The Most Beautiful Dunes in the World

16 places in 13 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Dune of Pilat

   Dune du Pilat

   France44.590° N 1.212° W

   

   At around 105 metres, the Dune of Pilat is the tallest sand dune in Europe, a single ridge stretching nearly three kilometres along the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux. But the number that matters more than its height is its speed: driven by onshore wind, the whole dune creeps inland by four to five metres every year. Sand blows up the gentle seaward slope, piles at the crest, then slides down the far side at angles as steep as 29 degrees — a slow-motion avalanche that never stops.

   Did you know? The dune holds roughly 60 million cubic metres of sand, piled about 500 metres wide from the ocean to the forest.

   More about Dune of Pilat →

2. 02 Lençóis Maranhenses National Park

   Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses

   Brazil2.483° S 43.133° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Lençóis Maranhenses means "bedsheets of Maranhão" — the name comes straight from the shape of the dunes, whose parallel ridges look like a tangle of linens left out to dry. That image already hints at the park's real trick: this looks like a desert, but it isn't one. Rain falls here in real quantities, more than a metre a year, and between January and June it collects in the valleys between the dunes to form thousands of turquoise freshwater lagoons. By December most of them have evaporated or drained into the sand, and the cycle starts again.

   Did you know? The sand is carried to the coast by the Parnaíba and Preguiças rivers, then pushed back inland by the wind as far as 50 kilometres.

   More about Lençóis Maranhenses National Park →

3. 03 White Sands National Park

   United States · 23.9 km from Alamogordo32.780° N 106.172° W

   

   In the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico lies the largest gypsum dune field on Earth, a white sea of roughly 275 square miles, and White Sands National Park protects about 42 per cent of it. Gypsum dissolves in water, so it rarely survives as sand; here rain and snowmelt carried it down from the surrounding mountains into the basin, where it stayed. During the last ice age a lake, Lake Otero, covered some 1,600 square miles of the basin. As it dried, the gypsum crystallised into selenite, and wind and weather have been breaking those crystals down into fine grains and piling them into dunes ever since. The park alone holds an estimated 4.5 billion short tons of this sand.

   Did you know? Fossil trackways here include those of Harlan's ground sloth, an animal about 3 metres tall when upright and weighing over a ton.

   More about White Sands National Park →

4. 04 Tottori Sand Dunes

   Japan · 4.4 km from Tottori35.540° N 134.227° E

   

   Japan is a land of forests and rice terraces, which makes the Tottori Sand Dunes a surprise: a strip of coastal dunes stretching some 16 km along the Sea of Japan, up to about 2.4 km deep, formed from sediment carried down from the Chūgoku Mountains by the Sendai River and shaped by the wind over about 100,000 years. The part most people mean by the name is the Hamasaka dune, east of the river mouth, which is a national natural monument and lies within the San'in Kaigan Geopark, a UNESCO Global Geopark.

   Did you know? The open sand is partly a human creation: forests around the dunes were cut to fuel traditional tatara iron smelting, letting the sand spread farther.

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5. 05 Dune 45

   Namibia24.717° S 15.467° E

   

   Among the towering dunes of Sossusvlei, one has become the image of the Namib Desert: Dune 45, a star dune more than 170 metres high, named simply for the marker on the park road beside which it stands, 45 kilometres from the Sesriem gate. Its sand is some five million years old, washed out of the Kalahari by the Orange River, carried up the Atlantic coast and blown inland over ages. Iron oxide gives these older dunes their deep orange-red: the longer the grains have been exposed, the redder the colour.

   Did you know? Star dunes form where winds blow from several directions; here westerly coastal winds meet easterly winds from the interior, raising arms around a central peak.

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6. 06 Badain Jaran Desert

   People's Republic of China40.072° N 102.210° E

   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The Badain Jaran is a desert of superlatives in the far west of Inner Mongolia, spreading over some 49,000 km² of the Alxa Plateau at around 1,200 m above sea level and reaching into Gansu and Ningxia. It holds the tallest stationary dunes on Earth: many of its megadunes stand about 400 m above their bases, and the highest, Bilutu Peak, reaches about 500 m. Yet the desert is best known for something less expected. Between the sand mountains lie more than 140 small lakes, and the Mongolian name of the desert is usually explained as a reference to its mysterious lakes.

   Did you know? UNESCO lists 144 lakes between the dunes, the highest concentration of inter-dune lakes known, coloured by differing salinity and microbes.

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7. 07 Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve

   United States37.834° N 105.497° W

   • Dark Sky Place

   

   At the eastern edge of Colorado's broad San Luis Valley, a sea of sand rises against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as if it had been poured there. These are the tallest dunes in North America: the Star Dune reaches about 229 metres (750 ft) from base to crest, and the whole dunefield covers some 30 square miles holding billions of cubic metres of sand. The setting is what makes them unforgettable. You stand on bare, rippled sand at over 2,300 metres, with peaks of more than 13,000 feet directly behind and a creek running across the foot of the dunes.

   Did you know? The dunes stay moist year-round: under a thin dry crust the sand holds about 7% water, which helps them grow so tall.

   More about Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve →

8. 08 Erg Chebbi

   Morocco31.167° N 3.983° W

   

   Erg Chebbi is the Sahara as the imagination paints it: a single sea of sand rising abruptly out of the flat black stone desert of south-eastern Morocco, close to the Algerian border. The dune field runs about 28 kilometres from north to south and five to seven kilometres across, and its highest crests stand up to 150 metres above the surrounding hamada. Its colour is what stays with people. Under the midday sun the sand looks pale and almost flat, but at dawn and in the last hour before dark the dunes turn a deep apricot and then rust red, while the knife-edged ridges throw long blue shadows down their lee slopes.

