Fame can be a blessing and a curse. Across the world tourists flock to high-profile sites that the guide books insist are worth all the effort and expense, only to be disappointed by their own inflated expectations. Whether they're oversold, overrun or sometimes absent entirely, we've picked out what we think are the most overrated attractions on Earth that fail to live up to their often-enormous reputations.
Read on to see our ranking of the world's most overhyped tourist sites. To enjoy these images FULL SCREEN, click the icon in the top right...
The Brandenburg Gate is a great site – for about five minutes. Alongside Neuschwanstein Castle, the gate is the public face of German tourism, adorning postcards, guide book covers and the header of the Visit Berlin website. Its history is remarkable and its status as a German icon is beyond question, but it's still just a gate, and at half the height of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris it's not even that big. You arrive; you snap a photo; you head off to the East Side Gallery. There's not much to do, and only one thing to see.
In the 1950s and 60s, the Empire State Building sat, quite literally, on top of the world. It was the tallest skyscraper on Earth until 1971, and visitors to its 86th-floor observation deck could see, splayed out below them, the city that was quickly becoming the world's cultural and economic capital. Outings in An Affair to Remember and Sleepless In Seattle confirmed its status as a romantic icon.
Now, in 2025, the Empire State Building languishes a measly 8th-tallest just in New York, while its open-air deck with mounted metal binoculars looks quaint next to the glass-fronted observatories offered elsewhere. There's also one key ingredient missing from the Empire State Building's panorama: the iconic spire of the Empire State Building itself.
Australia has 16,000 miles (26,000km) of coastline, so why does half a mile of it in the Sydney suburbs gobble up so much footfall? The sand is golden, the waves serve up great breaks and you can get there by public bus, but during summer the beach is rammed.
Beach balls whistling past your ears, teens playing music on loudspeaker, scurrying children spraying you with sand: high-season Bondi is no place for R&R. Like many of the world's best-known urban beaches (Copacabana, Waikiki, Barceloneta and so on), Bondi is famous because it's convenient – not because it's unusually great.
When the Eiffel Tower opened in 1889, it did so amid a chorus of protest from writers, artists and architects alike. Novelist Leon Bloy called it "a truly tragic street lamp", while author Joris-Karl Huysmans was appalled by the "hideous column with railings". In the early-20th century it was briefly repurposed as a billboard, with the word 'Citroen' inscribed down its side in large neon letters. Somehow, the intervening years have seen this huge hunk of metal become perhaps the most famous monument on Earth. Huh.
A masterpiece of Modernist design, the elegant curves of the Sydney Opera House made headlines around the world when they debuted in 1973. But they are – however justifiably – famous almost exclusively for being a weird shape. If you're not interested in its orchestral, theatrical or operatic offerings, and most of its millions of annual visitors are not, then the venue doesn't give you much you can't get from a postcard.
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Maya Bay was the main shooting location for The Beach, a 2000 Leonardo DiCaprio film about a fragile and isolated island paradise that's slowly destroyed by a stream of new arrivals from the outside world. The film put Maya Bay on the map and, since its white-sand beach now requires annual closures to mitigate the destructive ecological effects of mass tourism, it was well-cast.
The beach is stunningly beautiful, but it would have to be almost otherworldly to live up to its reputation, and the closely-controlled crowds, damaged corals and pollution problems kill the vibe. Most visits are capped at around an hour, so there isn't much time to relax.
All sorts of negative words get thrown at Las Vegas – tacky, garish, overwhelming, seedy and so on – and while Sin City's bright lights still have the power to dazzle, no one would ever use the word 'nice'. Full of adult entertainments of various kinds, Vegas takes the crowds, costs and concrete of any big city and dials it up to 11. And then there's the gambling. Seeing dishevelled punters slumped over slot machines at 2am, with empty wallets in their pockets and empty bottles in their hands, isn't great holiday fare. At 2pm, it's even worse.
We feel a little sorry for Stonehenge. If it were a moderately famous site visited by history buffs interested in the Neolithic, it wouldn’t be anywhere near this list. But its worldwide renown means it’s expected to provide blockbuster entertainment for the masses, despite its niche role as a relic of English prehistory.
In 2024, a poll by Rough Guides saw the 5,000-year-old stone circle voted the world's most overrated attraction – a harsh judgement on a site that’s fascinating for the right audience. "Big bits of stone in an old field" reads one recent Tripadvisor review.
The same poll that named Stonehenge the world's most overrated attraction placed Lady Liberty at number five. A patriotic emblem of American identity, today the Statue of Liberty works better as a piece of imagery than it does as a tourist site. At 305 feet (93m) tall, it's less impressive now than it was on its debut in 1886, and looks better from the boat than it does from beneath its lofty pedestal.
Complaints over lengthy queues and overcrowded ferries dot the statue's Tripadvisor page, while you need special tickets to enter the pedestal or climb the 162 steps to the crown.
