The Most Spectacular Viewpoints in the World

33 places in 17 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Fernsehturm Berlin

   Berliner Fernsehturm

   Germany · 0.7 km from Berlin52.521° N 13.409° E

   

   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.

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2. 02 Eiffel Tower

   Tour Eiffel

   France · 4.3 km from Paris48.858° N 2.294° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   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.

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3. 03 Space Needle

   United States · 3.4 km from Seattle47.620° N 122.349° W

   

   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.

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4. 04 Aiguille du Midi

   France · 36.8 km from Aosta45.879° N 6.888° E

   

   The Aiguille du Midi is a 3,842-metre rock needle in the Mont Blanc massif, and one of the few places in the Alps where anyone can stand face to face with the high mountains without climbing. Its name means "needle of midday". From the summit the view takes in Mont Blanc to the south, a whole horizon of peaks and glaciers, and, straight down, the rooftops of Chamonix more than two and a half kilometres below.

   Did you know? The rock needle was first climbed on 4 August 1818 by the Polish count Antoni Malczewski with Jean-Michel Balmat and five other guides.

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5. 05 Zabriskie Point

   United States36.420° N 116.811° W

   

   Zabriskie Point is a short climb above Highway 190 in Death Valley, and from the top a whole landscape of eroded badlands spreads out below: rippled hills of pale gold and darker brown, cut by countless gullies, with the sharp fin of Manly Beacon standing above them and the white floor of Death Valley and the Panamint Range beyond. Few places in the American West show erosion so nakedly — there is no vegetation to soften the folds, so every ridge and channel is visible.

   Did you know? Ancient lakeshore muds near Zabriskie Point preserve tracks of extinct camels, mastodons, wild horses, carnivores and birds, alongside fossil grasses and reeds.

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6. 06 Roque Nublo

   Spain · 23 km from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria27.971° N 15.613° W

   

   Roque Nublo is the finger of rock that anchors the skyline of Gran Canaria: an 80-metre monolith standing on a summit plateau at about 1,813 metres, near the geographic centre of the island and among its highest points. From the coast it reads as a single thumb raised above the ridges; up close it becomes a rough, many-layered tower whose surface is studded with embedded stones and pale ash.

   Did you know? Geologists call one whole phase of Gran Canaria's volcanic history the Roque Nublo cycle, after the rock it left behind.

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7. 07 CN Tower

   Canada · 2.4 km from Toronto43.643° N 79.387° W

   

   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.

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8. 08 Dalsnibba

   Norway62.049° N 7.269° E

   

   Dalsnibba is a mountain at the head of the Geiranger valley in western Norway, and from its summit at around 1,500 metres the view drops all the way down to the Geirangerfjord — a narrow blue arm of the sea wound between near-vertical walls, with the village of Geiranger small at the water's edge. It is often described as the highest fjord view in Europe reachable by road, and the scale is the point: from bare rock, snow patches and meltwater lakes to the fjord far below, the whole descent from high mountain plateau to sea level is laid out in one sweep.

   Did you know? The summit straddles a major watershed: rain on its west side flows to the Geirangerfjord, while the east side drains via the Otta into Norway's longest river, the Glomma.

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9. 09 Metropol Parasol

   Spain · 1.7 km from Seville37.393° N 5.992° W

   

   Metropol Parasol, known to everyone in Seville as Las Setas, "the mushrooms", is a giant canopy of timber latticework spread over the Plaza de la Encarnación in the old town. Its vast parasols, joined into a single undulating roof about 150 metres long, 70 metres wide and some 26 metres high, rise from the square on thick trunks. It is promoted as the largest wooden structure in the world, and from the walkway that winds across its top the whole medieval centre of Seville, with the cathedral and the Giralda, lies spread out below.

   Did you know? The city adopted Setas de Sevilla as the official name after learning that the architect had trademarked Metropol Parasol and would charge for its use.

