The Most Remarkable Monuments in the World

56 places in 30 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Mount Rushmore

   United States · 29 km from Rapid City43.879° N 103.459° W

   

   The four faces on Mount Rushmore were not the original plan. Gutzon Borglum's first brief called for figures tied to the American West — Lewis and Clark, their guide Sacagawea, and Lakota leaders Red Cloud and Crazy Horse were all part of early discussions — before Borglum redirected the project toward four presidents on the theory that it would draw broader national interest. That pivot is easy to miss now that the presidents feel inevitable, but the mountain could have told a very different story.

   Did you know? Behind Lincoln's head lies an unfinished Hall of Records, where a vault holding 16 enamel panels on American history was sealed in 1998.

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2. 02 Castel Sant'Angelo

   Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.903° N 12.466° E

   

   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. By the 5th century Rome's defenders had already folded the tomb into the city's Aurelian Walls as a fortress, because a solid stone cylinder that size, sitting right on the Tiber, was too good a defensive position to leave to the dead.

   Did you know? In 537, as Goths besieged Rome, defenders hurled the tomb's bronze and stone statues down onto the attackers.

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3. 03 Trajan's Column

   Colonna Traiana

   Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.896° N 12.484° E

   

   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. The shaft is built from 20 huge drums of Carrara marble, each about 3.7 m across and weighing some 32 tonnes, and inside it a spiral staircase of 185 steps, lit by 43 narrow slits, climbs to a platform at the top.

   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.

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4. 04 Fernsehturm Berlin

   Berliner Fernsehturm

   Germany · 0.7 km from Berlin52.521° N 13.409° E

   

   The Fernsehturm rises 368 metres from the centre of Berlin, the tallest structure in Germany and visible from almost every district of the city. It was built between 1965 and 1969 by the East German government as both a broadcasting tower and a statement of socialist modernity, and its silhouette deliberately borrowed from the space age: the steel-clad sphere near the top was meant to recall Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Many architects worked on it, among them Hermann Henselmann, Jörg Streitparth, Fritz Dieter and Günter Franke.

   Did you know? The East German budget for the tower was about 33 million marks, but the final bill came to more than 132 million, four times the plan.

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5. 05 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

   Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas

   Germany · 1.8 km from Berlin52.514° N 13.379° E

   

   Two blocks from the Brandenburg Gate, on ground where the Berlin Wall's death strip once ran, a field of 2,711 grey concrete blocks tilts gently across 1.9 hectares. Seen from the pavement it looks almost calm: low slabs at the edges, a grid of rows, nothing that announces itself. The memorial to the Jews murdered in Europe works only when you walk into it. The ground sinks beneath you, the stelae rise to more than four and a half metres, the city noise thins out, and within a few steps you are alone in a narrow grey corridor with no sense of where the others have gone.

   Did you know? The memorial's 2,711 stelae are arranged in 54 rows running north to south and 87 rows running east to west.

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6. 06 Gateway of India

   India · 16.8 km from Mumbai18.922° N 72.835° E

   

   The strange thing about the Gateway of India is that its most famous moment — commemorating the arrival of King George V and Queen Mary in December 1911 — happened thirteen years before the monument itself was finished. The visit was a landmark event, the first time any reigning British monarch had set foot in India, and Apollo Bunder was picked for the arch precisely because it was the first thing anyone would see stepping off a ship: a deliberate piece of stagecraft for arriving dignitaries, built where the water met the city. The site itself had to be manufactured before the monument could exist. What is now solid ground was previously open water at a modest fishing jetty; the government spent four years, from 1915 to 1919, reclaiming land and building a new seawall at Apollo Bunder before construction of the arch itself could even begin.

   Did you know? When King George V and Queen Mary landed on 2 December 1911, the arch they saw was only a temporary cardboard model.

