The Most Beautiful Islands in the World

59 places in 33 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Great Barrier Reef

   Australia · 37.6 km from Port Douglas16.400° S 145.800° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   At around 344,400 square kilometers and roughly 2,300 km long, the Great Barrier Reef isn't one reef so much as some 3,000 individual reefs and hundreds of islands strung together — a footprint about the size of Italy or Japan, and by most measures the largest living structure ever built by living organisms, coral included. It's living habitat for well over a thousand fish species, hundreds of types of hard and soft coral, and dozens of species of whales, dolphins, and sea turtles moving through it at different times of year.

   Did you know? On 11 June 1770 James Cook's ship Endeavour ran aground on the reef, and repairing her took about seven weeks.

   More about Great Barrier Reef →

2. 02 Moorea

   French Polynesia · 26.6 km from Papeete17.535° S 149.835° W

   

   Moʻorea rises from the sea 17 km north-west of Tahiti, and seen from its larger neighbour it is a jagged silhouette of spires and saw-toothed ridges. The island is what remains of a shield volcano that was active between about 1.5 and 2.5 million years ago. Erosion has since carved the old crater into a ring of steep peaks, the highest of which, Mount Tohivea, reaches 1,207 metres, and a coral reef encircles the whole island, enclosing a lagoon of shallow, luminous water in every shade of turquoise. The island covers about 134 square kilometres.

   Did you know? Mount Mouaputa has a hole right through its summit; according to legend, the hero Pai hurled his spear through it from Tahiti to stop thieves from stealing a mountain.

   More about Moorea →

3. 03 Easter Island

   Chile27.120° S 109.350° W

   

   The single biggest puzzle Easter Island still hands visitors is how a Polynesian society without draft animals, wheels or metal tools moved statues weighing as much as 80 tons for kilometres over rough ground. For decades the default answer was rollers and ropes, dragged flat. But the Rapa Nui themselves always said the moai "walked" — and experimental archaeology backs them up: teams pulling ropes attached to a wide, D-shaped base can rock an upright statue side to side and inch it forward, matching the forward-leaning, waddling posture carved into the statues meant for the roads. Look closely at the quarry at Rano Raraku and you can see the evidence of the theory's other half: dozens of moai abandoned mid-carve, including one unfinished giant over 21 metres long, still fused to the volcanic rock its makers never freed it from.

   Did you know? The island's rongorongo script, recorded on about two dozen wooden objects, has never been deciphered, and none of them remain on the island.

   More about Easter Island →

4. 04 Capri

   Isola di Capri

   Italy · 32.4 km from Naples40.550° N 14.233° E

   

   Capri is a limestone island of just over 10 square kilometres at the southern entrance to the Gulf of Naples, about 5 km off the tip of the Sorrento Peninsula. It rises in cliffs straight from the sea and is split into two communities: Capri town in the east, around its famous little square, and Anacapri higher up in the west, below Monte Solaro, at 589 m the island's highest point, which you can reach by chairlift. About 13,500 people live here, and the island has been a resort for two thousand years.

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5. 05 Socotra

   Yemen · 19.3 km from Hadibu12.510° N 53.920° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Socotra broke off from the African and Arabian mainland somewhere between 6 and 18 million years ago, as tectonic shifts reshaped the Gulf of Aden, and it's been drifting in isolation in the Arabian Sea ever since. That much time cut off from anywhere else, combined with terrain running from coastal plains up through limestone plateaus to granite peaks over 1,500 meters, let evolution run its own experiment on the island largely undisturbed — Socotra now ranks among the ten richest places on Earth for endemic species relative to its size, with over a third of its roughly 825 plant species and more than 90 percent of its land snails found nowhere else.

   Did you know? Socotra's cucumber tree, Dendrosicyos socotranus, is the only member of the entire gourd and cucumber family that grows as a true tree.

   More about Socotra →

6. 06 Sveti Stefan

   Montenegro · 38.7 km from Podgorica42.256° N 18.891° E

   

   Sveti Stefan is the postcard of the Montenegrin coast: a walled village of red-roofed stone houses covering an islet of about 1.2 hectares, tied to the shore by a narrow sandy tombolo, between Budva and Petrovac. From the road above it the whole thing reads as one piece of architecture floating on the Adriatic, and that view — free, open to everyone — is the main reason to come.

