50 most visited tourist attractions in the world

Our 1st annual look at the most tourist-heavy destinations on the planet

Times Square, New York City, NY: An estimated 80 percent of the Big Apple’s 44 million visitors head for Broadway (including the considerable theater crowds) and end up gawking at the world’s most garish neon crossroads. Plugging numbers into the equation, we get an estimated total of 35,200,000 per year.





By Sandra Larriva and Gabe Weisert

updated 3:09 p.m. ET April 30, 2007
At first glance, the Forbes Traveler 50 Most Visited Attractions List confirms several tourist industry truisms: A) Americans love to travel, but they prefer to stick within their own borders. B) Wherever Mickey Mouse goes, he conquers. C) Paris is the unofficial cultural theme park of the world. And D) Niagara Falls isn’t just for lovers anymore.

But the list also contains several surprises. Since the Taj Mahal—our fiftieth and final attraction—receives 2.4 million visitors a year, several popular favorites like the the Prado (2 million), the Uffizi (1.6 million), Angkor (1.5 million) and Stonehenge (850,000) didn’t make the cut. And while Western audiences may not be familiar with names like Everland and Lotte World, these South Korean mega-parks managed to rank 16th and 22nd on our list, respectively.

Not surprisingly, the French are out in force. How to account for the preponderance of attractions in Paris? According to the latest statistics report from the World Tourism Organization, France receives more foreign tourists per year than any other country -- some 76 million in 2005. Spain followed with 55 million, the United States with 50 million and China with 47 million. Italy rounded out the top five with 37 million (with the U.K. not far behind).




o where did the numbers for our ranking come from? They’re based on the most up-to-date, officially sanctioned tourism statistics available (there were several likely candidates for this list which we unfortunately couldn’t include, owing to a dearth of hard numbers). When we couldn’t find figures from national and municipal tourism bureaus, we relied on reputable media sources and tourism industry newsletters.

We excluded religious pilgrimage sites, such as Saudi Arabia’s Mecca, India’s Varanasi, and Tokyo’s Sensoji Temple, which according to the Japan Tourism Authority receives over 30 million visitors each year. We chose to include some famous churches in Paris owing to their status as cultural attractions and the high numbers of foreign tourists they receive. St. Peter’s Square straddled the line, but there are no estimates for tourist traffic versus religious attendance, so we included only visitors to the Vatican museums.