The landscapes of memory constitute a study of the human contexts, built for the rites of commemoration of last century’s violent events. It is about establishing a framework for the “more contemporary variations in the dialogue between cultural landscapes and the design of the places of knowledge”, while determining how their phenomenological structure functions from a symbolical point of view. The study focuses on three of the most popular and frequented places that constitute cultural landmarks in the cities of New York, Berlin and Washington. They are the 9/11 Memorial, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Through the analysis and interpretation of these paradigms, we establish a series of revealing categories of the socio-spatial construction of the contemporary urban landscape, for they are read as symbolical landscapes in the sense of visual metaphors of the events commemorated through the formal and ritual behavior in said places of memory. They are spaces where the present temporality is suspended, and they are experienced as perturbing spatio-temporal realities of latent everyday life. As spaces related to the memory of violence and death, they are experienced as sacred and ritualized spaces, publicly consecrated and widely venerated, without them being religious spaces. Finally, they are categorized as “heterotopies”, a concept that designates places whose spatial programs – related to the public sphere – are in a divergent relationship with the continuity and normality of the spaces in which social and cultural representations are juxtaposed.Keywords: Landscape, Hierotopy, Heterotopia.