The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in North America
39 places in 7 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in North America are Yellowstone National Park (United States), Monument Valley (United States) and Banff National Park (Canada). The list covers 39 gardens, parks and forests in 7 countries. The United States has the most, with 25. Last updated 14 October 2026.
North America invented the national park, and it had the landscapes to justify the idea: plateaus of red sandstone cut into canyons and buttes, a supervolcano under the Rockies, and Pacific forests with the largest trees on earth. Further south, karst valleys and tropical forest add a different kind of scenery, while the continent's cities answered with great public parks of their own.
Yellowstone, set aside in 1872, sits on top of a volcanic hotspot that feeds its geysers and hot springs. On the Colorado Plateau, Monument Valley raises sandstone buttes from the desert floor, Bryce Canyon is a natural amphitheatre filled with orange hoodoos, Zion is carved deep into pale and red cliffs, and the Grand Canyon exposes nearly two billion years of rock. In California's Sierra Nevada, the General Sherman tree in Sequoia National Park is the largest single-stem tree known by volume.
Canada brings Banff, its first national park, with glacial lakes under the Rockies, and Gros Morne in Newfoundland, where rock from the earth's mantle lies exposed on the surface. In Cuba the Viñales Valley spreads tobacco fields between steep limestone hills called mogotes. And two city parks hold their own here: Central Park, designed by Olmsted and Vaux in the middle of Manhattan, and Stanley Park in Vancouver, a peninsula of forest almost surrounded by the sea.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yellowstone National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 2 | Monument Valley | Protected area | United States | |
| 3 | Banff National Park | Protected area | Canada | |
| 4 | General Sherman | Remarkable tree | United States | |
| 5 | Bryce Canyon National Park | National park | United States | |
| 6 | Viñales Valley | Protected area | Cuba | |
| 7 | Gros Morne National Park | National park | Canada | ✓ |
| 8 | Central Park | Urban park | United States | |
| 9 | Zion National Park | National park | United States | |
| 10 | Stanley Park | Urban park | Canada | |
| 11 | Sequoia National Park | National park | United States | |
| 12 | Grand Canyon National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 13 | Yosemite National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 14 | Sumidero Canyon | Canyon | Mexico | |
| 15 | Actun Tunichil Muknal | Cave | Belize | |
| 16 | Badlands National Park | National park | United States | |
| 17 | Goosenecks State Park | Protected area | United States | |
| 18 | Canyon de Chelly National Monument | Canyon | United States | |
| 19 | Árbol del Tule | Remarkable tree | Mexico | |
| 20 | Grizzly Giant | Remarkable tree | United States | |
| 21 | Lone Cypress | Remarkable tree | United States | |
| 22 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | United States | |
| 23 | Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park | Protected area | Canada | |
| 24 | Tongass National Forest | Forest | United States | |
| 25 | Marieta Islands | National park | Mexico | |
| 26 | Mesa Verde National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 27 | General Grant Tree | Remarkable tree | United States | |
| 28 | Butchart Gardens | Historic garden | Canada | |
| 29 | Semuc Champey | River | Guatemala | |
| 30 | Angel Oak | Remarkable tree | United States |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 Central Park
United States · 7.2 km from New York City40.782° N 73.966° W
Image by Josmanu1970 from Pixabay What the tidy Greensward plan doesn't advertise is what stood there before construction started. A settlement called Seneca Village occupied the land between what's now West 82nd and West 89th Streets — roughly 225 residents, two-thirds of them African American landowners, along with Irish immigrant families, with their own church and school, thirty-two years into a stable community.
Did you know? The Angel of the Waters on Bethesda Fountain, unveiled in 1873, made Emma Stebbins the first woman commissioned for a major public artwork in New York City.
09 Zion National Park
United States37.203° N 112.988° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Pexels from Pixabay Long before it was a park, it was a landscape with a name problem. Mormon pioneers who settled the area in the 1860s and 70s named it "Zion," the biblical term for a place of refuge, but not everyone agreed it deserved the name — one prominent local dissenter is said to have insisted it should be called "Not Zion," on the grounds that no ordinary canyon, however striking, should claim a name reserved for paradise.
