The Most Remarkable Monuments in the United States
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable monuments in the United States are Mount Rushmore, Statue of Liberty and Gateway Arch. The list covers 5 monuments. Last updated 13 October 2026.
American monuments were built for a young country that wanted to give its ideals a physical form. Instead of royal statues, the nation commissioned colossal portraits, temples to presidents and abstract forms marking its westward growth, often on a scale only the new industrial century could achieve. In the 20th century the idea of a monument widened to include modern architecture itself.
The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi around an iron framework by Gustave Eiffel, has stood in New York Harbor since 1886. Mount Rushmore in South Dakota carries the faces of four presidents carved into granite under Gutzon Borglum. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., is a Doric temple housing Daniel Chester French's seated Lincoln. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, designed by Eero Saarinen, is a stainless steel arch 630 feet high. The Salk Institute in La Jolla, by Louis Kahn, frames the Pacific with a travertine courtyard split by a narrow channel of water.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Rushmore | Monument | |
| 2 | Statue of Liberty | Monument | ✓ |
| 3 | Gateway Arch | Monument | |
| 4 | Lincoln Memorial | Monument | |
| 5 | Salk Institute for Biological Studies building | Monument |
01 Mount Rushmore
United States · 29 km from Rapid City43.879° N 103.459° W
Dean Franklin · Public domain The mountain the sculpture is carved into has its own name and its own history that predates the carving by a very long time. The Lakota call the formation Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, the Six Grandfathers, and regard the Black Hills as sacred ground. The land passed out of Lakota control after treaties from the 1860s and 1870s were broken, so for many Native Americans the monument represents a double loss — land taken, then reshaped into a tribute to the government that took it. Borglum's own record adds another layer: he had documented ties to the Ku Klux Klan and used openly racist language about immigrants, facts that sit uneasily alongside the monument's status as a patriotic landmark.
Did you know? The figures were originally meant to be carved from head to waist, but the money ran out before anything below the faces was attempted.
02 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 She was a gift, but not a simple one: France paid for the statue itself through public subscription, while the United States was supposed to fund the pedestal — and Americans dragged their feet badly enough that fundraising nearly derailed the whole project until newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer shamed his readers into covering the shortfall with small donations. Dedicated in October 1886, she's officially recognised today as a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, a designation that, given the argument above, arguably owes as much to Eiffel's ironwork as to Bartholdi's copper.
Did you know? The tablet in her left hand is inscribed JULY IV MDCCLXXVI, the date of the American Declaration of Independence in Roman numerals.
03 Gateway Arch
United States · 5.1 km from St. Louis38.625° N 90.185° W
Image by Erdenebayar from Pixabay Beneath the arch lies a large underground visitor centre with a museum telling the story of westward expansion, rebuilt and extended in a renovation completed in 2018. The same year the whole memorial, until then known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, was renamed Gateway Arch National Park, the smallest national park in the United States.
Did you know? Planners expected around thirteen workers to die during construction, yet the arch was completed without a single fatality.
04 Lincoln Memorial
United States · 3.6 km from Washington38.889° N 77.050° W
Image by MarkThomas from Pixabay The memorial became a stage for American history. In 1939, after she was refused a concert hall, the contralto Marian Anderson sang on its steps, and on 28 August 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech here at the end of the March on Washington, a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The memorial is administered by the National Park Service and draws more than seven million visitors a year; it is at its most moving early in the morning or after dark.
Did you know? The ceiling panels are thin Alabama marble soaked in paraffin to make them translucent, and hidden floodlights were added in 1929.
05 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 Kahn struggled for a long time to decide what the space between the two wings should be. He asked the Mexican architect Luis Barragán for advice, and Barragán told him to plant nothing at all and make it a plaza of stone with a single water feature. The result, a stone square divided by its thread of water, is now the most celebrated part of the design. The original buildings were made a San Diego historical landmark in 1991, and since 2014 the Getty Conservation Institute has worked with the institute on conserving the concrete and teak against the salt air. La Jolla, the seaside community of San Diego around it, is known for its coves, cliffs and research campuses.
Did you know? In 1992 the American Institute of Architects gave the building its Twenty-five Year Award, an honour granted to only one building each year.
More about Salk Institute for Biological Studies building →
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 the United States?
- On our list, Mount Rushmore ranks first, followed by Statue of Liberty and Gateway Arch.
- Why is the Statue of Liberty green?
- Its outer skin is copper, which was originally reddish brown. Over about two decades of exposure to air and sea water it developed the green patina, called verdigris, that protects the metal.
- How tall is the Gateway Arch?
- The Gateway Arch is 630 feet (192 m) tall and the same distance wide at its base. Completed in 1965, it is the tallest arch in the world.
- How many monuments are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 5 monuments.