   Did you know? In return for Venetian protection from 1423, the Paštrovići kept wide self-rule and paid no tribute, but had to stop raiding Venetian ships.

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7. 07 Ionian Islands

   Επτάνησα

   Greece37.800° N 20.700° E

   

   Strung along the western coast of Greece, the Ionian Islands are the green counterpart to the bare Aegean: limestone mountains wooded with cypress, olive and fir, falling into a sea that shifts from deep blue to milky turquoise over pale pebble and marble. Tradition counts seven principal islands, the Heptanese — Corfu, Paxos, Lefkada, Ithaca, Kefalonia, Zakynthos and, off the tip of the Peloponnese, Kythira — but the group includes many smaller islets as well. Their character owes as much to history as to geology. Venice took Corfu in the early 13th century and the rest piece by piece, and the islands became the only Greek-speaking land never to fall under Ottoman rule. French, Russian-Ottoman and British administrations followed, until the islands joined the Greek state in 1864.

   Did you know? A quarrel between Corfu, then called Corcyra, and its mother city Corinth in 434 BC drew in Athens and helped spark the Peloponnesian War.

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8. 08 Lanzarote

   Spain · 12 km from Arrecife29.035° N 13.635° W

   

   Lanzarote's black-and-red volcanic badlands aren't ancient history — they're the result of an eruption sequence that ran from 1730 to 1736, one of the longest continuously documented volcanic events anywhere in recorded history, and one that buried a third of the island's most fertile land under lava in the process. Timanfaya National Park, the protected core of that eruption zone, still runs warm just beneath the surface: dig a hole a few centimetres deep in some spots and you'll feel heat rising from rock that hasn't fully cooled in nearly three centuries.

   Did you know? The 1730–1736 eruptions opened 32 new volcanoes along an 18 km fissure and buried 11 villages, a catastrophe chronicled day by day by Yaiza's parish priest.

   More about Lanzarote →

9. 09 Santorini

   Σαντορίνη

   Greece36.415° N 25.433° E

   

   Santorini is what remains of a volcano that blew itself apart. The islands of the group — Thera, Therasia, Aspronisi and the young, dark cones of Nea and Palea Kameni in the middle — form a broken ring around a flooded caldera, and on the main island the inner cliff falls more than 300 metres straight to the sea. The wall is a cross-section of the volcano's history: bands of red, black and grey lava and ash, capped by the pale layer of pumice left by the great Late Bronze Age eruption some 3,600 years ago, which threw out some 60 cubic kilometres of material and buried the island under tens of metres of tephra.

   Did you know? Bronze Age Akrotiri had twin sets of clay pipes for hot and cold water and indoor toilets, among the oldest such utilities ever found; the hot water was probably volcanic.

   More about Santorini →

10. 10 Lofoten

    Norway68.333° N 14.666° E

    

    Seen from the mainland around Bodø, Lofoten looks less like a chain of islands than a single serrated wall rising out of the Norwegian Sea — Norwegians even call it Lofotveggen, the Lofoten Wall. Up close the wall breaks into peaks of ancient gneiss that drop straight into fjords, sheltered bays, beaches and narrow sounds, all of it lying between the 68th and 69th parallels, well inside the Arctic Circle. The highest summit, Higravstinden on Austvågøya, reaches only 1,161 m, yet because the mountains start at the waterline they read as alpine. The warm Norwegian Current keeps winters remarkably mild for the latitude, and the light swings to extremes: at Svolvær the sun stays above the horizon from late May to mid-July and does not rise at all from early December into January.

    Did you know? Lofoten's mild winters may be the largest positive temperature anomaly for its latitude anywhere on Earth.

    More about Lofoten →

11. 11 Kangaroo Island

    Australia35.800° S 137.300° E

    

    Kangaroo Island is Australia's third-largest island, a 145-kilometre slab of farmland, scrub and wild coast lying off the tip of the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. Cut off from the mainland when sea levels rose at the end of the last Ice Age, it became a refuge where wildlife survived largely untouched by the foxes and rabbits that ravaged the continent. Nearly half of the island has never been cleared, and around a quarter is protected in national parks, conservation parks and wilderness areas. Sea lions lounge on the sand at Seal Bay, kangaroos, wallabies and echidnas move through the bush, and the island is the last refuge in South Australia of a rare subspecies of glossy black cockatoo.