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10. 10 Tokyo Skytree

    Japan · 6.1 km from Tokyo35.710° N 139.811° E

    

    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.

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11. 11 Canton Tower

    People's Republic of China · 6.1 km from Guangzhou23.109° N 113.319° E

    

    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.

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12. 12 Tokyo Tower

    Japan · 3.2 km from Tokyo35.659° N 139.746° E

    

    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.

    More about Tokyo Tower →

13. 13 Fisherman's Bastion

    Halászbástya

    Hungary · 3.5 km from Budapest47.502° N 19.035° E

    

    On the edge of Castle Hill in Buda, a terrace of white stone arcades, staircases and conical turrets runs for about 140 metres along the slope above the Danube. From its parapets the view crosses the river to the Hungarian Parliament and the rooftops of Pest. The seven pointed towers stand for the seven Magyar chieftains traditionally credited with founding Hungary in 895, and the whole ensemble wraps around the sanctuary of Matthias Church.

    Did you know? On the pedestal of King Stephen's statue, sculptor Alajos Stróbl portrayed the ageing architect Schulek as the bearded, kneeling master builder.

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14. 14 Victoria Peak

    People's Republic of China · 5.3 km from Hong Kong22.275° N 114.144° E

    

    Victoria Peak — to Hong Kong simply "the Peak" — is the 552-metre hill at the western end of Hong Kong Island, and from its upper slopes one of the most famous city views on Earth opens up: a wall of skyscrapers packed along the shore of Victoria Harbour, the water crowded with ferries, and beyond it the towers of Kowloon rolling back to the hills of the New Territories. Turn the other way and the view changes character entirely, falling away to the south over green slopes to Aberdeen, Lamma Island and the open sea. Few places show so sharply how a dense metropolis is squeezed between mountains and water.

    Did you know? The Peak Tram, opened on 30 May 1888, was the first funicular railway in Asia and was originally hauled by a stationary steam engine.

    More about Victoria Peak →

15. 15 Tunnel View, Yosemite

    Tunnel View

    United States37.716° N 119.677° W

    

    Drive north towards Yosemite on the Wawona Road and the last stretch before the valley runs through solid granite, inside the Wawona Tunnel. Then it bursts out into daylight, and the whole of Yosemite Valley is laid out ahead at once. Tunnel View, the pull-out built at the tunnel's eastern portal when it opened in 1933, frames what is probably the most reproduced landscape in America: the sheer southwest face of El Capitan on the left, the veil of Bridalveil Fall dropping from its hanging valley on the right, the Cathedral Rocks above it, and, far off at the end of the valley and dead on the axis of the view, the cleft profile of Half Dome.

    Did you know? On 25 March 1851 the men of the Mariposa Battalion got their first sight of Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point, on the old trail above today's overlook.

    More about Tunnel View, Yosemite →

16. 16 Gornergrat

    Switzerland45.983° N 7.785° E

    

    Gornergrat is a rocky ridge above Zermatt, and from its crest at 3,135 metres it offers one of the great high-mountain panoramas of the Alps. The Matterhorn stands to the west in its most familiar profile, while to the east and south a wall of snow peaks crowds the horizon — Monte Rosa with the Dufourspitze, Switzerland's highest summit. Nearly thirty summits above 4,000 metres are in view. Directly below, the Gorner Glacier curves round the foot of the Monte Rosa massif, a broad, crevassed river of ice fed by tributaries from every side.

    Did you know? The Gornergrat Railway was Europe's highest railway until the Jungfrau Railway reached higher in 1912; it is still the continent's second highest.

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17. 17 Ještěd Tower

    Ještěd

    Czech Republic · 10.1 km from Liberec50.733° N 14.985° E

    

    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.

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18. 18 Big Ben

    United Kingdom · 0.4 km from London51.501° N 0.125° W

    

    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.

