The Most Beautiful Canyons and Gorges in the World

70 places in 36 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Grand Canyon

   United States36.097° N 112.095° W

   

   The Grand Canyon is not the deepest gorge on Earth, but few landscapes expose so much of the planet's history in a single view. The Colorado River has cut through the rising Colorado Plateau for 446 km, opening a chasm up to 29 km wide and more than 1.8 km deep. At the bottom lies the Vishnu Schist, around two billion years old; at the rim, the Kaibab Limestone, laid down some 270 million years ago. In between, the walls are banded in reds, creams and greys, and between some of the layers there are gaps of hundreds of millions of years that geologists call the Great Unconformity.

   Did you know? In 1956 two airliners collided over the canyon, killing all 128 aboard; the disaster led to the creation of the Federal Aviation Agency in 1958.

   More about Grand Canyon →

2. 02 Tiger Leaping Gorge

   People's Republic of China27.230° N 100.140° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The Jinsha River — the upper Yangtze, before it earns that name downstream — has cut a 15-kilometer gorge between the Yulong and Haba snow-capped ranges so deep that the drop from the highest peaks to the river below runs to nearly 3,800 meters, making it one of the deepest canyons on the planet, whatever the exact ranking on any given list.

   Did you know? The river squeezes between Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, 5,596 m high, and Haba Snow Mountain, 5,396 m, under cliffs rising some 2,000 m.

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3. 03 Samariá Gorge National Park

   Φαράγγι της Σαμαριάς

   Greece · 27.2 km from Chania35.271° N 23.961° E

   • biosphere reserve

   

   The Samariá Gorge cuts through the White Mountains of western Crete in a single long descent from the Omalos plateau to the Libyan Sea. The walk begins at Xyloskalo, at about 1,230 metres, where a stair of logs once helped walkers down the first steep drop; today stone steps and a railing do the job. From there the path follows a stream bed for roughly 13 km through the national park, and a further couple of kilometres bring you out at the seaside village of Agia Roumeli. It is one of the longest gorges in Europe, and the people of Sfakia will tell you there is only one real gorge on Crete, and that all the others are merely gorges.

   Did you know? In late May 1941, fleeing the German invasion of Crete, King George II and Prime Minister Emmanouil Tsouderos escaped down the gorge to Agia Roumeli and on to Egypt.

   More about Samariá Gorge National Park →

4. 04 Verdon Gorge

   Gorges du Verdon

   France43.738° N 6.364° E

   

   Few colours in European landscape are as startling as the Verdon's. The river runs a milky turquoise-green through the bottom of a limestone canyon up to 700 m deep and about 25 km long, and the name itself is said to come from that colour; the tint comes from fine rock flour and minerals suspended in the water. The gorge lies in Provence between Castellane and Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, marking for part of its length the boundary between the Var and the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, and it ends where the river spills into the artificial Lac de Sainte-Croix.

   Did you know? Griffon vultures, long gone from the gorge, were reintroduced near Rougon between 1999 and 2004 and have bred there since 2002.

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5. 05 Colca Canyon

   Valle del Colca

   Peru15.597° S 72.056° W

   

   The Colca Canyon cuts through the volcanic highlands of southern Peru for around a hundred kilometres, and in places the land drops more than three thousand metres from the surrounding peaks to the river. It is not one sheer slot but a long inhabited valley that narrows downstream into a true gorge: in the upper part the slopes are stepped from top to bottom with agricultural terraces, many of them older than the Inca and still farmed, while further west the walls close in and the river disappears far below. Snow-capped volcanoes stand over it all — Ampato rises to 6,288 metres, and Hualca Hualca, with its steaming Infiernillo geyser, looms above the valley.

   Did you know? The canyon reaches its greatest depth near Huambo, where the river runs only about 1,066 metres above sea level.

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6. 06 Makhtesh Ramon

   Israel30.579° N 34.818° E

   

   From the cliff edge at Mitzpe Ramon the ground simply falls away. Makhtesh Ramon is a closed depression some 40 km long, 2 to 10 km wide and about 500 metres deep, opening below the town in a sweep of bare, many-coloured desert rock. It looks like a crater, and is often called one, but it was made neither by a meteorite nor by a volcano. It is a makhtesh, a landform named in Hebrew and characteristic of the Negev: after the sea that once covered the region withdrew and the Arava rift formed, around five million years ago, rivers began cutting into the land and carried away the softer rock layers, hollowing out a vast steep-walled basin. It is the largest such erosion cirque in the world.

