The Most Remarkable Ancient Places in Europe
45 places in 11 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable ancient places in Europe are Colosseum (Italy), Roman Forum (Italy) and Pont du Gard (France). The list covers 45 ancient places in 11 countries. Italy has the most, with 16. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Europe's ancient world survives because it was built to last and then never fully abandoned. Neolithic builders raised stone circles on chalk downs; Minoans and Greeks built palaces and temples around the Aegean; and Rome spread roads, aqueducts and amphitheatres from Britain to the Balkans, engineered with concrete, arches and cut stone. Later generations turned these buildings into fortresses, churches and homes, and that reuse is often why they still stand.
Rome is the centre. The Colosseum, inaugurated under Titus, could hold tens of thousands of spectators; the Roman Forum below the Palatine was the city's civic heart; Trajan's Column wraps a spiral frieze of the Dacian wars around its shaft; and Hadrian's mausoleum became Castel Sant'Angelo, a papal fortress on the Tiber. Across the provinces, the three tiers of the Pont du Gard carry an aqueduct over the Gardon, the Aqueduct of Segovia stands on unmortared granite, and the Tower of Hercules still guides ships into A Coruña.
Greece and the deep past add other worlds. Knossos on Crete was the centre of the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation, the Parthenon crowns the Acropolis of Athens, and the Odeon of Herodes Atticus on its slope still fills with audiences on summer evenings. In Split, the retirement palace of the emperor Diocletian became the old town itself. Far older than all of them, Stonehenge was raised in stages by Neolithic people on Salisbury Plain.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Colosseum | Archaeological site | Italy | |
| 2 | Roman Forum | Archaeological site | Italy | |
| 3 | Pont du Gard | Aqueduct | France | ✓ |
| 4 | Castel Sant'Angelo | Castle | Italy | |
| 5 | Aqueduct of Segovia | Aqueduct | Spain | ✓ |
| 6 | Trajan's Column | Sculpture | Italy | |
| 7 | Tower of Hercules | Fortified tower | Spain | ✓ |
| 8 | Stonehenge | Stone circle | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 9 | Diocletian's Palace | Palace | Croatia | ✓ |
| 10 | Knossos | Archaeological site | Greece | |
| 11 | Parthenon | Ruins | Greece | ✓ |
| 12 | Odeon of Herodes Atticus | Roman theatre | Greece | |
| 13 | Roman Theatre of Orange | Roman theatre | France | ✓ |
| 14 | Column of Marcus Aurelius | Sculpture | Italy | |
| 15 | Arena of Nîmes | Amphitheatre | France | |
| 16 | Pompeii | Archaeological site | Italy | |
| 17 | Laocoön and His Sons | Sculpture | Vatican City | |
| 18 | Hadrian's Wall | Archaeological site | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 19 | Artemision Bronze | Sculpture | Greece | |
| 20 | Trajan's Market | Ruins | Italy | |
| 21 | Triumphal Arch of Orange | Triumphal arch | France | ✓ |
| 22 | Skara Brae | Archaeological site | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 23 | Baths of Caracalla | Thermae | Italy | |
| 24 | Paestum | Archaeological site | Italy | ✓ |
| 25 | Venus de Milo | Sculpture | France | |
| 26 | Porta Nigra | City gate | Germany | ✓ |
| 27 | Uffington White Horse | Geoglyph | United Kingdom | |
| 28 | Ġgantija | Archaeological site | Malta | ✓ |
| 29 | Charioteer of Delphi | Sculpture | Greece | |
| 30 | Maiden Castle, Dorset | Hillfort | United Kingdom |
01 Colosseum
Colosseo
Italy · 1.2 km from Rome41.890° N 12.492° E
Image by MARTINOPHUC from Pixabay The eighty-foot drop beneath the Colosseum's sand floor is where the real machinery of the show lived.
Did you know? It held an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 spectators, making it the largest amphitheatre ever built in the ancient world.
