The Most Spectacular Viewpoints in Europe
15 places in 11 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular viewpoints in Europe are Fernsehturm Berlin (Germany), Eiffel Tower (France) and Aiguille du Midi (France). The list covers 15 viewpoints in 11 countries. Spain has the most, with 3. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Europe's viewpoints come in two kinds, and both are rich. The continent's dense, layered cities invite towers, bastions and terraces from which centuries of rooftops can be read at once, while the Alps and the fjords of Norway put road and rail within reach of summits and cliff edges that elsewhere would demand an expedition. Many of these platforms were built precisely to frame a view, so the structure is often as memorable as what it looks over.
In the cities, the Eiffel Tower, the tallest structure in the world when it opened in 1889, still gives the classic view of Paris. Berlin's Fernsehturm, a television tower with a steel sphere near the top, looks out over the whole of the reunited city. Fisherman's Bastion in Budapest is a neo-Romanesque terrace above the Danube whose seven turrets recall the seven Magyar tribes, Piazzale Michelangelo spreads Florence's domes and towers below, and Seville's Metropol Parasol lets visitors walk across the roof of a vast timber canopy.
In the mountains, the Aiguille du Midi lifts visitors by cable car from Chamonix to 3,842 metres, face to face with Mont Blanc, and the Gornergrat railway climbs above Zermatt to a classic view of the Matterhorn. Norway answers with Dalsnibba, high above the Geirangerfjord, and Stegastein, a platform that juts out over the Aurlandsfjord. On Gran Canaria, the basalt monolith of Roque Nublo stands over the island's volcanic interior, and the Ještěd Tower crowns its ridge above Liberec with a hyperboloid silhouette.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fernsehturm Berlin | Observation tower | Germany | |
| 2 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | France | ✓ |
| 3 | Aiguille du Midi | Scenic viewpoint | France | |
| 4 | Roque Nublo | Rock formation | Spain | |
| 5 | Dalsnibba | Scenic viewpoint | Norway | |
| 6 | Metropol Parasol | Scenic viewpoint | Spain | |
| 7 | Fisherman's Bastion | Scenic viewpoint | Hungary | |
| 8 | Gornergrat | Scenic viewpoint | Switzerland | |
| 9 | Ještěd Tower | Observation tower | Czech Republic | |
| 10 | Big Ben | Clock tower | United Kingdom | |
| 11 | Piazzale Michelangelo | Scenic viewpoint | Italy | |
| 12 | Stegastein | Scenic viewpoint | Norway | |
| 13 | Mirador del Río | Scenic viewpoint | Spain | |
| 14 | Skierfe | Scenic viewpoint | Sweden | |
| 15 | Ukko-Koli | Scenic viewpoint | Finland |
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 Aiguille du Midi
France · 36.8 km from Aosta45.879° N 6.888° E
Image by Simon from Pixabay The cable car that makes this possible was first proposed around 1909 but did not open until 1955, when it was the highest cable car in the world, a title it held for about two decades. It still has the greatest vertical rise of any cable car: from Chamonix at 1,035 metres to the top station at 3,777 metres, the rest of the way to the summit by lift. The first stage climbs to the Plan de l'Aiguille at 2,317 metres; the second is a single unsupported span of about 2,867 metres, with no pylon at all between the two stations, rising steeply up the rock. The whole journey takes about 20 minutes.
Did you know? Its true summit, the Piton Central, was not reached until 5 August 1856, by three Chamonix guides.
04 Roque Nublo
Spain · 23 km from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria27.971° N 15.613° W
Image by WunschbrunnenEla from Pixabay That texture tells how it was made. The rock is what erosion has left of a pyroclastic flow – a scalding avalanche of blocks and welded ash thrown out by an explosive stratovolcano between roughly 4.5 and 3.4 million years ago. Softer material around it has washed away over the ages, leaving the hardened core standing alone, with smaller companions nearby: the slender Roque del Fraile, "the Friar", and the rounded formation called La Rana, "the Frog". Long before hikers arrived, the island's pre-Hispanic inhabitants treated the rock as a place of worship.
