The Most Curious Places in Europe
23 places in 11 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most curious places in Europe are Tivoli Gardens (Denmark), Broadway Tower (United Kingdom) and Vigeland Sculpture Park (Norway). The list covers 23 curious places in 11 countries. The United Kingdom has the most, with 7. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Europe has a long habit of building things for no practical reason at all. Eighteenth-century landowners scattered towers, sham ruins and temples across their parks to complete a view; wealthy eccentrics left monuments to their own ideas; and from the 19th century cities opened pleasure gardens and amusement parks where people came simply to wonder. Later came miniature worlds and sculpture parks, each a small universe made by one obsession.
Broadway Tower in the Cotswolds is a classic folly, a castle-like lookout raised on a hilltop for the view, and McCaig's Tower above Oban in Scotland is a granite ring modelled on the Colosseum that was never finished. Much older and stranger are the Gardens of Bomarzo in Lazio, where in the 16th century giant monsters, a tilted house and a gaping stone mouth were carved from the bedrock of a wooded valley. In Oslo, Gustav Vigeland filled a park with hundreds of granite and bronze figures culminating in a monolith of intertwined bodies.
Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens, opened in 1843, is one of the oldest amusement parks still running, and Vienna's Prater has been an entertainment ground for generations, with the giant Ferris wheel of 1897 at its edge. Tibidabo's rides sit on a mountaintop above Barcelona, and Efteling in the Netherlands turns European fairy tales into a forest of pavilions. Madurodam shrinks the Netherlands into a model town, and Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg runs the largest model railway in the world. At Pripyat, near Chernobyl, a yellow Ferris wheel that never carried the public stands in an abandoned town.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tivoli Gardens | Amusement park | Denmark | |
| 2 | Broadway Tower | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 3 | Vigeland Sculpture Park | Sculpture garden | Norway | |
| 4 | Wurstelprater | Amusement park | Austria | |
| 5 | Swallow's Nest | Castle | Ukraine | |
| 6 | Gardens of Bomarzo | Sculpture garden | Italy | |
| 7 | Tibidabo Amusement Park | Amusement park | Spain | |
| 8 | Pripyat amusement park | Amusement park | Ukraine | |
| 9 | Efteling | Amusement park | Kingdom of the Netherlands | |
| 10 | Madurodam | Miniature park | Kingdom of the Netherlands | |
| 11 | Miniatur Wunderland | Miniature park | Germany | |
| 12 | Yorkshire Sculpture Park | Sculpture garden | United Kingdom | |
| 13 | McCaig's Tower | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 14 | Mussenden Temple | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 15 | Dunmore Pineapple | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 16 | Tarot Garden | Sculpture garden | Italy | |
| 17 | Palais Idéal | Folly | France | |
| 18 | Villa Palagonia | Folly | Italy | |
| 19 | Shell Grotto | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 20 | Bekonscot | Miniature park | United Kingdom | |
| 21 | Braun's Bethlehem near Kuks | Sculpture garden | Czech Republic | |
| 22 | Désert de Retz | Folly | France | |
| 23 | Pagoda of Chanteloup | Folly | France |
01 Tivoli Gardens
Tivoli
Denmark · 0.9 km from Copenhagen55.674° N 12.568° E
Image by nozurbina from Pixabay The rides span a century. The wooden roller coaster, Rutschebanen, has run here since 1914 and is one of very few old scenic railways left where a brakeman travels on every train and controls its speed by hand; it rolls along a track of roughly 720 metres at up to about 50 km/h.
Did you know? In 1844 founder Georg Carstensen predicted Tivoli would never be finished, a sentiment Walt Disney echoed a century later about Disneyland.
02 Broadway Tower
United Kingdom52.024° N 1.836° W
The author is Newton2 (cropped by Yummifruitbat ) · CC BY 2.5 Capability Brown is credited with the idea, and James Wyatt designed it in 1794 for George Coventry, 6th Earl of Coventry; it was built in 1798–1799 for his wife Barbara. One story says that Lady Coventry wanted to know whether a beacon on the hill would be visible from their home at Croome Court, about fifteen miles to the north-west — it was. Over the nineteenth century the tower led a string of unlikely lives.
Did you know? Before Cormell Price leased it in 1866, the tower was used for a time by local glove makers.
03 Vigeland Sculpture Park
Norway · 2.9 km from Oslo59.928° N 10.699° E
Image by office8 from Pixabay The route runs east to west. A granite and wrought-iron Main Gate, erected in 1942, leads onto the Bridge, 100 metres long and lined with 58 bronzes of people of every age — the stamping, furious toddler known as Sinnataggen, the Angry Boy, is the one everybody photographs. The Bridge was the first part opened, in 1940.
Did you know? Most of the park's granite sculptures were carved from Iddefjord granite, quarried in south-eastern Norway.
04 Wurstelprater
Austria · 3.1 km from Vienna48.215° N 16.402° E
Image by rperucho from Pixabay Its landmark is the Wiener Riesenrad, the giant Ferris wheel built in 1897 by the British engineer Walter Bassett. About 65 metres tall, it was the tallest Ferris wheel still standing anywhere from 1920 until 1985. It was badly damaged in the Second World War and was rebuilt with only half of its original thirty cabins, and in 1949 it became a film location in The Third Man.
Did you know? A permit to demolish the Riesenrad was issued in 1916, but there was no money to pull it down, so the wheel survived.
05 Swallow's Nest
Ластівчине гніздо
Ukraine · 8 km from Yalta44.431° N 34.129° E
Image by IrinaKushnikova from Pixabay In 1927 a major earthquake shook the Crimean coast hard enough to be felt as far as Yalta, and while the building itself came through largely intact, the cliff it stands on cracked badly.
Did you know? The pioneering colour photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky photographed the earlier castle on the cliff in the early 1900s.
06 Gardens of Bomarzo
Parco dei Mostri
Italy42.492° N 12.248° E
Livioandronico2013 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Unlike the ordered symmetry of nearby Villa Lante or Villa Farnese, Bomarzo was meant to astonish rather than please. Giant figures, many carved straight out of the bedrock, appear among the trees without any obvious plan: an elephant crushing a Roman legionary, a dragon fighting lions, a whale, a giant tearing another figure apart, a tortoise with a winged woman on its back, a sleeping nymph, Pegasus, Cerberus.
Did you know? The elephant grappling a Roman soldier is usually identified as one of Hannibal's war elephants.
07 Tibidabo Amusement Park
Parque de Atracciones Tibidabo
Spain · 6.5 km from Barcelona41.422° N 2.120° E
Image by Miller_Eszter from Pixabay The pleasure here lies as much in the antique rides as in the view. The Avió, installed in 1928, is a replica aeroplane that circles on an arm out over the edge of the hill, commemorating an early Madrid–Barcelona flight. The Talaia, opened in 1921, lifts its gondola on a tall mast to give a panorama of the city and the sea, and the Embruixabruixes, a suspended monorail dating from 1915, runs along the slope.
Did you know? The Talaia, opened in December 1921, lifts riders to the park's highest point at about 551 metres above sea level.
08 Pripyat amusement park
Парк розваг (Прип'ять)
Ukraine51.408° N 30.057° E
Image by 1681551 from Pixabay The equipment is modest by any standard: a Ferris wheel about 26 m tall, bumper cars, swing boats and a small paratrooper ride, all standard products of a Soviet manufacturer in Yeysk. What makes the place memorable is the setting.
Did you know? Radiation is lowest on the concrete paving, which liquidators washed down after the accident, and highest in patches of moss.
09 Efteling
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 18.9 km from 's-Hertogenbosch51.650° N 5.048° E
Rémih · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes Efteling different from most theme parks is that Pieck's taste set the rules. He insisted on real materials, weathered textures and a nostalgic, slightly melancholy romance — thatched roofs, mossy brick, crooked towers — rather than painted plywood, and the park never abandoned that standard. The Fairytale Forest has grown to around thirty tales, but it still reads as an enchanted wood, with figures half-hidden among old trees.
Did you know? In 1997 Villa Volta won a Thea award as the world's first 'new style' madhouse ride, where the room rather than the visitor seems to turn.
10 Madurodam
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.9 km from The Hague52.099° N 4.298° E
Cqui · CC BY-SA 2.5 Behind the charm lies a moving story. The park is named after George Maduro, a law student from Curaçao who fought the German invasion in 1940 as a young army lieutenant, then joined the resistance, and died in Dachau in 1945; he was posthumously awarded the Military William Order, the country's highest decoration for bravery.