The London Eye is the Empire State Building of London – without the excuse of being nearly a century old. A mile or so downriver, visitors can ascend 800 feet (244m) to the tip of the UK's tallest building, the Shard, and enjoy 360-degree views over the capital while sipping on cocktails and coffees. At the London Eye, punters pay similar prices to pile into pods that rotate to 443 feet (135m) as part of a 30-minute ride. We get it, Ferris wheels are fun – but the numbers don't really add up.
Oh look, a pub. You never see those in Ireland.
In fairness to the Temple Bar, it's a centrepiece for Dublin's cultural quarter of the same name, and inside there's an enormous whiskey collection, daily Irish music sessions and décor that's the right blend of cosy and quirky. But every pub can be ruined by overcrowding, and you can guess what happens at one that's internationally renowned.
If you type 'What is the most beautiful building in the world?' into an AI, odds-on the Taj Mahal will be the first result. Described by poet Rabindranath Tagore as "a teardrop on the cheek of time", the milky-white dome of the Taj was built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and lives on as a byword for purity and grace.
It's an awesomely ethereal building, but it strains under the weight of extraordinary expectation. That is, if you can see it at all. Foggy Indian mornings mean that early birds sometimes leave disappointed, while a haze of smog often picks up where the mist leaves off. Pollutants have steadily dimmed the pure-white façade, and restoration is a constant battle.
Recent research found that the island of Phuket hosts 118 tourists for every resident – and you can probably work the rest out from there. Overcrowding and congestion, environmental damage, an overbearing party atmosphere, scammers and upselling: the list goes on. The beaches are good and the scuba diving is great, but Phuket mainly draws visitors by being better-known than its competitors. It's not the only tropical island off the Thai coast – in fact, there are well over a thousand.
It’s hard for an attraction not to be underwhelming when it’s almost exclusively famous for something that doesn’t exist. The Loch Ness Monster is unfortunately fictional – whatever blurry photo you've seen on YouTube – and if you take away the flutter of fear that accompanies the mythical monster, all you're left with is a lake. It's a very nice lake, but it's in the Scottish Highlands – a world capital for very nice lakes. There's also an old castle at one end, and it's very big. We're going to need a little more.
The Spanish Steps are actually in Italy – and that might be the most interesting thing about them. Built in the 18th century (hardly historic by Italian standards), these Romano-Baroque steps have a fountain at their foot and a 16th-century church at their top, and are often barely visible beneath swarms of selfie-taking tourists.
Lonely Planet describes the steps as "a perfect place for people-watching" – a tourist attraction where the tourists themselves are the attraction. The world’s most famous staircase is still just a staircase – and not a particularly long one at that.
We could probably put the entire city of Barcelona on this list, and we’re confident locals would agree. The city's 1.6 million inhabitants are dwarfed by its 32 million annual visitors, leading to widespread protests by residents who feel overrun. Central boulevard Las Ramblas is now 90% tourists and 10% pickpockets (locals avoid it like the plague), while anti-tourist slogans adorn downtown bus stops and walls.
The city owes much of its popularity to the works of Antoni GaudÍ, and his buildings face varying fortunes. The majestic spires of the Sagrada Familia retain their good looks despite the crowds, but the tourist crush at Park Güell – sculpted gardens best enjoyed on a tranquil stroll – would have the Catalan master turning in his grave.
The Great Wall of China once stretched for an impressive 13,000 miles (21,000km), but tourists can only visit a mile or so at a time, so there's limited sense of scale. Badaling near Beijing is the stretch that sees the most footfall, but there's a number of reasons its greatness is limited. First, it's mostly a 20th-century reconstruction; second, its narrow walkways do not handle crowds well; and third, it's just... a wall.
And no, at about 15 feet (5m) across, the Great Wall of China is not visible from space. That's the length of a large jeep.
A tumble of chocolate-box houses perched by a pristine lake in the foothills of the Austrian Alps, Hallstatt is far, far too pretty for its own good. What should be a sleepy bolthole where time stands still is instead a poster-child for overtourism, with up to 10,000 visitors overwhelming its 700 inhabitants every day. In 2006 it starred in a South Korean romantic drama, and a replica of the town was built in China in 2012.
In 2023, resentful residents briefly erected a wooden wall to block the view at Hallstatt's premier selfie spot, while the mayor said he wanted to reduce tour buses by a third. Between thronging crowds spilling into the roads and the glares of seething locals, the village is not at the top of our to-do list.
Central Park is famous for its Manhattan location, its history and its appearance in some of the best-loved films and TV shows of recent times. It is not famous for being an especially nice park. At a little over a square mile it's on the large side, and the zoo is fun for families, but if you transported it to almost any other square mile in the United States you would not know that it exists.