Did you know? In 2014 rangers confirmed the first successful breeding of endangered California condors inside the park.
10 Stanley Park
Canada · 3 km from Vancouver49.300° N 123.140° W
Image by MICHOFF from Pixabay Long before it was a park the land belonged to Coast Salish peoples. A large village called Xwayxway stood where Lumberman's Arch is today, with longhouses dozens of metres long, and the Squamish and Musqueam used the peninsula for thousands of years; in 1888 residents were forced out to make way for the park road.
Did you know? The 700- to 800-year-old Hollow Tree was saved from road widening in 1910 thanks to lobbying by a photographer who earned his living there.
11 Sequoia National Park
United States36.565° N 118.773° W
Image by Kjjj3 from Pixabay Giant sequoia cones are serotinous, meaning they stay sealed until heat forces them open.
Did you know? Crystal Cave, a marble cave with more than 3.4 miles of surveyed passages, was discovered on 28 April 1918.
12 Grand Canyon National Park
United States36.055° N 112.122° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Filio from Pixabay Protection came slowly. Benjamin Harrison introduced the first bill for a national park here in 1882 and failed three times; as president he made the area a forest reserve in 1893. Theodore Roosevelt, who visited in 1903 and urged Americans to leave the canyon as it was, declared a national monument in 1908. Only on 26 February 1919 did Woodrow Wilson sign the act creating the national park, the fifteenth in the country.
Did you know? John Wesley Powell led the first expedition down the river in 1869, and he is credited with popularising the name Grand Canyon instead of Big Canyon.
13 Yosemite National Park
United States37.742° N 119.537° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12019 from Pixabay On its north side stands El Capitan, a single face of granite about 3,000 feet from base to rim, which became the proving ground of modern big-wall climbing: The Nose was first climbed in 1958 over 47 days of fixed ropes, freed by Lynn Hill in 1993, and in 2017 Alex Honnold climbed the Freerider route alone and without a rope in under four hours.
Did you know? Before the National Park Service existed, US Army cavalry ran the park, including the all-Black 9th Cavalry, the Buffalo Soldiers, between 1899 and 1913.
14 Sumidero Canyon
Cañón del Sumidero
Mexico · 11.9 km from Tuxtla Gutiérrez16.848° N 93.106° W
Sgroey · CC BY-SA 4.0 Most people see it from a boat. Launches run upstream from the old colonial town of Chiapa de Corzo, and the cliffs grow taller with every bend until the sky becomes a strip overhead. Crocodiles bask on the narrow banks, spider monkeys move through the trees clinging to the rock.
Did you know? Surveys have recorded about 195 bird species in the park, including the great curassow and the king vulture, alongside ocelots and jaguarundis.
15 Actun Tunichil Muknal
Belize · 18.3 km from Belmopan17.114° N 88.862° W
Jkolecki · CC BY-SA 3.0 The cave lies within the Tapir Mountain Nature Reserve. Its main system runs for about 5 km: a river passage of roughly 3 km ends at a flooded sump, and a series of upper passages continues beyond it through huge fallen boulders and broad chambers, finally opening into a collapsed sinkhole in the jungle. The upper levels are richly hung with formations, and the cave is home to bats, freshwater crabs, crayfish, catfish and large whip spiders.
Did you know? The bodies were never buried: they were left on the cave floor, and marks of trauma on the bones indicate that the victims were sacrificed.
16 Badlands National Park
United States43.750° N 102.500° W
Image by victortran0107 from Pixabay What makes the Badlands unusual is how fast it is changing. In bare areas the soft rock erodes at about an inch a year, a pace that is visible within a human lifetime: formations soften, gullies deepen, and new fossils are washed out every spring. Those fossils are the other reason the place matters.
Did you know? Badlands fossils entered the scientific literature as early as 1846, when a titanothere from the area was described.
17 Goosenecks State Park
United States37.175° N 109.927° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by PapaTom64 from Pixabay The shape is inherited. Millions of years ago the San Juan wandered across a nearly level plain, swinging in lazy bends as lowland rivers do. Then the Monument Upwarp, part of the broader uplift of the Colorado Plateau, slowly raised the land beneath it. Rather than straightening out, the river held its course and cut downward as the ground rose, locking its old bends into solid rock.
Did you know? The Honaker Trail is the type locality of a rock unit named after it, and fossil crinoids and brachiopods from a Pennsylvanian sea can be seen along the way.
18 Canyon de Chelly National Monument
United States36.155° N 109.509° W
Image by ducken99 from Pixabay What sets the place apart from other red-rock canyons is that it has never stopped being lived in. People have farmed here for more than four thousand years. Ancestral Puebloans built their houses into alcoves in the cliffs and left the canyons around the mid-1300s; Hopi farmers came after them, and then the Navajo, for whom the canyon remains home. About forty Navajo families still live and farm inside the monument.
Did you know? During Kit Carson's 1864 campaign, Captain Albert Pfeiffer's detachment missed the canyon entrance in a snowstorm and marched through Canyon del Muerto instead.
19 Árbol del Tule
Mexico · 5.4 km from Oaxaca de Juárez17.047° N 96.636° W
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Nobody knows exactly how old it is. Estimates run from 1,200 to 3,000 years, with the best estimate from growth rates at roughly 1,433 to 1,600 years. Zapotec tradition holds that it was planted some 1,400 years ago by Pechocha, a priest of the wind god Ehécatl, which agrees surprisingly well with the science. Other local stories say the town sits on a hidden lake and that the tree acts as its stopper — if it ever dies, the water will return.
Did you know? In 1990 the archaeologist John Paddock warned that, without urgent protection from traffic and pollution, the tree might not live another 50 years.
20 Grizzly Giant
United States37.504° N 119.601° W
Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 Current estimates put its age at about 3,000 years, give or take two and a half centuries; nineteenth-century enthusiasts guessed at many times that. The tree's scars tell the story of those millennia. Fire has consumed most of its bark and sapwood on one side, and in a single storm in 1942 it was struck by lightning six times.
21 Lone Cypress
United States · 7.3 km from Monterey36.569° N 121.965° W
Image by sarahtipton79 from Pixabay Monterey cypress is a rare tree in the wild: its natural range today is just two small relict groves near Carmel, one at Point Lobos and the other at Cypress Point, a short way along this same shore. It is the constant sea wind that gives old specimens their flattened, sculptural shape. The exact age of this one is unknown; it is thought to have taken root around the middle of the eighteenth century.
Did you know? German botanist Karl Hartweg named the species in July 1846, collecting near Monterey because the Mexican–American War made longer excursions unsafe.
22 Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
United States · 16.6 km from Montrose38.580° N 107.728° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by misterfarmer from Pixabay The rock is what gives the place its gravity. The walls expose Precambrian gneiss and schist, metamorphic "basement" rock close to two billion years old, which resists erosion far better than the softer layers that once lay above it. The river began cutting into this hard core roughly two million years ago, and because it could not widen its course, it could only deepen it.
Did you know? Even through this hard metamorphic rock, the Gunnison River keeps cutting down at roughly an inch every hundred years.
23 Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park
Canada · 32.6 km from Moncton45.823° N 64.573° W
Image by Graham-H from Pixabay The result is the Flowerpot Rocks: sea stacks of soft sandstone and conglomerate, standing 12 to 21 metres tall, undercut at the base by that relentless tidal erosion while trees keep growing improbably out of the flat tops, giving each formation the look of a plant crammed into a clay pot.
Did you know? The bases erode faster than the tops, because seawater attacks them twice a day while the crowns are only exposed to rain and frost.
24 Tongass National Forest
United States56.750° N 133.000° W
Forest Service Photography · Public domain The landscape is built from water as much as land. The forest takes in the Alexander Archipelago's maze of islands and channels, deep glacial fjords such as Tracy Arm, and the summits of the Coast Mountains along the border with British Columbia. Glaciers still pour off the icefields, among them the Mendenhall Glacier just outside Juneau, where the Forest Service opened its first visitor centre anywhere in 1962.
Did you know? The Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center near Juneau, opened in 1962, was the first visitor centre in the US National Forest System.