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19. 19 Piazzale Michelangelo

    Italy · 2.3 km from Florence43.763° N 11.265° E

    

    Florence is a city of narrow streets and high walls, and from most of it you see the Duomo only in fragments — a slice of marble at the end of an alley, a curve of red tile over a rooftop. Piazzale Michelangelo is where the whole city finally assembles itself. From the broad terrace on the hill above the Oltrarno the view runs across the Arno and its bridges, the Ponte Vecchio among them, to the great dome of the cathedral, the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Bargello and the slender octagonal bell tower of the Badia Fiorentina — a sweep that runs all the way from Forte Belvedere to Santa Croce. Beyond the roofs the northern hills close the picture, with Fiesole and Settignano at their centre.

    Did you know? The idea of a full-size bronze David was first put to Grand Duke Leopold II by the sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini, and a royal decree of 1840 commissioned the plaster model.

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20. 20 Glacier Point

    United States37.731° N 119.573° W

    

    Glacier Point stands on the south rim of Yosemite Valley at about 7,214 feet, roughly 3,200 feet straight above the floor of the valley near Curry Village. What makes it extraordinary is not height alone but alignment: from the railing the whole architecture of the upper valley opens at once. Half Dome rises directly across Tenaya Canyon, its sheared face turned toward you; to the right Liberty Cap stands above the paired steps of Vernal and Nevada Falls, and beyond them the granite swells toward Clouds Rest. Turn north and Yosemite Falls drops from the opposite wall, while the meadows and the thread of the Merced lie so far below that cars look like grains of rice.

    Did you know? The Firefall began by accident: hotel keeper James McCauley kicked his guests' campfire embers over the edge, and people watching from the valley paid his sons for repeat shows.

    More about Glacier Point →

21. 21 Dante's View

    United States36.221° N 116.726° W

    

    Dante's View is a perch on the crest of the Black Mountains, 1,669 metres up on the north shoulder of Coffin Peak, and what it frames is the whole architecture of Death Valley in a single glance. Directly below, almost vertically, lies Badwater Basin, 86 metres below sea level and the lowest ground in North America; straight across, about 20 kilometres to the west, the Panamint Range climbs to Telescope Peak at 3,367 metres. The difference between the valley floor and that summit is well over three kilometres of relief, and from here it reads as one continuous wall of rock and air.

    Did you know? On very clear days both extremes of the contiguous United States are visible from here: Badwater Basin below and Mount Whitney far to the west.

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22. 22 Amanohashidate

    Japan · 18.4 km from Maizuru35.570° N 135.192° E

    

    In the north of Kyoto Prefecture, a narrow ribbon of sand and pine trees runs straight across the water, dividing Miyazu Bay from the inner lagoon known as the Aso Sea. The sandbar is roughly 3.3 km long and in places only some 20 to 40 metres wide, and several thousand pines grow along it, many of them seeded naturally rather than planted, above a strip of white beach on the eastern side. Since the scholar Hayashi Gahō singled it out in 1643, together with Matsushima and Miyajima, Amanohashidate has been counted among the Three Views of Japan.

    Did you know? Old Japanese dictionaries record single kanji meaning Amanohashidate, one built from nine sun signs; two such characters entered Unicode only in September 2025.

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23. 23 Kamikōchi

    Japan · 30.3 km from Matsumoto36.247° N 137.633° E

    

    Kamikōchi is a high valley in the Hida Mountains, the Northern Alps of Japan, where the clear Azusa River runs over a broad gravel bed beneath walls of rock and snow. The valley is about 18 km long, its floor lying between roughly 1,400 and 1,600 metres, while the surrounding peaks reach 3,190 metres. Mount Hotaka closes the northern end and the active volcano Mount Yake the southern one. The Azusa is the headwater of the Shinano, Japan's longest river, and at the foot of Yake it fills Lake Taishō, created when an eruption in 1915 dammed the valley.