    Did you know? Matthew Flinders named the island in March 1802 after the kangaroos his crew hunted for fresh meat.

    More about Kangaroo Island →

12. 12 K'gari

    Australia · 31.6 km from Hervey Bay25.240° S 153.150° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    K'gari, known for a century and a half as Fraser Island, is the largest sand island in the world: some 123 km of dunes, forest and lakes off the coast of Queensland, built up over roughly 750,000 years from sand carried north by coastal currents onto a volcanic bedrock base. Its name comes from the language of the Butchulla people, whose creation story tells of a white spirit, K'gari, who loved the land she had helped to make so much that she was turned into it — an island of trees, lakes and creeks to keep her company. The state government restored the name officially in 2023, and the island has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1992.

    More about K'gari →

13. 13 Our Lady of the Rocks

    Montenegro42.487° N 18.689° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    According to Perast tradition, on 22 July 1452 two fishermen came across an icon of the Virgin Mary resting on a rock offshore and took it as a sign — one of them, already ill, reported being cured shortly after. Rather than simply take the icon home, the town decided to build the icon a home of its own: for over five centuries, generations of Perast sailors have returned from voyages carrying stone, and on ships loaded specifically for the purpose have deliberately sunk old and captured vessels onto the same reef, slowly building an artificial island up out of the bay one boatload at a time.

    Did you know? Art historians nicknamed the church the Croatian Sistine Chapel for its densely painted baroque interior.

    More about Our Lady of the Rocks →

14. 14 Hormuz Island

    Iran · 24 km from Bandar Abbas27.067° N 56.460° E

    

    Hormuz is a small island of 42 km² in the Strait of Hormuz, about 8 km off the Iranian coast opposite Bandar Abbas, and it looks like nowhere else in the Gulf. It is a salt dome: ancient salt deposits, pushed up through the overlying rock, have surfaced and eroded into hills streaked with red, ochre, yellow, purple and white. Locals dig the red ochre, called golak, for pigment and even for cooking, and heavy use has led the environment authorities to protect it.

    Did you know? The island's colourful salt belongs to the Hormuz Formation, deposited in the Ediacaran to Early Cambrian, more than 500 million years ago.

    More about Hormuz Island →

15. 15 Bass Rock

    United Kingdom56.080° N 2.640° W

    

    For much of the year the Bass Rock looks as if it were dusted with snow. The steep volcanic stack rising 107 metres out of the Firth of Forth is home to what has been the largest colony of northern gannets in the world, more than 150,000 birds, so many that the cliffs and summit turn white with them. The species takes its scientific name, Morus bassanus, from this rock. Sheer on almost every side, the island has only one landing place, and its slopes still carry the ruins of a castle, a medieval chapel and a lighthouse.

    Did you know? The gannets' droppings are estimated to release about 152,000 kg of ammonia a year, roughly as much as 10 million broiler chickens.

    More about Bass Rock →

16. 16 Lord Howe Island

    Australia31.550° S 159.083° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Lord Howe Island is a crescent of land in the Tasman Sea, about ten kilometres long and in places barely three hundred metres wide, lying some 600 km east of Port Macquarie on the Australian coast. Its drama is concentrated at the southern end, where Mount Lidgbird (777 m) and Mount Gower (875 m) rise almost sheer from the water, their summits often wrapped in cloud. The curve of the island shelters a lagoon of astonishing clarity, closed off by a barrier reef that sits at about 31°30' south — the most southerly coral reef on Earth, where tropical corals and fish share water with species from cooler seas.

    Did you know? No trace of prehistoric human presence has ever been found, even after a 1996 archaeological search, which is unusual for a Pacific island of its size.

    More about Lord Howe Island →

17. 17 Vulcano

    Isola di Vulcano

    Italy38.404° N 14.966° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Vulcano is the island that gave its name to every volcano on earth: the Romans believed it was the chimney of the fire god Vulcan's forge, and the Greeks thought Hephaestus worked here. It is the southernmost of the seven Aeolian Islands, about 20 km off Sicily and only 750 m across a strait from Lipari, and it is small — around 8 km by 4 km — with most of its few hundred residents at Vulcano Porto on the north side.