25 Marieta Islands
Islas Marietas
Mexico · 35.5 km from Puerto Vallarta20.699° N 105.585° W
Marcin Klapczynski · CC BY-SA 3.0 The islands owe part of their shape to an unlikely history. In the early twentieth century the Mexican military used them for target practice, and bombing helped carve the caverns that now make the place famous. Advocacy by Jacques Cousteau in the late 1960s pushed the government towards protecting them; today they are a national park, a Ramsar wetland and a UNESCO biosphere reserve.
Did you know? The islands were added to the Ramsar list of wetlands of international importance on 2 February 2004.
26 Mesa Verde National Park
United States37.260° N 108.494° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- Dark Sky Place
Image by kaylee from Pixabay People used the mesa for thousands of years before the famous houses appeared. Hunters passed through in the Archaic era, Basketmaker families later farmed corn on the mesa top and lived in pithouses, and from roughly 750 CE their descendants began grouping into above-ground pueblos with ceremonial chambers known as kivas.
Did you know? Rancher Richard Wetherill and his companion Charlie Mason came upon Cliff Palace in December 1888, spotting it from the mesa rim.
27 General Grant Tree
General Grant
United States36.748° N 118.971° W
Eric Kilby from Somerville, MA, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0 What strikes a visitor is less its height than its mass. The trunk rises like a cinnamon-coloured column of fibrous, fire-scarred bark, barely tapering for dozens of metres, with a broad, rounded crown of heavy limbs far above. Giant sequoias depend on fire to open their cones and clear the ground for seedlings, and the thick spongy bark lets them survive burns that kill other trees; the scars on the Grant show fires it has lived through.
28 Butchart Gardens
Canada · 17.1 km from Victoria48.565° N 123.469° W
Image by Photoman from Pixabay The Sunken Garden is best seen first from above: a bowl of lawns, flower beds and trees laid out on the old quarry floor, enclosed by cliffs that were once a working face of stone and are now curtained in green. It is still the largest section of the gardens and an early, remarkable case of turning an industrial wound into something beautiful.
Did you know? In 1939 the Butcharts gave the gardens to their grandson Ian Ross as a present for his 21st birthday.
29 Semuc Champey
Guatemala15.533° N 89.961° W
Lucía García González · CC0 What makes the place unforgettable is the contrast. On one side of the bridge the river roars into darkness; on the other, a few metres away, the terraced pools are completely still and coloured turquoise, jade and emerald depending on depth and light, their mineral-rich water depositing fresh calcium carbonate along the rims that hold them. Swimmers move from pool to pool down the natural steps.
Did you know? The Q'eqchi' name is usually broken down into the roots xmuq, 'to hide', cham, 'deep', and pek, 'stone'.
30 Angel Oak
United States32.718° N 80.079° W
Image by RegalShave from Pixabay How old it is nobody knows. Far greater ages have been claimed and are still repeated, but estimates of about 400 to 500 years are more widely accepted, and even those are debated. The name comes not from the heavens but from Justus Angel and his wife Martha Waight Tucker Angel, former owners of the land.
Did you know? In 2008 Samantha Siegel, then 26, launched a Save the Angel Oak petition against housing planned beside the tree; the developer later went bankrupt.
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 gardens, parks and forests in North America?
- On our list, Yellowstone National Park (United States) ranks first, followed by Monument Valley (United States) and Banff National Park (Canada).
- Which country has the most gardens, parks and forests in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (25), Canada (5) and Mexico (4).
- What was the first national park in the world?
- Yellowstone, established by the United States Congress in 1872, is generally considered the first national park. Canada followed with Banff in 1885.
- What is the largest tree in the world?
- By volume, the largest known single-stem tree is General Sherman, a giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park, California. Coast redwoods are taller, but none carries as much wood.
- What are hoodoos?
- Hoodoos are tall, thin spires of rock left standing where softer layers erode faster than a harder cap above them. Bryce Canyon in Utah has one of the largest concentrations in the world.
- How many gardens, parks and forests are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 39 gardens, parks and forests in 7 countries. The United States has the most, with 25.