The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Temples in the World
35 places in 14 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed temples in the world are Angkor Wat (Cambodia), Prambanan Temple (Indonesia) and Parthenon (Greece). The list covers 35 UNESCO-listed temples in 14 countries. Japan has the most, with 8. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A temple on the World Heritage List has been judged as a monument of the whole of humanity, not only of the faith that raised it. That bar favours buildings that changed how people built: the first stone shrines of the Mediterranean, the temple-mountains of Southeast Asia, the timber halls of East Asia that survived because generations of monks kept repairing them. What these places share is a sense of order made visible, a cosmos laid out in stone, brick or cypress wood.
Angkor Wat, raised in the 12th century as a temple to Vishnu, is the largest religious monument on earth, its five towers standing for the peaks of Mount Meru. On Java, the slender Hindu spires of Prambanan and the stepped Buddhist mandala of Borobudur were built within a few decades and a short distance of each other in the 9th century. The Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis set the proportions that classical architecture has quoted ever since.
India's Konark Sun Temple is carved as the chariot of the sun god Surya, with stone wheels that work as sundials. In Beijing, the round, triple-roofed Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests at the Temple of Heaven is where Ming and Qing emperors prayed for the year's crops. Kyoto's Kiyomizu-dera stands on a wooden stage jutting over a wooded slope, and Malta's Ġgantija on Gozo takes the story back to the Neolithic, to megalithic walls older than the pyramids of Giza.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Angkor Wat | Archaeological site | Cambodia | ✓ |
| 2 | Prambanan Temple | Archaeological site | Indonesia | ✓ |
| 3 | Parthenon | Ruins | Greece | ✓ |
| 4 | Konark Sun Temple | Temple | India | ✓ |
| 5 | Potala Palace | Palace | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 6 | Kiyomizu-dera | Temple | Japan | ✓ |
| 7 | Temple of Heaven | Temple | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 8 | Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary | Archaeological site | Vietnam | ✓ |
| 9 | Borobudur Temple | Stupa | Indonesia | ✓ |
| 10 | Tōdai-ji Temple | Temple | Japan | ✓ |
| 11 | Ġgantija | Archaeological site | Malta | ✓ |
| 12 | Kinkaku-ji Temple | Temple | Japan | ✓ |
| 13 | Mahabodhi Temple | Temple | India | ✓ |
| 14 | Luxor Temple | Archaeological site | Egypt | ✓ |
| 15 | Pashupatinath Temple | Temple | Nepal | ✓ |
| 16 | Brihadisvara Temple, Thanjavur | Temple | India | ✓ |
| 17 | Karnak Temple Complex | Archaeological site | Egypt | ✓ |
| 18 | Temple of Kukulcan | Temple | Mexico | ✓ |
| 19 | Jokhang | Temple | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 20 | Maison Carrée | Temple | France | ✓ |
| 21 | Preah Vihear Temple | Temple | Cambodia | ✓ |
| 22 | Dambulla cave temple | Temple | Sri Lanka | ✓ |
| 23 | Ginkaku-ji Temple | Temple | Japan | ✓ |
| 24 | Swayambhunath | Stupa | Nepal | ✓ |
| 25 | Hōryū-ji | Temple | Japan | ✓ |
| 26 | Byōdō-in Temple | Temple | Japan | ✓ |
| 27 | Khajuraho Group of Monuments | Temple | India | ✓ |
| 28 | Banteay Srei | Temple | Cambodia | ✓ |
| 29 | Temple of Apollo Epicurius in Bassae | Ruins | Greece | ✓ |
| 30 | Ramappa Temple | Temple | India | ✓ |
01 Angkor Wat
Cambodia · 5.4 km from Siem Reap13.412° N 103.867° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by The_5ifth from Pixabay 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.
Did you know? The temple was built from an estimated five to ten million sandstone blocks, the heaviest weighing about 1.5 tonnes.
02 Prambanan Temple
Indonesia · 13.2 km from Yogyakarta City7.752° S 110.491° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Gunawan Kartapranata · CC BY-SA 3.0 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.
