The Most Impressive Dams in the World
6 places in 4 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most impressive dams in the world are Hoover Dam (United States), Verzasca Dam (Contra Dam) (Switzerland) and Vajont Dam (Italy). The list covers 6 dams in 4 countries. Japan has the most, with 2. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A great dam is a wall built against a river, and the best of them make that tension visible. A concrete arch bowed into a gorge shows where the water pushes; a spillway turns overflow into a curtain or a whirlpool; the sheer height of a downstream face makes the valley below seem small. Some dams were designed as architecture from the start, with towers, inscriptions and ornament worthy of a public monument.
Hoover Dam, completed in 1936 in Black Canyon on the Colorado River, pairs its immense concrete arch with Art Deco towers and sculpture. The Verzasca Dam in Ticino became famous when a bungee jump from its crest opened the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye. Kurobe Dam, the tallest in Japan, releases plumes of spray into its Alpine gorge, and the older Hakusui Dam in ÅŒita spreads water over a curved stone spillway like a sheet of lace. In California, Monticello Dam drains Lake Berryessa through a round funnel-shaped spillway known as the glory hole.
The dams were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map; the section also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hoover Dam | Dam | United States | |
| 2 | Verzasca Dam (Contra Dam) | Dam | Switzerland | |
| 3 | Vajont Dam | Dam | Italy | |
| 4 | Kurobe Dam | Dam | Japan | |
| 5 | Monticello Dam | Dam | United States | |
| 6 | Hakusui Dam | Dam | Japan |
01 Hoover Dam
United States · 9.4 km from Boulder City36.016° N 114.738° W
Image by MrUweS from Pixabay Hoover Dam plugs the Black Canyon of the Colorado River on the border between Nevada and Arizona, a curved wall of concrete standing 726 feet (about 221 metres) from its foundation rock to the roadway on its crest. Built between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression, it created Lake Mead and was, at the time, a concrete structure of unprecedented size: some 3.25 million cubic yards went into the dam alone. It was handed to the federal government in March 1936, more than two years ahead of schedule.
Did you know? The first recorded death on the project, surveyor J. G. Tierney, drowned on 20 December 1922; his son Patrick died there on 20 December 1935.
02 Verzasca Dam (Contra Dam)
Talsperre Contra
Switzerland · 13.3 km from Bellinzona46.197° N 8.848° E
Audrix · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Contra Dam, better known simply as the Verzasca Dam, closes the mouth of the Verzasca valley in Ticino with a single curved wall of concrete 220 metres high and 380 metres long across the crest. It was built between 1961 and 1965, and behind it lies Lago di Vogorno, a long green reservoir holding around 105 million cubic metres of water that feeds a hydroelectric plant with three Francis turbines and an output of about 105 megawatts. Below it, the Verzasca river runs on toward Lake Maggiore.
Did you know? Filling the reservoir set off a swarm of small earthquakes, at times up to 25 shocks a day, which faded only by 1971 and caused no damage.
03 Vajont Dam
Diga del Vajont
Italy46.267° N 12.329° E
Davide Mauro · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Vajont Dam closes a deep, narrow gorge under Monte Toc in the Carnic Prealps, about 100 km north of Venice. It is a double-arch concrete dam 262 m high, among the tallest dams in the world, built between 1957 and 1960 by the Società Adriatica di Elettricità to the design of the engineer Carlo Semenza. As a piece of engineering it is breathtaking: a pale curved wall wedged between sheer rock faces, meant to be the heart of a network of reservoirs and tunnels feeding power stations in the Piave valley.
04 Kurobe Dam
Japan36.566° N 137.662° E
Raki_Man · CC BY 3.0 Deep in the Northern Alps, where the Kurobe River cuts between the Tateyama and Ushiro-Tateyama ranges, stands the tallest dam in Japan: a concrete wall 186 metres high and 492 metres long at 1,454 metres above sea level. Kansai Electric Power built it between 1956 and 1963 to end the post-war power shortages of the Kansai region, and the site had been studied since the 1920s but always defeated by the gorge. The cost was enormous, 51.3 billion yen, several times the company's capital, partly financed by a World Bank loan, and it was paid in lives as well: 171 people died on the project.
Did you know? Japanese people often call it Kuroyon Dam, short for Kurobe No. 4, after the power station it was built to feed.
05 Monticello Dam
United States38.513° N 122.105° W
Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States · CC BY-SA 2.0 Monticello Dam is best known not for its wall but for a hole in the lake beside it. The dam, a concrete arch 304 feet high and 1,023 feet long across the narrow canyon of Putah Creek in the Vaca Mountains, was built between 1953 and 1957 by the Bureau of Reclamation. Its spillway is a "morning glory" — a bell-shaped concrete funnel 72 feet across at the lip, set in the reservoir a short distance from the dam. When Lake Berryessa rises above the rim, water pours evenly over every side of the circle and vanishes into a shaft that narrows to about 28 feet, reappearing in the canyon below. At full flow it can swallow 48,400 cubic feet per second. It is one of the strangest sights in California water engineering: a perfect round waterfall with no visible bottom.
Did you know? In February 2017 boaters eager to see the spillway run churned up enough wake to make water spill briefly into the Glory Hole.
06 Hakusui Dam
Japan32.905° N 131.327° E
No machine-readable author provided. Tmizuk assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain Most dams impress by mass. Hakusui is small — 14 metres high and 86 metres long across the upper Ōno River in the hills of Taketa, in Ōita Prefecture on Kyushu — and it is loved for its grace. The river spills over the dam in a broad sheet that breaks into white lace as it falls. That whiteness gave the dam its name: hakusui means white water. Seen from the bank below, with the green of the gorge around it, the curtain of water looks less like engineering than like a carefully composed garden feature.
Did you know? The curved channel on the right bank imitates musha-gaeshi, the outward-curving profile of Japanese castle walls designed to stop attackers from climbing.
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 impressive dam in the world?
- On our list, Hoover Dam (United States) ranks first, followed by Verzasca Dam (Contra Dam) (Switzerland) and Vajont Dam (Italy).
- Which countries have the most beautiful dams?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (2), the United States (2) and Italy (1).
- What is a glory hole spillway?
- It is a bell-shaped funnel set in a reservoir: when the water rises above its rim, the overflow drops through the funnel into a pipe beneath the dam. Monticello Dam in California has one of the best-known examples.
- What is the tallest dam in Japan?
- Kurobe Dam in Toyama Prefecture, completed in 1963, is the tallest dam in Japan at about 186 metres.
- How many dams are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 6 dams in 4 countries. Japan has the most, with 2.