The oldest buildings in the world still standing, in order, and the oldest still in use

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The oldest building in the world still standing is Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, a complex of stone enclosures raised around 9500 BC, about 11,600 years ago. After it the list runs through the megalithic tombs and temples of Atlantic Europe and Malta from about 4800 to 3000 BC, the stone village of Skara Brae in Orkney, the pyramids of Egypt, the palaces of Crete, the temples of Greece, and then the first buildings that are not ruins but complete: the Pantheon in Rome, roofed and in use since AD 126. "Standing" here means walls and, where claimed, a roof still in place; "building" means made by people to enclose space, so mounds and standing stones are noted but not counted. Below: the oldest standing buildings in order, the oldest still in use, the oldest of each kind, and the oldest in the Americas and the United States. Most of them are in the Ancient temples of the world collection.

The oldest standing buildings, in order

1. Göbekli Tepe, Turkey, about 9500 BC. Circular enclosures of T-shaped pillars up to 18 feet tall, buried by their builders and so preserved standing. Radiocarbon dates on the fill. Details in the Göbekli Tepe article.
2. Tell Qaramel and Jericho, Syria and the West Bank, about 8000–7000 BC. The tower of Jericho, 28 feet (8.5 m) of stone with an internal stair, is the oldest known tower and defensive structure.
3. Çatalhöyük, Turkey, about 7100 BC. Mud-brick houses entered through the roof, thousands of them packed together; walls survive to shoulder height.
4. Barnenez, Brittany, about 4800 BC. A stone cairn 236 feet (72 m) long with eleven passage tombs inside, older than the pyramids by two thousand years and, by many counts, the oldest complete monumental building in Europe.
5. Knap of Howar, Orkney, about 3700 BC. Two stone farmhouses with walls standing to 5 feet, the oldest standing houses in northern Europe.
6. Ġgantija, Malta, about 3600 BC. The oldest free-standing stone temple, with walls of 50-ton blocks still 20 feet high; Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra follow around 3200 BC.
7. Newgrange, Ireland, about 3200 BC. A passage tomb with a corbelled stone roof that has kept its chamber dry for 5,200 years, the oldest intact roofed building in the world.
8. Skara Brae, Orkney, about 3100 BC. Eight stone houses with stone beds, dressers and hearths, buried in sand until a storm in 1850; the best-preserved Neolithic village in Europe. Maeshowe, its tomb, is of the same age.
9. Pyramid of Djoser, Egypt, about 2650 BC. The oldest large stone building in the world and the first pyramid, with the funerary complex around it; the pyramids of Giza follow within a century.
10. Caral, Peru, about 2600 BC. The oldest buildings in the Americas: platform mounds and sunken plazas of stone and earth.
11. Knossos, Crete, about 1700 BC. The oldest palace in Europe, partly reconstructed by Arthur Evans; the Bronze Age houses of Akrotiri on Santorini, buried by the eruption of about 1600 BC, stand three storeys high with their frescoes.
12. Greek temples, from about 600 BC. The Temple of Hera at Olympia, the Temple of Concordia at Agrigento (about 430 BC) and the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens (about 415 BC), the most complete.
13. The Pantheon, Rome, AD 126. The oldest large building in the world still complete with its original roof and in continuous use.

The oldest buildings still in use

• Oldest in continuous use of any kind: the Pantheon, a temple from 126 and a church since 609, never abandoned.
• Oldest place of worship in continuous use: the Dambulla cave temples in Sri Lanka, Buddhist since about 100 BC; among built churches, Etchmiadzin in Armenia (483 on a 303 foundation). The full list is in the oldest temples in the world.
• Oldest wooden building: Hōryū-ji in Japan, whose pagoda and hall date from about 711 by tree-ring dating of the timbers; the oldest wooden building in Europe is the Greensted church in Essex, about 1060.
• Oldest inhabited house: claims run from the stone houses of Aleppo and Sana'a to the Saltford Manor House in England (about 1150) and the Roman-founded houses of Rome and Naples; the oldest continuously inhabited settlements are Jericho, Damascus and Aleppo.
• Oldest hotel: Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan in Japan, run by the same family since 705.
• Oldest university building: the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, teaching since 859; in Europe, Bologna's colleges from 1088.
• Oldest bridge in use: the Pons Fabricius in Rome, 62 BC, and the Arkadiko bridge in Greece, about 1300 BC, still crossed on foot.

The oldest buildings in the Americas and the United States

The oldest in the Americas are the mounds of Caral in Peru (about 2600 BC) and Watson Brake in Louisiana (about 3500 BC), earthworks rather than buildings. The oldest standing buildings in the United States are the cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Puebloans: Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde in Colorado (about 1190–1260) and the great houses of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico (about 850–1150), Pueblo Bonito with 650 rooms. Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, built about 1000–1450, is the oldest continuously inhabited building complex in the country, and Acoma Pueblo the oldest continuously inhabited settlement. The oldest European building is the Castillo de San Marcos in St Augustine, Florida (1672–1695), and the oldest house the Fairbanks House in Dedham, Massachusetts (about 1637), the oldest surviving timber-frame house in North America; the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe (1610) is the oldest public building. In Mexico, the pyramids of Monte Albán and Teotihuacan (about 500 BC to AD 200) are the oldest large buildings north of Peru.

How the dates are known

Radiocarbon dating of organic material sealed in the structure, charcoal, bone, plant fibre in mortar, gives most of the prehistoric dates, calibrated by tree rings and ice cores. Tree-ring dating of the timbers themselves gives exact years for wooden buildings such as Hōryū-ji and for the roof of Newgrange's neighbour Knowth. Historic buildings are dated by inscriptions, king lists and documents, and by the pottery and coins in their foundations. The list changes: Göbekli Tepe was unknown until 1994, and the Taş Tepeler sites around it have added a dozen buildings of the same age since 2019, so the oldest building in the world may yet be replaced by an older neighbour.

Open the sections: ancient temples of the world, buildings by style, all articles.