02 Roman Forum
Foro Romano
Italy · 0.7 km from Rome41.892° N 12.485° E
Image by jensjunge from Pixabay The Roman Forum fills a small valley between the Palatine and Capitoline hills that was once a marsh. Drained in the 7th century BC by the first stretch of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer that emptied into the Tiber, it became the place where Rome did everything in public: voted, traded, tried criminals, heard speeches, worshipped and celebrated its triumphs.
Did you know? Long before it was a public square, part of the Forum served as an Iron Age cemetery in the 10th century BC, with cremation urns buried in large clay jars.
03 Pont du Gard
France · 19.8 km from Nîmes43.947° N 4.535° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Sloopng from Pixabay In the 1st century AD the Roman colony of Nemausus, today's Nîmes, needed water and found it at a spring near Uzès. The two towns are only about 20 km apart, but hills covered in dense garrigue lay between them, so the engineers took a winding route of some 50 km, mostly underground, with a total drop of just 17 metres. 8 metres high. 5 cm along its length.
Did you know? Coins found in the outflow at Nîmes suggest the aqueduct was built between about AD 40 and 60, in the reign of Claudius.
04 Castel Sant'Angelo
Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.903° N 12.466° E
Image by rainhard2 from Pixabay Hadrian started building his own tomb in 123 CE and didn't live to see it finished — it was completed in 139 under his successor Antoninus Pius, a cylindrical drum of a monument meant to hold the ashes of an emperor and his family for eternity. Eternity lasted about three centuries as a mausoleum.
Did you know? The current bronze angel by Peter Anton von Verschaffelt replaced a 1536 marble Saint Michael by Raffaello da Montelupo in 1753.
05 Aqueduct of Segovia
Acueducto de Segovia
Spain40.948° N 4.118° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0 The aqueduct does not stand at the edge of Segovia; it walks straight through it. 5 m above the street, and people pass beneath arches that have carried water, or at least the channel for it, since the Roman period. The whole elevated bridge runs for roughly 728 m and has 167 arches, and the blocks are laid entirely without mortar, held in place by their own weight and careful cutting.
Did you know? According to legend, a water-carrier girl struck a pact with the devil, who built the aqueduct in one night but was beaten by dawn before laying the final stone.
06 Trajan's Column
Colonna Traiana
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.896° N 12.484° E
Raffaele pagani · CC BY-SA 4.0 Trajan's Column is a 30-metre marble shaft, 35 m with its pedestal, that has stood in Trajan's Forum just north of the Roman Forum since it was dedicated on 12 May 113. It celebrates Emperor Trajan's two wars against the Dacians in 101-102 and 105-106, and it was most likely designed under the architect Apollodorus of Damascus.
Did you know? The lettering of the dedication on the base became the classic model of Roman square capitals, and Carol Twombly based her 1989 Trajan typeface on it.
07 Tower of Hercules
Torre de Hércules
Spain · 6.3 km from A Coruña43.386° N 8.406° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez (Lmbuga) · CC BY-SA 3.0 There were dozens of lighthouses like this one once, scattered around the edges of the Roman world. There is exactly one left that still works.
Did you know? Of the tower's roughly 55 metres, about 34 are surviving Roman masonry; the top 21 metres were added during the 18th-century restoration.
08 Stonehenge
United Kingdom51.179° N 1.826° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by diego_torres from Pixabay 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? Large Mesolithic postholes found nearby date to around 8000 BC, thousands of years before the first ditch at Stonehenge was dug.
09 Diocletian's Palace
Dioklecijanova palača
Croatia · 2.9 km from Split43.508° N 16.438° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay Diocletian, the emperor who divided power among four rulers and then did something rare for a Roman emperor — abdicated, in 305 — chose a peninsula on the Dalmatian coast for his retirement, a few kilometres from Salona, the provincial capital.
Did you know? In the 7th century a small church of St Martin was built above the Golden Gate.
10 Knossos
Κνωσός
Greece · 4.2 km from Heraklion35.298° N 25.163° E
Image by davestem from Pixabay Knossos, on Kephala hill 5 km south of the centre of Heraklion, was the greatest centre of Minoan Crete and is often described as Europe's oldest city. People settled on the hill around 7000 BC, and by about 1900 BC they had built the first palace: a multi-storey complex around a central court, covering roughly 20,000 m², with storerooms, workshops, shrines and halls of state.
Did you know? The Throne Room, built in the 15th century BC, is considered the oldest throne room in Europe, and its alabaster seat the oldest stone throne on the continent.
11 Parthenon
Παρθενώνας
Greece · 1.6 km from Athens37.972° N 23.727° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nonbirinonko from Pixabay The Parthenon looks perfectly straight only because almost nothing about it actually is.
Did you know? On 26 September 1687 a Venetian mortar round hit gunpowder stored inside by the Ottoman garrison, and the blast killed about 300 people.
12 Odeon of Herodes Atticus
Ωδείο Ηρώδου του Αττικού
Greece · 1.7 km from Athens37.971° N 23.725° E
Image by 2770862 from Pixabay Built into the southwest slope of the Acropolis, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus shows Athens the Roman way: a steep semicircle of marble seats facing a stage building whose three-storey wall of arched openings still rises about 28 metres against the rock. Herodes Atticus, a rich Athenian orator and patron, completed it in AD 161 in memory of his Roman wife, Aspasia Annia Regilla, and gave it to the city.
Did you know? In 1973 the ancient theatre hosted the Miss Universe pageant, broadcast around the world from the foot of the Acropolis.
13 Roman Theatre of Orange
Théâtre antique d'Orange
France44.136° N 4.809° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by fietzfotos from Pixabay The Roman Theatre of Orange is one of the best-preserved Roman theatres anywhere, and its great stage wall still stands to its full original height. It was built early in the 1st century AD under Augustus for the Roman colony of Arausio, founded by veterans of the Second Legion. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1981.
Did you know? The colony it served was founded in 40 BC with the full name Colonia Julia Firma Secundanorum Arausio.
14 Column of Marcus Aurelius
Colonna di Marco Aurelio
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.901° N 12.480° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Column of Marcus Aurelius stands in Piazza Colonna, on the Via del Corso in the centre of Rome, in front of Palazzo Chigi, the seat of the Italian government. It was raised to honour the emperor Marcus Aurelius and his campaigns against the Germanic and Sarmatian peoples north of the Danube, fought from 169 until his death in 180, and was completed around 193.
15 Arena of Nîmes
Arènes de Nîmes
France · 0.9 km from Nîmes43.835° N 4.360° E
Krzysztof Golik · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Roman amphitheatre of Nîmes rises straight out of the city's streets, an oval 133 metres long and 101 wide, its outer wall 21 metres high and pierced by two storeys of sixty arches. Built around 100 AD, only some twenty years after the Colosseum, it is among the best-preserved Roman amphitheatres anywhere and one of the twenty largest of the roughly four hundred known.
Did you know? In the 12th century the fortified arena became a residential quarter with its own churches of St Peter and St Martin.
16 Pompeii
Pompei
Italy · 23.2 km from Naples40.751° N 14.490° E
Glen Scarborough from The Central Coast, Australia · CC BY 2.0 Pompeii is the most complete picture we have of an ordinary Roman town, and it owes that to the catastrophe that ended it. In AD 79 Vesuvius, about 8 km away, erupted for two days. First came some eighteen hours of falling pumice, which let many of the inhabitants flee; then surges of superheated gas and ash swept through the streets and killed those who had stayed.
Did you know? After Sulla captured the town in 89 BC it became a colony of his veterans, renamed Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum.
17 Laocoön and His Sons
Gruppo del Laocoonte
Vatican City · 2.4 km from Rome41.907° N 12.454° E
Alvesgaspar · CC BY-SA 4.0 Laocoön and His Sons is the marble group that launched the Vatican Museums. It was dug up in early 1506 in a vineyard on the Oppian Hill in Rome, and Pope Julius II sent Giuliano da Sangallo to look at it; Michelangelo went too. It was quickly recognised as the Laocoön described by Pliny the Elder, who knew it in the palace of Emperor Titus and called it preferable to all other painting and sculpture.
