The Most Spectacular Observation Towers in Europe
7 places in 7 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular observation towers in Europe are Fernsehturm Berlin (Germany), Eiffel Tower (France) and Mole Antonelliana (Italy). The list covers 7 observation towers in 7 countries. Austria has the most, with 1. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Europe's towers record the continent's changing idea of what a tall structure is for. In the nineteenth century, iron and engineering pride produced towers that existed mainly to be climbed and admired. In the twentieth, broadcasting gave cities concrete masts with viewing platforms near the top, and in the twenty-first, forest and lakeside towers in timber and steel were built purely to lift visitors above the landscape. The best of them became symbols of the cities and regions they stand over.
The Eiffel Tower, completed for the Paris Exposition of 1889, was the tallest structure in the world until 1930 and is still the image of Paris itself. Turin's Mole Antonelliana, begun as a synagogue and finished in 1889 with a slender spire, now houses the National Museum of Cinema, with a glass lift rising through its hollow interior. In London, the Elizabeth Tower, home of the great bell known as Big Ben, has marked time over Westminster since 1859.
The television age added the Fernsehturm in Berlin, finished in 1969, whose steel sphere on a concrete shaft is the tallest structure in Germany, and the Ještěd Tower above Liberec in the Czech Republic, a hyperboloid of steel and concrete that holds a hotel and a transmitter on a mountain summit. The newest towers belong to nature: the Pyramidenkogel in Carinthia, a twisting timber frame above the Wörthersee with a long slide down its side, and the Skovtårnet in a Danish forest, where an hourglass-shaped ramp spirals above the treetops.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fernsehturm Berlin | Observation tower | Germany | |
| 2 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | France | ✓ |
| 3 | Mole Antonelliana | Observation tower | Italy | |
| 4 | Ještěd Tower | Observation tower | Czech Republic | |
| 5 | Big Ben | Clock tower | United Kingdom | |
| 6 | Pyramidenkogel Tower | Observation tower | Austria | |
| 7 | 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 sphere produced an unintended joke. When the sun strikes its tiled stainless-steel skin, the reflection forms a bright Greek cross, and Berliners nicknamed it the "Pope's Revenge", a divine answer to a state that had stripped crosses from churches. After reunification the tower shed its political meaning and became a symbol of the whole city, appearing in the opening shot of countless films about Berlin; it has been a listed monument since 1979 and draws more than a million visitors a year.
Did you know? The sphere is 32 metres across, weighs about 4,800 tonnes and was assembled high above the city from 120 separate segments.
02 Eiffel Tower
Tour Eiffel
France · 4.3 km from Paris48.858° N 2.294° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay What made the design work — visually, not structurally — was a third man: architect Stephen Sauvestre, brought in to soften the raw lattice engineering into something the public might actually love. Sauvestre added the sweeping stone-arched base, the glass-enclosed halls on the platforms, and the bulbous cupola at the summit — decorative flourishes with no structural purpose, but exactly what turned an engineer's calculation into an unmistakable monument. 5 million rivets — went up between January 1887 and March 1889 without a single worker dying, a remarkable safety record for ironwork at that height and era.
Did you know? In 1925 the con artist Victor Lustig twice 'sold' the Eiffel Tower to scrap dealers who believed it was about to be demolished.
03 Mole Antonelliana
Italy · 2 km from Turin45.069° N 7.693° E
Image by nonmisvegliate from Pixabay The building began as a synagogue. Turin's Jewish community, given full civil rights in 1848, commissioned Antonelli in 1863 to build a temple worthy of the new national capital. Antonelli, who had already crowned the basilica of San Gaudenzio in Novara with a soaring dome and spire, kept revising his design upwards, and the costs and delays grew with it. Work stopped in 1869 under a temporary roof, and in 1876 the community withdrew. The city took the building over, giving the community land elsewhere for a new synagogue, and dedicated the Mole to King Victor Emmanuel II.
Did you know? The Jewish community had budgeted 250,000 lire; by the time it withdrew, about 692,000 lire had been spent on the unfinished building.