   Did you know? About 65 of the 100 metres of the star dune Lala Lallia piled up only within the last thousand years, a remarkably fast growth for a dune.

   More about Erg Chebbi →

9. 09 Wahiba Sands

   Oman22.000° N 58.833° E

   

   South of the Eastern Hajar mountains lies a sea of sand that runs about 180 km from north to south and 80 km from east to west, covering some 12,500 square kilometres. Long known as the Wahiba Sands after the Al Wahiba Bedouin, and officially renamed the Sharqiya Sands, it is a compact desert by Arabian standards, which is exactly why it reads so clearly: in the north, great ridges of sand line up in parallel from north to south, some of them up to 100 metres high.

   Did you know? Under and around the sands lies a field of aeolianite, or fossilised dune sand, stretching more than 100 km inland and over 3 km offshore.

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10. 10 Rubjerg Knude and Lighthouse

    Rubjerg Knude

    Denmark57.449° N 9.774° E

    

    Rubjerg Knude is the highest point of Lønstrup Klint, a cliff of sand and clay about 15 km long on the North Sea coast of Vendsyssel, running between Lønstrup and Løkken. It rises some 60 metres above the beach, and its top is not rock but a moving landscape of dunes: wind blows sand up the face of the cliff and piles it on the plateau, so that the summit is a small desert of sand high above the sea. The cliff itself was formed in the last Ice Age, and geologists study it as a glaciotectonic complex, where the pushing ice folded and stacked the layers of sediment that the sea now cuts open.

    Did you know? The tower's 720-tonne move in October 2019 took a single day, starting at 9:15 in the morning and finishing at 14:35 the same afternoon.

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11. 11 Singing Sand Dunes

    People's Republic of China · 6.5 km from Dunhuang40.085° N 94.675° E

    

    The Singing Sand Dunes rise directly behind the oasis town of Dunhuang, at the edge of the Kumtag Desert in Gansu: a range of sharply crested dunes that stretches for about 40 km, the highest point reaching around 250 m. From the crests the view runs from pale desert to the green fields of the oasis, and in low evening light the knife-edge ridges throw long shadows across each other.

    Did you know? Singing dunes are rare: the booming effect is known from only about 35 desert sites worldwide, and the sound can reach roughly 105 decibels.

    More about Singing Sand Dunes →

12. 12 Råbjerg Mile

    Denmark · 25.1 km from Frederikshavn57.649° N 10.407° E

    

    Råbjerg Mile is a hill of bare sand that refuses to stay put. Rising to about 40 metres and covering roughly two square kilometres at the northern tip of Jutland, it is the largest migrating dune in Northern Europe and the only big wandering dune left in Denmark. Some four million cubic metres of sand began gathering on the Skagerrak shore a little over three centuries ago, and the whole mass still creeps north-east with the prevailing wind, by as much as 18 metres in a year.

    Did you know? Since the state bought it in 1900, the dune has travelled roughly 1.75 km east, and it takes about forty years to pass over any given spot.

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13. 13 Khongoryn Els

    Mongolia43.500° N 103.167° E

    

    In the south of Mongolia, Khongoryn Els lies along the foot of the Gobi Altai like a long, pale wave that has stopped in mid-motion. The dune field runs for about 100 kilometres and is up to 12 kilometres wide, its ridges typically some 80 metres high but climbing to around 300 metres at the highest crests. Against the dark, bare mountains behind it, the sand changes colour through the day from white to deep gold, and the wind keeps sharpening the crests into knife-edges that curve away in long, overlapping lines.

    Did you know? The dune field covers more than 965 square kilometres, among the largest areas of sand in Mongolia.

    More about Khongoryn Els →

14. 14 Moreeb Dune

    United Arab Emirates22.980° N 53.786° E

    

    Moreeb Dune (Tal Moreeb) is a single mountain of sand on the northern edge of the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, about 25 km south of the Liwa Oasis in the Al Dhafra region of Abu Dhabi. It rises some 300 m and runs for about 1.6 km, and its face is a slipface pitched at around 50 degrees, steep enough that loose sand pours down it in slow streams whenever the wind or a footstep disturbs the crest. It is the tallest dune in the United Arab Emirates and among the highest anywhere.

    Did you know? Its Arabic name, Tal Moreeb, is usually translated as the terrifying or scary hill.

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15. 15 Sarykum

    Russia · 21.5 km from Buynaksk43.007° N 47.229° E

    

    Sarykum is a single enormous sand dune rising out of the green foothills of Dagestan, some 18 km north-west of Makhachkala, and the sight of it — a golden, rippled ridge set among grassland and mountains near the Caspian — seems almost out of place. The dune is about 3 km long and covers around 1,175 hectares, and its summit is variously given at between 213 and 262 metres. It is the highest point of the Sarykum barchan field, lying under the northern slopes of the Narat-Tyube range on the left bank of the Shura-Ozen river.

    Did you know? Luminescence dating by the Karpinsky Geological Institute, published in 2025, suggests the dune complex began forming about 60,000 years ago.

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16. 16 Natural Monument «Singing barchans»

    Kazakhstan43.867° N 78.567° E

    

    In the steppe of south-eastern Kazakhstan, between two bare ridges called the Greater and Lesser Kalkan, a lone mountain of pale sand rises more than a hundred metres above the plain and stretches for well over a kilometre. In dry weather, when wind or footsteps set its surface sliding, the dune gives off a deep, sustained hum that observers have compared to an organ — the reason it is known as the Singing Dune, in Kazakh Aigai Kum. It stands within Altyn-Emel National Park, created in 1996 to protect the desert, mountain and archaeological landscapes of the Ili valley.

    Did you know? Sound-producing dunes are rare worldwide: booming sand is known from only about 35 desert locations, and its rumble can reach roughly 105 decibels.

    More about Natural Monument «Singing barchans» →