The Most Spectacular Modern Viewpoints in the World
9 places in 7 countries · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular modern viewpoints in the world are Fernsehturm Berlin (Germany), Space Needle (United States) and CN Tower (Canada). The list covers 9 modern viewpoints in 7 countries. Japan has the most, with 2. Last updated 6 October 2026.
Modern viewpoints are a product of the twentieth century: television towers, observation decks and engineered terraces that lift ordinary visitors to heights once reserved for climbers and pilots. Broadcasting needed tall masts, and cities discovered that a public platform near the top could become a national symbol. In wild landscapes, architects learned to build lookouts that disappear into the rock they stand on.
The Fernsehturm in Berlin, finished in 1969, carries its observation sphere above Alexanderplatz. Seattle's Space Needle was built for the 1962 World's Fair, and the CN Tower in Toronto, completed in 1976, adds a glass floor to its lookout. In Tokyo, the red-and-white Tokyo Tower of 1958 shares the skyline with Tokyo Skytree, which reaches 634 metres, while Canton Tower in Guangzhou twists into a slender, waisted lattice.
Ještěd Tower near Liberec combines a hotel and transmitter in a hyperboloid on a mountain summit, designed by Karel Hubáček. On Lanzarote, César Manrique built the Mirador del Río into a cliff high above the strait facing La Graciosa. In Utah, Dead Horse Point looks down on a gooseneck bend of the Colorado River carved deep into red sandstone.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fernsehturm Berlin | Observation tower | Germany | |
| 2 | Space Needle | Observation tower | United States | |
| 3 | CN Tower | Observation tower | Canada | |
| 4 | Tokyo Skytree | Observation tower | Japan | |
| 5 | Canton Tower | Observation tower | People's Republic of China | |
| 6 | Tokyo Tower | Observation tower | Japan | |
| 7 | Ještěd Tower | Observation tower | Czech Republic | |
| 8 | Mirador del Río | Scenic viewpoint | Spain | |
| 9 | Dead Horse Point State Park | Scenic viewpoint | United States |
01 Fernsehturm Berlin
Berliner Fernsehturm
Germany · 0.7 km from Berlin52.521° N 13.409° E
Image by BernardoUPloud from Pixabay 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.
02 Space Needle
United States · 3.4 km from Seattle47.620° N 122.349° W
Image by Sebastian_127 from Pixabay The Space Needle was built for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and finished in under a year: work began in April 1961 and the last elevator car was installed the day before the fair opened in April 1962. Its shape came from a compromise. The fair's chairman Edward Carlson sketched a giant tethered balloon, the architect John Graham proposed a flying saucer for the top, and Victor Steinbrueck contributed the hourglass waist and the three-legged stance. The result, 605 feet (184 m) tall, was for years the tallest structure west of the Mississippi.
Did you know? Edward Carlson's idea for the tower came after a visit to the Stuttgart TV Tower in Germany, and his first balloon-like sketch was drawn on a napkin.
03 CN Tower
Canada · 2.4 km from Toronto43.643° N 79.387° W
Image by jameswheeler from Pixabay Toronto's skyline is organised around a single concrete needle. The CN Tower rises 553.3 metres from the old Railway Lands south of Front Street, and for 32 years, from 1975 to 2007, nothing freestanding anywhere on Earth stood taller. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai took that title, and the Canton Tower later overtook it as the world's tallest tower, but the CN Tower is still the tallest freestanding structure in the Western Hemisphere. It was conceived by the Canadian National railway as a television and radio broadcasting platform for the Toronto area, and as a showcase for Canadian engineering; the design came from John Andrews with the firm Webb Zerafa Menkes Housden.
Did you know? Over its full height the concrete shaft strays from true vertical by just 29 mm, checked during pouring against huge plumb bobs watched through telescopes.
04 Tokyo Skytree
Japan · 6.1 km from Tokyo35.710° N 139.811° E
Image by cegoh from Pixabay Tokyo Skytree is the tallest tower in the world, a 634 m lattice of steel that Guinness World Records certified in 2011 as the tallest free-standing tower; among all structures, only the Burj Khalifa and Merdeka 118 are taller. It was built by Tobu Railway with a group of six broadcasters led by NHK, because the older Tokyo Tower, hemmed in by high-rises, could no longer send digital television signals across the whole Kanto region. The architects were Nikken Sekkei and the main contractor Obayashi. Construction started in July 2008, the tower reached full height on 18 March 2011, a week after the Tohoku earthquake, and it opened to the public on 22 May 2012. The height was chosen as a pun: read in Japanese, the digits 6, 3 and 4 spell Musashi, the old name of the province around Tokyo.
Did you know? The name Tokyo Skytree was picked by a nationwide public vote in 2008, winning about 30 percent of roughly 110,000 ballots cast.
