The Most Beautiful Fjords in the World

16 places in 7 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Geirangerfjord

   Norway62.094° N 7.081° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Geirangerfjord is a narrow blade of water, about 15 km long, cut into the mountains of Sunnmøre in western Norway. It branches off the Sunnylvsfjorden, itself an arm of the long Storfjorden, and ends at the small village of Geiranger, where the Geirangelva river runs into it. The walls rise so steeply from the water that there is almost no shoreline, and in 2005 UNESCO inscribed it together with the Nærøyfjord as the West Norwegian Fjords.

   Did you know? The Seven Sisters drop about 410 metres in total, and the tallest of the seven strands falls freely for roughly 250 metres.

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2. 02 Milford Sound / Piopiotahi

   New Zealand44.617° S 167.867° E

   

   Milford Sound / Piopiotahi is a fiord in the far southwest of New Zealand's South Island, cut by glaciers into the mountains of Fiordland and running about 15 km inland from the Tasman Sea. Its walls rise sheer from the water for 1,200 metres or more, and above them stand peaks such as the Elephant and the Lion, named for their shapes, and Mitre Peak, which climbs 1,692 metres straight out of the sound. Rudyard Kipling called it the eighth wonder of the world. The fiord lies within Fiordland National Park and the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Area.

   Did you know? Since the glacier that carved the fiord melted about 16,000 years ago, at least 16 rockfalls of more than a million cubic metres each have crashed into its waters.

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3. 03 Nærøyfjord

   Norway60.944° N 6.931° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The Nærøyfjord is the narrowest and one of the most dramatic arms of Norway's Sognefjord system: about 17 km long, down to roughly 250 metres wide at its tightest point, and walled by mountains that rise to around 1,760 metres. South of the hamlet of Bakka the fjord narrows to less than 500 metres of water, while the summits on either side are only about three kilometres apart, so the cliffs seem to lean over the boats. It branches off the Aurlandsfjord in Aurland municipality and ends at the village of Gudvangen, where the Nærøydalselvi river comes down from its valley.

   Did you know? For a fjord walled by peaks over 1,700 metres, the water is strikingly shallow: about 75 metres at most, and only around 11 metres at Bakka.

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4. 04 Lysefjord

   Norway · 39.3 km from Stavanger59.010° N 6.359° E

   

   The Lysefjord cuts 42 km into the mountains of Ryfylke, east of Stavanger, and it is narrow even by Norwegian standards: in places under two kilometres wide, with granite walls dropping almost sheer for a thousand metres. The name is usually explained as "light fjord", after the pale granite of its sides. Glaciers carved the trough during the ice ages and the sea flooded it when they retreated. At its mouth near Forsand the water is only about 13 metres deep, but inland beneath Preikestolen it plunges to more than 400 metres, so the fjord is almost as deep as its walls are high.

   Did you know? At Flørli, a wooden staircase of 4,444 steps climbs about 740 metres beside an old hydropower pipeline, billed as the longest wooden stairway in the world.

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5. 05 Ilulissat Icefjord

   Greenland69.150° N 49.550° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Ilulissat Icefjord is where one of the fastest glaciers on the planet meets the sea. Sermeq Kujalleq, also called Jakobshavn Isbræ, pushes out of the Greenland ice sheet at a rate usually measured in tens of metres per day, and the fjord it feeds carries its icebergs some 40 km west to Disko Bay. The volume is hard to picture: on the order of 20 billion tonnes of ice pass out of the fjord each year, and the glacier is credited with roughly a tenth of all the icebergs that calve from Greenland. The fjord is some 6 km wide, and its surface is often packed with ice from shore to shore.

   Did you know? Some icebergs leaving the glacier stand up to a kilometre tall, too deep to float out, so they ground on the fjord's shallows for years.

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6. 06 Trollfjord

   Norway · 22.4 km from Svolvær68.364° N 14.977° E

   

   Trollfjorden is a narrow arm of the sea only about 2 km long, cutting into the island of Austvågøya from the Raftsundet strait, and it is one of the most dramatic places on the coast of northern Norway. At the mouth it is barely 100 metres wide, opening to no more than about 400 metres inside, while the mountains on either side rise almost straight from the water to 600–900 metres — Trollfjordtindan at 830 metres to the west and Tverrdalstindan at 903 metres to the north.

   Did you know? Until about 1960 a waterfall plunged into the head of the fjord, before its water was diverted to a hydroelectric power station.

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7. 07 Western Brook Pond

   Canada49.733° N 57.767° W

   

   Western Brook Pond in Gros Morne National Park, on the west coast of Newfoundland, is a fjord that lost its sea. Glaciers of the ice ages gouged a deep trough through the Long Range Mountains, the northernmost stretch of the Appalachians. When the ice melted and the weight came off, the land slowly rose, the mouth of the fjord was lifted above sea level, and the salt water was gradually flushed out by rain and streams. What remains is a freshwater lake about 16 km long and up to 165 metres deep, closed in by near-vertical rock walls around 600 metres high.

   Did you know? The water is so slowly renewed that it takes about 15.4 years for the lake's entire volume to be flushed through.

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8. 08 Saltstraumen

   Norway · 9.5 km from Bodø67.231° N 14.614° E

   

   Four times a day, the sea tries to squeeze through a gap 150 metres wide and three kilometres long near Bodø in northern Norway — and the result is one of the strongest tidal currents in the world. Saltstraumen is the narrow strait that links the outer Saltfjorden with the large Skjerstad Fjord behind it. As the tide rises and falls, up to 400 million cubic metres of seawater race through it in about six hours, at speeds that can reach some 40 km/h, and the difference in water level between the two sides can be up to a metre. At full strength the current spins up whirlpools as much as ten metres across and five metres deep.

   Did you know? The strait's narrow mouth chokes the tide, so high and low water inside Skjerstad Fjord arrive about two hours later than in the open sea outside.

   More about Saltstraumen →

9. 09 Tracy Arm

   United States57.911° N 133.402° W

   

   Tracy Arm is a narrow glacial fjord that cuts some 45 km into the Coast Mountains of Southeast Alaska, running from Holkham Bay up to the twin tidewater fronts of the North and South Sawyer glaciers. The channel is hemmed in by steep rock walls scoured by ice, and in summer the water is thick with floating ice, from pieces the size of a hand to blue bergs as large as a three-storey building. It is one of the most dramatic stretches of water on the Inside Passage and a classic example of a young, still-working fjord.

   Did you know? On 10 August 2025 a landslide of over 60 million cubic metres fell into the fjord near South Sawyer Glacier and sent water about 481 metres up the opposite slope.

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10. 10 Doubtful Sound / Patea

    New Zealand45.345° S 167.030° E

    

    Doubtful Sound / Patea is one of the grandest of the fiords that cut into the south-western edge of New Zealand's South Island: about 40 km long, up to 2 km wide and as much as 421 metres deep, it is the second longest and the deepest of them. It owes its English name to James Cook, who sailed past in 1770 and, unsure whether he could get his ship back out against the wind, called it "Doubtful Harbour"; sealers and whalers later made it a sound. A Spanish expedition in 1793 left names still on the map — Malaspina Reach, Bauza Island, Febrero Point — and since 1998 the fiord officially carries its Māori name Patea as well.

    Did you know? Its bottlenose dolphins form an isolated group of around 70 animals that monitoring over several years never saw leave the fiord.

    More about Doubtful Sound / Patea →

11. 11 Paradise Harbour

    64.817° S 62.867° W

    

    Paradise Harbour is a sheltered embayment on the Danco Coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, cut into the western side of Graham Land between Duthiers Point and Leniz Point. Bryde Island and Lemaire Island close it off from the open water to the west, so the bay is calm more often than the channels around it, and the water mirrors the peaks and ice walls that rise on every side. Whalers working these waters in the early twentieth century gave it its name, which was already in use by 1920 — a rare moment of tenderness in a nomenclature full of capes and dangers.

