The Most Expensive Watches In The World

Considering that everyone has the exact time, in every timezone on earth, in their pocket at all times, a mechanical watch that costs more than a house can seem like a curious investment. But a these days, watches aren't really about telling the time. Or rather, they're not just about telling the time.

Instead, they're more like functional jewellery, a way for men to buy themselves something fancy but also know that what they've purchased does more than just look pretty. The best watches do, of course, look very pretty. But like an Italian sports car, your outlay also buys you precision engineering and decades of heritage. Which makes it all feel a bit more justifiable than dropping more than most mortgages on a ring with a big diamond on.

The most expensive watches on earth, then, tend to fall into one of two camps. On the traditional side, you've got six- and sometimes seven-figure timepieces that earn their price tag by squeezing incomprehensibly complicated engineering into teeny tiny cases. This is where you'll find the flagship watches by your Swiss old-guard (and the odd disruptive new brand), which use nothing more than cogs and gears to track the movement of the planets, or chime like Big Ben. On the other side, you've got watches that are expensive because they're made from expensive stuff – precious metals, hand-cut diamonds, bits of meteorites. Bling, basically. But when you want people to know that you've spent the GDP of a Pacific island on your watch, sometimes the best way is to make it glittery.

And then, a notch above both, you've got your one-offs – watches owned by famous people, or long-dead people, or, counterintuitively, the watches were made slightly wrong and are, therefore, completely unique (read: collectable). With the vintage watch market booming, this is where you'll find your expensive watch record-breakers, the timepieces that go for as much as a decent Premier League midfielder.

Here are the priciest of the bunch. For the sake of fairness, we've left out the models that are caked in bazillions of diamonds. Because that doesn't really count, does it? Have a look below: