The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in the World
232 places in 66 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in the world are Plitvice Lakes National Park (Croatia), Jiuzhaigou Valley (People's Republic of China) and Arashiyama Bamboo Grove (Japan). The list covers 232 gardens, parks and forests in 66 countries. The United States has the most, with 25. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Living places are beautiful in a different way from stone ones: they grow, flower, change colour with the seasons and are never quite the same twice. A great garden is a design held in place by constant care, with water, shade and geometry arranged to be walked through. A great park or forest works at the opposite scale, protecting whole valleys, herds and old trees from change. In between are the landscapes people have shaped by hand over centuries, such as terraced rice fields that follow every contour of a hill.
Among the places here is the Fin Garden in Kashan, a Persian garden of channels, pools and cypresses laid out in the Safavid era. The Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden, founded in 1808, is known for its avenue of imperial palms. Kyoto's Arashiyama Bamboo Grove closes over its path like a green corridor, while on Lanzarote the Jardín de Cactus was shaped by César Manrique in a former quarry. Yellowstone, the first national park in the world, and the Longji Rice Terraces in Guangxi show the range from wild to cultivated.
The places here were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the section also opens into separate pages by country and by type, from historic gardens to forests and remarkable trees.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 2 | Jiuzhaigou Valley | National park | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 3 | Arashiyama Bamboo Grove | Forest | Japan | |
| 4 | Avenue of the Baobabs | Remarkable tree | Madagascar | |
| 5 | Wulingyuan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 6 | Keukenhof | Botanical garden | Kingdom of the Netherlands | |
| 7 | Banff National Park | Protected area | Canada | |
| 8 | Gardens by the Bay | Urban park | Singapore | |
| 9 | Fiordland National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 10 | Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park | Forest | United States | |
| 11 | Yellowstone National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 12 | Ngorongoro Conservation Area | Protected area | Tanzania | ✓ |
| 13 | Serengeti National Park | National park | Tanzania | ✓ |
| 14 | Monument Valley | Protected area | United States | |
| 15 | Masai Mara | Protected area | Kenya | |
| 16 | Ha Long Bay | Protected area | Vietnam | |
| 17 | Park Güell | Urban park | Spain | ✓ |
| 18 | General Sherman | Remarkable tree | United States | |
| 19 | Etosha National Park | Protected area | Namibia | |
| 20 | Kakadu National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 21 | Bryce Canyon National Park | National park | United States | |
| 22 | Viñales Valley | Protected area | Cuba | |
| 23 | Namib-Naukluft National Park | National park | Namibia | |
| 24 | Bardenas Reales | Protected area | Spain | |
| 25 | Boboli Gardens | Historic garden | Italy | ✓ |
| 26 | Valley of Flowers National Park | National park | India | ✓ |
| 27 | Amboseli National Park | National park | Kenya | |
| 28 | Gros Morne National Park | National park | Canada | ✓ |
| 29 | Huanglong | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 30 | Fin Garden | Historic garden | Iran |
01 Plitvice Lakes National Park
Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera
Croatia44.880° N 15.616° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Hobbyfotography from Pixabay That means the landscape people photograph is never finished; it's mid-construction, permanently. The famous shifts in the water's colour — turquoise, green, grey, depending on mineral content, sunlight angle and the season — come from exactly the same chemistry that's building the barriers, which is part of why the colour looks different every time someone visits rather than being some kind of seasonal trick.
Did you know? The upper lakes lie on dolomite bedrock, while the lower lakes sit in a limestone canyon.
02 Jiuzhaigou Valley
People's Republic of China33.200° N 103.900° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by HI-MXWG from Pixabay That seismic origin isn't just history; it's ongoing risk the park has had to live with directly. In August 2017, a magnitude-7 earthquake tore through the region and damaged several of the valley's signature features, including draining much of the water from what had been one of its clearest pools — the same kind of violent, sudden geology that built the place in the first place came back to reshape it.
Did you know? The valley is one of only three places in the world where the threatened Duke of Bedford's vole is known to live.