05 Canton Tower
People's Republic of China · 6.1 km from Guangzhou23.109° N 113.319° E
Image by AndyLeungHK from Pixabay Canton Tower rises 600 m above Guangzhou, a slender lattice of steel twisted like a wrung-out rope. Its form comes from two ellipses, one at ground level and one at 450 m, rotated against each other; the twist squeezes the structure into a narrow "waist" halfway up, where the lattice becomes dense, and lets it open out again towards the top. Locals nicknamed it the "slim waist". It was designed by the Dutch architects Mark Hemel and Barbara Kuit of Information Based Architecture with the engineers of Arup, who won the international competition in 2004, and it opened in 2010 in time for the Asian Games. The hyperboloid principle goes back to the Russian engineer Vladimir Shukhov, who patented it in 1899.
Did you know? From its topping-out in August 2009 until Tokyo Skytree overtook it in 2011, it was the tallest tower in the world.
06 Tokyo Tower
Japan · 3.2 km from Tokyo35.659° N 139.746° E
Image by LittleMouse from Pixabay Tokyo Tower was completed in 1958 as a transmitter for the Kantō region and as a symbol of Japan's recovery after the war. The engineer Tachū Naitō, a designer of tall buildings in earthquake country, took the Eiffel Tower as his model, and when its antenna was bolted into place in October 1958 the tower, at 332.9 metres, overtook its Parisian model by nine metres to become the tallest freestanding tower in the world. It is far lighter, around 4,000 tons against the Eiffel Tower's 7,300, and about a third of its steel came from scrap, including US tanks damaged in the Korean War.
Did you know? The tower's owner first wanted it taller than the Empire State Building, but money and materials ran short, and broadcast range set the final height.
07 Ještěd Tower
Ještěd
Czech Republic · 10.1 km from Liberec50.733° N 14.985° E
Image by ivabalk from Pixabay From almost anywhere in Liberec you can see it: on the bare summit of Ještěd, 1,012 metres up and about six kilometres from the town centre, stands a silver cone that looks less like a building than like something that has landed. It is a television transmitter and a mountain hotel folded into a single shape — a hyperboloid of reinforced concrete about 94 metres tall, clad in aluminium and glass. The curve is not a stylistic whim: it continues the silhouette of the mountain into the sky, and it is built to withstand the harsh climate of an exposed summit.
Did you know? Eleven architects and teams entered the 1963 design competition, and Hubáček's entry was the only one to meet both the hotel and transmitter briefs.
08 Mirador del Río
Spain · 27.8 km from Arrecife29.214° N 13.481° W
Image by lapping from Pixabay Mirador del Río is a viewpoint at the northern tip of Lanzarote that is almost invisible until you are inside it. César Manrique, the island's artist and architect, built it between 1971 and 1973 into the edge of the Famara cliffs at a spot called Batería del Río, about 475 metres above the sea, and clad it in rough volcanic stone so that from the outside it reads as part of the rock. Entry is through a narrow, winding passage that shuts out the view entirely, which is the point: it opens suddenly into two broad vaulted rooms, and the full width of the ocean appears at once through two great windows that Manrique called the eyes of the Mirador.
Did you know? A sculpture of a bird and a fish greets visitors at the entrance, introducing the twin themes of air and sea.
09 Dead Horse Point State Park
United States · 17.7 km from Moab38.506° N 109.733° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by ducken99 from Pixabay Dead Horse Point is a narrow finger of mesa in southeastern Utah that ends in a sheer drop of about 2,000 feet (610 m) to the Colorado River. From the overlook at its tip the river makes a tight gooseneck loop directly below, a green-edged ribbon of water folded around a tower of red rock, while the canyon country spreads to the horizon in stepped layers of cliffs, benches and buttes. It is one of the most complete views of the Colorado Plateau from a single point, and it changes completely with the light: flat and hazy at noon, glowing orange and throwing long shadows at sunrise and sunset.
Did you know? Just before the point the mesa pinches to a neck only about 30 yards wide, which is why it could be fenced off so easily.
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 spectacular modern viewpoints in the world?
- On our list, Fernsehturm Berlin (Germany) ranks first, followed by Space Needle (United States) and CN Tower (Canada).
- Which country has the most modern viewpoints in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (2), the United States (2) and Canada (1).
- How tall is Tokyo Skytree?
- Tokyo Skytree is 634 metres tall, making it the tallest tower in the world. It opened in 2012 as a broadcasting and observation tower.
- Why was the Space Needle built?
- The Space Needle was built for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, the Century 21 Exposition, whose theme looked toward the space age.
- Who designed the Mirador del Río?
- The Mirador del Río on Lanzarote was designed by the island's artist and architect César Manrique and opened in 1973. It is set into the cliff of the Risco de Famara, looking over the island of La Graciosa.
- How many modern viewpoints are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 9 modern viewpoints in 7 countries. Japan has the most, with 2.