 <p>This is a bit old but I'm trying to find the same myself. The best I can find are:</p> <p><a href="http://www.mapquestapi.com/search/">http://www.mapquestapi.com/search/</a></p> <p>Mapquest search has a data set which allows querying for tourist attractions. However I cannot find a way to sort the results by importance. Radius search returns results in order of proximity and I have no idea what order a rectangle search is in.</p> <p><a href="https://developers.google.com/places/documentation/search">https://developers.google.com/places/documentation/search</a></p> <p>Google places allows sorting by "prominence". This actually returns a list that is reasonably representative of the main places a tourist might want to see. You can filter out certain types to refine this.</p> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Visitor_attractions_in_Manhattan">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Visitor_attractions_in_Manhattan</a></p> <p>Wikipedia has categories of "visitor attractions in_<strong>_</strong>" for many cities. Being crowdsourced, there are lots of issues. For example, the Empire State Building which is one of the main attractions in Manhattan is not on this list, but some random little coffee shop Everyman Espresso is.</p> <p><a href="http://wikitravel.org/en/New_York_City#See">http://wikitravel.org/en/New_York_City#See</a></p> <p>Wikitravel has a "see" section for most cities. There's no structure to it, but most of the attractions are bold, although this example shows a lot of other things that are bold like various passes.</p> <p><a href="http://www.geonames.org/export/wikipedia-webservice.html">http://www.geonames.org/export/wikipedia-webservice.html</a></p> <p>Geonames has indexed all the geotagged Wikipedia articles and has a service to search it. It has a "rank" parameter, which could somewhat indicate the relative interestingness for tourists.</p>