The Most Spectacular Observation Towers in the World
12 places in 11 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular observation towers in the world are Fernsehturm Berlin (Germany), Eiffel Tower (France) and Space Needle (United States). The list covers 12 observation towers in 11 countries. Japan has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
An observation tower is built for a single act: lifting people high enough to see a city or a landscape whole. The great ones turn that function into a shape you recognise from miles away. Wrought-iron lattice, a concrete shaft topped with a sphere, a twisted mesh, a spiral of timber: the structure has to stand against wind and its own weight, and the best towers let that engineering show as form rather than hide it behind cladding.
This collection crosses more than a century of ideas about height. The Mole Antonelliana in Turin, Alessandro Antonelli's slender dome and spire completed in 1889, now carries a glass lift through the middle of a cinema museum. The Eiffel Tower opened the same year as the showpiece of the Paris Exposition. Berlin's Fernsehturm, finished in 1969, puts a steel sphere above Alexanderplatz, while the Ještěd Tower near Liberec flares from a mountain summit as a hyperboloid that holds a hotel and a transmitter. In Japan, Tokyo Skytree rises to 634 metres; in Denmark, Skovtårnet climbs through a forest canopy as a timber hourglass with a ramp instead of stairs.
Every tower here was chosen for how it looks and is ranked by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a place on the map, and the section also opens by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fernsehturm Berlin | Observation tower | Germany | |
| 2 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | France | ✓ |
| 3 | Space Needle | Observation tower | United States | |
| 4 | Mole Antonelliana | Observation tower | Italy | |
| 5 | CN Tower | Observation tower | Canada | |
| 6 | Tokyo Skytree | Observation tower | Japan | |
| 7 | Canton Tower | Observation tower | People's Republic of China | |
| 8 | Tokyo Tower | Observation tower | Japan | |
| 9 | Ještěd Tower | Observation tower | Czech Republic | |
| 10 | Big Ben | Clock tower | United Kingdom | |
| 11 | Pyramidenkogel Tower | Observation tower | Austria | |
| 12 | Skovtårnet | Observation tower | Denmark |
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 Eiffel Tower
Tour Eiffel
France · 4.3 km from Paris48.858° N 2.294° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay The tower's basic shape wasn't originally Gustave Eiffel's idea at all. Two engineers working inside Eiffel's own company, Émile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, sketched the concept for an enormously tall iron tower in June 1884, intended as the centrepiece for the 1889 World's Fair marking the centenary of the French Revolution. Eiffel reportedly found Koechlin's earliest, bare-bones sketch unconvincing.
Did you know? According to a popular anecdote, Guy de Maupassant lunched at the tower daily because it was the one place in Paris he could not see it.
03 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.
04 Mole Antonelliana
Italy · 2 km from Turin45.069° N 7.693° E
Image by nonmisvegliate from Pixabay Turin's skyline is ruled by a dome that keeps going upward: a square cupola that narrows into a colonnaded lantern and then into a slender spire, 167.5 metres in all. The Mole Antonelliana takes its name from its architect, Alessandro Antonelli, and from the Italian word mole, a building of monumental size. Turin itself, the first capital of united Italy and the seat of the House of Savoy, is a city of arcaded streets and Baroque squares on the Po, and the Mole rises a few blocks from its centre.
Did you know? Antonelli's first design for the synagogue, in 1862, was only about 47 metres tall, barely a quarter of the building's final height.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 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.
10 Big Ben
United Kingdom · 0.4 km from London51.501° N 0.125° W
Image by pemacallan from Pixabay Everyone calls the tower Big Ben, but that name actually belongs to the bell inside it — the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster — and the tower itself wasn't even called Elizabeth Tower until 2012, when it was renamed for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Before that it was simply the Clock Tower, which undersells what a fight it took to get built.
Did you know? The Great Bell cracked months after it first rang in 1859; instead of recasting it, workers turned it an eighth of a turn, and it still rings cracked.
11 Pyramidenkogel Tower
Aussichtsturm Pyramidenkogel
Austria · 12.7 km from Klagenfurt46.609° N 14.145° E
C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Pyramidenkogel is an 851-metre wooded summit on the south side of the Wörthersee in Carinthia, and the tower on top of it is the reason people drive up. Opened on 20 June 2013 after only eight months of construction, it rises 100 metres including its antenna and is billed as the tallest wooden observation tower in the world. The design, by the Klagenfurt architects Markus Klaura and Dietmar Kaden with structural engineer Markus Lackner, won a competition in 2007: sixteen laminated timber posts climb in a gentle twist, held together by ten elliptical steel rings and eighty diagonal braces, so that from below the whole thing reads like a ladder of stacked ovals leaning into the sky.
Did you know? The view from the Pyramidenkogel was already praised in Karl Baedeker's 1879 guidebook to the Eastern Alps.
12 Skovtårnet
Denmark55.253° N 11.977° E
Johan Wessman / News Oresund · CC BY 2.0 Rising out of the woods of the Gisselfeld estate on Zealand, Skovtårnet, the Forest Tower, is shaped like an hourglass twisted around its own axis. Its slender waist and flaring crown are formed by a lattice of weathering steel and timber, and a single spiral ramp winds up through the structure from the forest floor to a viewing platform 45 m above the ground.
Did you know? The tower's vertical Corten steel tubes twist through 120 degrees from base to top, giving the structure its spiralling look.
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 beautiful observation tower in the world?
- On our list, Fernsehturm Berlin (Germany) ranks first, followed by Eiffel Tower (France) and Space Needle (United States).
- What is the tallest tower in the world?
- Tokyo Skytree, completed in 2012, is the tallest tower in the world at 634 metres. It serves as a broadcasting tower and has two observation decks.
- Which country has the most famous observation towers?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (2), Austria (1) and Canada (1).
- Why were so many observation towers built as TV towers?
- Television and radio transmitters need height, so cities built tall masts in concrete or steel and often added an observation deck and restaurant near the top. The Fernsehturm in Berlin, the CN Tower in Toronto and the Ještěd Tower all combine broadcasting with a public viewpoint.
- How many observation towers are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 12 observation towers in 11 countries. Japan has the most, with 2.