The Most Remarkable Monuments in North America
7 places in 3 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable monuments in North America are Mount Rushmore (United States), Habitat 67 (Canada) and Teotihuacan (Mexico). The list covers 7 monuments in 3 countries. The United States has the most, with 5. Last updated 13 October 2026.
North America's monuments range from ancient cities to modern statements of national identity and architecture. Indigenous civilisations in Mexico built some of the largest structures of the pre-Columbian world, while the young United States and Canada used monuments and landmark buildings to give form to their ideals, their history and their visions of the future. The result is a collection that spans two thousand years, from stone pyramids to concrete experiments.
Teotihuacan, northeast of Mexico City, was one of the largest cities in the world in the first centuries CE, and its Pyramid of the Sun and Avenue of the Dead still define the site. The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France dedicated in 1886, was designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi around an iron frame engineered by Gustave Eiffel. Mount Rushmore, carved between 1927 and 1941 under Gutzon Borglum, shows the faces of four presidents in the granite of the Black Hills.
Other monuments are works of architecture. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, dedicated in 1922, encloses Daniel Chester French's seated statue of Lincoln within a temple of 36 columns. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1965, rises 192 metres in stainless steel. Habitat 67 in Montreal, created by Moshe Safdie for Expo 67, stacks prefabricated concrete modules into an experimental housing complex, and the Salk Institute in La Jolla, designed by Louis Kahn, frames the Pacific with a travertine courtyard divided by a narrow channel of water.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Rushmore | Monument | United States | |
| 2 | Habitat 67 | Monument | Canada | |
| 3 | Teotihuacan | Archaeological site | Mexico | ✓ |
| 4 | Statue of Liberty | Monument | United States | ✓ |
| 5 | Gateway Arch | Monument | United States | |
| 6 | Lincoln Memorial | Monument | United States | |
| 7 | Salk Institute for Biological Studies building | Monument | United States |
01 Mount Rushmore
United States · 29 km from Rapid City43.879° N 103.459° W
Dean Franklin · Public domain The scale of the physical work is easy to understate. Borglum and his son Lincoln oversaw roughly 400 workers, many of them former miners, over fourteen years from 1927 to 1941. They used dynamite to remove the bulk of the rock, then switched to jackhammers and hand tools for the finer carving, ultimately blasting and chiselling away about 450,000 tons of granite to reveal the faces underneath.
Did you know? Jefferson was first carved on Washington's other side, but the rock there proved unstable, so the face was dynamited away and started again.
02 Habitat 67
Canada · 3.2 km from Montreal45.500° N 73.544° W
Image by ifinnsson from Pixabay The complex was built as a pavilion and housing showcase for Expo 67, the World's Fair held in Montreal from April to October 1967. 3 by 3 metres. Combined in different ways, they originally formed 158 apartments, now 146 homes of varying sizes, rising up to twelve storeys. Each home has at least one private garden terrace laid out on the roof of the unit below, and the stacking leaves gaps through which light and views pass between the blocks. Safdie's original scheme was far larger, with around 1,200 homes, but the budget allowed only a fraction to be built. The project made his reputation, launching a career of more than 75 buildings and master plans worldwide.
Did you know? Safdie's thesis on the idea failed to win the Pilkington Prize for the best thesis at Canadian architecture schools, an early sign of how divisive it would be.
03 Teotihuacan
Mexico · 30.8 km from Zumpango19.692° N 98.844° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JordiMA1587 from Pixabay The centre of the site is the Avenue of the Dead, a ceremonial axis more than two kilometres long lined with stepped platforms in the local talud-tablero style, a sloping base topped by a vertical panel that spread across Mesoamerica as a Teotihuacan signature. At its north end rises the Pyramid of the Moon; on its eastern side, the Pyramid of the Sun, finished by about 100 CE and among the largest pyramids ever built, measuring over 200 metres along each side of its base and around 65 metres high. To the south the Ciudadela encloses the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, the political and religious heart of the early city.
Did you know? The tunnel under the temple was found in 2003 only because heavy rain opened a sinkhole roughly a metre wide at the base of the pyramid.
04 Statue of Liberty
United States · 5.5 km from New York City40.689° N 74.044° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by itou365 from Pixabay Bartholdi's first engineer was Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the architect famous for restoring Notre-Dame, and his plan was almost defiantly old-fashioned: fill the statue's interior with sand-packed masonry compartments and let sheer weight keep her standing. Viollet-le-Duc died in 1879 with that plan unfinished, and Bartholdi turned instead to a bridge engineer named Gustave Eiffel — a decade before his tower made him famous.
Did you know? The statue was originally a coppery brown and turned green within about twenty years as the metal oxidised into a layer of verdigris.
05 Gateway Arch
United States · 5.1 km from St. Louis38.625° N 90.185° W
Image by Erdenebayar from Pixabay Its shape is not a parabola but a weighted catenary, the curve of a hanging chain turned upside down and made slightly heavier at the feet, so that the forces run down through the legs and straight into the foundations. The architect Eero Saarinen won a nationwide design competition in 1947–48, with structural calculations by Severud Associates. Building the arch itself began on 12 February 1963, the two legs rising in triangular sections of steel until the last piece was fitted at the top on 28 October 1965. Saarinen, who died in 1961, never saw it finished; it opened to the public in 1967.
Did you know? The 10-ton keystone section was slotted into place in just 13 minutes, with about six inches of clearance remaining.
06 Lincoln Memorial
United States · 3.6 km from Washington38.889° N 77.050° W
Image by MarkThomas from Pixabay Inside, in a hall open to the air, sits Daniel Chester French's colossal Lincoln, carved from Georgia white marble by the six Piccirilli brothers over four years and shipped in 28 pieces. The president sits in contemplation, gazing east along the Reflecting Pool towards the Washington Monument and the Capitol. The flanking chambers carry the words of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address, below murals by Jules Guérin, and above the statue runs the epitaph by Royal Cortissoz. It has been suggested, though never proved, that French shaped Lincoln's hands to spell his initials in sign language.
Did you know? The outer columns and walls lean slightly inward, an ancient Greek trick that keeps the building from appearing to bulge at the top.
07 Salk Institute for Biological Studies building
United States · 20.7 km from San Diego32.887° N 117.245° W
Codera23 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, who wanted a building beautiful enough to draw the best scientists in the world. Salk and Kahn persuaded the city of San Diego to grant land on the Torrey Pines mesa, and the March of Dimes paid for the first phase; researchers moved into the first laboratory in 1963. Kahn's plan foresaw three clusters, for meetings, for living and for laboratories, but only the laboratories were built.
Did you know? Jonas Salk saw the channel as a stream of knowledge flowing out of the institute into the ocean of human understanding, and it is often called the River of Life.
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 monuments in North America?
- On our list, Mount Rushmore (United States) ranks first, followed by Habitat 67 (Canada) and Teotihuacan (Mexico).
- Which country has the most monuments in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (5), Canada (1) and Mexico (1).
- What is the tallest monument in the United States?
- The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, at 192 metres, is the tallest human-made monument in the United States and in the Western Hemisphere. It commemorates the westward expansion of the country.
- Why does the Lincoln Memorial have 36 columns?
- The 36 Doric columns represent the 36 states of the Union at the time of Lincoln's death in 1865. Their names are inscribed above the colonnade.
- Who built Teotihuacan?
- The city's builders remain unknown; the name Teotihuacan was given later by the Aztecs, who found it already in ruins. At its height in the first half of the first millennium CE it was among the largest cities in the world.
- How many monuments are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 7 monuments in 3 countries. The United States has the most, with 5.