Did you know? The outstretched right arm that the priest held for centuries was a restoration made by Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli in 1532.
18 Hadrian's Wall
United Kingdom55.024° N 2.292° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by 18623647 from Pixabay Hadrian's Wall crosses the whole width of northern England, from Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway on the Solway Firth in the west — 80 Roman miles, or about 117 km. The Emperor Hadrian ordered it built in AD 122 to mark the northern edge of the province of Britannia.
Did you know? Around 15,000 soldiers from three legions, helped by men of the Roman fleet, built most of the wall in about six years.
19 Artemision Bronze
Ποσειδώνας του Αρτεμισίου
Greece · 0.4 km from Athens37.989° N 23.732° E
George E. Koronaios · CC0 The Artemision Bronze, known as the God from the Sea, is one of the few large Greek bronzes of the classical period to survive, and it is one of the highlights of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Did you know? One theory links the cargo to Roman plunder from Corinth in 146 BC; another to the sack of Chalkis in 86 BC.
20 Trajan's Market
Mercati di Traiano
Italy · 0.5 km from Rome41.896° N 12.486° E
NikonZ7II · CC BY-SA 4.0 Trajan's Market is a curved cliff of Roman brick set into the side of the Quirinal Hill, above the ruins of Trajan's Forum and across Via dei Fori Imperiali from the Vittoriano. It was probably built between about AD 100 and 110, most likely to designs by Apollodorus of Damascus, Trajan's architect for the forum and for his campaigns, and inaugurated in 113.
21 Triumphal Arch of Orange
Arc antique d'Orange
France44.142° N 4.805° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Xavier D'ABRIGEON · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Triumphal Arch of Orange is one of the best-preserved Roman arches anywhere, and the oldest surviving example of the three-bay design later used for the Arch of Septimius Severus and the Arch of Constantine in Rome itself. It stands on the old Via Agrippa at the northern entrance to Orange, a town in the Rhône valley.
Did you know? A single bronze letter L from the lost dedication was found in the 19th century and then mislaid; only the fixing holes survive.
22 Skara Brae
United Kingdom · 24.3 km from Kirkwall59.049° N 3.342° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Giorgio Galeotti · CC BY-SA 4.0 Skara Brae is a Neolithic village on the Bay of Skaill, on the west coast of Orkney's Mainland, and the most complete settlement of its age in Europe. People lived here from about 3180 BC for some six centuries. The village lay hidden under a grassy mound until the winter of 1850, when a great storm stripped the dunes and exposed the outlines of roofless stone houses.
Did you know? V. Gordon Childe first believed the village dated from around 500 BC; radiocarbon dating in 1972–73 showed it was some 2,500 years older.
23 Baths of Caracalla
Terme di Caracalla
Italy · 2.2 km from Rome41.880° N 12.493° E
Image by pcdazero from Pixabay Few ruins in Rome convey the scale of imperial ambition as bluntly as the Baths of Caracalla. Begun under Septimius Severus and inaugurated by his son Caracalla in AD 216, the complex occupied a walled rectangle of roughly 337 by 328 metres on the southern edge of the city, on land that had once been a garden estate.
Did you know? The baths could hold about 1,600 bathers at once and served an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people a day, free of charge.
24 Paestum
Italy · 34.9 km from Salerno40.423° N 15.006° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SCAPIN from Pixabay Paestum, on the plain south of Salerno, has three Greek temples in the Doric order that are among the best preserved anywhere, standing in open fields inside an almost complete ring of ancient walls. Settlers from Sybaris founded the city around 600 BCE as Poseidonia; the Lucanians took it at the end of the 5th century BCE, and Rome made it a Latin colony called Paestum in 273 BCE.
Did you know? Only about 25 of the city's roughly 120 hectares have been excavated; the rest lies under private land, still unexplored.