   Did you know? The ammonite fossils that once covered its north-eastern hills ranged in size from a snail to a tractor wheel.

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7. 07 Horseshoe Bend

   United States36.879° N 111.514° W

   

   Horseshoe Bend is a single, perfect loop of the Colorado River a few miles below Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona. From the rim, the river curls almost all the way around a central butte of red rock, so that the canyon draws a nearly closed horseshoe in the ground, and the water at the bottom shows green against the orange and cream of the sandstone. The overlook stands at about 4,200 feet above sea level and the river at about 3,200, so visitors look down on a drop of roughly 1,000 feet from the edge.

   Did you know? The Colorado River swings through about 270 degrees around the central butte, almost closing the loop.

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8. 08 Caminito del Rey

   Spain · 38.2 km from Málaga36.916° N 4.773° W

   

   The Guadalhorce, on its way down to Málaga, forces its way through a limestone barrier in a gorge that narrows in places to about ten metres between sheer walls: the Desfiladero de los Gaitanes. Along one of those walls, more than 100 metres above the river, runs a path pinned to the rock. The Caminito del Rey began as a strictly practical thing. Between 1901 and 1905 a walkway about a metre wide, concrete laid on steel rails driven into the cliff, was built so that workers could move between the hydroelectric plants at the Chorro and Gaitanejo falls. In 1921 King Alfonso XIII walked it when he came to inaugurate the Conde del Guadalhorce dam upstream, and the workmen's path has carried the name "the King's little path" ever since.

   Did you know? Its restoration, designed by architect Luis Machuca, won first prize for conservation at the 2016 EU Prize for Cultural Heritage, praised for keeping the old structures visible.

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9. 09 Tara River Canyon

   Кањон реке Таре

   Montenegro43.251° N 19.008° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Tara cuts one of the deepest river gorges on the continent: some 82 kilometres long and up to about 1,300 metres from rim to riverbed, it winds west from northern Montenegro and, for its last 36 kilometres, forms the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina before the Tara meets the Piva near Hum and together they become the Drina. The finest walls rise beneath the Ljubišnja massif, and the Montenegrin stretch lies inside Durmitor National Park, a World Heritage Site; on the Bosnian side the canyon is protected as Tara Nature Park.

   Did you know? Nicknamed the Tear of Europe, the Tara gorge ranks among the deepest canyons on the continent, with only Russia's Sulak Canyon often cited as deeper.

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10. 10 Vikos Gorge

    Φαράγγι του Βίκου

    Greece · 30.5 km from Ioannina39.929° N 20.741° E

    

    The Vikos Gorge cuts through the southern flank of Mount Tymfi in the Pindus Mountains of Epirus, in northwestern Greece. It is about 32 km long, its walls drop from 120 to as much as 1,350 metres, and it narrows in places to just a few metres across. The Guinness Book of Records has listed it as the deepest gorge in the world in proportion to its width — a claim others contest, but one that is easy to believe when standing on its rim.

    Did you know? In 2023 the gorge became part of the Zagori Cultural Landscape, Greece's first World Heritage site listed as a cultural landscape.

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11. 11 Kings Canyon

    Australia24.258° S 131.563° E

    

    Kings Canyon is a deep cleft cut into the sandstone of Central Australia, and its walls are the reason people come: sheer faces of red and ochre sandstone rising more than 100 metres above the creek bed. The canyon lies within Watarrka National Park, whose name comes from the Luritja word for the umbrella bush that grows across the surrounding plain. Luritja and Arrernte people have lived in this country for at least twenty thousand years and remain its traditional owners.

    Did you know? A solar power station built here in December 2003 was at the time the largest single solar installation in Australia.

    More about Kings Canyon →

12. 12 Gorges du Tarn

    France44.355° N 3.562° E

    

    For some 53 kilometres, from Quézac to Le Rozier, the river Tarn runs at the bottom of a canyon 400 to 600 metres deep, cut into the limestone plateaux of the Grands Causses between the Causse Méjean and the Causse de Sauveterre. The Gorges du Tarn are among the great natural spectacles of southern France: sheer cliffs, the river far below, villages and castles clinging to the slopes, and a succession of bends each more dramatic than the last.

    Did you know? The Tarn rises on the granite of Mont Lozère and plunges into limestone almost as soon as it leaves the massif to begin cutting its canyon.