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7. 07 Tower of Hercules

   Torre de Hércules

   Spain · 6.3 km from A Coruña43.386° N 8.406° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   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. The Tower of Hercules, built or substantially rebuilt during the reign of Trajan in the early second century AD, has been guiding ships into what's now A Coruña for roughly nineteen centuries, and it is both the oldest lighthouse in the world still in active service and the only Roman one still doing the job it was built for. Its original name, Farum Brigantium, borrowed directly from pharos, the Greek word that also named the famous lighthouse at Alexandria — a deliberate echo, from one wonder to another.

   Did you know? A cornerstone at the base names the designer, Gaius Sevius Lupus, an architect from Aeminium, today's Coimbra in Portugal, who dedicated the work to Mars.

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8. 08 Cave of Altamira

   Cueva de Altamira

   Spain · 25.7 km from Santander43.383° N 4.117° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Cave of Altamira, near Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, holds some of the finest Palaeolithic art in the world, and no other cave in northern Spain has such complex and crowded painting. The cave is about 270 m long, a series of passages in the limestone of Mount Vispieres. People lived at its mouth during the Solutrean and Magdalenian periods, until a rockfall sealed the entrance about 13,000 years ago and preserved everything inside. Uranium-thorium dating shows that painting went on for more than 10,000 years, and some red signs are around 36,000 years old. Altamira is the key site of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palaeolithic cave art in northern Spain.

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9. 09 Dancing House

   Tančící dům

   Czech Republic · 1.4 km from Prague50.076° N 14.414° E

   

   On the Vltava embankment in Prague, among rows of 19th-century apartment houses, one building seems to sway: a glass tower pinched at the waist leans against a solid partner whose windows bob up and down across a rippling façade. Nicknamed the Dancing House — or "Ginger and Fred", after Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire — it was designed by the Croatian-Czech architect Vlado Milunić with Frank Gehry and completed in 1996.

   Did you know? Frank Gehry reportedly agreed to take on the project because he would do anything for the country that gave America the ice hockey star Jaromír Jágr.

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10. 10 Colossi of Memnon

    Egypt · 4.6 km from Luxor25.721° N 32.611° E

    

    These two seated figures — about 18 metres tall, roughly 720 tons of quartzite sandstone apiece — are nearly all that remains standing of what was once Egypt's largest mortuary temple, built for Amenhotep III around 1350 BC. The temple itself behind them was dismantled and its stone reused for other buildings in antiquity; the colossi survived purely because they were too massive to be worth moving.

    Did you know? The quartzite was quarried at Gebel el-Ahmar near modern Cairo and transported about 675 km south to Thebes.

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11. 11 Visoki Dečani

    Manastiri i Deçanit

    Kosovo · 13.1 km from Pejë42.547° N 20.266° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Visoki Dečani is a Serbian Orthodox monastery at the foot of the mountains on the western edge of Kosovo, and its church is the largest surviving medieval church in the Balkans. King Stefan Dečanski began it in 1327 as his own burial church; he died in 1331 before it was finished, and his son Stefan Dušan completed the work. The founding charter of 1330 survives, and so does the name of the master builder, a Franciscan friar known as Vito of Kotor, a detail that explains much of what makes the building unusual.

    Did you know? A carved inscription over the south portal names the builder as Fra Vita, a Franciscan friar from Kotor, and says the church took eight years to build.

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12. 12 Walhalla, Donaustauf

    Walhalla

    Germany · 7.7 km from Regensburg49.031° N 12.224° E

    

    Walhalla is a Greek temple on the Danube, raised by a Bavarian king to honour German-speaking greatness. Ludwig I conceived the idea in 1807, at the age of twenty, while still crown prince; once he came to the throne in 1825 he had it built, and the architect Leo von Klenze supervised the work from 1830 to 1842. Klenze modelled the building on the Parthenon in Athens, a Doric temple surrounded by columns, about 67 m long and 20 m high, and set it on a hill above the river near Donaustauf; with its terraces and stairways the whole complex stretches about 125 m and rises 55 m. Seen from the Danube, it looks as if a piece of ancient Greece had been carried north.

    Did you know? Martin Luther was left out at the 1842 opening because the devoutly Catholic king hesitated; Ludwig only added his bust himself in 1848.

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13. 13 Terracotta Army

    People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The farmer who found the Terracotta Army wasn't looking for it. In March 1974, Yang Zhifa, his five brothers and a neighbor were digging a well during a drought, hoping only for water, when at about three metres down they hit a layer of charcoal and reddened soil, and past four metres one of them pulled up a life-sized pottery head. The villagers' first guess was that they'd disturbed some kind of "Pottery God" idol — it was only after bronze arrowheads and crossbow parts turned up nearby that anyone suspected they'd found something closer to an army.

    Did you know? The paint on the figures is so fragile that, once exposed to Xi'an's dry air, its lacquer base can curl within seconds and flake off in minutes.

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14. 14 Habitat 67

    Canada · 3.2 km from Montreal45.500° N 73.544° W

    

    On a spit of land in the St. Lawrence River, opposite Old Montreal, hundreds of concrete boxes are stacked at angles into three stepped hills, so that the roof of one home becomes the garden of the next. Habitat 67 was conceived by the architect Moshe Safdie, who developed it from his master's thesis at McGill University, as an answer to a simple question: how to give the residents of a dense city the light, air, privacy and gardens of a suburban house.

    Did you know? According to Safdie's firm, the first models of Habitat 67 were built from Lego bricks, and later versions were tested in Lego as well.

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15. 15 Column of Marcus Aurelius

    Colonna di Marco Aurelio

    Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.901° N 12.480° E

    

    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. It is modelled closely on Trajan's Column: the shaft is 29.6 m high, stands on a 10 m base, is made of Carrara marble drums and is hollow, with a stair of around 190 to 200 steps lit through slits in the relief.

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16. 16 Teotihuacan

    Mexico · 30.8 km from Zumpango19.692° N 98.844° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Long before the Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico, Teotihuacan was already a ruin they could only guess about. The Nahuatl name they gave it is usually translated as the place where the gods were born, and in their cosmology it was here that the present sun had been created. The real builders left no readable account of themselves: nobody knows for certain what language they spoke, and the city's own name for itself survives only in Maya inscriptions, which call it a place of reeds. What is clear from excavation is its scale. Settled from around 100 BCE, it grew in the first centuries CE into the largest city in the Americas, with most estimates placing its peak population near 100,000 people living in stone apartment compounds laid out on a grid.

    Did you know? About 17 metres beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, archaeologists found a miniature mountain landscape with tiny pools of liquid mercury standing in for lakes.

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17. 17 Qutb complex

    India · 8.5 km from New Delhi28.524° N 77.185° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Qutb complex in Mehrauli, in the south of Delhi, is where the architecture of the Delhi Sultanate begins. Its centrepiece, the Qutb Minar, was started by Qutb-ud-din Aibak after the Ghurid victory over Prithviraj Chauhan in 1192; Aibak finished only the first storey, his successor Iltutmish added three more, and after lightning struck the tower in 1368 Firoz Shah Tughlaq rebuilt the top as two storeys faced with white marble. The result, 72.5 metres high and tapering from 14.3 metres across at the base, is the tallest brick minaret in the world, with fluted and angular flanges that make its shaft look like a bundle of reeds and bands of carved Quranic inscription running around each level.

    Did you know? Phosphorus-rich iron lets a protective film form on the iron pillar, and in some 1,600 years that film has grown only about a twentieth of a millimetre thick.

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18. 18 Statue of Liberty

    United States · 5.5 km from New York City40.689° N 74.044° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The name most people reach for is Bartholdi, and that's correct as far as it goes — Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi conceived the whole figure, from her raised torch to the broken chains at her feet, and sculpted the copper skin that visitors actually see, a figure standing some 46 metres from base to torch. What's murkier, and worth untangling, is who built what's actually holding her up.

    Did you know? Her copper skin is only about 2.4 millimetres thick across the entire figure.

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19. 19 Taj Mahal

    India · 2.9 km from Agra27.175° N 78.042° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Shah Jahan began building this in 1631 as a tomb for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who had died giving birth to their fourteenth child. Its chief architect, Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, coordinated craftsmen — masons, calligraphers, inlay specialists — drawn from across the Mughal empire and beyond, housed in a purpose-built settlement called Taj Ganj that still exists today; some residents there are descendants of the original workforce, and a few still practice the same inlay and stonework trades their ancestors were brought in for.

