The Most Mystical Places in Europe

64 places in 17 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Catacombs of Paris

   Catacombes de Paris

   France · 3.1 km from Paris48.834° N 2.332° E

   

   Twenty metres beneath the 14th arrondissement, in tunnels left by centuries of limestone quarrying, lie the bones of several million Parisians.

   Did you know? The ossuary holds the remains of more than six million people, yet it occupies only a small part of the old quarry tunnels beneath Paris.

   More about Catacombs of Paris →

2. 02 Stonehenge

   United Kingdom51.179° N 1.826° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Stonehenge wasn't built — it was built, rebuilt, and rearranged over roughly 1,500 years, and what stands today is really the last of several distinct monuments on the same spot. The earliest phase, a circular ditch and bank enclosing cremated human remains, dates to around 3000 BCE.

   Did you know? Studies published in 2024 traced the Altar Stone not to Wales but to the Orcadian Basin of north-east Scotland, roughly 700 km away.

   More about Stonehenge →

3. 03 Su Nuraxi di Barumini

   Area archeologica di Su Nuraxi

   Italy39.703° N 9.000° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Sardinia is dotted with nuraghi, the stone towers of the Bronze Age Nuragic civilization, and Su Nuraxi at Barumini is the most complete of them. The name simply means "the nuraghe" in Campidanese Sardinian. Scholars regard it as the most impressive expression of that civilization, and it was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1997.

   Did you know? Until 1949 the whole complex lay buried under earth and looked like just another low hill, until torrential rains washed soil away and exposed its stones.

   More about Su Nuraxi di Barumini →

4. 04 San Juan de Gaztelugatxe

   Gaztelugatxe

   Spain · 24.8 km from Bilbao43.447° N 2.785° W

   

   Off the rugged Biscay coast between Bermeo and Bakio, a steep, rocky islet rises out of the Atlantic, tethered to the mainland by a narrow stone bridge and crowned by a small hermitage dedicated to Saint John the Baptist. The approach is the spectacle: a stairway of 241 steps that zigzags along the spine of the rock, doubling back on itself over the surf, until it arrives at the chapel some 80 metres above the sea.

   Did you know? According to tradition, hollows in the steps are Saint John's footprints, and placing one's feet in them is said to cure corns.

   More about San Juan de Gaztelugatxe →

5. 05 Poulnabrone dolmen

   Ireland · 25.6 km from Galway53.049° N 9.140° W

   

   Poulnabrone is a portal tomb standing alone on the bare limestone of the Burren in County Clare — a thin, tilted capstone balanced on slender uprights, framed by grey pavement cut into blocks by deep fissures. 8 metres tall. Around it is the remnant of a low cairn about ten metres across.

   Did you know? Remains of a six-month-old baby with Down syndrome found here are among the earliest known cases of the condition.

   More about Poulnabrone dolmen →

6. 06 Newgrange

   Ireland · 8.4 km from Drogheda53.695° N 6.476° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Newgrange is a Neolithic passage tomb on a rise above the River Boyne in County Meath, built around 3100 BC, several centuries before the Great Pyramid and the stone circle at Stonehenge. It is the best-known monument of Brú na Bóinne, the World Heritage landscape in a bend of the river that also includes the great tombs of Knowth and Dowth.

   Did you know? According to Irish myth, the god Dagda made the sun stand still here, a tale some scholars read as a memory of the solstice illumination.

   More about Newgrange →

7. 07 Craco

   Italy40.379° N 16.440° E

   

   Craco is a medieval hill town in Basilicata that its people had to leave. Its houses cling to a steep crest about 400 metres high above the valley of the Cavone, around a square Norman tower that dominates the skyline; below and around it spread the calanchi, bare grey badlands carved by erosion. Few places in Italy look so much like a stage set, which is exactly why film directors keep coming back.

   Did you know? Greek settlers are believed to have lived on the site from around 540 BC.