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.
03 Parthenon
Παρθενώνας
Greece · 1.6 km from Athens37.972° N 23.727° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nonbirinonko from Pixabay The Parthenon looks perfectly straight only because almost nothing about it actually is.
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.
04 Konark Sun Temple
India · 21.7 km from Puri19.887° N 86.095° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Souravdas1987 · CC BY-SA 4.0 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.
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.
05 Potala Palace
People's Republic of China · 2.2 km from Lhasa29.658° N 91.117° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nrxfly from Pixabay 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.
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.
06 Kiyomizu-dera
Japan · 5.3 km from Kyoto34.995° N 135.785° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JordyMeow from Pixabay 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.
Did you know? Kiyomizu-dera became part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of historic Kyoto in 1994.
07 Temple of Heaven
People's Republic of China · 2.4 km from Beijing39.882° N 116.407° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ccxcn from Pixabay 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.
Did you know? UNESCO notes that the temple's symbolic plan shaped architecture and city planning across East Asia for centuries.
08 Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary
Vietnam · 35.5 km from Da Nang15.763° N 108.124° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
shankar s. from Dubai, united arab emirates · CC BY 2.0 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.
Did you know? About 32 inscribed steles have been found at Mỹ Sơn, written in Sanskrit and Cham between the 5th and 12th centuries.
09 Borobudur Temple
Indonesia · 15.5 km from Magelang7.608° S 110.204° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Justine Hong · CC BY 2.0 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.
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.
10 Tōdai-ji Temple
Japan · 35.3 km from Ōtsu34.689° N 135.840° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by daeron from Pixabay 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.
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.
11 Ġgantija
Malta · 27.5 km from Valletta36.047° N 14.269° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Vitold Muratov · CC BY-SA 4.0 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.
Did you know? Ġgantija was inscribed alone on the World Heritage List in 1980; in 1992 five more temples joined it and the listing was renamed the Megalithic Temples of Malta.
12 Kinkaku-ji Temple
Japan · 2 km from Kyoto35.039° N 135.728° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by siamkop from Pixabay 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.
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.
13 Mahabodhi Temple
India · 11.5 km from Gaya24.696° N 84.991° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Sumitsurai · CC BY-SA 4.0 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.
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.
14 Luxor Temple
Egypt · 1.1 km from Luxor25.700° N 32.639° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay 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.
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.
15 Pashupatinath Temple
Nepal · 3.5 km from Kathmandu27.710° N 85.349° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by bijayyadav from Pixabay Pashupatinath is the most important Hindu temple in Nepal and one of the holiest Shiva shrines anywhere, the destination of pilgrims from across South Asia. It stands on the banks of the Bagmati river on the eastern side of Kathmandu, where a temple is recorded as early as 400 AD.
Did you know? The name Pashupati means lord of animals, one of the epithets of Shiva, who is worshipped here as protector of all living beings.
16 Brihadisvara Temple, Thanjavur
India · 2.4 km from Thanjavur10.783° N 79.132° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0 Rajaraja I, the Chola emperor who dominated south India at the turn of the first millennium, built this temple to Shiva at Thanjavur between 1003 and 1010 and named it after himself: Rajarajesvaram. Locals simply call it the Big Temple, Periya Kovil, and the name is fair.
Did you know? In 1954 India's ₹1,000 banknote carried a panoramic view of the temple, and in 2010 it featured on the first ₹1,000 coin ever minted in the Republic.
17 Karnak Temple Complex
Egypt · 2.2 km from Luxor25.718° N 32.658° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nadkol19 from Pixabay The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak is large enough that Notre-Dame Cathedral would fit inside its footprint, held up by 134 sandstone columns, with the twelve tallest running down the central nave at about 21 metres high and roughly 10 metres around — big enough that a handful of people can link arms around the base of just one.
Did you know? The ancient Egyptians called the complex Ipet-isut, usually translated as the Most Selected of Places; Karnak is simply the name of a modern village nearby.
