9 of the World's Most Beautiful Pharmacies

The obvious one, and still the best. Founded by Dominican friars in 1221 and arranged as a sequence of rooms that were once chapels and a sacristy - vaulted ceilings, frescoes, glass-fronted cabinets, a museum of ceramic vases and old formularies, a tea room at the end. The soaps are cured on wooden racks for around a month before they are cut by hand. Buy Acqua della Regina, the citrus-musk composition made in 1533 for Caterina de' Medici before she left for France. There are outposts in most major cities now, which slightly undercuts the pilgrimage, though not the room.

Rambla de Catalunya, 1902, and almost entirely intact. The building is by Josep Domènech i Estapà; the decoration was designed by the original pharmacist, Antoni Novellas, and executed by the craftsman Antoni Falguera. Everything is symbolic and nothing is subtle. A leaded-glass door panel showing an orange tree. A wrought-iron sign wreathed in poppies, which was the standard emblem of a Modernista chemist. A curved mahogany cabinet, ceiling murals of pharmaceutical allegory, stained glass in medicinal herbs. The original lamp still hangs from the bay window above the door and still works.

Bognergasse 9. The pharmacy name goes back to at least 1587 and possibly the 1440s, but the building is pure Secession: the old house was demolished and replaced in 1901–02 to designs by Oskar Laske and Viktor Fiala. The reason to go is the portal. Marble, and two life-size mosaic angels flanking the door, with a third mosaic above the first-floor window. It is the rare piece of figurative Jugendstil applied to a commercial shopfront in Vienna, and it has been photographed roughly a million times without getting less good. The interior is a working chemist. Manage expectations.

Inside the Franciscan monastery on Stradun, founded in 1317 and open more or less continuously since, which makes it by the strictest measure the oldest working pharmacy in Europe. Most people walk past the door without going in. Two halves: a museum in the cloister with seventeenth-century ceramic jars, marble mortars, precision scales and manuscript formularies, and a dispensary still selling rose water and herb creams to the friars' recipes. The cloister - 120 columns, no two capitals alike, a garden in the middle - is the quietest place in the old town. Entry to monastery and museum is around €10.

Started in the sixteenth century by Discalced Carmelites working from their own herb garden, and known for a while as the pharmacy of the popes on the strength of an anti-plague water. Downstairs is a functioning chemist with marble floors. Upstairs is a preserved seventeenth-century dispensary, which generally needs arranging in advance rather than turning up on spec - worth the email.

Calle Obispo 155, in a townhouse converted to a pharmacy by Francisco Taquechel in 1898 and restored in 1996. Floor-to-ceiling cedar and mahogany, crystal chandeliers, and rank upon rank of nineteenth-century French porcelain jars, many of them recovered from excavations elsewhere in the old city. There is also a solar microscope, a hundred-year-old porcelain water filter and an illuminated skeleton, because someone made a decision at some point and stuck to it. Still sells Cuban herbal preparations over the counter.

On Town Hall Square, trading since the fifteenth century and looking every year of it. Part shop, part small museum, with cabinets of remedies that make a strong case for the twentieth century - powdered mummy, various things involving snails. Buy the claret marzipan, which Tallinn maintains was invented on the premises as a medicine.

The oldest apothecary in America, on the same corner of Sixth Avenue since 1838. The family have kept the monogrammed entrance, the tiled floor, the gas chandeliers, the canvas ceiling and a neon sign from the 1930s, which is a lot of restraint for a shop on that street. Eleanor Roosevelt shopped here, and so did Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, who wore the tortoiseshell headbands they still stock. Take home the Milk of Cucumber and Roses.

The modern entry, and the one most likely to start an argument. Ramdane Touhami and Victoire de Taillac relaunched a defunct 1803 perfumer in 2014 in a small shop at 6 rue Bonaparte, built as a nineteenth-century apothecary from scratch: custom floor tiles, burl-walnut and oak cabinets, marble counters, banks of medicine drawers, powders and clays weighed out of glass amphorae by hand. It is a set, and it does not pretend otherwise. It is also better made than most of the real ones, and the shops in New York, Tokyo and Milan each get a different vernacular rather than a rollout. Bought by LVMH; still worth the visit.