The Most Beautiful Canyons and Gorges in Africa
6 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful canyons and gorges in Africa are Blyde River Canyon (South Africa), Todgha Gorge (Morocco) and Fish River Canyon (Namibia). The list covers 6 canyons and gorges in 6 countries. Algeria has the most, with 1. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Africa's canyons are carved into some of the oldest rock on Earth. Rivers that flow only part of the year have worked for millions of years into ancient plateaus, while the escarpments of the south and the folded ranges of the Atlas trapped water and cut deep, narrow clefts. Desert air keeps the walls bare, so their colours and layers are on full view, and in the tropics volcanic islands are slashed by gorges as young as they are steep.
The Fish River Canyon in southern Namibia is the largest in Africa, about 160 kilometres long and in places almost 550 metres deep, its river reduced for most of the year to a chain of pools. In South Africa, the Blyde River Canyon cuts through the Drakensberg escarpment, green with subtropical forest, with the rounded peaks of the Three Rondavels above the reservoir.
In Morocco, the Todgha Gorge narrows between vertical limestone walls on the southern side of the High Atlas, with palm groves and earthen villages at its mouth. Algeria's Ghoufi Canyon, in the Aurès, is lined with abandoned Berber villages and granaries built into its cliffs above a ribbon of palms. In Sinai, the Coloured Canyon winds through sandstone banded in red, yellow and violet, and on Réunion the Trou de Fer is a sheer volcanic chasm into which several waterfalls plunge from the forest above.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Blyde River Canyon | Canyon | South Africa | |
| 2 | Todgha Gorge | Canyon | Morocco | |
| 3 | Fish River Canyon | Canyon | Namibia | |
| 4 | Trou de Fer | Canyon | Réunion | |
| 5 | Ghoufi | Canyon | Algeria | |
| 6 | Coloured Canyon | Canyon | Egypt |
01 Blyde River Canyon
South Africa24.564° S 30.808° E
Image by manfredrichter from Pixabay The name goes back to 1844, when a party of Voortrekkers led by Hendrik Potgieter returned safely to this river; "blyde" is old Dutch for glad or happy, and in 2005 the river itself was renamed the Motlatse. It meets the Treur River at Bourke's Luck Potholes, where swirling water charged with pebbles has drilled deep cylindrical basins into the bedrock; footbridges cross directly above them. The spot is named after the prospector Bernard Thomas Bourke, who hoped for gold here.
Did you know? The Blyde River flat gecko, discovered in 1991, is known only from the cliff face of one of the Three Rondavels.
02 Todgha Gorge
Morocco31.588° N 5.593° W
Not414 · Public domain The approach is as much a part of the place as the narrows. Upstream from Tinghir the valley is filled by a long, dense palm grove, one of the greenest in southern Morocco. Earth-built ksour, the fortified villages of the Amazigh (Berber) oases, such as Tizgui and Ait Tizgui, stand along its edges, their mud walls the same colour as the hills behind. Walking a stretch of the palm grove, on the paths between the irrigation channels, shows how completely life here depends on the water that comes out of the gorge.
Did you know? Over its length the canyon swings from a slot about 10 metres across to a valley close to a kilometre wide.
03 Fish River Canyon
Namibia27.719° S 17.579° E
Thomas Schoch · CC BY-SA 3.0 The canyon took shape over hundreds of millions of years. A rift formed along a north–south fault long before the dinosaurs, glaciers later deepened it, and when Africa and South America drifted apart the river gained steepness and cut down into the hard gneiss beneath. That history is written in the two levels of the gorge: an upper canyon where erosion stalled on resistant rock, and a lower canyon carved once the river finally broke through. The Fish River itself is Namibia's longest interior river, but it runs for only part of the year — it floods in late summer, and for the rest of the year shrinks to a chain of long, still pools among boulders.
Did you know? The first documented run through the canyon came in 1990, when a group of hikers in running gear finished the route in 11 hours 42 minutes.
04 Trou de Fer
Réunion · 16.2 km from Saint-Benoît21.040° S 55.557° E
Jean-Louis Sicot · CC BY-SA 4.0 Its two halves work differently. The upper section is a wide, amphitheater-like crater catching runoff from several falls at once; from there the water is squeezed into a narrow slot canyon that makes up most of the feature's length before the final plunge. It's a shape better suited to water and rope than to feet.
Did you know? Its main stream, the Bras de Caverne, a tributary of the Rivière du Mât, enters the crater over a 200-metre drop that is often almost dry.
05 Ghoufi
Algeria35.049° N 6.167° E
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY 4.0 The canyon is a geological cross-section as much as a landscape. Its walls expose clearly separated strata of sedimentary rock from the Mesozoic era, stacked in bands that can be read from rim to riverbed, and the villages perched on its ledges are what give the "balconies" their name. At the bottom, the river sustains an oasis of palms and fruit trees, a startling strip of green against the bare ochre slopes of the Aurès.
Did you know? The canyon runs across the Aurès from Tifelfel to M'Chouneche, and the cliff villages sit in the bends of its meanders.
06 Coloured Canyon
Egypt29.143° N 34.598° E
Ahmed Emad Hamdy · CC BY-SA 4.0 The canyon appears to have begun as a great natural fissure in the sandstone, probably opened by an earthquake, and was then widened and sculpted by erosion. The colours come from the mixture of minerals in the rock, which also contains inclusions of granite and traces of ancient corals, a reminder that this material was once laid down under water. In places the passage pinches so tight that walkers must squeeze between the walls; elsewhere it opens into small chambers where the bands of colour can be seen running across the cliffs. The area receives only a handful of rain showers a year, but when flash floods do come, water drains through these gorges towards Wadi Watir.
Did you know? Besides granite and fossil coral, the banded sandstone contains inclusions of cobalt and copper minerals.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful canyons and gorges in Africa?
- On our list, Blyde River Canyon (South Africa) ranks first, followed by Todgha Gorge (Morocco) and Fish River Canyon (Namibia).
- Which country has the most canyons and gorges in Africa?
- In our collection, the most come from Algeria (1), Egypt (1) and Morocco (1).
- What is the largest canyon in Africa?
- The Fish River Canyon in Namibia. It is about 160 kilometres long, up to 27 kilometres wide and in places nearly 550 metres deep.
- What are the Three Rondavels?
- They are three rounded peaks of quartzite and shale with grassy tops on the rim of the Blyde River Canyon in Mpumalanga. Their shape recalls the round, thatched huts of the region, which gives them their name.
- Where is the Todgha Gorge?
- It is near the town of Tinghir in south-eastern Morocco, where the Todgha River has cut through the eastern High Atlas. In its narrowest section the vertical walls stand only a few metres apart.
- How many canyons and gorges are on this list in Africa?
- The list covers 6 canyons and gorges in 6 countries. Algeria has the most, with 1.