus-rich iron lets a protective film form on the iron pillar, and in some 1,600 years that film has grown only about a twentieth of a millimetre thick.
10 Statue of Liberty
United States · 5.5 km from New York City40.689° N 74.044° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by itou365 from Pixabay The name most people reach for is Bartholdi, and that's correct as far as it goes — Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi conceived the whole figure, from her raised torch to the broken chains at her feet, and sculpted the copper skin that visitors actually see, a figure standing some 46 metres from base to torch. What's murkier, and worth untangling, is who built what's actually holding her up.
Did you know? The tablet in her left hand is inscribed JULY IV MDCCLXXVI, the date of the American Declaration of Independence in Roman numerals.
11 Taj Mahal
India · 2.9 km from Agra27.175° N 78.042° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Taj_Mahal,_Agra,_India_edit2.jpg : Yann ; edited by King of Hearts derivative work: Jbarta ( talk ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 Shah Jahan began building this in 1631 as a tomb for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who had died giving birth to their fourteenth child.
Did you know? Its four minarets, each over 40 metres tall, lean slightly outward so that if one ever collapsed it would fall away from the tomb.
12 Triumphal Arch of Orange
Arc antique d'Orange
France44.142° N 4.805° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Xavier D'ABRIGEON · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Triumphal Arch of Orange is one of the best-preserved Roman arches anywhere, and the oldest surviving example of the three-bay design later used for the Arch of Septimius Severus and the Arch of Constantine in Rome itself. It stands on the old Via Agrippa at the northern entrance to Orange, a town in the Rhône valley.
Did you know? The arch was among the monuments on France's very first list of protected historic monuments, drawn up in 1840.
13 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.
14 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.
15 Göbekli Tepe
Göbeklitepe
Turkey · 12.8 km from Şanlıurfa37.223° N 38.922° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Spica-Vega Photo Arts (Banu Nazikcan) · CC BY-SA 4.0 Göbekli Tepe changes the order in which the story of civilisation is usually told. On a limestone ridge north-east of Şanlıurfa, a mound about 15 metres high and 8 hectares across holds monumental enclosures built between roughly 9500 and 8000 BC — by people who had not yet adopted pottery and were only on the threshold of farming.
Did you know? In Turkish the name means Potbelly Hill, while one Kurdish name for the mound translates as Wish Hill.
16 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.
17 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.
18 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.
19 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.
20 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.
21 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 León's cathedral, Santa María de Regla, is the Spanish cathedral that went furthest in the Gothic dream of replacing walls with light. It has around 125 windows and about 1,800 square metres of stained glass, most of it made between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, one of the largest collections of medieval glass anywhere.
Did you know? For centuries a dried hide over a door was said to be a mole that wrecked the builders' work by night; in the 1990s it proved a leatherback turtle shell.
22 Plain of Jars
Laos · 5.1 km from Phonsavan19.431° N 103.153° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Plain of Jars is scattered across the Xiangkhoang Plateau in northern Laos: thousands of great stone vessels standing on hillsides and ridges, in clusters from a single jar to several hundred. They are between one and three metres tall, cylindrical, wider at the base than at the mouth, and hewn from sandstone, granite, conglomerate, limestone or breccia.
Did you know? The heaviest of the stone jars are estimated to weigh up to about 14 tonnes, yet they were moved from quarries kilometres away.
23 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.
24 Igel Column
Igeler Säule
Germany · 9.5 km from Grevenmacher49.709° N 6.549° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Enyavar · Public domain In the middle of a Moselle village, next to the road between Trier and Luxembourg, stands a Roman tomb that has never been moved, never buried and never fully lost. The Igel Column is a pillar of red and grey sandstone about 23 metres high, raised in the 3rd century AD, probably around 250, by the Secundinii, a wealthy family of cloth merchants and landowners.
Did you know? The column has been part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986.
25 Maiden Tower
Azerbaijan · 4 km from Baku40.366° N 49.837° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Maxxja from Pixabay Baku, Azerbaijan's capital on the Caspian Sea, keeps its medieval heart inside the walls of the Old City, Icherisheher, and the Maiden Tower is its emblem. 5 m at the base. It has eight floors, each covered by a shallow stone vault with a central opening, and a staircase runs up inside the thickness of the walls, which are about 5 m thick at the bottom. A massive buttress projects from the tower toward the east.
Did you know? After damage in the 2000 earthquake, the Old City with the tower was on UNESCO's List of World Heritage in Danger from 2004 to 2009.
26 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.
27 Leshan Giant Buddha
People's Republic of China · 4.4 km from Leshan29.547° N 103.769° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by christels from Pixabay The Leshan Giant Buddha is carved directly into a sandstone cliff at the point where the Min, Dadu and Qingyi rivers meet below the city of Leshan in southern Sichuan. At 71 metres high it is the tallest stone Buddha in the world and by far the largest pre-modern statue anywhere. It depicts Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, seated with hands resting on his knees and gazing across the water towards Mount Emei.
Did you know? The statue was declared a protected cultural relic in 1956, four decades before UNESCO listed it.
28 Aljafería
Spain · 0.9 km from Zaragoza41.656° N 0.897° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Pixels4Free from Pixabay The Aljafería is the finest surviving building from the taifa kingdoms, the patchwork of Muslim states that followed the break-up of the Caliphate of Córdoba. It was raised in Zaragoza for Ahmad al-Muqtadir of the Banu Hud dynasty and largely finished between 1065 and 1081.
Did you know? The palace's architect is known by name: a Slav called Zuhayr, recorded by a Zaragoza writer active in the late eleventh century.
29 Hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni
L-Ipogew ta’ Ħal Saflieni
Malta · 3.4 km from Valletta35.870° N 14.507° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
-jkb- · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni is an underground sanctuary and burial place cut into the limestone of Malta more than five thousand years ago, the only prehistoric underground temple of its kind known. It was found by accident in 1902, when workmen digging cisterns for new houses in Paola broke through its roof.
Did you know? The Holy of Holies seems to have been aligned so that winter solstice light, entering through the original opening above, fell on its carved facade.
30 Royal Alcázar of Seville
Spain · 2.5 km from Seville37.384° N 5.991° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Danor from Pixabay The Royal Alcázar of Seville is a palace built as a sequence of courtyards, each opening into the next: arcades carved with lace-like plaster, tiled walls, pools and channels of water, and beyond them a maze of gardens full of orange trees and palms.
Did you know? Arabic inscriptions in Pedro I's palace refer to the Christian king as 'Sultan Don Bidru'.
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, streets and monuments in the world?
- On our list, Tower of Hercules (Spain) ranks first, followed by Eiffel Tower (France) and Cave of Altamira (Spain).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed squares, streets and monuments in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Spain (7), France (3) and Italy (3).
- Is the Eiffel Tower a UNESCO World Heritage Site?
- Not on its own: it is part of the World Heritage Site 'Paris, Banks of the Seine', inscribed in 1991, which covers the riverside from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower.
- How tall is Qutb Minar?
- Qutb Minar in Delhi is about 73 metres tall, which makes it one of the tallest brick minarets in the world. It was begun around 1200 under Qutb ud-Din Aibak and completed by his successors.
- Why is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial a World Heritage Site?
- The Genbaku Dome was the building left standing closest to the hypocentre of the atomic bomb of 6 August 1945. It was inscribed in 1996 as a symbol of the destructive force of nuclear weapons and of the hope for peace.
- How many UNESCO-listed squares, streets and monuments are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 33 UNESCO-listed squares, streets and monuments in 19 countries. Spain has the most, with 7.