Top 100 Countries by UNESCO World Heritage Sites (2026)

What counts as a UNESCO World Heritage property?

UNESCO lists cultural properties for their cultural significance, natural properties for their natural significance and mixed properties for both. The three categories add up to each country's total: a mixed property is not counted again as cultural or natural.

The country total is a count of properties, not the number of monuments, buildings, archaeological components or square kilometres. Serial properties can consist of multiple component parts yet still contribute only one property to a country's count.

UNESCO's five World Heritage regions are used for filtering: Europe and North America, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, Arab States, and Africa. These are UNESCO classifications, not standard continental boundaries.

Top 10 countries with the most UNESCO World Heritage properties

Italy's one-property lead over China is narrow. France, Germany and Spain complete the first five; among the next five countries, the totals run from India's 45 to Iran's 30. The table also shows how each country's properties are divided into cultural, natural and mixed categories.

UNESCO World Heritage national totals, after 48COM (2026)

Countries are ranked by their total number of properties. When totals are equal, countries appear in alphabetical order. All three category counts come directly from UNESCO.

Chart: World Heritage properties in the Top 20 countries

China's 61 properties amount to 98.4% of Italy's 62, while France's 56 amount to 90.3%. The bars use the same totals as the tables, with Italy setting the scale.

Methodology and source verification

The ranking uses the inscribed World Heritage properties recorded in UNESCO's country profiles on 10 October 2026, following its July committee meeting. We use UNESCO's published totals and category counts, rather than estimating how many properties a country might have. Every country entry is marked official_value.

Countries without a listed property are not ranked. We do not replace UNESCO figures with older or missing values from other websites. Some of the 1,273 properties worldwide are shared across borders, so adding countries' totals together would count those properties more than once.

Full ranking: Top 100 countries by total World Heritage properties

Search for a country, choose a UNESCO region or data status, and sort by total or natural properties. Each row shows the country's official cultural, natural and mixed counts beside its overall total.

Showing all 100 countries.

UNESCO World Heritage country totals, October 2026 snapshot

UNESCO country records, retrieved 10 October 2026. All 100 rows have official_value status. A listed property counts once, even if it includes several individual landmarks or locations.

Four findings from the 2026 UNESCO country ranking

What the country ranking means—and what it does not

The ranking shows the number of properties UNESCO has inscribed for each country. It is not a score of how impressive a country's history, landscapes or cultural traditions are. A single entry may cover a large natural area or several historic locations.

If you're interested in visiting these places, the cultural, natural and mixed counts offer a useful starting point. The country total won't tell you which sites are open to visitors, how far apart they are or whether access is restricted. For that, consult the individual UNESCO property records.

UNESCO's global figure of 1,273 counts each property once. Country totals count shared properties in each participating country, so national percentages cannot simply be added together to produce a worldwide share.

UNESCO World Heritage ranking: FAQ

Sources and reproducibility

UNESCO publishes both the country profiles used for the national totals and the World Heritage List used to check the worldwide figures. These are two resources from the same organization. World Population Review is included only to show where a separate published ranking disagrees; its numbers do not determine positions here.