04 Ještěd Tower
Ještěd
Czech Republic · 10.1 km from Liberec50.733° N 14.985° E
Image by ivabalk from Pixabay It exists because of a fire. The older wooden mountain hotel on the summit burned down in January 1963, and its replacement was entrusted to Karel Hubáček, one of the founders of the Liberec architectural studio SIAL. Working with the structural engineer Zdeněk Patrman, he designed the tower between 1963 and 1966; construction took until 1973, and the building opened on 9 July that year. Even before it was finished, Hubáček received the Auguste Perret Prize of the International Union of Architects in 1969 for the creative use of technology in architecture.
Did you know? The transmitter began broadcasting on 1 May 1971, two years before the hotel and restaurant were finished.
05 Big Ben
United Kingdom · 0.4 km from London51.501° N 0.125° W
Image by pemacallan from Pixabay The tower exists because the old Palace of Westminster burned down almost completely on 16 October 1834. Charles Barry won the resulting design competition — 97 architects entered — with a grand Gothic Revival scheme for the whole rebuilt palace, and his 96-metre clock tower needed detailing his own training hadn't prepared him for, so he brought in Augustus Pugin specifically to handle it. It's Pugin's decorative work — the tracery, the ornament, the clock faces — that gives the tower its unmistakable Perpendicular Gothic silhouette, even though Barry held the overall commission.
Did you know? The first bell, cast in Stockton-on-Tees in 1856, cracked beyond repair during testing; its replacement took 18 hours to haul up to the belfry.
06 Pyramidenkogel Tower
Aussichtsturm Pyramidenkogel
Austria · 12.7 km from Klagenfurt46.609° N 14.145° E
C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0 The tower replaced a 54-metre concrete predecessor built in 1966–1968, which had welcomed its five-millionth visitor in 2008 and was demolished in October 2012. Before that, from 1950, a simple wooden platform and a memorial cross for the victims of both world wars stood on the summit. The new structure proved far more popular than planned: roughly 330,000 people came in its first year, more than twice the expected number.
Did you know? The mountain lies on the old boundary between German and Slovene speakers, and its old Slovene name is Jedvovca.
07 Skovtårnet
Denmark55.253° N 11.977° E
Johan Wessman / News Oresund · CC BY 2.0 The tower was designed by the Danish practice EFFEKT Arkitekter as part of Camp Adventure, a treetop park in the Gisselfeld Kloster forest. Construction started in 2017 and the tower opened in March 2019. Its geometry is a hyperboloid, a form built entirely from straight members set at an angle so that together they describe a curved surface. The structure combines Corten steel with oak from certified local forests, and the 650 m ramp climbs at a gentle gradient of about 7.5 percent, so that the walk to the top becomes a slow journey through the forest canopy. Visitors pass first among the trunks, then through the crowns, and finally emerge above the trees.
Did you know? Built from steel and oak, the finished tower weighs about 600 tonnes, yet its waist narrows to a slender core.
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 observation towers in Europe?
- On our list, Fernsehturm Berlin (Germany) ranks first, followed by Eiffel Tower (France) and Mole Antonelliana (Italy).
- Which country has the most observation towers in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Austria (1), the Czech Republic (1) and Denmark (1).
- Why is it called Big Ben?
- Big Ben is strictly the nickname of the great bell inside the clock tower at the Palace of Westminster. The tower itself was renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012, though the name Big Ben is commonly used for the whole structure.
- How tall is the Eiffel Tower?
- The Eiffel Tower is about 330 metres tall including its antennas; its iron structure alone reaches about 300 metres. It was the tallest man-made structure in the world from 1889 until the Chrysler Building was completed in New York in 1930.
- What is inside the Mole Antonelliana?
- Since 2000 the Mole Antonelliana has housed Italy's National Museum of Cinema. A glass lift runs up through the centre of the building to a viewing terrace overlooking Turin and the Alps.
- How many observation towers are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 7 observation towers in 7 countries. Austria has the most, with 1.