03 Arashiyama Bamboo Grove
Japan · 7.8 km from Kyoto35.009° N 135.667° E
Naokijp · CC BY-SA 4.0 The grove belongs to Sagano, the old district at the foot of the western hills, and it is woven into a landscape of temples and villas rather than standing alone as a forest.
Did you know? Neighbouring Tenryū-ji was founded in 1339 by the shogun Ashikaga Takauji to honour the memory of Emperor Go-Daigo, his former enemy.
04 Avenue of the Baobabs
Madagascar · 14.6 km from Morondava20.251° S 44.418° E
Hiroki Ogawa · CC BY 3.0 The name is apt, because these baobabs are survivors rather than an avenue that anyone planted. They are the last remnants of the dense dry forest that once covered the Menabe region; as the land around them was cleared for farming, the baobabs were spared, and they now stand in open, flat country with nothing to hide their silhouettes. Many of them are thought to be more than 800 years old.
Did you know? The white flowers open around dusk and are pollinated by fork-marked lemurs, which push their snouts in to drink nectar, and by hawk moths.
05 Wulingyuan
People's Republic of China29.346° N 110.467° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Vined from Pixabay The pillars were shaped over hundreds of millions of years: the sandstone was laid down in the Devonian period and then lifted by tectonic forces, and erosion by water carved it into separate columns. The scenic area covers about 690 square kilometres of the Wuling Mountains and is made up of four parts: Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, the Suoxi Valley and Tianzi Mountain nature reserves, and the more recently added Yangjiajie.
Did you know? Roughly the lower half of the Bailong Elevator shaft is buried inside the cliff, while the upper part is an exposed steel frame.
06 Keukenhof
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 13.6 km from Haarlem52.269° N 4.547° E
Image by baruya from Pixabay The ground has a long past. In the fifteenth century it belonged to the hunting grounds of Countess Jacoba of Bavaria, and its herb and vegetable plots supplied her castle kitchen, which is what the name Keukenhof, "kitchen garden", recalls.
Did you know? In 2025 about 1.4 million people came, some 26,500 a day, more than three times the daily attendance of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum.
07 Banff National Park
Canada · 2 km from Banff51.167° N 115.550° W
Image by NUNZG from Pixabay The lakes are what people come for. Lake Louise, with the Chateau Lake Louise hotel at one end and a glacier at the other, and Moraine Lake, about 15 km away beneath the Valley of the Ten Peaks, are among the most photographed views in Canada.
Did you know? The elk now common around the town descend in part from 57 animals brought in from Yellowstone National Park in 1917.
08 Gardens by the Bay
Singapore · 1.8 km from Singapore1.283° N 103.865° E
Shiny Things . · CC BY 2.0 The whole 101-hectare park sits on land that didn't exist a few decades ago — reclaimed from the sea as part of Singapore's long-running program of expanding its usable land area, and given over entirely to a garden rather than housing or industry, which for a small island nation with some of the highest land values on earth is itself a statement of priorities.
Did you know? The Cloud Forest recreates the cool, moist climate of tropical mountains between 1,000 and 3,000 metres above sea level.
09 Fiordland National Park
New Zealand45.386° S 167.347° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay That rain does something specific underwater that most visitors never see. Runoff stained brown by forest tannins settles into a layer up to 10 metres deep on top of the denser seawater, and that dark layer filters sunlight so effectively that light conditions at 10 metres underwater match what you'd normally find at 70 metres in the open ocean.
Did you know? Captain James Cook named Dusky Sound Dusky Bay in 1770 and later sheltered there with HMS Resolution on his second voyage.
10 Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park
United States · 8.7 km from Crescent City41.782° N 124.101° W
- UNESCO natural beauty
Chris Rycroft from Madison, Wisconsin, United States · CC BY 2.0 The Smith River, which runs through the park, is California's last major undammed river, and its clear green water is part of the beauty here. At the confluence of Mill Creek and the Smith lies Stout Memorial Grove, where an easy loop of under a kilometre winds among trees of enormous girth on a flat river terrace.