    More about Gorges du Tarn →

13. 13 Sumidero Canyon

    Cañón del Sumidero

    Mexico · 11.9 km from Tuxtla Gutiérrez16.848° N 93.106° W

    

    The Sumidero Canyon is the gorge of the Grijalva River in central Chiapas, a cleft roughly 13 km long whose walls rise as much as 1,000 m above the water. The river opened its way along fractures in the Earth's crust, beginning around 35 million years ago, and the canyon twists as it goes, at times turning almost at right angles while the walls close in. It has been a national park since 1980, protecting more than 21,000 hectares between the Belisario Domínguez bridge near Chiapa de Corzo and the Chicoasén dam, and its wetlands have been listed under the Ramsar Convention since 2004.

    Did you know? The canyon was long thought impassable; several early expeditions ended in death, and the first full traverse came only on 31 March 1960, by an army team.

    More about Sumidero Canyon →

14. 14 Waimea Canyon State Park

    United States · 31.8 km from Līhuʻe22.056° N 159.665° W

    

    Fourteen miles long, a mile wide in places, and cut more than 3,600 feet deep, Waimea Canyon is what happens when millennia of runoff from Mount Waiʻaleʻale — one of the wettest spots on the planet — pours down the same channels again and again. The iron-rich volcanic soil it exposes gives both the canyon walls and the water at its base a distinct rust-red tint that's rare to see at this scale anywhere in the Pacific.

    Did you know? Waimea means reddish water in Hawaiian, after the iron-stained runoff that colours the river.

    More about Waimea Canyon State Park →

15. 15 Partnach Gorge

    Partnachklamm

    Germany · 29.6 km from Innsbruck47.463° N 11.124° E

    

    The Partnach Gorge is a narrow slot cut by the Partnach stream into the limestone just south of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and walking through it feels like being swallowed by the mountain. For about 700 metres the path runs along the wall of the gorge, partly through tunnels blasted in the rock, while the walls close in above to heights of more than 80 metres and the water, fed from the Zugspitze plateau, roars a few metres below. The rock is Alpine Muschelkalk, a shell-bearing limestone of the Triassic, interleaved with softer marls that the stream has scoured into smooth hollows and ledges.

    Did you know? Until the 1960s the stream was used to float firewood down from the Reintal, each log marked with its owner's sign before being thrown into the spring meltwater.

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16. 16 Tajo de Ronda

    Spain · 35.3 km from Marbella36.740° N 5.164° W

    

    El Tajo is the gorge that splits the town of Ronda in two. The Guadalevín river has cut it straight through the rock plateau on which the town stands, leaving a chasm roughly 500 metres long, about 100 metres deep and in places only 50 metres wide. The houses of both halves are built right to the lip of the cliffs, and the view down from the edge — sheer walls, the thread of water far below, and the open farmland of the valley beyond — is one of the most dramatic urban landscapes in Spain. In 2019 the gorge was declared a Natural Monument of Andalusia. Kestrels and peregrine falcons nest in its walls, and swifts and crows wheel through it all summer.

    Did you know? Legend says the Puente Nuevo architect José Martín de Aldehuela fell to his death from his bridge; in fact he died naturally in Málaga in 1802.

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17. 17 Macocha Gorge

    Macocha

    Czech Republic · 21.1 km from Brno49.373° N 16.730° E

    

    The Macocha Abyss is a collapsed sinkhole in the Moravian Karst, 138.5 metres deep to the surface of the lake at its bottom — the deepest chasm of its kind in Central Europe. It measures about 174 by 76 metres, wide enough for daylight to reach the floor, which puts it in the category of "light hole" abysses. Beneath the two lakes at the bottom, divers have followed flooded spaces to a total depth of about 187 metres. The underground Punkva River runs through it, and the abyss forms part of the Punkva Caves system.

    Did you know? Of the two lakes on the floor, the Upper Lake is about 11 metres deep and the Lower Lake at least 50 metres.

    More about Macocha Gorge →

18. 18 Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

    United States44.717° N 110.497° W

    

    In the middle of Yellowstone National Park the Yellowstone River drops over two waterfalls and then runs through a canyon whose colours give the whole park its name. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is about 39 km long, more than 300 metres deep in places and between roughly 450 metres and 1.2 km wide. Its walls are not the reds and browns of Arizona but a startling mix of pale yellow, cream, orange and pink, streaked with white and dotted with steam vents.

    Did you know? Before the river cut through it, the canyon area was a geyser basin whose heat cooked the rhyolite soft, a process geologists have likened to baking a potato.

    More about Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone →

19. 19 Kadisha Valley

    Lebanon · 20.5 km from Tripoli34.283° N 35.952° E

    

    Below the bare summits of Mount Lebanon the ground falls away into a deep, green ravine whose cliffs are riddled with caves, chapels and monasteries tucked into the rock. The Kadisha Valley, from the Aramaic word for "holy", sheltered some of the earliest Christian monastic communities in the world, and together with the nearby Forest of the Cedars of God it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998.

    Did you know? The valley's natural mummies date from around 1283, the same year the Mamluk sultan Qalawun led a campaign into the area.

    More about Kadisha Valley →

20. 20 Liechtensteinklamm

    Austria47.311° N 13.191° E

    

    The Liechtensteinklamm is one of the deepest and narrowest gorges in the Alps: a cleft up to 300 metres deep that the mountain stream Großarler Ache has cut through the rock on its way out of the Großarl valley. In places the walls close in to only a few metres apart, so that the sky shows as a thin, twisting strip high overhead while the water thunders through the polished channel below. At the end of the walkway the gorge opens on a waterfall.

    Did you know? A spiral staircase of Corten steel called the Helix, dropping about 30 metres, was built in 2020 to carry the path around a rockfall zone.

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21. 21 Canyon de Chelly National Monument

    United States36.155° N 109.509° W

    

    Canyon de Chelly is not one gorge but a branching system of them — Canyon de Chelly itself, Canyon del Muerto and Monument Canyon — cut into the Defiance Plateau of northeastern Arizona by streams running off the Chuska Mountains. The walls are de Chelly sandstone, the petrified remains of a Permian sand sea, and the old dunes are still legible in them as long, slanting lines of cross-bedding. Near the town of Chinle the rims stand only a few dozen metres above the floor; by the upper reaches they rise to about 1,000 feet, sheer and streaked with dark desert varnish, while the floor below stays green with cottonwoods, fields and grazing land.

    Did you know? "Chelly" is a Spanish rendering of the Navajo name Tséyiʼ, meaning "inside the rock", later anglicised to the pronunciation "de SHAY".

    More about Canyon de Chelly National Monument →

22. 22 Copper Canyon

    Barrancas del Cobre

    Mexico27.516° N 107.766° W

    

    The Copper Canyon — Barrancas del Cobre — is not one gorge but a whole system of them, carved by several rivers into the Sierra Madre Occidental in southwestern Chihuahua before they gather into the Río Fuerte and run to the Gulf of California. Taken together the network is far larger in area than the Grand Canyon, and its deepest branch, the Urique canyon, falls about 1,879 metres, the deepest in Mexico. The name comes from the copper-green tones of the canyon walls. The high country along the rims is alpine, with mild weather in spring and autumn, while the canyon floors below stay warm and humid all year, so a single descent crosses several climates.

    Did you know? The canyon system is made up of six main canyons cut by six rivers, and covers roughly 65,000 square kilometres.

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23. 23 Ruinaulta

    Switzerland · 14.9 km from Chur46.808° N 9.315° E

    

    Ruinaulta, the Rhine Gorge, is the canyon the Vorderrhein has cut through the debris of the Flims rockslide, one of the greatest landslides known in the Alps. Almost 10,000 years ago the mountainside above today's Flims gave way, and more than ten billion cubic metres of rock came down and buried the valley of the young Rhine. The river then slowly sawed its way through the rubble, and the result is a gorge about 13 km long and up to 400 m deep between Ilanz and Reichenau, whose pale walls look more like a desert canyon than anything one expects in green Graubünden.

    Did you know? In 2024 researchers dated an oak drowned by the newly dammed lake to 7469 BC, give or take two years, the most precise date yet for the rockslide.

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24. 24 Alcantara Gorges

    Gole dell'Alcantara

    Italy37.880° N 15.173° E

    

    Between walls of black basalt up to 25 metres high, the cold, clear water of the Alcantara river squeezes through a channel in places only two metres wide. The rock on either side is broken into thousands of columns — upright like organ pipes, splayed like a fan, curved like a harp, or stacked like a pile of logs. The Gole dell'Alcantara in eastern Sicily is one of the most striking displays of columnar basalt in the Mediterranean.

