The Most Impressive City Walls in the World
11 places in 9 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most impressive city walls in the world are Walls of Ávila (Spain), Xi'an City Wall (People's Republic of China) and Walls of Dubrovnik (Croatia). The list covers 11 city walls in 9 countries. Croatia has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
City walls are among the most ambitious things a community ever built. They had to enclose everything that mattered, run unbroken around streets, harbours and hills, and still leave room for gates, towers and the life of the town inside. Where they survive whole, they give a place an edge you can walk along, a line between the city and the world that reads more clearly than any map.
The walls here cover many cultures and eras. Conwy's circuit, raised for Edward I in the late thirteenth century, still rings the Welsh town with its towers. The walls of Ávila wrap the Castilian city in a nearly complete medieval ring. Xi'an's Ming-dynasty wall is broad enough to cycle along. Dubrovnik's walls run around the old town above the Adriatic, while the long walls of Ston climb the hills of the Pelješac peninsula. Monteriggioni is a small crown of towers on a Tuscan hill, mentioned by Dante in the Inferno, and the walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt under Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century.
The walls in this collection were chosen for how they look and ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph with its author named and a location on the map, and the section also opens by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Walls of Ávila | City walls | Spain | ✓ |
| 2 | Xi'an City Wall | City walls | People's Republic of China | |
| 3 | Walls of Dubrovnik | City walls | Croatia | |
| 4 | Walls of Jerusalem | City walls | Israel | ✓ |
| 5 | Conwy Town Walls | City walls | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 6 | Fortifications of Kotor | City walls | Montenegro | ✓ |
| 7 | Walls of Tallinn | City walls | Estonia | |
| 8 | Visby City Wall | City walls | Sweden | ✓ |
| 9 | Monteriggioni | City walls | Italy | |
| 10 | Walls of Ston | City walls | Croatia | |
| 11 | Jinshanling | City walls | People's Republic of China |
01 Walls of Ávila
Muralla de Ávila
Spain40.657° N 4.707° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by NakNakNak from Pixabay The walls of Ávila wrap the whole of the old town in an unbroken ring of granite, and they are the reason the city looks, from the plain below, like an illumination in a medieval manuscript. Work on them traditionally begins in 1090, after the resettlement of the town, but most of what stands today dates from the 12th century, with later work into the 14th. The builders reused whatever lay to hand — stones from the Roman cemetery, older Roman and Visigothic walls, fragments of civil buildings — and the grey and dark granite gives the circuit its sombre, even colour.
Did you know? After Queen Joanna had a postern by the Dávila palace walled up in 1507, its lord opened a window there in 1542 inscribed "Where one door closes, another opens."
02 Xi'an City Wall
People's Republic of China · 5.2 km from Xi'an34.253° N 108.942° E
xiquinhosilva · CC BY 2.0 Xi'an keeps one of the oldest, largest and best preserved city walls in China, and its scale is hard to grasp until you stand on top of it. The rampart runs for about 13.7 kilometres in a long rectangle around the old centre, twelve metres high, fifteen to eighteen metres thick at the base and still twelve to fourteen metres wide at the top: broad enough for a road, and today used as one by walkers and cyclists. Outside, a moat about eighteen metres wide follows the line of the wall, and inside lies a grid of streets that still orients itself on the old gates.
Did you know? The Ming founder built the wall on the advice of the scholar Zhu Sheng: first raise high walls and store grain, then unify the realm.
03 Walls of Dubrovnik
Dubrovačke gradske zidine
Croatia · 2.7 km from Dubrovnik42.640° N 18.108° E
Image by fjaka from Pixabay Few cities are as completely held by their fortifications as Dubrovnik. A continuous ring of stone, close to two kilometres long, wraps the entire old town, rising in places to about 25 metres and swelling to four to six metres thick on the landward side, where attack was most feared. On the seaward flank the walls grow thinner, trusting the cliffs and the water to do part of the work. Walk the full circuit on top and the city unfolds beneath you as a single composition: terracotta roofs, bell towers, the long straight line of the Stradun, and on the other side the open Adriatic.
Did you know? Above the gate of Fort Lovrijenac is carved the Latin motto Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro: freedom is not sold for all the gold in the world.
04 Walls of Jerusalem
Israel · 2 km from Jerusalem31.775° N 35.228° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
איתן פרמן 13:56, 4 December 2006 (UTC) · Public domain The walls that ring the Old City of Jerusalem enclose an area of about one square kilometre that holds sites sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Their line is ancient, but the stones you see today are mostly Ottoman. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent ordered the ruined fortifications rebuilt, partly on older foundations, and the work was carried out between about 1537 and 1541. An Arabic inscription records his decree in grand terms. The circuit runs for about 4 km, with an average height of 12 m and walls about 2.5 m thick, and 34 towers punctuate it.
Did you know? According to legend, Suleiman executed his two architects for leaving Mount Zion outside the walls; two graves inside the Jaffa Gate are popularly said to be theirs.
05 Conwy Town Walls
United Kingdom53.281° N 3.831° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
David Dixon · CC BY-SA 2.0 The town walls of Conwy are a remarkably complete medieval circuit: a ring of stone about 1.3 km long, with 21 towers and three gateways, still wrapped around the small town at the mouth of the Conwy river in North Wales. Edward I had them built between 1283 and 1287, together with the castle at their corner, as part of his conquest of Wales; the works were directed by Master James of St George. The circuit forms a rough triangle, climbing from the quay up the hillside and back down to the castle, built of local sandstone, limestone and rhyolite.