Did you know? Since 1993 the park has displayed a miniature of the house in Curaçao where George Maduro was born.
11 Miniatur Wunderland
Germany · 1.1 km from Hamburg53.544° N 9.989° E
Image by McRonny from Pixabay The idea came to Frederik Braun on holiday in Zurich in 2000; with his twin brother Gerrit and two partners he began building in December that year, and the first three sections opened in August 2001.
Did you know? In the invented town of Knuffingen, more than 100 fire engines respond to a simulated emergency on average every 15 minutes.
12 Yorkshire Sculpture Park
United Kingdom · 19.6 km from Leeds53.614° N 1.570° W
Michael Garlick · CC BY-SA 2.0 Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth anchor the collection, and their large bronzes sit comfortably in the open landscape. Around them works by Lynn Chadwick, Eduardo Paolozzi, Phillip King, Kenneth Armitage, Nigel Hall and many others appear across the hillsides, alongside pieces by Andy Goldsworthy, Yinka Shonibare and Ursula von Rydingsvard, whose "Damski Czepek" of 2015 is cast in polyurethane resin.
Did you know? Rather than a fixed display, the park runs a changing programme of mostly single-artist exhibitions, earning it the nickname 'gallery without walls'.
13 McCaig's Tower
United Kingdom56.416° N 5.469° W
Holger Uwe Schmitt · CC BY-SA 4.0 It was the idea of John Stuart McCaig, a wealthy banker with the North of Scotland Bank and an admirer of classical architecture, who acted as his own architect. He began building in 1897, with two aims: a permanent monument to his family, and winter work for the town's stonemasons. The plan was ambitious — a museum and art gallery inside the ring, a central tower, and statues of himself, his parents and his siblings.
Did you know? His will also set up prizes for young artists who submitted designs for new 'artistic towers' around Oban.
14 Mussenden Temple
United Kingdom · 38.2 km from Londonderry/Derry55.168° N 6.811° W
D LN · CC BY-SA 4.0 The building was never a place of worship. It was a library, with bookcases lining the walls and busts set in the dome, and a fire was kept burning in the basement so that the books would stay dry in one of the most exposed spots on the island.
Did you know? The Earl-Bishop's art collection at Downhill included works attributed to Correggio, Dürer, Murillo, Rubens and Tintoretto, and the fire of 1851 destroyed the house's library.
15 Dunmore Pineapple
United Kingdom56.077° N 3.787° W
giannandrea · CC0 The joke is carried off with great craftsmanship. Each of the stone leaves of the fruit was individually shaped and drained so that rainwater would not collect and crack it in frost, and the chimneys of the heating system were disguised as Grecian urns.
Did you know? The upper floor once held two small cottages, known as bothies, where the estate's gardeners lived beside their hothouses.
16 Tarot Garden
Giardino dei Tarocchi
Italy42.426° N 11.466° E
DustyLosAngeles · CC BY-SA 4.0 Saint Phalle, the French-American sculptor, had long dreamed of a garden of her own after seeing Gaudí's Park Güell in Barcelona, and she also admired the Sacro Bosco of Bomarzo and the Facteur Cheval's Palais Idéal. In the mid-1970s the brothers Carlo and Nicola Caracciolo, to whom she was introduced by Marella Caracciolo Agnelli, offered her land at Garavicchio, and work began in 1978.
Did you know? The tallest figures stand about 12 to 15 metres high, and several are hollow enough for visitors to walk through.
17 Palais Idéal
France45.256° N 5.029° E
Image by Olzheim from Pixabay He worked on it for thirty-three years, mostly at night after his rounds, hauling stones home in a wheelbarrow with no training in architecture, masonry or sculpture — by his own reckoning, something like 10,000 days and 93,000 hours of solitary labour.
Did you know? The north façade is a stone menagerie, with an ostrich family, a camel, flamingos, octopuses, lions, dragons and even a polar bear.
18 Villa Palagonia
Italy · 15.3 km from Palermo38.080° N 13.511° E
Jpbazard Jean-Pierre Bazard · CC BY-SA 3.0 The villa was begun in 1715 for Ferdinando Francesco I Gravina, Prince of Palagonia, to designs by Tommaso Maria Napoli, a Dominican friar, assisted by Agatino Daidone; the main construction lasted until 1737. The plan joins two square blocks with a curved central section, and a double staircase with stone balustrades climbs to the main floor. It is one of the earliest examples of Sicilian Baroque villa architecture in the area around Palermo.
