The Most Remarkable Burial Mounds in Europe
5 places in 5 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable burial mounds in Europe are Newgrange (Ireland), Maeshowe (United Kingdom) and Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak (Bulgaria). The list covers 5 burial mounds in 5 countries. Bulgaria has the most, with 1. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Burial mounds are among the oldest monumental architecture in Europe. Neolithic communities along the Atlantic coast built stone passages and chambers and covered them with earth and cairns, sometimes aligning them so that the sun reached the dead on a single day of the year. Thousands of years later the same idea of a hill raised over a grave served Thracian and Macedonian kings, whose tombs held painted walls and gold.
Newgrange in Ireland's Boyne Valley was built around 3200 BC, older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid. Above its entrance a roof box lets the rising sun of the winter solstice run down the passage and light the inner chamber. Maeshowe on Orkney performs a similar trick at sunset in midwinter, and its walls also carry runic graffiti left by Norse visitors who broke into the tomb in the twelfth century. The Cairn of Gavrinis, on a small island in the Gulf of Morbihan in Brittany, is lined with stones carved almost entirely in swirling lines and spirals.
The classical mounds are no less remarkable. The Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak in Bulgaria, from the fourth century BC, preserves a beehive chamber painted with a funeral feast and chariot race. At Aigai, the ancient Macedonian royal capital near the village of Vergina in Greece, excavations in 1977 opened the Great Tumulus and revealed unplundered royal tombs with a golden larnax, now shown in a museum built inside the mound itself.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Newgrange | Tumulus | Ireland | ✓ |
| 2 | Maeshowe | Tumulus | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 3 | Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak | Tumulus | Bulgaria | ✓ |
| 4 | Cairn of Gavrinis | Tumulus | France | |
| 5 | Aigai | Tumulus | Greece |
01 Newgrange
Ireland · 8.4 km from Drogheda53.695° N 6.476° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by fsHH from Pixabay Its glittering front is a modern and much-argued reconstruction. During excavations from 1962 to 1975 Michael O'Kelly found a spread of white quartz and grey cobbles fallen from the mound's face, and rebuilt it as a vertical wall held by concrete; some archaeologists admire it, others have been scathing. Inside, a 19-metre passage lined with upright slabs leads to a cross-shaped chamber under a corbelled roof, with stone basins in its side recesses.
Did you know? The mound holds about 200,000 tonnes of material, mostly pebbles gathered from terraces of the nearby River Boyne.
02 Maeshowe
Maes Howe
United Kingdom · 14.1 km from Kirkwall58.997° N 3.188° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Gordon Hatton · CC BY-SA 2.0 The builders aligned the entrance passage on the setting sun at midwinter. For about three weeks either side of the winter solstice, when skies allow, the last light of the afternoon runs down the passage and falls on the back wall of the chamber, the same kind of alignment found at Newgrange in Ireland. Standing in the dark while a narrow bar of gold creeps across the stones is the moment many people come for.
Did you know? The Orkneyinga saga tells how men of Earl Harald Maddadsson sheltered in the mound, which it calls Orkahaugr, during a twelfth-century snowstorm.
03 Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak
Bulgaria · 29 km from Stara Zagora42.626° N 25.399° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Roweromaniak · CC BY-SA 3.0 The tomb itself is modest in size: a narrow brick-vaulted corridor leading into a round, domed chamber, just big enough for a burial. Both spaces were painted in fresco. The dome shows a funeral feast: a man and a woman sit on separate ornate chairs and clasp each other by the wrist while attendants approach in procession bearing trays and gifts, horn players walk alongside, saddled horses are led without riders, and a chariot waits. Around the top of the dome runs a chariot race, and the borders mix ox skulls draped with cloth, egg-and-dart patterns of Greek origin and simple rosettes. The seated woman is familiar to every Bulgarian: she appears on the 50-stotinki coin.
Did you know? The mound hiding it is about 7 metres high and some 40 metres across at the base.
04 Cairn of Gavrinis
Cairn de Gavrinis
France47.572° N 2.899° W
Myrabella · CC BY-SA 3.0 Inside, a passage 14 metres long leads to a small square chamber about two and a half metres across. What makes Gavrinis unique is the stone itself: of the 29 upright slabs lining the passage, 23 are covered almost edge to edge with carvings, pecked into the granite in dense concentric arcs, zigzags, wavy lines, lozenges, axe blades and crook shapes, so that the walls look like fingerprints or rippled water. The meaning of the motifs is unknown, and every attempt to read them, from sun symbols to stylised figures, remains a guess.
Did you know? Some motifs were carved on faces that ended up concealed behind other stones, such as an 80-centimetre axe on one passage slab, so the decoration predates the building.
05 Aigai
ΑιγÎÏ‚
Greece · 27.5 km from Katerini40.478° N 22.323° E
Македонец · CC BY-SA 4.0 The tomb attributed to Philip has two chambers under a barrel vault, and its facade carries a hunting scene painted across 5.6 metres, thought to be the work of the painter Philoxenos of Eretria. A smaller cist tomb nearby is decorated with a fresco of Hades carrying off Persephone dating from the third quarter of the fourth century BC. A third, the so-called Prince's Tomb, held the bones of a boy of about thirteen in a silver vessel, often identified as Alexander IV, the son of Alexander the Great. Since 1993 the tombs have been shown in place inside a museum built over them, which leaves them where they were found.
Did you know? The gold wreath found inside it has 313 oak leaves and 68 acorns and weighs 717 grams.
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 burial mounds in Europe?
- On our list, Newgrange (Ireland) ranks first, followed by Maeshowe (United Kingdom) and Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak (Bulgaria).
- Which country has the most burial mounds in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Bulgaria (1), France (1) and Greece (1).
- What happens at Newgrange on the winter solstice?
- For a few days around 21 December, sunlight from the rising sun enters through the roof box above the entrance, travels up the 19-metre passage and illuminates the floor of the inner chamber for about seventeen minutes.
- Whose tomb was found at Vergina?
- The richest tomb under the Great Tumulus at Vergina, opened by Manolis Andronikos in 1977, is widely attributed to Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great. It contained a gold larnax with cremated remains and a gold wreath.
- How old is Maeshowe?
- Maeshowe was built around 2800 BC, in the Neolithic period. It is part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site together with the Ring of Brodgar and Skara Brae.
- How many burial mounds are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 5 burial mounds in 5 countries. Bulgaria has the most, with 1.