The 18 Most Beautiful Religious Buildings in The World

Built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal, the Taj Mahal is widely considered the finest example of Mughal architecture in the world.

The white marble monument changes colour from pink in the dawn light to brilliant white at midday.

Built in the early 12th century by the Khmer Empire, Angkor Wat is the world's largest religious monument covering over 400 acres.

The temple's five lotus-shaped towers rising above the jungle, reflected in its surrounding moat, and the extraordinary bas-reliefs on its walls make it one of humanity's greatest achievements.

The holiest site in Sikhism sits at the centre of a large square pool, its upper floors gilded in real gold and doubled by a near-perfect reflection in the still water.

Pilgrims circle the marble walkway at all hours, and the temple runs one of the world's largest free communal kitchens, feeding tens of thousands daily.

Lit at night, the gold dome and its reflection form one symmetrical image.

Borobudur is a 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist temple in Central Java and the world's largest Buddhist temple.

Its nine stacked platforms are decorated with 2,672 relief panels and 504 Buddha statues; the three circular upper tiers hold 72 openwork stupas, each containing a Buddha statue, creating one of the world's greatest religious monuments.

Gaudi's still-unfinished basilica rises in melting, organic stone spires unlike any other building on Earth, over 140 years into construction.

Inside, columns branch like trees to support a ceiling washed in colour from vast stained-glass windows.

The mix of Gothic scale and Art Nouveau strangeness makes both the exterior facades and the interior light equally worth lingering over.

Fushimi Inari Shrine's thousands of vermillion torii gates form a tunnel climbing the wooded slopes of Mount Inari on Kyoto's eastern edge.

The lower gates near the entrance are the most photographed; the full loop to the summit takes 2-3 hours and thins to a handful of hikers past the first viewpoint.

Founded before 794, it remains an active Shinto shrine to the rice deity Inari, with fox statues marking its guardian messengers.

Nearly 1,500 years old, this Byzantine cathedral-turned-mosque carries a vast dome that dominated the ancient world's skyline for centuries.

Gold mosaics of Christian saints sit alongside Islamic calligraphy inside, a rare visible record of the building's several religious lives.

Dozens of windows ringing the dome's base light the vast interior.

Eleven medieval churches here weren't built up from the ground but carved downward into solid volcanic rock, each one excavated as a single monolithic block below ground level.

Narrow trenches and tunnels connect them, and pilgrims in white robes moving through the passages add scale and colour against the bare stone.

Nothing else in the world uses this exact rock-hewn technique at this scale.

Byzantine-era monasteries perch atop towering sandstone pillars rising 400 meters above the Thessalian plain, originally reachable only by rope basket.

Six remain active today, their frescoed interiors and the otherworldly rock landscape outside making this one of Greece's most singular sights.

A gold-leaf-covered boulder balances impossibly on the very edge of a cliff, topped with a small pagoda said to be held in place by a strand of Buddha's hair.

Generations of pilgrims have applied gold leaf by hand, thickening the surface over centuries into a solid gilded shell.

At sunset the rock glows against the surrounding hills, appearing to defy gravity from almost every angle.

The Temple of Dawn rises in a steep, porcelain-and-seashell-encrusted spire directly on the bank of Bangkok's Chao Phraya River.

Its silhouette against a sunset sky, seen from the river or the opposite bank, is one of the most recognisable images of the city.

Close up, the tower is covered in thousands of tiny inlaid ceramic fragments, a texture that only shows up on approach.

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque, universally known as the Blue Mosque for its Iznik tile-clad interior, is Istanbul's most iconic building.

Completed in 1616, it is the only mosque in Turkey with six minarets and its cascading domes and slender minarets form one of the world's most beautiful skylines.

Doi Suthep is a gold-spired temple on a forested mountain above Chiang Mai, reached by a naga-flanked staircase of more than 300 steps or a funicular for those who'd rather skip the climb.

Founded in the 14th century around a relic believed to be a piece of the Buddha's bone, it remains one of northern Thailand's most important pilgrimage sites, with a terrace giving a sweeping view over the whole Chiang Mai valley.

Prambanan is Indonesia's largest Hindu temple complex, its central shrine to Shiva soaring nearly 47 meters above a UNESCO-listed field of 9th-century stone spires.

The reliefs lining its inner galleries narrate the Ramayana in stone, and the complex hosts an outdoor ballet retelling the same epic on moonlit evenings.

Less crowded and more intricately carved than its Buddhist counterpart Borobudur an hour away, it rewards an unhurried walk around all three main shrines.

Melk Abbey is a baroque Benedictine monastery perched on a rocky outcrop above the Danube, marking the eastern gateway to the Wachau Valley's vineyards.

Its library holds tens of thousands of historic volumes beneath elaborate ceiling frescoes, and the abbey church's gold-and-marble interior is one of the most ornate in Austria.

The terrace outside gives a wide view down over the river and the town of Melk below.

Kizhi Pogost is an open-air ensemble of wooden churches on a small island in Lake Onega, built with traditional log construction and no iron nails in the original structure.

The 22-domed Church of the Transfiguration, raised in 1714, is the centrepiece of a wider museum-reserve of relocated wooden chapels, houses and windmills from across Karelia.

It's reachable only by boat in summer or over ice in winter, keeping it genuinely quiet.

An Armenian monastery on a hilltop with Mount Ararat rising dramatically behind it just across the Turkish border.

Founded on the pit where Saint Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned for years, it's one of the most recognisable religious sites in the Caucasus.

Scattered across the hills of northern Moldavia, these 15th- and 16th-century Orthodox monasteries are covered — inside and out — in vivid frescoes depicting biblical scenes, painted onto the exterior stone walls and still remarkably vibrant after 500 years of weather.

Voroneț is famous for its dense, luminous blue background; each has its own dominant palette, together forming a UNESCO ensemble found nowhere else in Europe.