18 Temple of Kukulcan
Mexico · 38.4 km from Valladolid20.683° N 88.569° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by willysilvaquesada from Pixabay El Castillo, the Temple of Kukulcan, is the step pyramid that dominates the centre of Chichen Itza in Mexico's Yucatán, and archaeologists catalogue it simply as Structure 5B18. It was built by the Maya between roughly the 8th and 12th centuries and dedicated to Kukulcan, the feathered serpent of the Yucatec Maya.
Did you know? The inner pyramid hidden under the present shell is itself impressive: about 33 metres wide and 17 metres high, built between roughly 600 and 800 CE.
19 Jokhang
People's Republic of China · 3.2 km from Lhasa29.653° N 91.132° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by VY from Pixabay The Jokhang is the most sacred temple in Tibet, the place every Tibetan Buddhist hopes to reach at least once, and the old heart of Lhasa grew up around it. It was founded in the 7th century under King Songtsen Gampo, the first ruler of a unified Tibet, to house a Buddha image brought by his Nepalese queen Bhrikuti; its design is attributed to Nepalese craftsmen.
Did you know? In front of the temple stands a pillar inscribed with the Sino-Tibetan treaty of 821–822, which fixed the border between the two empires.
20 Maison Carrée
Maison carrée
France · 1 km from Nîmes43.838° N 4.356° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by pcdazero from Pixabay Two thousand years after it was built, the Maison Carrée still stands complete on its podium in the centre of Nîmes, columns, roof, pediment and all. It is one of the best-preserved Roman temples anywhere in the former empire. In 2023 UNESCO added it to the World Heritage list.
Did you know? Despite its name, which means square house, the temple is a rectangle almost twice as long as it is wide.
21 Preah Vihear Temple
Cambodia14.391° N 104.680° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
PsamatheM · CC BY-SA 4.0 Preah Vihear is a temple built on the edge of the world as the Khmer knew it. It stands on a promontory of the Dângrêk Mountains where the escarpment breaks off in a sheer cliff some 525 metres above the Cambodian plain, and from the last terrace the land below stretches away to the horizon — a view that makes the setting as much a part of the monument as its stones.
Did you know? A stele inscribed around 1120 records that the royal guru Divakarapandita gave the temple a golden dancing Shiva and lined its floor with bronze plates.
22 Dambulla cave temple
Sri Lanka7.857° N 80.649° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SuzyT from Pixabay The Dambulla cave temple occupies a great granite outcrop that rises about 160 metres above the plains of central Sri Lanka, and beneath one immense overhang it holds five shrines packed with statues and painted from floor to ceiling. It is the largest and best-preserved cave temple complex in the country and still an active monastery. UNESCO listed it in 1991, and it is also known as the Golden Temple of Dambulla.
Did you know? The complex holds 153 Buddha statues alongside three statues of Sri Lankan kings and four of Hindu deities.
23 Ginkaku-ji Temple
Japan · 4.6 km from Kyoto35.027° N 135.798° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Michelle-Maria from Pixabay Ginkaku-ji, the "Temple of the Silver Pavilion", is officially called Jishō-ji and belongs to the Shōkoku-ji branch of Rinzai Zen. It stands at the foot of the Higashiyama hills on Kyoto's eastern edge. It began as the retirement villa of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who started planning it around 1460.
Did you know? Ginkaku-ji is one of the seventeen sites of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.
24 Swayambhunath
Nepal · 2.5 km from Kathmandu27.715° N 85.290° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0 Swayambhunath crowns a wooded hill just west of Kathmandu, and from almost anywhere in the valley you can see its white dome and gilded spire, painted on all four sides with the half-closed eyes of the Buddha. For the Newar Buddhists of the valley it is one of their three holiest sites, for Tibetan Buddhists second only to Boudhanath, and Hindus worship here too.
Did you know? According to local legend, the temple's monkeys descended from lice in the long hair of the bodhisattva Manjushri.
25 Hōryū-ji
Japan · 22.8 km from Osaka34.614° N 135.734° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
ONO Masanobu · CC0 The wooden halls of Hōryū-ji have been standing for some thirteen centuries. Its Golden Hall (Kondō) and five-storey pagoda are among the oldest surviving wooden buildings anywhere in the world, and in 1993 the temple, together with nearby Hokki-ji, became Japan's first UNESCO World Heritage Site as the Buddhist Monuments in the Hōryū-ji Area.
Did you know? Inside the pagoda, the central pillar reaches three metres below the great foundation stone, where a relic believed to be a fragment of the Buddha's bones is enshrined.
26 Byōdō-in Temple
Japan · 14.1 km from Ōtsu34.889° N 135.808° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by jamie_nakamura from Pixabay Byōdō-in is the temple on the Japanese ten-yen coin, and the building on that coin, the Phoenix Hall, has stood beside its pond in Uji since 1053.
Did you know? The temple bell is counted among Japan's three most famous bells, celebrated specifically for the beauty of its shape and relief decoration.
27 Khajuraho Group of Monuments
India24.850° N 79.933° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Hiroki Ogawa · CC BY 3.0 The temples of Khajuraho are the surviving core of a religious city built by the Chandela dynasty in what is now Madhya Pradesh, in the heart of India. Most were raised between about 885 and 1000 CE, and inscriptions suggest the greater part of what stands today was complete by around 1030. By the 12th century there were some 85 temples spread over 20 square kilometres; about 25 survive across 6.
Did you know? The temples were built without mortar: sandstone blocks lock together with mortise-and-tenon joints and stay in place by gravity, some beams weighing up to 20 tons.
28 Banteay Srei
Cambodia · 28.4 km from Siem Reap13.599° N 103.963° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay Banteay Srei is a small temple with an outsized reputation. Set in the countryside about 25 kilometres northeast of the main Angkor group, it was consecrated in 967, and unlike almost every other major monument of Angkor it was not built by a king but by two courtiers in the service of Rajendravarman II, Yajnavaraha and Vishnukumara.
Did you know? Its exact consecration date, 22 April 967, is known from a foundation stela found only in 1936; scholars had assumed the rich carving meant a later date.
29 Temple of Apollo Epicurius in Bassae
Ναός Επικούριου Απόλλωνα
Greece37.430° N 21.900° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jean Housen · CC BY-SA 4.0 On a bare limestone shoulder of Mount Kotilion, more than 1,100 metres up in the wild hills where ancient Arcadia met Messenia, stands one of the best-preserved temples of classical Greece. Its name, Bassai, means roughly a little vale among the rocks, and the setting is exactly that: grey stone, oak scrub and a long view over ridges towards the sea.
Did you know? Bassae became the first Greek site on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986.
30 Ramappa Temple
India18.259° N 79.942° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Ms Sarah Welch · CC0 Ramappa is a temple named after the man who built it, not the god it honours, and the sculptor has earned the tribute. Raised in 1213 in the village of Palampet in Telangana by Recherla Rudra, a general of the Kakatiya king Ganapati Deva, the temple is dedicated to Shiva as Rudreshwara, but it is known everywhere by the name of its designer. It is often said to be the only temple in India named after its craftsman.
Did you know? The light bricks of the tower weigh only about three-quarters as much as ordinary bricks, thanks to husk and fibre burned out in firing.
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 temples in the world?
- On our list, Angkor Wat (Cambodia) ranks first, followed by Prambanan Temple (Indonesia) and Parthenon (Greece).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed temples in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (8), India (5) and the People's Republic of China (4).
- What is the largest religious monument in the world?
- Angkor Wat in Cambodia, built in the first half of the 12th century under King Suryavarman II. It began as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu and later became a Buddhist place of worship.
- What is the oldest temple on the UNESCO World Heritage List?
- Among the oldest are the Megalithic Temples of Malta, including Ġgantija on Gozo, built in the fourth millennium BC. They predate both Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids.
- Who was the Parthenon dedicated to?
- The Parthenon was dedicated to Athena Parthenos, the patron goddess of Athens. It was built on the Acropolis in the 5th century BC under Pericles.
- How many UNESCO-listed temples are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 35 UNESCO-listed temples in 14 countries. Japan has the most, with 8.