25 Venus de Milo
France · 1.2 km from Paris48.860° N 2.337° E
Image by NakNakNak from Pixabay The Venus de Milo is a marble statue of a half-draped woman, a little over two metres tall, almost certainly representing Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. It was carved in the Hellenistic period, most likely in the second century BC, from fine Parian marble, and has been in the Louvre since 1821.
Did you know? Salvador Dalí built several paintings and sculptures around her, including The Hallucinogenic Toreador, and Yves Klein, Arman and Jim Dine also reworked her image.
26 Porta Nigra
Germany · 18.1 km from Grevenmacher49.760° N 6.644° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by connie_sf from Pixabay The Porta Nigra is the only survivor of the four gates that once closed the roughly rectangular circuit of Roman Trier, and today it is one of the best-preserved Roman city gates north of the Alps. It was raised in the late second century, after about 170 AD, from large blocks of grey sandstone.
Did you know? Tree-ring dating of timber from the city wall, published in 2018, fixed the start of construction at 170 AD, after estimates had ranged from the 2nd to the 4th century.
27 Uffington White Horse
United Kingdom · 29.4 km from Oxford51.578° N 1.567° W
Vieve Forward · CC BY-SA 2.0 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? A document from Abingdon Abbey, compiled between 1072 and 1084, already refers to the place as the hill of the white horse.
28 Ġgantija
Malta · 27.5 km from Valletta36.047° N 14.269° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Vitold Muratov · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ġgantija stands on the edge of the Xagħra plateau on Gozo, the second island of the Maltese archipelago, and it is the oldest of the megalithic temples that make up the Maltese World Heritage listing. Its two temples were raised around 3600 BC, which puts them centuries ahead of the Egyptian pyramids.
Did you know? Ġgantija is regarded as the second-oldest surviving human-built religious structure in the world, younger only than Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.
29 Charioteer of Delphi
Ηνίοχος
Greece38.480° N 22.500° E
Václav Moravec · CC BY-SA 4.0 8 m tall, made around 470 BC and now the centrepiece of the Delphi Archaeological Museum. It belonged to a victory monument at the Sanctuary of Apollo celebrating a chariot win in the Pythian Games of 478 or 474 BC. The inscription on its limestone base names the dedicator as Polyzalus, tyrant of Gela in Sicily.
Did you know? When excavated, the bronze had a bluish sheen, echoing Plutarch's remark on the strange blue patina of bronzes at Delphi; it has since turned largely green.
30 Maiden Castle, Dorset
Maiden Castle
United Kingdom50.695° N 2.470° W
Hadrianus1959 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Maiden Castle is the largest hillfort in Britain and one of the largest in Europe, a whole hilltop southwest of Dorchester wrapped in rings of grassy earthwork. At its greatest extent the enclosure covered about 19 hectares, an area English Heritage likens to fifty football pitches, and on the southern side the defences run to four banks and three ditches stacked one above the other.
Did you know? The name Maiden Castle is first recorded in 1607; it may describe a fortress that looked impregnable, or derive from Brittonic mai-dun, great hill.
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 remarkable ancient places in Europe?
- On our list, Colosseum (Italy) ranks first, followed by Roman Forum (Italy) and Pont du Gard (France).
- Which country has the most ancient places in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (16), Greece (8) and France (6).
- How old is Stonehenge?
- Construction began around 3000 BC with a circular ditch and bank, and the great sarsen stones were raised around 2500 BC. The monument was reworked for centuries after that.
- Why is there a Roman palace in the centre of Split?
- Diocletian built the palace for his retirement around AD 300. After the nearby city of Salona was sacked in the 7th century, its people took refuge inside the walls, and the palace grew into a living town.
- Is the Odeon of Herodes Atticus still used?
- Yes. The stone theatre, built in AD 161 on the south slope of the Acropolis, was restored in the 1950s and hosts concerts and plays of the Athens Festival.
- How many ancient places are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 45 ancient places in 11 countries. Italy has the most, with 16.