    Did you know? The name was first written with characters meaning 'divine enclosure': by tradition the god of Hotaka Shrine descended on Mount Hotaka and is worshipped by Myōjin Pond.

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24. 24 Stegastein

    Norway60.908° N 7.213° E

    

    Stegastein is a single gesture of architecture: a timber-clad walkway that leaves the mountainside, runs about 30 metres straight out over the treetops and then simply stops, some 650 metres above the Aurlandsfjord. At its tip the wooden deck curves down and is closed by a sheet of glass instead of a railing, so the platform seems to end in mid-air. Below lie the village of Aurlandsvangen and the long, dark arm of the fjord, walled by mountains that plunge almost vertically into the water.

    Did you know? Todd Saunders and Tommie Wilhelmsen won the job through an invited competition in 2002, when Norway set out to create 18 National Tourist Routes.

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25. 25 Naruto whirlpools

    Japan · 21 km from Tokushima34.238° N 134.651° E

    

    Four times a day the sea itself starts to turn in the Naruto Strait. The channel between Naruto on Shikoku and Awaji Island is only about 1.3 km wide, yet it is one of the gates through which the tides of the Pacific fill and drain the Seto Inland Sea. With each change of tide the water level on the two sides can differ by up to 1.5 metres, and the whole mass of water is forced through the narrows at roughly 13 to 15 km/h – up to about 20 km/h at spring tides. Where the fast stream meets slower water, it spins off whirlpools that can reach some 20 metres across, form, drift and collapse within moments.

    Did you know? At spring tides the largest Naruto vortices are sometimes said to reach 30 metres across, which would place them among the biggest tidal whirlpools on Earth.

    More about Naruto whirlpools →

26. 26 Mirador del Río

    Spain · 27.8 km from Arrecife29.214° N 13.481° W

    

    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.

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27. 27 Morro do Pai Inácio

    Brazil12.457° S 41.473° W

    

    From the flat top of Morro do Pai Inácio the northern Chapada Diamantina opens in every direction: a skyline of table mountains with sheer walls and level crowns, separated by broad green valleys. The hill itself is one of these mesas, rising to about 1,120 metres in the municipality of Palmeiras, in the interior of the Brazilian state of Bahia. A short, steep path of roughly half a kilometre climbs from the road to the summit plateau, and from the edge the neighbouring buttes line up like a row of stranded ships, glowing orange and then violet in the low evening light.

    Did you know? The hill is held up by hard sandstone of the Tombador Formation, rock laid down in ancient desert and coastal environments more than a billion years ago.

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28. 28 Skierfe

    Sweden67.165° N 18.210° E

    

    From the top of Skierfe the ground simply ends. The mountain's western face drops almost vertically some 700 metres to the floor of the Rapa Valley, and from the edge one looks straight down on the delta where the Rapa River braids itself into dozens of silty channels before entering Lake Laitaure. The glacial meltwater gives the channels a milky, shifting colour, and the view across the delta towards the peaks of Sarek is counted among the best-known landscape views in Sweden.

    Did you know? One of the most important Sámi sacred offering sites, a sieidi where people from across the region gathered for ceremonies, lay at the foot of Skierfe.

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29. 29 Artist Point, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

    Artist Point Overlook

    United States44.721° N 110.479° W

    

    Artist Point is a rocky ledge on the south rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and it frames what may be the single most painted and photographed scene in the American West: the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River, a 308-foot (94-metre) white plume dropping between walls of yellow, ochre, salmon and cream rock, with the green river winding away in the depths below. From the overlook the canyon runs straight towards the waterfall, so the view has the composed quality of a stage set — the falls at the vanishing point, the coloured cliffs as wings.

    Did you know? The Lower Falls seen from Artist Point are 308 feet high, nearly twice the height of Niagara Falls.

    More about Artist Point, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone →

30. 30 Dead Horse Point State Park

    United States · 17.7 km from Moab38.506° N 109.733° W

    • Dark Sky Place

    

    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.

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