   More about Craco →

8. 08 Rock Drawings in Valcamonica

   Incisioni rupestri della Val Camonica

   Italy46.024° N 10.350° E

   

   Valcamonica, the long valley of the river Oglio in the Lombard Alps, holds one of the largest collections of prehistoric rock art in the world. When it was inscribed in 1979 it became Italy's first World Heritage Site, with more than 140,000 figures recognised; continued survey has since pushed the catalogue to somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 engravings.

   Did you know? Most of the engravings were made by pecking: a hammer-like stone or metal tool struck rows of tiny round pits into the rock surface.

   More about Rock Drawings in Valcamonica →

9. 09 Batalha Monastery

   Mosteiro da Batalha

   Portugal · 9 km from Leiria39.659° N 8.826° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Monastery of Batalha is a promise kept in stone. Before the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1385, King John I vowed a great church to the Virgin if Portugal defeated Castile; the victory secured the country's independence, and work began the following year.

   Did you know? According to tradition, the chapter house vault was thought so dangerous that condemned prisoners were set to work on it.

   More about Batalha Monastery →

10. 10 Avebury

    United Kingdom · 34.9 km from Bath51.429° N 1.854° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Avebury is the stone circle you walk into rather than look at. A village grew up inside it, so the sarsens stand among cottages, a pub and grazing sheep. It is also the largest stone circle in Europe: the outer ring measures about 330 metres across and once held around a hundred great undressed stones, some weighing more than 40 tonnes.

    Did you know? William Stukeley believed druids had built Avebury in 1859 BC, and in his 1743 book deliberately adjusted some measurements to fit his theory.

    More about Avebury →

11. 11 Uffington White Horse

    United Kingdom · 29.4 km from Oxford51.578° N 1.567° W

    

    The Uffington White Horse is barely a horse at all, and that is what makes it unforgettable. Some 110 metres long, it is drawn in a handful of flowing strokes: a long thin body, a beaked head with a single eye, and disconnected lines for legs, as if the animal were galloping out of the hill.

    Did you know? According to local legend, the horse leaves the hillside at night to graze in the Manger, the deep dry valley below it.

    More about Uffington White Horse →

12. 12 St. Bartholomew's Church, Berchtesgaden

    St. Bartholomä

    Germany · 30 km from Salzburg47.545° N 12.973° E

    

    St. Bartholomä is a small pilgrimage church on the small Hirschau peninsula, halfway along the western shore of the Königssee in the Berchtesgaden Alps. Its red onion domes set against dark water and the huge east face of the Watzmann behind make it one of the classic images of the Bavarian Alps.

    Did you know? In 1688 a boat carrying pilgrims across the Königssee capsized, and some 60 to 70 people drowned in the cold lake.

    More about St. Bartholomew's Church, Berchtesgaden →

13. 13 Cerne Abbas Giant

    United Kingdom50.814° N 2.475° W

    

    The Cerne Abbas Giant is a naked man drawn in white lines on the steep grass of Giant Hill above the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset. He is about 55 metres tall and brandishes a knotted club some 37 metres long over his head, and he is famously, emphatically male.

    Did you know? Surveys of the soil suggest the giant's famous phallus was added long after the rest of the figure, which may originally have been clothed.

    More about Cerne Abbas Giant →

14. 14 Ring of Brodgar

    United Kingdom · 16.5 km from Kirkwall59.001° N 3.230° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Ring of Brodgar stands on a narrow neck of land in the middle of Mainland, the largest of the Orkney islands, with the Loch of Stenness on one side and the Loch of Harray on the other. Water on both hands and a wide sky overhead make the setting as much a part of the monument as the stones themselves.

    Did you know? In June 1980 lightning struck one of the stones during a summer storm and split it, leaving a noticeably slimmer pillar beside its fallen fragment.

    More about Ring of Brodgar →

15. 15 Tanum Rock Carvings

    Hällristningsområdet i Tanum

    Sweden58.700° N 11.336° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    In the granite hills around Tanumshede, in the province of Bohuslän on Sweden's west coast, thousands of figures were hammered into smooth rock faces during the Nordic Bronze Age, roughly between 1700 and 300 BC. They are spread over some 600 panels along a belt of about 25 kilometres, and together they form one of the richest collections of prehistoric rock art in Europe, a World Heritage Site since 1994.

    Did you know? At Litsleby a spear-wielding figure 2.3 metres tall, the so-called Spear God, is the largest carved human figure in northern Europe.

    More about Tanum Rock Carvings →

16. 16 Rock carvings at Alta

    Norway · 3 km from Alta69.947° N 23.188° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    When the first figures were spotted on the shore rocks of Alta in the autumn of 1973, nobody expected the scale of what followed. More than 6,000 carvings have since been found at several sites around the head of the Altafjord in Finnmark, and the site is Norway's only prehistoric World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1985.

    Did you know? Bears, once a central motif in hunting and ritual scenes, disappear from the carvings after about 1700 BC.

    More about Rock carvings at Alta →

17. 17 Maeshowe

    Maes Howe

    United Kingdom · 14.1 km from Kirkwall58.997° N 3.188° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    From outside, Maes Howe is only a smooth green mound rising from the fields of Orkney's West Mainland, about 35 metres across and a little over seven metres high, with a ditch around its platform. Inside is one of the most accomplished buildings of Neolithic Europe.

    Did you know? Among the Norse graffiti are three carved figures, including a finely cut beast known as the Maeshowe Dragon, now a familiar emblem of Orkney.

    More about Maeshowe →

18. 18 Necropolis of Pantalica

    Pantalica

    Italy · 28.1 km from Syracuse37.133° N 14.983° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    In the limestone gorges of southeastern Sicily, thousands of small rectangular openings honeycomb the cliffs like the cells of a vast hive. Each is the mouth of a tomb cut into the rock between roughly the thirteenth and the seventh centuries BC.

    Did you know? No trace survives of the prehistoric houses; Paolo Orsi argued the people lived in light huts of wood, reeds and straw that weather simply erased.

    More about Necropolis of Pantalica →

19. 19 Callanish Stones

    Calanais Stones

    United Kingdom58.198° N 6.745° W

    

    The Calanais Stones — Tursachan Chalanais in Gaelic, long known in English as Callanish — stand on a low ridge on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, above the sea inlet of Loch Roag with the island of Great Bernera behind them.

    Did you know? In 1695 the writer Martin Martin reported that islanders believed a chief druid had stood beside the great central stone.

    More about Callanish Stones →

20. 20 Hill of Crosses

    Kryžių kalnas

    Lithuania · 10.3 km from Šiauliai56.015° N 23.417° E

    

    Nobody recorded the day the first cross went up here, but the likeliest account ties it to the failed uprising of 1831 against Russian rule, when families who couldn't find or bury their dead began planting crosses on the site of an old fort instead — a place to mourn people the state had made it impossible to properly grieve. There is no cemetery here.

    Did you know? Pope John Paul II prayed at the hill on 7 September 1993, and the following year he sent a crucifix of his own, which now stands among the crosses.

    More about Hill of Crosses →

21. 21 Catacombe dei Cappuccini

    Italy · 1.9 km from Palermo38.112° N 13.339° E

    

    Beneath the Capuchin friary in Palermo lies one of Europe's most unsettling burial places: corridors lined with the dressed, dried and upright bodies of Palermitans who died between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries.

    Did you know? Brother Silvestro of Gubbio, the first friar laid here on 16 October 1599, still lies first on the left after the entrance.

    More about Catacombe dei Cappuccini →

22. 22 Dolmen of Menga

    Dolmen de Menga

    Spain · 35.6 km from Málaga37.024° N 4.548° W

    

    Stepping into Menga feels less like entering a tomb than a stone hall. The chamber runs about 25 metres into the hillside and it is roofed by slabs so enormous that the largest is estimated at around 150 tonnes, the heaviest stone known to have been moved by megalith builders anywhere in Iberia.

    Did you know? Menga is about 27.5 metres long overall and was assembled from just thirty-two megaliths.

