The Most Impressive UNESCO-Listed City Walls in the World
5 places in 5 countries · updated 5 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most impressive UNESCO-listed city walls in the world are Walls of Ávila (Spain), Walls of Jerusalem (Israel) and Conwy Town Walls (United Kingdom). The list covers 5 UNESCO-listed city walls in 5 countries. Israel has the most, with 1. Last updated 5 October 2026.
City walls define a town more completely than any single building: they fix its shape, decide where the gates and roads go, and for centuries separate the citizen from the outsider. Most European and Middle Eastern towns lost theirs to growth and artillery, so the circuits that survive whole are rare, and UNESCO usually lists them together with the old town they enclose. What makes them beautiful is continuity — towers and battlements that can be followed around an entire city.
The Walls of Ávila, built mainly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, enclose the old town of the Castilian city in an almost complete circuit of granite walls and rounded towers. The Walls of Jerusalem, in their present form built under the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century, ring the Old City with gates such as the Damascus Gate and Jaffa Gate.
The other walls show how varied the form can be. Conwy's town walls were raised by Edward I in the 1280s together with his castle, with more than twenty towers still standing. The fortifications of Kotor climb the steep mountain behind the town to the fortress of St John, and Visby's ring wall on Gotland, more than three kilometres long, survives almost entire around its Hanseatic town.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Walls of Ávila | City walls | Spain | ✓ |
| 2 | Walls of Jerusalem | City walls | Israel | ✓ |
| 3 | Conwy Town Walls | City walls | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 4 | Fortifications of Kotor | City walls | Montenegro | ✓ |
| 5 | Visby City Wall | City walls | Sweden | ✓ |
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.
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 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.
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.
03 Conwy Town Walls
United Kingdom53.281° N 3.831° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
David Dixon · CC BY-SA 2.0 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.
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.
04 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.
Did you know? After the 1979 earthquake the site went straight onto UNESCO's List of World Heritage in Danger, where it stayed until 2003.
05 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. 44 still stand, closing the old Hanseatic town on three sides against the land and following the shore on the fourth.
Did you know? In medieval Sweden only three towns had walls: Stockholm, Kalmar and Visby.
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 UNESCO-listed city walls in the world?
- On our list, Walls of Ávila (Spain) ranks first, followed by Walls of Jerusalem (Israel) and Conwy Town Walls (United Kingdom).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed city walls in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Israel (1), Montenegro (1) and Spain (1).
- Which city has the best preserved medieval walls?
- Ávila in Spain, Visby in Sweden and Carcassonne in France are usually named among the best preserved walled towns of medieval Europe; Ávila's circuit survives almost complete.
- Who built the walls of Jerusalem's Old City?
- The walls of Jerusalem's Old City in their present form were built between 1535 and 1542 by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, on the lines of earlier walls.
- Who built the town walls of Conwy?
- Edward I of England built Conwy's town walls in the 1280s together with Conwy Castle, after his conquest of Wales. They are listed with his other castles in Gwynedd as a single World Heritage Site.
- How many UNESCO-listed city walls are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 5 UNESCO-listed city walls in 5 countries. Israel has the most, with 1.