The Most Beautiful Forests in the World

14 places in 10 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Arashiyama Bamboo Grove

   Japan · 7.8 km from Kyoto35.009° N 135.667° E

   

   On the western edge of Kyoto, behind the temples of Arashiyama, a narrow path runs for a few hundred metres through a dense stand of giant bamboo. The stems are mōsō bamboo, the largest of the species grown in Japan, and they rise straight and close on both sides of the lane until their crowns meet overhead. What reaches the ground is filtered green light, and a sound: the stalks knock and creak against each other in the wind and the leaves hiss high above. Japan's Ministry of the Environment has counted it among the country's notable soundscapes, which is a rare honour for a place most people know only from photographs.

   Did you know? In 1996 a national study group chose the bamboo forest of Kyoto as one of the 100 Soundscapes of Japan, out of 738 nominations.

   More about Arashiyama Bamboo Grove →

2. 02 Amazon rainforest

   Floresta amazônica

   Brazil · 7.5 km from Manaus3.160° S 60.030° W

   

   Manaus sits at a junction that looks wrong even once you know why it happens. The dark, tea-coloured Rio Negro and the pale, sediment-heavy Amazon (locally the Solimões) meet just outside the city and, for several kilometres, run side by side in the same channel without mixing — a visible line down the middle of the river — because the two flows differ enough in temperature, density and speed that they resist blending. Boat operators run tours specifically to put you exactly on that seam.

   Did you know? The forest holds an estimated 390 billion individual trees belonging to around 16,000 species.

   More about Amazon rainforest →

3. 03 Crooked Forest

   Krzywy Las

   Poland · 23.3 km from Szczecin53.214° N 14.475° E

   

   In a plantation of Scots pines near the village of Nowe Czarnowo, a few kilometres south of Gryfino in north-western Poland, a whole group of trees has grown in the same impossible way. Just above the ground each trunk swings sharply sideways, almost at a right angle, runs nearly horizontal for up to a couple of metres, and then curves back up to rise straight and tall like any other pine. All of them bend in the same direction, to the north, so that walking among them feels like standing in a field of question marks, or in a stand of trees frozen in the middle of a bow.

   Did you know? The bend starts only about 20 cm above the ground, and in some trees the crooked section reaches as high as 3 metres.

   More about Crooked Forest →

4. 04 Laurisilva of Madeira

   Floresta Laurissilva na Madeira

   Portugal · 17.1 km from Funchal32.767° N 17.000° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Millions of years ago, forests of evergreen laurel-type trees covered much of southern Europe; the ice ages and a drying climate wiped them out on the continent, and they survived only on a few Atlantic islands. Madeira holds the largest remaining stand. Around 15,000 hectares of laurisilva still clothe the island, mostly on the steep, wet northern slopes, and roughly nine-tenths of it is primary forest, with trees up to 800 years old that were growing before Portuguese settlers arrived after 1420. Fossil records show laurel forest has grown on the island for at least 1.8 million years. UNESCO inscribed it as a natural World Heritage Site in 1999.

   Did you know? Madeira means wood in Portuguese, the name settlers gave the island for the dense laurel forest that covered it.

   More about Laurisilva of Madeira →

5. 05 Tongass National Forest

   United States56.750° N 133.000° W

   

   The Tongass is less a forest than a whole coastline. It covers almost the entire Alaska Panhandle, nearly 17 million acres of islands, fjords, icefields and mountains along the Pacific, and it is by far the largest national forest in the United States, bigger than several US states. Most of its wooded land is temperate rainforest of Sitka spruce, western hemlock and western red cedar, soaked by rain off the Gulf of Alaska, and it is regarded as the largest intact temperate rainforest left on Earth.

   Did you know? The Tongass is the largest national forest in the United States, covering nearly 17 million acres.

   More about Tongass National Forest →

6. 06 Dancing Forest

   Russia55.180° N 20.862° E

   

   The Dancing Forest is a stand of pines on the Russian part of the Curonian Spit whose trunks twist, loop and coil as though the trees had frozen mid-movement. Some bend into rings, others spiral close to the ground before turning upwards, and a few have grown into shapes that visitors read as hearts. The site lies at kilometre 37 of the road along the spit, near the village of Rybachy, on a dune known as Kruglaya ("round") that stands apart from the main ridge of dunes along the lagoon shore.

   Did you know? The pine shoot moth blamed for the twisting, Rhyacionia buoliana, mainly attacks young pines between about five and twenty years old.

   More about Dancing Forest →

7. 07 Cocora Valley

   Valle de Cocora

   Colombia · 24.4 km from Armenia4.637° N 75.487° W

   

   The Cocora Valley is the place to see Colombia's national tree in its own landscape. On green, cattle-grazed slopes of the Central Cordillera, between about 1,800 and 2,400 metres above sea level, stand groves of Quindío wax palms, Ceroxylon quindiuense, the tallest palms on Earth. Their trunks, pale and ringed, rise bare for 45 metres and more before ending in a small tuft of fronds, so that the trees look like pins stuck into the hillside, often with wisps of cloud drifting between them. The effect is strange and dreamlike: a palm grove in the cool, misty mountains, far from any beach.

   Did you know? The valley is said to take its name from Cocora, a Quimbaya princess and daughter of the local chief Acaime; the name is usually translated as star of water.

   More about Cocora Valley →

8. 08 Quiver Tree Forest

   Namibia · 14.9 km from Keetmanshoop26.480° S 18.237° E

   

   The Quiver Tree Forest is not a forest at all. The "trees" are giant aloes, Aloidendron dichotomum, succulents that grow into thick-trunked, many-branched shapes on the stony plains of southern Namibia, and here about 250 of them stand together on the Gariganus farm, an unusually dense gathering of a plant that normally grows scattered across the desert. Their trunks are covered in golden, flaking bark, their branches fork again and again into rounded crowns, and each branch ends in a rosette of grey-green, fleshy leaves. Seen against a hard blue sky, they look more like sculpture than vegetation.

   Did you know? Quiver trees are common across southern Africa, but natural stands dense enough to be called forests are rare.

   More about Quiver Tree Forest →

9. 09 Hoh Rainforest

   United States47.861° N 123.925° W

   

   The Hoh Rainforest on the western side of the Olympic Peninsula is one of the few places in the temperate world where a forest looks the way the word "primeval" suggests. Rain arrives off the Pacific in quantities that are hard to picture — around 140 inches a year on average, among the highest totals anywhere in the continental United States — and the whole valley of the Hoh River has turned that water into biomass. Sitka spruce and western hemlock dominate, some of them over 300 feet tall, with western red cedar, Douglas-fir and bigleaf maple among them. What stops people in their tracks, though, is not the height of the trees but what grows on them.

   Did you know? In some years up to 12 feet of precipitation falls here, enough to make it one of the wettest places in the contiguous United States.

   More about Hoh Rainforest →

10. 10 Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest

    United States · 19.2 km from Bishop37.386° N 118.179° W

    

    High on the dry eastern slope of California's White Mountains, between about 3,000 and 3,400 metres, grow some of the oldest living trees on Earth. The Great Basin bristlecone pines of this forest are twisted, half-stripped of bark and polished by wind and sand into shapes closer to driftwood than timber, yet some are still alive after four or five thousand years. Their longevity owes much to the very harshness of the place: severe weather and scarce nutrients slow both growth and the processes of decay.

    Did you know? In the oldest trees most of the living tissue has died back, and often only a narrow strip of living tissue still connects the roots to a few living branches.

    More about Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest →

11. 11 Wistman's Wood

    United Kingdom · 26.3 km from Plymouth50.583° N 3.959° W

    

    High on Dartmoor, in the valley of the West Dart river, a small grove of oaks grows out of a jumble of moss-covered granite boulders. The trees of Wistman's Wood are dwarfed and twisted, with trunks that creep sideways across the rocks and branches draped in mosses, lichens and ferns, so that the whole wood looks barely touched since prehistory. It is one of Britain's best-known fragments of temperate rainforest and one of only three high-altitude oakwoods left on Dartmoor, lying at about 380 to 410 metres above sea level.

    Did you know? In 1866 Wentworth Buller felled one of the oaks to find out its age, counting about 168 rings; a boulder east of the wood, the Buller Stone, records the attempt.

    More about Wistman's Wood →

12. 12 Hallerbos

    Belgium · 14.4 km from Brussels50.708° N 4.295° E

    

    For most of the year the Hallerbos is a pleasant, well-kept beech wood on the edge of the Brussels commuter belt. For two or three weeks between late April and mid-May it becomes something else entirely: wild bluebells open across the forest floor before the beech canopy has fully closed, and the ground under the smooth grey trunks turns a continuous violet-blue that runs up the slopes and into the hollows as far as the eye can follow. The effect depends on timing and light – the leaves overhead are still a thin, bright green, so the whole wood seems lit from below by the flowers.

    Did you know? In 1648 Philip IV of Spain pledged Halle and its forest to the Duke of Arenberg for a loan; the unpaid debt won the duke two-thirds of the wood.

    More about Hallerbos →

13. 13 Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park

    United States · 8.7 km from Crescent City41.782° N 124.101° W

    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, in the far north-west corner of California, holds some of the most untouched old-growth coast redwood forest left on Earth. The park covers roughly 42 square kilometres along the Smith River, and most of it is redwood forest, much of it never logged. Unlike the drier, sunnier groves further south, this is a wet, dim, cathedral-like forest: huge trunks rising out of a green, fern-covered floor, with fallen giants slowly returning to the soil.

    Did you know? The Grove of Titans, hidden in a side valley of the park, was only recognised by scientists on 11 May 1998, by botanist Stephen Sillett and naturalist Michael Taylor.

    More about Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park →

14. 14 Shiratani Unsui Gorge

    Japan30.380° N 130.574° E

    

    Water, granite and moss shape everything in Shiratani Unsuikyo, a forested gorge in the north of Yakushima, the island off the southern tip of Kyushu. The Shiratani River, a tributary of the Miyanoura, runs over smooth granite boulders and through deep pools, while the forest around it is so wet that rocks, roots and fallen trunks disappear under a continuous green carpet of moss and ferns. Yakushima is one of the rainiest places in Japan, with an often-quoted local saying that it rains thirty-five days a month: the weather station on the island's lowland coast averages around 4,500 mm a year, and a rain gauge at the entrance to the gorge has recorded considerably more, over 10,000 mm in 2004.

    Did you know? More than 550 species of moss have been recorded in the gorge, which is why rocks and fallen trunks vanish under green carpets.

    More about Shiratani Unsui Gorge →