Did you know? Richard Preston's 2007 book The Wild Trees described the grove but kept its location secret to protect it from crowds.
11 Yellowstone National Park
United States44.600° N 110.500° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- biosphere reserve
James St. John from Newark, Ohio · CC BY 2.0 That it needed protecting at all says something about what's underneath it. Yellowstone sits on top of one of the largest active volcanic systems on Earth, and the geothermal features scattered across the park — geysers, hot springs, mudpots, fumaroles — aren't a curiosity on the side, they're most of the reason the place exists as a park in the first place: it holds well over half of all the geysers on the planet.
Did you know? The ground is restless: Yellowstone records 1,000 to 3,000 small earthquakes a year.
12 Ngorongoro Conservation Area
Tanzania · 8 km from Ngorongoro3.210° S 35.460° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
James Wagner · CC BY-SA 4.0 About 25,000 large animals live on the crater floor, mostly grazers: buffalo, wildebeest, zebra, eland and gazelles. Lions live here at one of the highest densities known. The crater's black rhino population fell from over a hundred in the 1960s to 13 in 1993, and protection programmes had brought it back to about 55 by 2018. Some familiar savannah species are missing, including giraffe, impala and topi.
Did you know? In 1962 a plague of blood-sucking stable flies left the crater's lions covered in infected sores, and their numbers crashed from 75–100 to just 12.
13 Serengeti National Park
Tanzania2.400° S 34.600° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Giles Laurent · CC BY-SA 4.0 Where you see the herds depends on the month. Around half a million calves are born on the short-grass plains of the south, largely inside Ngorongoro's borders, between January and March. As the dry season sets in the herds turn north and west, passing through the Western Corridor in April and May, where they must cross the Grumeti River.
Did you know? African wild dogs vanished from the Serengeti in 1991 and were brought back to the area in 2012.
14 Monument Valley
United States36.983° N 110.100° W
Image by ArtTower from Pixabay The shapes are a lesson in layered geology. At the bottom is soft Organ Rock Shale, which weathers into the sloping aprons; above it sits the thick, cliff-forming de Chelly Sandstone that makes the sheer faces; and many summits are protected by a hard cap of Shinarump conglomerate over Moenkopi beds. Where the cap survives, a butte keeps its flat top; where it has gone, the sandstone is whittled down into spires.
Did you know? Besides Stagecoach and The Searchers, John Ford also filmed Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon against these buttes.
15 Masai Mara
Kenya1.490° S 35.140° E
Image by sprinter1973 from Pixabay What the Mara is actually known for is the river crossing, the single most dramatic act in the wider Serengeti–Mara migration. Between roughly July and October, well over a million wildebeest, along with hundreds of thousands of zebra and gazelle, funnel toward the Mara River and throw themselves into water thick with crocodiles, while lions, hyenas, and cheetahs work the banks on either side.
Did you know? The reserve began in 1961 as a wildlife sanctuary of just 520 square kilometres, was enlarged the same year, and later trimmed to about 1,510 square kilometres.
16 Ha Long Bay
Vietnam · 12.4 km from Hạ Long20.900° N 107.200° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xuanduongvan87 from Pixabay The scenery is the drowned end of a karst landscape. The rock itself is hundreds of millions of years old, but the shapes are the work of roughly twenty million years of tropical rain dissolving it: clusters of cone-shaped hills in some parts of the bay, isolated towers standing alone in others. When sea levels rose, the valleys between them filled with water, leaving the summits as islands. Rain and waves have also hollowed out caves.
Did you know? Dau Be island at the mouth of the bay encloses six lakes inside its karst, including the Ba Ham lakes.
17 Park Güell
Spain · 4 km from Barcelona41.414° N 2.153° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nikolaus_bader from Pixabay The one house that did sell went to Gaudí himself, who lived there with his father and niece for close to twenty years — meaning the architect spent much of his later career living inside his own unsold real estate project.
Did you know? The mushroom-like dome of the entrance lodge is ribbed with upturned coffee cups, and neither gatehouse contains a single right angle.
18 General Sherman
United States36.582° N 118.751° W
Roman Tokman · CC BY-SA 4.0 Standing at its foot is less about reading numbers than about losing a sense of scale. The trunk rises almost without taper, a column of reddish bark, and the crown is so high above that it is hard to take in. In January 2006 the tree dropped its biggest branch, a limb more than 2 m thick and over 30 m long, which smashed part of the fence and cratered the paved path around the base; nobody saw it fall.
Did you know? The Kaweah colonists picked the Karl Marx name partly in protest at Sherman's role in the Indian Wars and the forced removal of Native tribes.
19 Etosha National Park
Namibia18.785° S 16.264° E
Thomas Schoch · CC BY-SA 3.0 Etosha was proclaimed a game reserve in 1907 under the German colonial governor Friedrich von Lindequist, when its limits reached all the way to the Atlantic coast; it was cut back several times and received its present boundaries in 1970. The fort at Namutoni recalls the colonial past more directly: a German post of 1889 that was destroyed in 1904 by the fighters of King Nehale Mpingana and later rebuilt, it is now one of the park's rest camps.
Did you know? African buffalo and African wild dogs have been gone from the park since the middle of the 20th century.
20 Kakadu National Park
Australia13.005° S 132.520° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Squirrel_photos from Pixabay The rock art is the heart of that cultural value. More than 5,000 art sites are recorded, painted over thousands of years in the rock shelters of the escarpment and its outliers, and they are among the finest bodies of Aboriginal rock art in Australia.
21 Bryce Canyon National Park
United States37.640° N 112.170° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay The park lies high, with its rim at about 2,400 to 2,700 m, and its rim looks out over the Paria valley to the Kaiparowits Plateau. An 18-mile (29 km) scenic drive runs south along the rim to Rainbow Point, the highest spot at 2,775 m, and on clear days the view from there and from Yovimpa Point reaches Navajo Mountain and the Kaibab Plateau in Arizona, about 145 km away.
Did you know? Bryce Canyon Lodge was built in 1924 and 1925 from local timber and stone and is now a National Historic Landmark of 1920s park architecture.
22 Viñales Valley
Valle de Viñales
Cuba · 22.1 km from Pinar del Rio22.617° N 83.717° W
Image by madfab from Pixabay It is also a working landscape. The valley lies in the Sierra de los Órganos in Pinar del Río, the province that grows Cuba's finest tobacco, and farmers here still work in traditional ways: ploughing with oxen, planting and harvesting by hand, and curing the leaves in wooden drying houses that stand among the fields. Growers hold that this labour-intensive method produces better tobacco than machines would.
Did you know? The Cuban trogon, the national bird, whose red, white and blue plumage matches the colours of the Cuban flag, is found in the valley's forests.
23 Namib-Naukluft National Park
Namibia24.546° S 15.330° E
Image by pvdberg from Pixabay The heart of the park for most visitors is the sea of dunes around Sossusvlei, a clay pan hemmed in by some of the tallest dunes in the world, in places more than 300 metres high. Their colour is the result of iron oxide coating the grains, and the older the dune, the deeper its orange and red.
Did you know? The Tsauchab reaches the Sossusvlei pan only rarely; years can pass between floods that turn it into a lake.
24 Bardenas Reales
Spain42.190° N 1.500° W
Image by alterRPC from Pixabay The most spectacular part is the Bardena Blanca in the centre, named for the pale, salt-crusted gypsum soils. Here the erosion is most intense, and hard caps of sandstone protect softer clay beneath, leaving isolated pillars. The best known is Castildetierra, a slender chimney of clay under a sandstone lid that has become the emblem of the region and the textbook example of how the badlands form.
Did you know? Beneath the gullies lie roughly four kilometres of sediment laid down in the closed Ebro basin, which only broke through to the Mediterranean about ten million years ago.
25 Boboli Gardens
Giardino di Boboli
Italy · 1.6 km from Florence43.765° N 11.250° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by psychographism from Pixabay The main axis climbs straight up from the palace. First comes the amphitheatre, dug into the slope and later lined with stone, with an ancient Egyptian obelisk brought from the Medici villa in Rome at its centre. Above it a double ramp leads to the Fountain of Neptune, made by Stoldo Lorenzi in the 1560s; its basin once doubled as the reservoir for the aqueduct that carried spring water down to the city.
