Toilets Worth Visiting (9 Photos)

Public Toilets People Travel to See

Most public toilets are places you leave as fast as you can. People cross the world to see these. In a small New Zealand town, the toilet block is the main sight. In Tokyo, star architects designed park toilets, one of them with walls you can see through.

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🌈 The Hundertwasser Toilets — By Friedensreich Hundertwasser in Kawakawa, New Zealand 🇳🇿

Fat ceramic columns in red, blue and purple hold up a grass-topped roof, and a tree grows straight through the middle. Hundertwasser lived near Kawakawa from the mid-’70s and designed the town’s public toilets. Local volunteers built them with bricks from an old Bank of New Zealand building and recycled bottles.

💡 Heritage Fact: The toilets opened in 1999, and Hundertwasser died a year later. Students from the local Bay of Islands College made the ceramic tiles. In 2023 the toilets were listed as a Category 1 Historic Place.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Petr Kraus / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🚽 The Victorian Toilets — Rothesay, Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Dark marble urinal stalls stand around a central column on a patterned mosaic floor, in a gents’ toilet built on Rothesay’s West Pier in 1899. Historic Environment Scotland lists it at Category A and calls it “an outstanding and rare surviving example of a high-quality Victorian public convenience.” Even the cisterns above the urinals have glass sides.

💡 Plumbing Fact: The fittings came from Twyfords and cost £530. A much later restoration cost almost £300,000.

📷 Photo: DeFacto / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🔍 Transparent Toilets — By Shigeru Ban in Tokyo, Japan 🇯🇵

Blue and green glass walls let you look straight inside the toilet in Haru-no-Ogawa Community Park. That is the idea: you can check that it is clean and empty before you walk in. Lock the door and the glass turns opaque. The first time still takes some trust.

💡 Design Fact: Ban built two of these for The Tokyo Toilet project, and both opened on August 5, 2020. At night they light up the park like lanterns.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Syced / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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🏛️ The Roman Latrines — Ephesus, Turkey 🇹🇷

A long marble bench with a row of keyhole-shaped holes, no walls between them, above a channel of running water. These public latrines in ancient Ephesus were built in the 1st century AD over a channel with a constant flow of water. Dozens of people sat here shoulder to shoulder. Privacy was not part of the plan.

📷 Photo: Carole Raddato / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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🌸 The Bryant Park Restroom — New York City, USA 🇺🇸

A carved stone building with “WOMEN · MEN” over the door, just off 42nd Street in Bryant Park. Inside there are two attendants at all times, fresh flowers and classical music. In Midtown Manhattan, that is close to a miracle.

💡 Restroom Fact: A 2017 makeover cost $280,000, and in 2011 the travel site VirtualTourist named it No. 1 in the world.

📷 Photo: SnowFire / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

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☕ Café Achteck — Berlin, Germany 🇩🇪

A green, eight-sided cast-iron urinal under the trees in Berlin’s Wedding district. The first ones went up in 1879. Berliners nicknamed them Café Achteck, “Café Octagon,” because this is where you get rid of your coffee.

💡 Berlin Fact: By 1920 the city had 142 of them; only 11 of the originals still exist, and some are protected monuments.

📷 Photo: Miriam Guterland / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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☂️ Amayadori — By Tadao Ando in Tokyo, Japan 🇯🇵

A round toilet wrapped in vertical metal louvers, under a wide circular roof in Jingu-Dori Park. Ando named it Amayadori, which means taking shelter from the rain. The space under the roof is meant as a place to rest, toilet or not.

💡 Tokyo Fact: It opened on September 7, 2020, as part of The Tokyo Toilet, a project with 17 toilets by 16 designers.

📷 Photo: sergejf / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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🪖 The Roman Fort Latrines — Hadrian’s Wall, England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Stone walls, water channels and two stone basins are what remain of the communal toilets at Housesteads Roman Fort in Northumberland. English Heritage calls them the best preserved Roman loos in Britain. Soldiers sat side by side here, in northern English weather.

💡 Roman Fact: There were no cubicles and no toilet paper. Many used a sponge on a stick, washed and shared.

📷 Photo: Carole Raddato / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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🚹 The Last Vespasienne — Paris, France 🇫🇷

A dark green metal street urinal on Boulevard Arago, in front of the high wall of La Santé prison. Paris had about 1,200 of these by 1930. This is the only one left.

💡 Name Fact: The name points to the Roman emperor Vespasian, who, according to Suetonius, taxed public toilets, then held a coin from the first payment under his son’s nose: “Yet it comes from urine.” The line “money doesn’t smell” is a later saying built on that story.

📷 Photo: Mbzt / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)