The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Sites in the World

114 places in 50 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Baalbek

   Lebanon · 33 km from Zahlé34.006° N 36.209° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Nowhere else did Rome build on quite this scale. On a hill in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, where the city of Heliopolis once worshipped a local storm god under the name of Jupiter, the imperial architects raised a sanctuary on a platform whose retaining walls are made of single stones.

   Did you know? In 2014 archaeologists found a block beside the Stone of the Pregnant Woman measuring about 19.6 by 6 by 5.5 metres and weighing an estimated 1,650 tonnes.

   More about Baalbek →

2. 02 Butrint

   Albania · 13.4 km from Saranda39.757° N 20.017° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Butrint sits on a hill above the Vivari Channel, close to the Straits of Corfu, and in one walk you pass through some 2,500 years of Mediterranean history: a Greek theatre, Roman baths, a Byzantine baptistery, a Venetian fortress and the castle of Ali Pasha. It is the most important archaeological site in Albania, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992 and the heart of a national park created in 2000.

   Did you know? Butrint's local calendar is among those inscribed on the Antikythera Mechanism, the oldest known analogue computer, made around 150 to 100 BC.

   More about Butrint →

3. 03 Angkor Wat

   Cambodia · 5.4 km from Siem Reap13.412° N 103.867° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument on Earth and the one building every Cambodian knows. It appears on the national flag. King Suryavarman II commissioned it in the first half of the 12th century as the state temple of his capital, Yaśodharapura, and dedicated it to Vishnu. It was most likely also intended as his mausoleum.

   Did you know? The temple was built from an estimated five to ten million sandstone blocks, the heaviest weighing about 1.5 tonnes.

   More about Angkor Wat →

4. 04 Diocletian's Palace

   Dioklecijanova palača

   Croatia · 2.9 km from Split43.508° N 16.438° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Diocletian, the emperor who divided power among four rulers and then did something rare for a Roman emperor — abdicated, in 305 — chose a peninsula on the Dalmatian coast for his retirement, a few kilometres from Salona, the provincial capital.

   Did you know? According to ancient sources, when asked to return to power Diocletian replied that anyone who saw the cabbages he grew would never suggest it.

   More about Diocletian's Palace →

5. 05 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.

   More about Cave of Altamira →

6. 06 Somapura Mahavihara

   Bangladesh25.031° N 88.977° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Somapura Mahavihara, at Paharpur in northwestern Bangladesh, is the ruin of one of the largest Buddhist monasteries ever built south of the Himalayas. Seals found during excavation name it as a foundation of the Pala king Dharmapala, who ruled Bengal around the late eighth and early ninth centuries, though Tibetan sources credit his successor Devapala.

   Did you know? Tibetan sources count Somapura among the five great monastic universities of Pala-era eastern India, and by area it was the largest of them.

   More about Somapura Mahavihara →

7. 07 Hampi

   India · 11.1 km from Hospet15.335° N 76.462° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Hampi is what remains of Vijayanagara, capital of the last great Hindu empire of South India. From 1336 until 1565 the city spread along the Tungabhadra River, and by around 1500 it may have been the second-largest city in the world after Beijing, drawing merchants from Persia and Portuguese Goa. In 1565 a coalition of Deccan sultanates defeated the empire's army, and the city was sacked and abandoned.

   Did you know? In 1442 the Persian envoy Abdul Razzaq described the city as enclosed by seven rings of fortifications, the inner ones packed with shops and bazaars.

   More about Hampi →

8. 08 Palmyra

   Syria · 1.2 km from Tadmur34.550° N 38.270° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Palmyra was a caravan city in an oasis of the Syrian Desert, about 215 km northeast of Damascus, and for three centuries it was one of the richest places in the Roman East. Its merchants ran trade routes between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia and set up trading colonies along the Silk Road, and their wealth paid for a city whose architecture mixed Greek and Roman forms with local Semitic traditions.

   Did you know? Palmyra's tax law of AD 137, carved in Greek and Palmyrene on a 5 m slab, went to the Russian tsar in 1901 and is now in the Hermitage.

   More about Palmyra →

9. 09 Prambanan Temple

   Indonesia · 13.2 km from Yogyakarta City7.752° S 110.491° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Local legend explains Prambanan's scale with a story dark enough that it kept people away for centuries: Prince Bandung Bondowoso wanted to marry Princess Roro Jonggrang, who agreed only if he could build a thousand temples in a single night. With the help of spirits he very nearly managed it — so she had the villagers light fires and pound rice to fake the approach of dawn, tricking the spirits into stopping short.

   Did you know? An inscription dated 856 records that the builders diverted a river, now the Opak, away from the main shrine and levelled its old bed to make room for more temples.