Going to one of the world's biggest tourist hubs and complaining about a lack of authenticity is a bit like complaining about the traffic (if you're there, you're part of the problem). But it remains the case that Venice's overtourism problem has become so acute that even sites with a thousand years of history behind them can seem somehow fake. The city's famous gondolas now feel like a pastiche; they're wholly tourist-facing and hideously overpriced, while their low-lying design leaves you uncomfortably close to Venice's pungent canal water.
Every year millions of tourists travel thousands of miles to sit in frozen fields long past their bedtimes to hopefully, maybe, potentially glimpse some green. Photos like this one depict the aurora as an all-singing-all-dancing light show, but the reality is often closer to a discoloured vapour trail – if, that is, the location, cloud cover, time of day and solar activity levels don't stop them appearing at all.
Every site on this list has the power to disappoint, but even on a good day the lights pale next to the long-exposure snaps taken on expensive cameras that populate Instagram. They're literally at their best on your computer screen at home.
A visit to the Mona Lisa, in the Louvre Museum in Paris, is not great for your faith in humanity. The painting is small – just 30 inches tall and 21 inches wide – and getting close enough to meet her famous gaze is a brutal battle of elbows in which the rude are predators and the polite are prey. The problem is so acute that the museum is pursuing plans to move the masterpiece to its own subterranean room by 2031.
Equally, the Mona Lisa’s reputation is just unrealistically large. Yes, her eyes follow you around the room, but they could follow you all the way back to the metro station and still not live up to the hype.
Mount Rushmore has been ruined by stock images. Looking at the four faces online you can see the creases in Lincoln’s beard, the sternness in Roosevelt's eyes and Jefferson's slight smile. Looking at the mountain in person – from viewpoints far below the rock face – you can just about tell which president is which. Throw in its location in rural South Dakota – not a common stop on the tourist trail – and we're surprised it gets as many visitors as it does.
The phrase 'tourist trap' is often used about Checkpoint Charlie – a site with an extraordinary past and a thoroughly underwhelming present. One of only a handful of crossings in the Berlin Wall, the checkpoint hosted a notorious 16-hour standoff between Soviet and American tanks in 1961, and went on to witness tense prisoner swaps and audacious escape attempts.
Today, the poky hut and stacked sandbags are a glorified photo op, which until 2019 was manned by fake soldiers posing with punters for a fee. Surrounding stores still hawk Cold War merch of questionable taste, and the site has none of the gravitas its recent history should command.
Do you have an Instagram account? If yes, then you've seen the Blue Domes of Santorini hundreds of times already, and your only reason for visiting would be to upload a photo of them for yourself. Even by Greek island standards Santorini is swamped with visitors, most of whom gather at the Blue Domes at dusk to take that shot that no lifestyle influencer account can be without. Frankly, the Blue Domes have been done to death and are squarely yesterday's news. Time to find somewhere new.
The Mitad del Mundo ('the middle of the world') has exactly one job: to mark the precise location of the equator. The entire site rests on this gimmick, and visitors flock to have their pictures taken with one foot either side of the line that divides the globe. There's just one problem – the actual equator lies 790 feet (240m) to the north. We're not sure there's much more to be said.
A medieval palace in Verona that housed the noble Dal Cappello family, Juliet's House and accompanying balcony now brands itself as the place that Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, courted in the moonlight. Shakespeare did write plays starring real people, but Romeo and Juliet is not one of them, and was based on an equally fictional novella.
The balcony is particularly dubious, as it was only added in the early 20th century, after the city council had designated the palace Juliet's home. They needn't have bothered, as the original scene takes place at a window; the balcony is a figment of popular imagination.
The queues at Madame Tussauds often snake out of the building and away down Marylebone Road, and most Londoners cannot fathom why. Inside the queues continue – if you want photos, that is – while sticky floors and elbows in the ribs come as standard in the crowded corridors. Some waxworks look 10 or 15 years younger than their real-life counterparts, though the Star Wars and Marvel exhibits are at least a hit with kids.
In any case, everyone knows waxworks are creepy. If you want to spend the night haunted by Prince Harry's paralytic grin, be our guest.
The Walk of Fame is meant to embody the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, with famous names ranging from Charlton Heston to Bugs Bunny immortalised in pink and gold. Instead, it serves as a gaudy window into the seedier side of LA. Hustlers line the sidewalk dressed up as cartoon characters, in summer the street smells of sweat and stale fast food, and everyone's looking at their feet so collisions are common. It's overcrowded, over-commercialised and frankly overpowering.
Our pick for the world's most overrated attraction – we simply cannot work out what turned this miniature mermaid statue in Copenhagen Harbour into an international tourist sensation. It's not particularly old, its backstory is not particularly exciting, and there's finer craftsmanship on display in every art museum in Europe. If you saw this statue in the street you would barely look up from your phone, and some tour guides explicitly warn visitors to expect to be underwhelmed.
Now discover the most underrated attractions from across Europe