    Did you know? Its four minarets, each over 40 metres tall, lean slightly outward so that if one ever collapsed it would fall away from the tomb.

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20. 20 Christ the Redeemer

    Cristo Redentor

    Brazil · 4.9 km from Rio de Janeiro22.952° S 43.210° W

    

    The statue is as much a French project as a Brazilian one. Engineer Heitor da Silva Costa won the 1922 competition to design it, then spent years in Europe developing the plans, where he brought on French sculptor Paul Landowski — who ended up designing the head and hands — while the face itself was modeled by a Romanian-born sculptor, Gheorghe Leonida. Three nationalities, working across two continents, to build Rio's most recognizable landmark.

    Did you know? The statue is 30 metres tall on an 8-metre pedestal, its outstretched arms span 28 metres, and it weighs about 635 tonnes.

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21. 21 Vittoriano (Victor Emmanuel II Monument), Rome

    Vittoriano

    Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.895° N 12.483° E

    

    The Vittoriano, the national monument to Victor Emmanuel II, is the building that Rome loves to argue about. Raised in honour of the first king of united Italy, it was designed by Giuseppe Sacconi, winner of a competition, and begun in 1885 on the northern slope of the Capitoline Hill. It was inaugurated on 4 June 1911, the fiftieth anniversary of unification, but not finished until 1935. Built of brilliant white marble from Botticino near Brescia, it is about 135 m wide and 81 m high to the tops of its sculptures, a colossal stage of stairways, terraces and colonnades that Romans have nicknamed the wedding cake and the typewriter.

    Did you know? Before the equestrian statue was finally assembled, more than twenty people reportedly sat down to a meal inside the belly of the bronze horse.

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22. 22 Trevi Fountain

    Fontana di Trevi

    Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.901° N 12.483° E

    

    What feeds this fountain isn't ornamental plumbing — it's the working outflow of the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct finished in 19 BC that has been delivering the same spring water to roughly this same spot for over two thousand years. The Roman legend behind the name says a young woman, a virgo, once led thirsty soldiers to the spring; whether or not that's true, the aqueduct itself is real and still functioning.

    Did you know? About 26 metres high and 49 metres wide, the Trevi is often called the largest Baroque fountain in the world.

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23. 23 Gateway Arch

    United States · 5.1 km from St. Louis38.625° N 90.185° W

    

    The Gateway Arch is a single line drawn against the sky: a curve of stainless steel 630 feet (192 m) high and exactly as wide at its base, standing on the west bank of the Mississippi where St. Louis was founded in 1764. It is the tallest arch in the world, and from almost any angle it seems to change thickness and weight, a knife edge seen from the side, a vast gate seen from the front, a mirror of the weather at sunset.

    Did you know? Before the final keystone could go in, sunlight had expanded the south leg so much that crews sprayed it with water to cool the steel and widen the gap.

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24. 24 Panthéon

    France · 1.4 km from Paris48.846° N 2.346° E

    

    The Panthéon began as a king's thank-offering and became a republic's hall of fame. Louis XV vowed during an illness in 1744 to rebuild the decrepit abbey church of Saint Genevieve, patron saint of Paris, on her hill in the Latin Quarter, and in 1755 the commission went to Jacques-Germain Soufflot, who had spent years studying ancient buildings in Rome. Work started in 1758 and dragged on so long that neither king nor architect lived to see it finished; Soufflot's pupil Jean-Baptiste Rondelet completed the church in 1790, just as the Revolution broke out.

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25. 25 Hungarian Parliament Building

    Országház

    Hungary · 2.8 km from Budapest47.507° N 19.046° E

    

    Stretched for 268 metres along the Pest bank of the Danube, the Hungarian Parliament is a forest of white pinnacles, pointed arches and buttresses gathered around a great ribbed dome. It is the largest building in Hungary, and seen from the Buda side of the river, its reflection doubling it in the water, it reads as one of the defining images of Budapest. The dome rises to 96 metres, a number chosen on purpose: it recalls the year 896, the traditional date of the Magyar settlement and the founding of the Hungarian principality.