Did you know? Edward I founded the town on the site of Aberconwy Abbey, a Cistercian house favoured by the Welsh princes, which he moved about eight miles inland.
06 Fortifications of Kotor
Montenegro42.425° N 18.771° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Ingo Mehling · CC BY-SA 4.0 Kotor sits at the innermost point of the Bay of Kotor, on a triangle of flat land between the water, the small river Škurda and the sheer limestone face of St John's Mountain. Its fortifications are not just a ring around the old town: from the corners of the town walls, two lines of ramparts climb straight up the mountainside and meet at the Castle of San Giovanni, about 280 metres above the sea. The whole circuit runs to some 4.5 km, with walls between 2 and 16 metres thick and up to 20 metres high. Together with the old town and its setting they were placed on the World Heritage List in 1979, and in 2017 Kotor was also included in the listing of Venetian works of defence.
Did you know? In December 1813 British sailors spent three weeks in constant rain hauling an 18-pounder gun up the mountain before setting it above the fortress.
07 Walls of Tallinn
Tallinna linnamüür
Estonia · 0.7 km from Tallinn59.435° N 24.741° E
Image by NakNakNak from Pixabay Tallinn has kept one of the most complete medieval town walls in northern Europe, and it still shapes the silhouette of the Old Town: a ring of grey limestone curtain walls punctuated by round towers with red conical roofs. Building went on for three centuries. The first wall, named after Queen Margaret Sambiria, who ordered it, dates from 1265, and a major expansion of the defences began in 1310. In its final form the circuit around the lower town ran about 2.35 km, with some 35 towers in the main wall and eight gates, plus outworks; around 1.85 km of wall and more than 25 towers survive today.
Did you know? Queen Margaret Sambiria, who ordered the first wall in 1265, was the mother of the Danish king Eric V and styled herself Lady of Estonia.
08 Visby City Wall
Visby ringmur
Sweden · 0.8 km from Visby57.640° N 18.294° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Adrian Farwell · CC BY 3.0 Visby is ringed by one of the best preserved medieval town walls in Europe. Of its original 3.6 kilometres, 3.44 still stand, closing the old Hanseatic town on three sides against the land and following the shore on the fourth. Of the 29 large and 22 small towers that once punctuated it, 27 large towers survive, so that the silhouette of Visby from outside is almost exactly the one medieval sailors saw: grey limestone curtain and steep-roofed towers rising above the Baltic.
Did you know? In medieval Sweden only three towns had walls: Stockholm, Kalmar and Visby.
09 Monteriggioni
Italy · 12.1 km from Siena43.367° N 11.218° E
Carsten Steger · CC BY-SA 4.0 Seen from the road below, Monteriggioni is a crown of stone set on a low hill: an almost unbroken ring of medieval wall, studded with square towers, enclosing a small village. So striking was this silhouette that Dante used it in the Inferno, comparing the giants who stand around the pit at the bottom of Hell to the towers that ring Monteriggioni.
Did you know? The walls originally carried fifteen towers; four were later cut down to wall height, and eleven still rise about 6.5 metres above the ramparts.
10 Walls of Ston
Stonske zidine
Croatia · 37.8 km from Dubrovnik42.838° N 17.697° E
Jules Verne Times Two · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Walls of Ston are one of the longest fortification systems ever built in Europe — originally more than 7 km of wall, towers and forts thrown across the narrow neck of the Pelješac peninsula in southern Dalmatia. They were built by the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) to protect a prize that made the city rich: the salt pans of Ston, which are still worked today.
Did you know? Ston's salt pans brought the Republic about 15,900 ducats a year, more than the 12,000 ducats the Great Wall section cost to build.
11 Jinshanling
People's Republic of China40.679° N 117.251° E
Image by Vined from Pixabay Jinshanling is the Great Wall as most people imagine it: a crenellated ridge line switching back and forth across steep mountains, crowded with watchtowers that march away to the horizon. The section lies in Luanping County, Hebei, on the border with Beijing's Miyun district, and runs about 10.5 km with 5 passes, 67 watchtowers and 3 beacon towers. The eastern end joins the Simatai section, and the wall changes character along the way: carefully restored near the main entrance, it becomes rougher and more overgrown the further east one walks.
Did you know? China's national anthem video, broadcast as part of CCTV's morning opening, was filmed on a brick platform of the Jinshanling wall.
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 impressive city walls in the world?
- On our list, Walls of Ávila (Spain) ranks first, followed by Xi'an City Wall (People's Republic of China) and Walls of Dubrovnik (Croatia).
- What is the longest wall in the world?
- The Great Wall of China is the longest wall ever built, a system of fortifications built and rebuilt over many centuries. Its restored Ming-dynasty section at Jinshanling is part of this collection.
- Which country has the most impressive city walls?
- In our collection, the most come from Croatia (2), the People's Republic of China (2) and Estonia (1).
- Why did medieval cities build walls?
- Walls protected against raids and sieges, but they also controlled who and what entered the city, so tolls could be collected at the gates, and they marked the legal boundary of the town's rights.
- How many city walls are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 11 city walls in 9 countries. Croatia has the most, with 2.