    Did you know? Recent studies trace the gorge to three successive lava flows from fissures near Monte Dolce, on Etna's lower slopes, all within roughly the last 8,000 years.

    More about Alcantara Gorges →

25. 25 Fjaðrárgljúfur

    Iceland63.777° N 18.176° W

    

    Fjaðrárgljúfur is a narrow, serpentine canyon in south-east Iceland, about two kilometres long and up to a hundred metres deep, cut into the green flank of the hills just west of Kirkjubæjarklaustur. Seen from its rim, the gorge twists back and forth like a ribbon: steep walls furred with moss drop to the thin, braided line of the Fjaðrá river, and the spurs of rock between the bends overlap so that each viewpoint reveals a new set of folds.

    Did you know? Its name means 'feather river canyon', after the Fjaðrá, the Feather River, whose meltwater carved it.

    More about Fjaðrárgljúfur →

26. 26 Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

    United States · 16.6 km from Montrose38.580° N 107.728° W

    • Dark Sky Place

    

    Few canyons in North America combine such depth with such narrowness. In western Colorado the Gunnison River has sawn straight down through some of the oldest rock on the continent, leaving a gorge that reaches 2,722 feet (829 m) deep at Warner Point but narrows to only about 40 feet (12 m) at river level in the Narrows. The walls are so steep and close that parts of the inner canyon see sunlight only briefly each day, and from the rim the depths look dark even at noon — which is where the Black Canyon gets its name.

    Did you know? In the deepest, narrowest stretches of the canyon, direct sunlight reaches the river for only about 33 minutes a day.

    More about Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park →

27. 27 Three Gorges

    People's Republic of China · 4.4 km from Fengjie31.043° N 109.561° E

    

    The Three Gorges are the most celebrated stretch of the Yangtze, the point where China's greatest river forces its way through the Wu Mountains between Chongqing and Hubei. From west to east they are the Qutang Gorge, only about 8 km long but the narrowest and most dramatic; the Wu Gorge, around 45 km of winding passage beneath forested peaks; and the Xiling Gorge, some 66 km long, ending at Nanjin Pass near Yichang. The gorges were carved as the land slowly rose and the river kept cutting down through it, and their character changes with the rock: sheer, narrow walls where the river passes through hard limestone, wider valleys where it meets softer sandstone and shale.

    More about Three Gorges →

28. 28 Charyn Canyon

    Kazakhstan · 36.7 km from Chundzha43.362° N 79.091° E

    

    Charyn Canyon cuts for about 154 kilometres through the dry steppe of south-eastern Kazakhstan, following the Charyn River, which rises in the Tian Shan. Its walls stand 150 to 300 metres high, and for much of the way they are sheer. What makes it remarkable is less the size than the colour and the shapes: soft sedimentary rock in shades of brick red, ochre and pale grey has been worked by wind, frost and occasional floods into towers, ribs and battlements that change tone through the day and glow almost orange in low evening light.

    Did you know? In 2021 scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry used the canyon's sediments to reconstruct about five million years of regional rainfall and climate.

    More about Charyn Canyon →

29. 29 Antelope Canyon

    United States36.858° N 111.372° W

    

    The same force that makes Antelope Canyon beautiful is the one that makes it dangerous. Flash floods have been carving this slot into the Navajo sandstone — itself nearly 190-million-year-old fossilized dune fields from the Jurassic — for something like 5 to 6 million years, grinding the passageway narrower and smoothing its walls into the flowing, wave-like curves that show up in every photograph.

    Did you know? In Navajo, Upper Antelope Canyon is Tsé bighánílíní, the place where water runs through rocks, and Lower Antelope is Hazdistazí, the spiral rock arches.

    More about Antelope Canyon →

30. 30 Wadi Mujib

    Jordan · 33.5 km from Al Karak31.466° N 35.573° E

    

    Wadi Mujib cuts through the eastern wall of the Dead Sea rift. The river gathers seven tributaries from the plateau of central Jordan and, in its last stretch, forces its way through a narrow canyon before spilling into the Dead Sea at around 420 metres below sea level. The reserve that protects the valley rises from that shore to 1,277 metres above sea level, an elevation difference of about 1,700 metres, a compressed stack of climates in one dramatic slice of desert.

    Did you know? The Mujib reserve is often described as the lowest nature reserve on Earth, since its lowest ground lies on the Dead Sea shore.

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