    More about Dolmen of Menga →

23. 23 Pyramiden

    Norway78.656° N 16.325° E

    

    At the head of Billefjorden, an Arctic fjord in the heart of Spitsbergen, stands a complete Soviet town that was simply switched off in 1998: brick apartment blocks, a sports hall, a cultural palace, and the northernmost monument to Vladimir Lenin in the world. Pyramiden is a time capsule of the Soviet Arctic, preserved by cold and isolation.

    Did you know? The town takes its name from the pyramid-shaped mountain that rises directly behind it; in Russian it is simply Piramida.

    More about Pyramiden →

24. 24 Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela

    Catedral Basílica Metropolitana de Santiago de Compostela

    Spain · 0.4 km from Santiago de Compostela42.881° N 8.544° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela is the end of the Way of St James, and for more than a thousand years pilgrims have walked across Europe to reach the tomb believed to hold the apostle James the Great. Tradition says the grave was rediscovered around 814, when a hermit saw lights over a forest; a chapel and then larger churches followed.

    Did you know? At the foot of the Pórtico da Gloria kneels a figure believed to be Master Mateo himself, popularly called the Santo dos Croques.

    More about Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela →

25. 25 Catacomb of Priscilla

    Catacombe di Priscilla

    Italy · 4.2 km from Rome41.930° N 12.509° E

    

    Beneath the Via Salaria, on the northern side of Rome, lies one of the richest of the city's early Christian cemeteries. The Catacomb of Priscilla was dug from an ancient quarry and grew into many kilometres of galleries on two levels, used for burials from the late second century into the fourth.

    More about Catacomb of Priscilla →

26. 26 Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak

    Bulgaria · 29 km from Stara Zagora42.626° N 25.399° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak is a small brick beehive tomb of the fourth century BC, and its painted dome is among the finest pieces of Hellenistic-era painting to survive anywhere in the Balkans.

    Did you know? The tomb was found by accident on 19 April 1944, when Bulgarian soldiers digging an air-raid shelter into the mound struck a brick wall.

    More about Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak →

27. 27 Pentre Ifan

    United Kingdom51.999° N 4.770° W

    

    Pentre Ifan is one of the best-known burial chambers in Wales, and it earns that reputation through a single act of balance. 5 metres above the ground. Seen from the side, the slab seems to hover, touching its supports so lightly that daylight shows through almost everywhere beneath it.

    Did you know? The name means 'Ifan's village' in Welsh; Ifan is a Welsh form of John, derived ultimately from the Latin Johannes.

    More about Pentre Ifan →

28. 28 Ħaġar Qim

    Malta · 10.3 km from Valletta35.828° N 14.442° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Ħaġar Qim, "the standing stones", sits on a ridge above Malta's south coast and is one of the island's great megalithic temples, built in the Ġgantija phase between 3600 and 3200 BC. It is part of the Megalithic Temples of Malta World Heritage Site, and it shares a clifftop park with Mnajdra, about 500 m away nearer the shore.

    Did you know? In 1647 the Maltese historian Giovanni Francesco Abela took the ruins as proof that the island's first inhabitants had been a race of giants.

    More about Ħaġar Qim →

29. 29 Temppeliaukio Church

    Finland · 1.1 km from Helsinki60.173° N 24.925° E

    

    Helsinki tried three times to build something on this particular outcrop of granite before anything got finished. A competition in the 1930s went nowhere; a second one, won by architect J. S. Sirén, was interrupted when the Second World War started in 1939 and never resumed.

    Did you know? In July 1968 Christian students painted BIAFRA across the unfinished church in protest at its cost; one of their paintings is still kept in the basement.

    More about Temppeliaukio Church →

30. 30 Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte

    Santuário do Bom Jesus do Monte

    Portugal · 3.7 km from Braga41.555° N 8.377° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Above Braga, on a wooded hill at Tenões, a monumental staircase zigzags up through the trees for 116 metres to a church at the top. Bom Jesus do Monte is less a church than a climb turned into architecture: a Baroque Via Sacra in which the pilgrim's ascent is the whole point. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019, and its design was copied from Lamego in Portugal to Congonhas in Brazil.

    Did you know? Each fountain of the Five Senses stairway shows a figure spouting water from the relevant organ: from the eyes, the ears, the nose and the mouth.

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