🏛️ The Best Countries For Culture & Heritage, As Determined by the People

Key Takeaways

• Greece is the best country in the world known for culture & heritage, according to a global survey conducted in 2024
• Respondents ranked it highly for all five equally-weighted attributes: culturally accessible, with a rich history, great food, and many cultural and geographical attractions
• Between its ancient monuments, sun-kissed beaches, and moussaka, it's easy to see why Greece is the favorite.

"Best Countries" Methodology

U.S. News designs its “Best Countries” ranking around 73 attributes grouped into 10 thematic subrankings, such as Heritage, Quality of Life, Power, and Entrepreneurship.

For the Heritage subtheme, they used five, equally-weighted attributes:

• Culturally accessible
• Has a rich history
• Has great food
• Many cultural attractions
• Many geographical attractions 

The attributes reflect public perceptions, not hard data. To gather this, the survey is distributed globally to about 17,000 respondents, including business leaders, informed elites, and general citizens.

Additional Data Footnotes

Each participant is shown a random subset of countries (that must meet GDP, tourism, and FDI thresholds) and asked to rate how strongly they associate those countries with each of the five attributes.

These individual attributes are pre-assigned to categories by researchers, and scores are normalized on a 0–100 scale.