Did you know? The stratovolcano whose eruptions produced the rock may have stood around 3,000 metres high, far above anything on the island today.
05 Dalsnibba
Norway62.049° N 7.269° E
Image by IK3 from Pixabay The summit plateau has an austere beauty of its own. Snow lingers here well into summer, and to the south-east lies Djupvatnet, a lake cupped in the bare rock. Across the valley the Blåbreen glacier shows white against dark mountainsides. Since the Geiranger Skywalk was built at the top, visitors can stand on a platform of open steel grating with glass rails, projecting over a drop of about 500 metres. The Geirangerfjord below belongs to the West Norwegian Fjords World Heritage Site, and Dalsnibba is one of the few places where its setting within the wider mountain landscape can be grasped all at once.
Did you know? The idea of a road to the summit was first floated about 50 years before construction by road director Hans Hagerup Krag, who had laid out the Geiranger road himself.
06 Metropol Parasol
Spain · 1.7 km from Seville37.393° N 5.992° W
Anual · CC BY-SA 4.0 The structure was designed by the German architect Jürgen Mayer H., who won an international competition held in 2004 against 65 rival entries. Its history is bound up with the square itself. A market hall stood on the Plaza de la Encarnación from the nineteenth century until it was demolished in the mid-twentieth, and the site then lay empty for decades. In 1990 work on a new market and car park uncovered Roman and Moorish remains, halting the project. The competition sought a design that would protect the ruins, house a market and give the city a new public square.
Did you know? Jürgen Mayer drew inspiration from the rib vaults of Seville Cathedral and the giant fig trees in the nearby Plaza del Cristo de Burgos.
07 Fisherman's Bastion
Halászbástya
Hungary · 3.5 km from Budapest47.502° N 19.035° E
Image by Giraffew from Pixabay The bastion is the work of the architect Frigyes Schulek, who designed it in Neo-Romanesque style as a setting for his restoration of Matthias Church. It was built between 1895 and 1902 on a stretch of the old castle walls, which had been rebuilt in the 18th century after the Rákóczi uprising, and it was handed over to the city in 1905. The name is usually linked to the guild of fishermen who, by tradition, defended this section of the walls in the Middle Ages, or to Fishtown, their settlement at the foot of the hill.
Did you know? Schulek first planned a domed hall around the statue of Saint Stephen, but the budget allowed only a free-standing monument in the open courtyard.
08 Gornergrat
Switzerland45.983° N 7.785° E
Image by klausdie from Pixabay What makes the viewpoint unusual is how it is reached. The Gornergrat Railway opened on 20 August 1898 and was the first electric rack railway built in Switzerland; it still runs on an unusual three-phase system with two overhead wires. On its 9.3-kilometre journey from Zermatt the metre-gauge line climbs almost 1,500 metres, past Riffelalp, Riffelberg and Rotenboden, to a terminus at about 3,089 metres — the highest open-air railway in Europe.
Did you know? It is one of only four railways in the world running on three-phase electric power, with the rails serving as the third conductor.
09 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.
10 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.
11 Piazzale Michelangelo
Italy · 2.3 km from Florence43.763° N 11.265° E
Michael Wittwer · CC BY-SA 4.0 The terrace is not an old belvedere but a piece of nineteenth-century city planning. In the years when Florence was briefly the capital of the newly united Italy, the city set about a sweeping programme of renewal, and the architect Giuseppe Poggi laid out the Viale dei Colli, a tree-lined avenue of some eight kilometres winding up through the hills south of the river. The piazzale, completed in 1869, was its climax, conceived as a monument to Michelangelo. Poggi designed a neoclassical loggia at the back of the terrace that was meant to house a museum of the artist's works; the museum never came, and the building now holds a restaurant.
Did you know? In 1847 the Florentine founder Clemente Papi took a mould directly from the marble original, a mould divided into more than 1,500 separate pieces.
12 Stegastein
Norway60.908° N 7.213° E
TomasEE · CC BY 3.0 The viewpoint was designed by the architects Todd Saunders and Tommie Wilhelmsen and completed in 2006 as part of Norway's National Tourist Routes, a programme run by the Norwegian Public Roads Administration that commissions contemporary architects to build rest stops and lookouts along the country's most scenic roads. The structure is a steel frame clad in pine, standing about 13 metres high on the lip of a precipice. A small service building was set slightly over the edge of the cliff so that it does not compete with the view, and the whole installation is accessible by wheelchair.
Did you know? In its opening year, 2006, Stegastein was named the structure of the year by the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, against projects from across the country.
13 Mirador del Río
Spain · 27.8 km from Arrecife29.214° N 13.481° W
Image by lapping from Pixabay What those eyes look onto is El Río, the strait that separates Lanzarote from La Graciosa, about two kilometres wide. The small island lies spread out below, and on clear days the view runs on past it to the islets of Montaña Clara and Roque del Oeste and, furthest out, Alegranza, together the Chinijo Archipelago. At the foot of the cliff lies one of the oldest salt marshes in the Canary Islands. Above the rooms, a viewing platform set into the lava rock opens the panorama to the wind.
Did you know? The winding entrance corridor displays ceramics by Juan Brito inspired by the pottery of the island's aboriginal inhabitants.
14 Skierfe
Sweden67.165° N 18.210° E
Tero Laakso · CC BY 3.0 Skierfe rises to 1,179 metres in the south-eastern corner of Sarek National Park in Jokkmokk Municipality, Swedish Lapland, well north of the Arctic Circle. Sarek, established in 1909, is among the oldest national parks in Europe: a roughly circular wilderness about 50 km across with some 200 summits above 1,800 metres, around a hundred glaciers and no marked trails or huts inside its borders. The Rapa Valley, about 35 km long and lined with steep massifs such as Skårki and Piellorieppe, is its main artery, and Skierfe stands guard at its mouth.
Did you know? The Rapa River below is fed by about thirty glaciers and in summer can carry 5,000 to 10,000 tonnes of sediment a day, which tints the delta grey-green.
15 Ukko-Koli
Finland63.099° N 29.820° E
Image by 3008133 from Pixabay The whiteness of the rock is the key to the place. Ukko-Koli is built of quartzite, 85 to 95 per cent quartz, which began as ancient beach sand and was compacted and transformed deep underground. 8 billion years ago and worn down over immense spans of time; ice-age glaciers then smoothed and rounded the cliffs into their present shape. Ukko-Koli is the highest of a cluster of summits that includes Akka-Koli and Paha-Koli, all within Koli National Park, established in 1991 on about 30 square kilometres of hills along the western shore of the lake. The park also preserves traces of traditional farming, from slash-and-burn clearings to meadows still grazed by native breeds of cattle and sheep.
Did you know? The summit names come from Finnish mythology: Ukko is the sky god, Akka a female spirit, and Paha-Koli means the evil Koli.
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 viewpoints in Europe?
- On our list, Fernsehturm Berlin (Germany) ranks first, followed by Eiffel Tower (France) and Aiguille du Midi (France).
- Which country has the most viewpoints in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Spain (3), France (2) and Norway (2).
- How high is the Aiguille du Midi?
- The summit station of the Aiguille du Midi stands at 3,842 metres in the Mont Blanc massif. It is reached by a cable car from Chamonix that climbs more than 2,800 metres.
- Why does Fisherman's Bastion have seven towers?
- Its seven turrets symbolise the seven Magyar tribes that settled the Carpathian Basin at the end of the ninth century. The terrace was built between 1895 and 1902.
- What is the Metropol Parasol in Seville made of?
- It is built largely of laminated timber on a concrete and steel base, and is often described as one of the largest wooden structures in the world. Designed by Jürgen Mayer, it opened in 2011.
- How many viewpoints are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 15 viewpoints in 11 countries. Spain has the most, with 3.