   More about Prambanan Temple →

10. 10 Valley of the Kings

    Egypt · 6.5 km from Luxor25.740° N 32.602° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    For nearly five centuries, from about 1539 to 1075 BC, the pharaohs of the New Kingdom were buried not under pyramids but in tombs cut deep into a dry valley on the west bank of the Nile opposite Thebes, modern Luxor. The valley lies beneath al-Qurn, a pyramid-shaped peak that may have been part of its appeal, and its hidden entrances were meant to defeat the robbers who had emptied the older royal tombs.

    Did you know? Workmen who cut and painted the royal tombs lived in the nearby village of Deir el-Medina, and their records include what may be history's first documented labour strike.

    More about Valley of the Kings →

11. 11 Parthenon

    Παρθενώνας

    Greece · 1.6 km from Athens37.972° N 23.727° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Parthenon looks perfectly straight only because almost nothing about it actually is.

    Did you know? On 26 September 1687 a Venetian mortar round hit gunpowder stored inside by the Ottoman garrison, and the blast killed about 300 people.

    More about Parthenon →

12. 12 Petra

    Jordan · 32.1 km from Ma'an30.329° N 35.442° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    For centuries Petra existed mainly in local Bedouin knowledge and old texts, unseen by European travelers, until the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt talked his way in in 1812 by posing as a Muslim pilgrim — the disguise mattered because outsiders weren't otherwise let anywhere near the site.

    Did you know? The Monastery, Ad Deir, is the largest monument at Petra, about 45 metres tall and 50 metres wide.

    More about Petra →

13. 13 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.

    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.

    More about Visoki Dečani →

14. 14 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.

    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.

    More about Terracotta Army →

15. 15 Ephesus

    Efes

    Turkey · 21.6 km from Söke37.940° N 27.349° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Ephesus is one of the largest Roman cities left standing in the eastern Mediterranean, and one of the few where you can walk a marble street from end to end and understand how a great ancient city worked. Founded by Ionian Greeks in the 10th century BC, it became one of the leading cities of Roman Asia, a centre of early Christianity and, until its harbour silted up, one of the busiest ports of the Aegean.

    Did you know? The Temple of Artemis took about 120 years to build and was burned down in 356 BC.

    More about Ephesus →

16. 16 Tassili n'Ajjer

    Algeria25.667° N 9.000° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Tassili n'Ajjer — "plateau of rivers" in Berber — is a sandstone upland of more than 72,000 square kilometres in south-eastern Algeria, near the borders with Libya and Niger, and it holds one of the densest concentrations of prehistoric rock art on Earth. Some 15,000 paintings and engravings have been recorded in its shelters and gorges.

    Did you know? Optically stimulated luminescence dating suggests most of the plateau's rock art was made in the ninth and tenth millennia before the present.

    More about Tassili n'Ajjer →

17. 17 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.

    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.

    More about Teotihuacan →

18. 18 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.

    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.

    More about Qutb complex →

19. 19 Tikal

    Guatemala17.222° N 89.624° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Tikal is the Maya city at its most theatrical: grey limestone pyramids breaking through the canopy of the Petén rainforest in northern Guatemala, with howler monkeys and ocellated turkeys for company. It was the capital of one of the most powerful Maya kingdoms, occupied from at least the 4th century BC and at its height between about AD 200 and 900, before its population drained away and the forest closed over it.

    Did you know? Tikal stood in for the rebel base on the moon Yavin 4 in the original 1977 Star Wars film.

    More about Tikal →

20. 20 San Agustin archeological park

    Parque Arqueológico de San Agustín

    Colombia1.884° N 76.296° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    In the green hills around the headwaters of the Magdalena River in southern Colombia, hundreds of stone figures stand guard over ancient tombs. San Agustín holds the largest group of religious monuments and megalithic sculpture in Latin America: more than 600 statues are known from the region, carved by a people whose name and language are unknown.

    Did you know? The Fuente de Lavapatas is a network of channels cut into the rock of a stream bed, carved with human, amphibian and reptile figures.

    More about San Agustin archeological park →

21. 21 Tiwanaku

    Bolivia · 39.7 km from Desaguadero16.555° S 68.673° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Tiwanaku, on the high plain south of Lake Titicaca, was the centre of one of the great civilisations of the Andes. The city grew in the first centuries AD, flourished from about 375 to 700, and at its peak covered some 4 square km with a population of well over 10,000. Tiwanaku imagery and trade spread across the southern Andes. Its society collapsed around 1000 AD, probably helped by a long drought.