    Did you know? The building was to use only Hungarian materials; the exception is eight six-metre marble monoliths by the main staircase, brought from Sweden.

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26. 26 Göbekli Tepe

    Göbeklitepe

    Turkey · 12.8 km from Şanlıurfa37.223° N 38.922° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Göbekli Tepe changes the order in which the story of civilisation is usually told. On a limestone ridge north-east of Şanlıurfa, a mound about 15 metres high and 8 hectares across holds monumental enclosures built between roughly 9500 and 8000 BC — by people who had not yet adopted pottery and were only on the threshold of farming. Monumental building, it turns out, did not have to wait for villages and fields; it may even have helped to bring them about.

    Did you know? In Turkish the name means Potbelly Hill, while one Kurdish name for the mound translates as Wish Hill.

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27. 27 The Great Sphinx

    Egypt · 6.4 km from Giza29.975° N 31.138° E

    

    The Great Sphinx of Giza is a lion with a human head, carved directly out of the limestone bedrock of the Giza Plateau and facing east toward the Nile Valley. It is 73 metres long from paws to tail and 20 metres high, and is the oldest known monumental sculpture in Egypt. Most Egyptologists date it to the Fourth Dynasty, around 2600–2500 BC, and link it to the pharaoh Khafre, builder of the second pyramid at Giza — though no inscription from the period names its maker, and some scholars argue for his father Khufu.

    Did you know? Its Arabic name, Abu al-Hawl, means father of terror, which may be a folk reworking of the name of an ancient god linked to the statue.

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28. 28 Atomium

    Belgium · 6.7 km from Brussels50.895° N 4.341° E

    

    The Atomium is a crystal of iron blown up to the scale of a building: nine stainless-steel spheres, each 18 metres across, joined by tubes into the shape of a body-centred cubic unit cell, the arrangement of atoms in iron enlarged roughly 165 billion times. It stands 102 metres tall on the Heysel plateau in Laeken, in the north of Brussels, and remains one of the tallest structures in Belgium and the emblem of the city's modern age.

    Did you know? For years photographs of the Atomium could not be freely published, as Belgian copyright society SABAM claimed rights over images until a freedom-of-panorama law passed in 2016.

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29. 29 Prague Astronomical Clock

    Staroměstský orloj

    Czech Republic · 0.2 km from Prague50.087° N 14.421° E

    

    The Prague Orloj is a medieval astronomical clock set into the south wall of the Old Town Hall on Old Town Square, and it has been telling time, and a good deal more, since 1410. Its oldest parts, the clockwork and the astronomical dial, were made by the clockmaker Mikuláš of Kadaň with Jan Šindel, a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Charles University; the first written mention dates from 9 October 1410. Around 1490 a calendar dial was added below and the façade was dressed with Gothic sculpture. For centuries the clock was wrongly credited to a later master, Hanuš, and a legend retold by the writer Alois Jirásek holds that the city councillors had him blinded so he could never build another.

    Did you know? Inside, the zodiac ring turns on a 365-tooth gear, the Sun's hand on a 366-tooth gear and the Moon's on a 379-tooth gear.

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30. 30 Hundertwasserhaus

    Austria · 2.3 km from Vienna48.208° N 16.394° E

    

    In a street of sober Viennese apartment blocks, one building refuses every straight line. The Hundertwasserhaus in the Landstraße district is patched in red, yellow, blue and white, its windows are all different, its floors undulate, and trees and shrubs, around 250 of them, grow from its terraces and roof, some rooted inside the flats with branches reaching out of the windows. It stands on the corner of Kegelgasse and Löwengasse, and it is ordinary municipal housing: people live here as tenants of the city.

    Did you know? Hundertwasser took no fee for designing the house, saying it was worth it simply to prevent something ugly from being built in its place.

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