Did you know? Expanded in the 17th century, the gardens cover about 45,000 square metres of hillside.
26 Valley of Flowers National Park
India30.730° N 79.618° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- biosphere reserve
Naresh Chandra · CC BY-SA 4.0 The outside world learned of it by accident. In 1931 the British mountaineers Frank Smythe, Eric Shipton and R. L. Holdsworth lost their way returning from Kamet and came down into a valley full of flowers; Smythe gave it its English name and wrote a book about it. In 1939 the botanist Joan Margaret Legge, sent by Kew Gardens, fell to her death while collecting plants on its slopes, and her sister later put up a memorial near the spot.
Did you know? A Forest Research Institute survey in 1992 counted about 600 flowering plant species and 30 ferns in the valley and its surroundings.
27 Amboseli National Park
Kenya2.650° S 37.250° E
Image by herbert2512 from Pixabay The contrast between water and dust is the key to the place. Much of the park is the bed of an old Pleistocene lake, pale and cracked for most of the year, while a chain of swamps stays green through the driest months. Their water comes from Kilimanjaro itself: meltwater and rain seep through the volcanic rock of the mountain and resurface as springs to the north, feeding the Enkongo Narok and Longinye swamps.
Did you know? Because poaching here has been comparatively low, Amboseli's elephants keep an age structure close to natural, unusual among African populations.
28 Gros Morne National Park
Canada49.689° N 57.738° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Canadian-Nature-Visions from Pixabay The Tablelands, between Trout River and Woody Point, are the most startling sight. They are made of peridotite, a rock from the Earth's mantle so poor in nutrients and so rich in toxic metals that almost nothing grows on it. The result, in the middle of green Newfoundland, is a bare, rust-brown plateau that looks like a desert; underneath the weathered crust, the rock is dark green.
Did you know? Here the boundary between Earth's crust and mantle, the Mohorovičić discontinuity, lies exposed at the surface, a site recognised by the International Union of Geological Sciences.
29 Huanglong
People's Republic of China32.741° N 103.831° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by ymyphoto from Pixabay The pools are the spectacle. Depending on depth, algae and light, the water shifts from turquoise and emerald to deep blue, amber and pale yellow, and the terrace walls themselves glint gold. The largest set, the Five-Colour Pools near the head of the valley at around 3,500 metres, packs hundreds of small basins into one hillside beneath snowy peaks.
Did you know? The Danyun Gorge, more than 1,000 metres deep, carries snowmelt from Mount Xuebaoding that feeds much of the area's water.
30 Fin Garden
Iran · 19.5 km from Kashan33.946° N 51.373° E
Fabienkhan · CC BY-SA 2.5 The source of all this is the Soleymaniyeh spring, fed by a qanat whose mother well lies some two kilometres upstream. The spring delivers an average of some 350 litres a second, enough to keep every channel, pool and jet of the garden running, and its steady murmur is the garden's real soundtrack. At the centre stands the pavilion, the kushk, the place from which the axes of water and trees are best read.
Did you know? The Kashan museum in its western section displays finds from Tepe Sialk, one of Iran's oldest settlements, as well as Chogha Zanbil and Hasanlu.
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 is the most beautiful garden in the world?
- Among gardens on our list, Boboli Gardens (Italy) ranks first, followed by Fin Garden (Iran) and Generalife (Spain).
- What was the first national park in the world?
- Yellowstone National Park in the United States, established in 1872, is generally regarded as the first national park in the world.
- Which country has the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (25), Spain (19) and Japan (18).
- What is a Persian garden?
- A Persian garden is an enclosed garden traditionally divided into four parts by water channels, a plan known as chahar bagh. Nine Iranian examples, including the Fin Garden, are inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
- How many gardens, parks and forests are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 232 gardens, parks and forests in 66 countries. The United States has the most, with 25.