Did you know? One bedroom was decorated with marble toads, frogs, serpents, lizards and scorpions, according to descriptions of the villa.
19 Shell Grotto
United Kingdom · 29 km from Dover51.388° N 1.390° E
Gernot Keller www.gernot-keller.com · CC BY-SA 2.5 The grotto was rediscovered around 1835; the earliest known account, from a newspaper of 1838, describes workmen at a cottage digging into an extensive underground space studded with shells. The layout is a serpentine passage about 70 feet long and 8 feet high, a circular rotunda with a shaft rising to daylight beneath a dome, and a rectangular chamber of roughly 15 by 20 feet, often called the altar chamber.
Did you know? A wall of the grotto was damaged by a bomb during the Second World War and had to be reconstructed.
20 Bekonscot
United Kingdom · 33.5 km from Luton51.614° N 0.645° W
Image by stgeorgemr from Pixabay The village began as the private hobby of Roland Callingham, who built a garden railway and then kept adding a world for it to run through, helped by W. A. Berry. Instead of one settlement there are several invented ones, each with its own character: Bekonscot itself, Evenlode with its new town and colliery, Epwood, Greenhaily, Hanton, Southpool and the seaside Splashyng.
Did you know? The first garden line was about 1,200 feet long; today's almost ten scale miles of track amount to roughly 400 metres in real life.
21 Braun's Bethlehem near Kuks
Betlém u Kuksu
Czech Republic · 21.5 km from Hradec Králové50.398° N 15.849° E
Dezidor · CC BY 3.0 The project belonged to Count Franz Anton von Sporck, the art-loving lord of Kuks, who bought the forest in February 1717 and turned it into a landscape for religious contemplation. From 1718 he founded seven hermitages in the wood, dedicated to saints including Anthony, Paul, Francis, Jerome, Hubert, Giles and Bruno, and settled hermits there.
Did you know? The Garín statue and its cave belong to the village of Hřibojedy, and in 2021 the state proposed buying them to unite the whole ensemble under one owner.
22 Désert de Retz
France · 13.4 km from Versailles48.893° N 2.016° E
Rémih · CC BY-SA 4.0 The garden was the creation of François Racine de Monville, a wealthy aristocrat who bought the estate in 1774 and enlarged it over the following decade. In the fashion of the day it was an "Anglo-Chinese" landscape garden, a deliberately irregular park studded with fabriques, small buildings meant to evoke distant times and places.
Did you know? The pyramid ice house holds a barrel-shaped pit about six metres deep, used to store ice and food.
23 Pagoda of Chanteloup
Pagode de Chanteloup
France · 20.4 km from Tours47.391° N 0.970° E
Manfred Heyde , · CC BY-SA 3.0 Its builder was Étienne-François, Duke of Choiseul, Louis XV's chief minister, who had owned Chanteloup since 1761. In December 1770 he fell from favour and was ordered to retire there, but instead of an empty exile he found his house crowded with friends and admirers who defied the king to visit him. Shortly before his exile was lifted in 1775, he commissioned the architect Louis-Denis Le Camus to raise a monument to their loyalty.
Did you know? Under the chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal, owner from 1802 to 1823, the estate was used to grow sugar beet for sugar production.
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 curious places in Europe?
- On our list, Tivoli Gardens (Denmark) ranks first, followed by Broadway Tower (United Kingdom) and Vigeland Sculpture Park (Norway).
- Which country has the most curious places in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from the United Kingdom (7), France (3) and Italy (3).
- What is a folly?
- A folly is a building made mainly for decoration or effect rather than use, such as a sham ruin, a lookout tower or a garden temple. They were especially fashionable in British and European landscape gardens of the 18th and 19th centuries.
- What is the Park of Monsters in Bomarzo?
- It is a 16th-century garden in Lazio, created for Prince Pier Francesco Orsini, known as Vicino, in which giant monsters, mythical figures and a leaning house were carved from boulders in a wooded valley.
- Why was the Pripyat Ferris wheel never used?
- The amusement park in Pripyat was due to open on 1 May 1986, but the town was evacuated days earlier after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 26 April. The Ferris wheel never entered regular service.
- How many curious places are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 23 curious places in 11 countries. The United Kingdom has the most, with 7.