    Did you know? In April 1984 the doctor at Argentina's Brown Station, ordered to stay through the winter, set the base on fire; the staff were evacuated by the US ship Hero.

    More about Paradise Harbour →

12. 12 Tasermiut Fjord

    Greenland60.270° N 44.780° W

    

    Tasermiut Fjord cuts some 70 km into the mountains of southernmost Greenland, and few places on the island pack so much vertical granite into a single view. Walls and spires stand on both sides of the water, the fjord ends at a retreating glacier, and in its valleys grow some of the very few stands of low trees anywhere in Greenland.

    Did you know? In Norse times the fjord was known as Ketilsfjord and formed part of the medieval Eastern Settlement of Greenland's Viking-age colonists.

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13. 13 Elphinstone Inlet

    Oman26.208° N 56.350° E

    

    On the Musandam Peninsula, the rocky tip of Arabia that juts into the Strait of Hormuz, the sea runs deep into the mountains along Elphinstone Inlet, known in Arabic as Khor ash Sham. The inlet stretches about 16 km inland between bare limestone walls that rise to 1,000–1,250 metres, so that the calm turquoise water feels more like a Norwegian fjord transplanted into the desert. The landscape is the product of plate tectonics: Musandam lies at the edge of the Arabian Plate, which is sliding beneath the Eurasian Plate, and at its northern tip the peninsula is being pushed down by about 6 mm a year.

    Did you know? A popular story claims that the phrase going round the bend was born here, from heat-crazed telegraph staff longing to sail round the Strait of Hormuz back to India.

    More about Elphinstone Inlet →

14. 14 Kangiqtualuk Uqquqti

    Canada70.501° N 71.148° W

    

    Kangiqtualuk Uqquqti is one of the most dramatic fjords of the Arctic: a narrow arm of sea pushing more than 100 km into north-eastern Baffin Island between granite walls that rise almost straight from the water to heights of up to 1,500 m. The fjord is known for its glaciers, and towers and spires of bare rock line both shores, making it one of the great big-wall climbing destinations on the planet.

    Did you know? The north face of Polar Sun Spire, about 1,350 metres high, was first climbed in 1996 by Jeff Chapman, Warren Hollinger and Mark Synnott over 39 days.

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15. 15 Fiordo di Furore

    Italy · 19.7 km from Salerno40.614° N 14.554° E

    

    The Fiordo di Furore is a narrow cleft in the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast, so deep and so tight that the sea seems to run straight into the mountain. At its mouth a tiny pebble beach lies between walls of rock, and high above it a single arch carries the Amalfi Drive, state road SS163, across the gap at a height of about 30 metres. Despite the name it is not a true fjord, which would be carved by ice, but a ria: a valley cut over millennia by the Schiato torrent tumbling down from the Lattari Mountains around Agerola, then drowned by the sea.

    Did you know? Furore is nicknamed 'il paese che non c'è', the village that isn't there, because it cannot be seen from the coast below.

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16. 16 Saguenay Fjord

    Canada · 36.2 km from Rivière-du-Loup48.132° N 69.727° W

    

    For about 105 km before it meets the St. Lawrence, the Saguenay River flows through a true fjord — a trench gouged by ice, two to four kilometres wide, walled by cliffs that average 150 metres and in places rise to 350, and filled with water averaging 210 metres deep. It is one of the most southerly fjords in the Northern Hemisphere, and the sheer scale of its rock walls is what gives it its force.

    Did you know? The statue of Notre-Dame-du-Saguenay on Cap Trinité, carved by Louis Jobin in 1881, is made of white pine sheathed in lead and stands about 9 metres tall.

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