The Most Remarkable Observatories in the World
8 places in 7 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable observatories in the world are Griffith Observatory (United States), Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Spain) and Maunakea Observatories (United States). The list covers 8 observatories in 7 countries. The United States has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
An observatory is a building turned towards the sky, and the best of them are shaped by that single purpose. Domes that open along a slit and rotate with the stars, clusters of white towers on a summit above the clouds, stone instruments the size of houses: their architecture follows the needs of looking upward. They are usually placed where the air is thin, dry and dark, which gives them some of the most extraordinary settings of any buildings on earth.
In this section, the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory gathers its telescopes on the rim of a volcanic caldera on La Palma, and the Maunakea Observatories stand on a Hawaiian summit at about 4,200 metres. Paranal in Chile's Atacama Desert houses the four units of the Very Large Telescope. Griffith Observatory, opened in 1935, looks out over Los Angeles from Mount Hollywood. Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in Potsdam, completed in the early 1920s, is one of the icons of Expressionist architecture, and the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, built in the early eighteenth century, measures the heavens with monumental instruments of masonry.
The observatories were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map; the section also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Griffith Observatory | Observatory | United States | |
| 2 | Roque de los Muchachos Observatory | Observatory | Spain | |
| 3 | Maunakea Observatories | Observatory | United States | |
| 4 | Jantar Mantar | Observatory | India | ✓ |
| 5 | Einstein Tower | Observatory | Germany | |
| 6 | Paranal Observatory | Observatory | Chile | |
| 7 | Sphinx Observatory | Observatory | Switzerland | |
| 8 | Pic du Midi Observatory | Observatory | France |
01 Griffith Observatory
United States · 9.9 km from Los Angeles34.119° N 118.300° W
Image by igorelick from Pixabay Griffith Observatory sits on the south-facing slope of Mount Hollywood, its domes and terraces looking out over the endless grid of Los Angeles. From its terraces the view sweeps from Downtown to the south-east across Hollywood to the Pacific, and the Hollywood Sign is close enough to feel like a neighbour. It was the gift of Griffith J. Griffith, who donated the surrounding parkland to the city in 1896 and left money in his will for an observatory with the explicit aim of bringing astronomy to ordinary people rather than keeping it on remote mountaintops for scientists. Admission has been free since it opened on 14 May 1935, as he wished.
Did you know? The observatory's Tesla coil, built in 1910 by Earle Ovington, once threw sparks more than ten feet across Madison Square Garden at an estimated 1.3 million volts.
02 Roque de los Muchachos Observatory
Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos
Spain28.764° N 17.895° W
H. Zell · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Roque de los Muchachos Observatory occupies the summit ridge of La Palma, the north-westernmost of the Canary Islands, at around 2,400 metres above the Atlantic. Run by the Instituto de AstrofÃsica de Canarias, it was inaugurated on 29 June 1985 in the presence of the Spanish royal family and six European heads of state, and it has since become one of the great astronomical sites of the world, generally ranked second only to Mauna Kea in the northern hemisphere for optical and infrared work. The reason lies below the domes: the island's position in mid-ocean and the steady trade winds produce a layer of cloud between about 1,000 and 2,000 metres, a white sea that smothers the lights of the coast and leaves the summit in clear, still, dry air.
Did you know? The Isaac Newton Telescope was moved to La Palma from cloudy Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex, a move so troubled that a new telescope would likely have been cheaper.
03 Maunakea Observatories
United States19.822° N 155.475° W
Image by doctor-a from Pixabay Near the summit of Mauna Kea, at about 4,200 metres, a cluster of white and silver domes stands on red-brown cinder cones high above the cloud layer. This is one of the world's great observatory sites: twelve facilities housing thirteen telescopes, including the twin 10-metre mirrors of the W. M. Keck Observatory, Japan's 8.2-metre Subaru Telescope, Gemini North, the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope and the 15-metre James Clerk Maxwell Telescope for submillimetre astronomy, along with the linked dishes of the Submillimeter Array.
Did you know? A Land Office map of 1901 already marked a Hawaii Astronomy Station on the mountain, decades before the first telescope arrived.
04 Jantar Mantar
India · 1.7 km from Jaipur26.925° N 75.825° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Gerd Eichmann · CC BY-SA 4.0 Jaipur's Jantar Mantar looks at first like a playground of giant abstract sculptures: ramps, bowls, arcs and walls of masonry and marble spread across a courtyard next to the City Palace. Each shape is in fact a precise astronomical instrument. Nineteen of them were built by Sawai Jai Singh II, the Rajput ruler who founded Jaipur, with construction from before 1728 until the 1730s. The name comes from Sanskrit words for instrument and calculation.
Did you know? Despite its precision claims, the sun's blurred shadow edge can be about 30 mm wide, making the great sundial's 1 mm markings of little practical use.
05 Einstein Tower
Einsteinturm
Germany · 2.4 km from Potsdam52.379° N 13.064° E
Bautsch · CC0 The Einstein Tower rises among the trees of the Telegrafenberg in Potsdam like something poured rather than built: a smooth, rounded shaft with deep-set windows, flowing down into a low body that seems to lean forward on its haunches. It was designed by Erich Mendelsohn, then at the start of his career, and it became the best-known work of his career and one of the landmarks of German Expressionist architecture. A young Richard Neutra worked in his office at the time.
Did you know? Inside the shaft, the telescope optics sit on two stacked wooden platforms, each six metres high, with a lens of 14 metres focal length.
06 Paranal Observatory
Observatorio Paranal
Chile24.627° S 70.404° W
European Southern Observatory · CC BY 4.0 Cerro Paranal is a bare summit 2,635 metres high in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, and on its levelled top the European Southern Observatory has built its flagship observatory. The nearest settlement, the coastal hamlet of Paposo, is 38 km away in a straight line, and that isolation from the lights of civilisation is exactly the point. By total light-collecting area Paranal is the largest optical and infrared observatory in the Southern Hemisphere, second in the world only to Mauna Kea.
Did you know? Before the observatory was built, the summit of Cerro Paranal stood about 29 metres higher; levelling in 1991–92 removed roughly 350,000 cubic metres of rock.
07 Sphinx Observatory
Sphinx-Observatorium
Switzerland46.548° N 7.985° E
Eric Hill from Boston, MA, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Sphinx Observatory sits on a rocky spur of the Jungfraujoch, the saddle between the Jungfrau and the Mönch, at 3,571 metres above sea level — one of the highest working observatories in the world and, from a distance, a strangely modest silhouette: a squat block with a silver dome perched on a crag of snow and rock, looking over the long white sweep of the Aletsch Glacier as it flows south into Valais. It opened in 1937, reached not by a path over the ridge but from inside the mountain, through a tunnel and a lift shaft cut up through the rock from the railway station below.
Did you know? A research station on the Jungfraujoch was promised in 1894 by Adolf Guyer-Zeller as part of the concession to build the Jungfrau Railway.
08 Pic du Midi Observatory
Observatoire du Pic du Midi
France · 33.3 km from Tarbes42.937° N 0.142° E
Image by jackmac34 from Pixabay The observatory on the Pic du Midi de Bigorre is one of the most spectacularly placed scientific stations in the world: a cluster of white domes and terraces on the summit of a detached Pyrenean peak at 2,877 m, standing out so far from the main chain that on a clear day the view runs along the whole range. Its height and isolation made the summit a place where, for more than a century, astronomers came to push the limits of what could be seen from the ground.
Did you know? In 1909 a telescope on the summit helped demolish the popular theory, championed by Percival Lowell, that canals criss-crossed the surface of Mars.
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 is the most remarkable observatory in the world?
- On our list, Griffith Observatory (United States) ranks first, followed by Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Spain) and Maunakea Observatories (United States).
- Why are observatories built on mountains?
- High sites put telescopes above much of the atmosphere's moisture and turbulence and away from city light, giving clearer, steadier and darker skies.
- What is the Jantar Mantar?
- The Jantar Mantar in Jaipur is an astronomical observatory of large masonry instruments built by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II in the early eighteenth century. Its Samrat Yantra is among the largest sundials in the world, and the site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- Which country has the most remarkable observatories?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (2), Chile (1) and France (1).
- How many observatories are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 8 observatories in 7 countries. The United States has the most, with 2.