    Did you know? The builders locked stones together with I-shaped clamps of an unusual copper-arsenic-nickel bronze, some poured molten straight into the carved sockets.

    More about Tiwanaku →

22. 22 Pasargadae

    Iran30.200° N 53.179° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Pasargadae is where the Persian Empire began to think of itself in stone. Cyrus the Great founded it in the 6th century BC, close to the field where he defeated the Median king Astyages in 550 BC, and named it after his own clan.

    More about Pasargadae →

23. 23 Hadrian's Wall

    United Kingdom55.024° N 2.292° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Hadrian's Wall crosses the whole width of northern England, from Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway on the Solway Firth in the west — 80 Roman miles, or about 117 km. The Emperor Hadrian ordered it built in AD 122 to mark the northern edge of the province of Britannia.

    Did you know? Around 15,000 soldiers from three legions, helped by men of the Roman fleet, built most of the wall in about six years.

    More about Hadrian's Wall →

24. 24 Djemila

    Algeria · 34 km from Sétif36.321° N 5.737° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Djemila is the Roman town of Cuicul, laid out in the 1st century AD as a garrison colony on a narrow triangular spur some 900 metres up in the hills of north-eastern Algeria, where two streams meet.

    Did you know? In 1839 the Duke of Orléans planned to ship the Arch of Caracalla to Paris; the project was dropped after his death in 1842.

    More about Djemila →

25. 25 Volubilis

    Morocco · 19.1 km from Meknes34.071° N 5.554° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Volubilis sits on a gentle ridge below the Zerhoun massif, looking over a plain of olive groves north of Meknes, and the olive is the key to the whole place. Rome's westernmost towns rarely looked this prosperous: the city's wealth came from oil, and the remains of dozens of presses are scattered among the houses, one of them rebuilt with a full-size replica of a Roman press.

    Did you know? A coin of AD 168 or 169 deliberately set into the masonry of the Tingis Gate dates its construction almost to the year.

    More about Volubilis →

26. 26 Zvartnots Cathedral

    Armenia · 15.9 km from Ashtarak40.160° N 44.337° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Zvartnots was one of the boldest buildings of early medieval Christendom: a round, multi-storey cathedral raised in the 7th century just outside Vagharshapat (Etchmiadzin), the spiritual centre of the Armenian Church. It collapsed within about three centuries, but its ring of foundations, column bases and sculpted capitals is one of the most evocative ruins in Armenia.

    Did you know? The name comes from a medieval account of the 'heavenly watchers', angels said to have appeared to Gregory the Illuminator at this spot.

    More about Zvartnots Cathedral →

27. 27 Cueva de las Manos

    Argentina47.150° S 70.667° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Most of the hand images at Cueva de las Manos weren't painted with a brush — they're negative stencils, made by pressing a hand flat against the rock and blowing pigment around it through a hollow bone or reed pipe, leaving a silhouette rather than a filled-in shape.

    Did you know? Of the hands that can be identified, 829 are left hands and only 31 right, suggesting most painters held the spray pipe in their right hand.

    More about Cueva de las Manos →

28. 28 Persepolis

    Iran · 16.2 km from Marvdasht29.935° N 52.890° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Persepolis, known in Persian as Takht-e Jamshid, the Throne of Jamshid, was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Darius I began it around 515 BC on a vast terrace of grey limestone, looking out over the plain of Marvdasht in Fars. Xerxes I and Artaxerxes I extended it, and building went on until the empire fell.

    Did you know? Plutarch claimed Alexander needed some 20,000 mules and 5,000 camels to carry away the treasure of Persepolis.

    More about Persepolis →

29. 29 Skara Brae

    United Kingdom · 24.3 km from Kirkwall59.049° N 3.342° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Skara Brae is a Neolithic village on the Bay of Skaill, on the west coast of Orkney's Mainland, and the most complete settlement of its age in Europe. People lived here from about 3180 BC for some six centuries. The village lay hidden under a grassy mound until the winter of 1850, when a great storm stripped the dunes and exposed the outlines of roofless stone houses.

    Did you know? The village provided the earliest known record of the human flea in Europe.

    More about Skara Brae →

30. 30 Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary

    Vietnam · 35.5 km from Da Nang15.763° N 108.124° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    In a green valley about two kilometres across, ringed by two ranges of hills in central Vietnam, stand the ruined red-brick towers of Mỹ Sơn, the great religious centre of the kingdom of Champa. For roughly a thousand years, from the 4th to the 13th century, Cham kings built and rebuilt temples here, most of them dedicated to Shiva.

    Did you know? About 32 inscribed steles have been found at Mỹ Sơn, written in Sanskrit and Cham between the 5th and 12th centuries.

    More about Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary →