The Most Beautiful Windmills in the World
4 places in 4 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful windmills in the world are Windmills at Kinderdijk (Kingdom of the Netherlands), Consuegra Windmills (Spain) and Kato Mili Windmills, Mykonos (Greece). The list covers 4 windmills in 4 countries. Greece has the most, with 1. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A windmill is a machine that became a landscape. Its sails turn the wind into work, but what makes one memorable is how it holds a horizon: a white tower on a bare ridge, a line of mills along a dyke, a row of sails facing the same weather. The best of them show their purpose in their shape, and they look most themselves against open sky.
Our list spans very different traditions. The Consuegra windmills stand in a white line along a ridge above the plains of La Mancha, the country of Don Quixote's giants. At Kinderdijk, a chain of eighteenth-century mills once pumped water out of the polders, and the whole system is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Kato Mili mills sit on a low rise above the harbour of Mykonos, and at Nashtifan in eastern Iran, mud-brick walls shelter vertical-axis mills of a much older Persian design, with wooden blades turning behind the wind slots.
The places here were chosen for how they look and ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the collection also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Windmills at Kinderdijk | Windmill | Kingdom of the Netherlands | |
| 2 | Consuegra Windmills | Windmill | Spain | |
| 3 | Kato Mili Windmills, Mykonos | Windmill | Greece | |
| 4 | Nashtifan Windmill Complex | Windmill | Iran |
01 Windmills at Kinderdijk
Kinderdijkse molens
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 11.4 km from Rotterdam51.889° N 4.635° E
Image by FeelHype from Pixabay Few places show so plainly how the Dutch made their own ground. At Kinderdijk, where the Lek and the Noord meet on the edge of the Alblasserwaard, nineteen windmills stand in long lines beside the drainage channels, the largest surviving group of old mills anywhere in the Netherlands. They were not built for picturesque effect: each one was a pump, and together they kept a low-lying polder from turning back into marsh. UNESCO added the whole mill network to its World Heritage List in 1997.
Did you know? Most of the mills are still lived in: the residents are bound to maintain them and set the sails turning on a set number of days each year.
02 Consuegra Windmills
Molinos de Consuegra
Spain39.450° N 3.607° W
Image by javierAlamo from Pixabay A bare ridge above the town of Consuegra, the Cerro Calderico, carries one of the most recognisable skylines in Spain: a file of white windmills with black conical caps, strung out along the crest behind a medieval castle. Thirteen mills once stood here; twelve have been rebuilt and can be visited, making this the most complete set of windmills in La Mancha. The region had few rivers reliable enough for water mills, so for centuries the steady wind across the plain did the grinding instead.
Did you know? Each mill has eight small windows around its top floor, which let the miller read the direction of the wind.
03 Kato Mili Windmills, Mykonos
Greece · 34.7 km from Ermoupolis37.444° N 25.326° E
Image by falco from Pixabay On the western edge of Chora, the main town of Mykonos, a row of white windmills stands on a low ridge above the sea. The islanders call them Kato Mili, the "lower mills", and from the harbour of Alefkandra they read as a single silhouette: squat cylinders, conical caps of wood and straw, and bare spoked sails pointing into the wind. Seven stand on this hill; across the island sixteen old mills survive in all.
Did you know? At their peak about 28 windmills worked across Mykonos, and the Kato Mili group above the harbour was the largest cluster, with around ten mills.
04 Nashtifan Windmill Complex
Iran34.432° N 60.175° E
Ali Vaseghnia · CC BY-SA 4.0 On a bare, wind-scoured plain in the far east of Khorasan, close to the Afghan frontier, a row of tall mud-brick walls stands shoulder to shoulder like the ribs of some enormous beast. These are the asbads of Nashtifan: windmills built from clay, straw and timber, rising to roughly twenty metres, and generally reckoned to be around a thousand years old in their lineage. The village name is usually explained as a compression of words meaning "storm's sting", and the place lives up to it — the mills exist because of the ferocious seasonal gale that sweeps across the region for about four months of the year, the wind locals call the 120-day wind.
Did you know? The great wall at Nashtifan holds about two dozen mills, and around thirty similar windmills survive in the surrounding area.
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 is the most beautiful windmill in the world?
- On our list, Windmills at Kinderdijk (Kingdom of the Netherlands) ranks first, followed by Consuegra Windmills (Spain) and Kato Mili Windmills, Mykonos (Greece).
- Why does the Netherlands have so many windmills?
- Much of the country lies below sea level, and from the late Middle Ages windmills were used to pump water out of reclaimed land. Kinderdijk, a UNESCO site, preserves one of the best-known groups of these drainage mills.
- What is a vertical-axis windmill?
- It is a mill whose blades turn around an upright shaft rather than a horizontal one. The Persian windmills at Nashtifan in Iran are a surviving example, with wooden blades set behind tall walls that funnel the wind.
- How many windmills are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 4 windmills in 4 countries. Greece has the most, with 1.