    More about Vulcano →

18. 18 Whakaari / White Island

    New Zealand37.520° S 177.183° E

    

    Whakaari has been killing people on a schedule of roughly once a generation for over a century, and it was doing so long before the eruption that most people now associate with the island. In September 1914, a landslide from the crater's unstable inner wall buried a sulphur-mining camp on the crater floor, killing all ten workers there instantly — the only survivor of the settlement was the camp cat, later nicknamed Peter the Great, found alive weeks later. Sulphur mining, extracting the pure yellow deposits the volcano's fumaroles constantly replenish, continued on and off at Whakaari into the 1930s despite the risk, because the ore was that valuable.

    Did you know? The island covers only about 325 hectares and rises 321 metres, but it is just the tip of a much larger volcano whose bulk lies beneath the sea.

    More about Whakaari / White Island →

19. 19 Aitutaki

    Cook Islands18.850° S 159.790° W

    

    Aitutaki is the Cook Islands' postcard: a small volcanic island at the tip of a triangular barrier reef, with a turquoise lagoon of 50 km² or more and fifteen islets, or motu, strung around its rim. Geographers call it an "almost atoll", because the reef encloses the lagoon on all sides while a hill, Maunga Pu, still rises 123 m above the main island. Around 1,800 people live here, most in and around Arutanga on the west coast.

    Did you know? Aitutaki was the only island in the Cook Islands to be formally annexed by Britain in 1900 rather than ceded by its chiefs.

    More about Aitutaki →

20. 20 Skellig Michael

    Ireland51.771° N 10.541° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Around the 6th century, a small group of monks chose the more punishing of Ireland's two available forms of isolation. Egypt had deserts to retreat into; Ireland didn't, so ascetics who wanted the same kind of hardship looked instead for the most inaccessible ground they could find, and a jagged rock rising out of the Atlantic 12 kilometers off the Kerry coast qualified. What they built there — a cluster of drystone beehive huts, two oratories, a small church, terraced gardens, and stone crosses, all fitted together without mortar on a slope with almost no flat ground to spare — has survived storms and salt spray for well over a thousand years largely intact.

    Did you know? In 823 Vikings raided the island and carried off its abbot, Eitgal, who died of hunger in captivity; a second attack followed in 838.

    More about Skellig Michael →

21. 21 Cocos Island

    Costa Rica5.528° N 87.061° W

    

    Cocos Island rises out of the open Pacific some 550 km off the coast of Costa Rica, a steep green block of volcanic rock with no permanent inhabitants except a small rotating team of park rangers. It covers under 24 square kilometres and climbs to 575 metres at Cerro Iglesias, and it is one of the wettest places on the ocean's eastern side: more than 7,000 mm of rain a year fall on it, feeding a dense cloud forest and a coastline laced with waterfalls, over two hundred of them, many dropping straight off the cliffs into the sea.

    Did you know? Cocos is the only piece of land above sea level on the entire Cocos tectonic plate.

    More about Cocos Island →

22. 22 Nan Madol

    Federated States of Micronesia · 21.8 km from Palikir6.842° N 158.332° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    On a reef flat off the eastern shore of Pohnpei, dozens of walled islets rise out of shallow water, separated by channels that fill and drain with the tide. Their walls are built from long, many-sided columns of natural basalt, and around the royal tombs they rise higher than a two-storey house. This is Nan Madol, the political and ceremonial heart of the Saudeleur dynasty, which brought all of Pohnpei under a single rule. The core of the site covers roughly 1.5 by 0.5 kilometres and holds 92 artificial islets of stone and coral fill, while the wider protected district extends over more than 18 square kilometres along the coast of Temwen Island.

    Did you know? Radiocarbon dates show Nan Madol is older than the stone city of Leluh on Kosrae, reversing the local tradition that Kosrae's builders came to Pohnpei.

    More about Nan Madol →

23. 23 La Gomera

    Spain28.115° N 17.225° W

    

    La Gomera, one of the smaller Canary Islands, is roughly round and about 22 km across, yet it rises to 1,487 metres at Alto de Garajonay. Its shape has been compared to half an orange split into segments: deep ravines, the barrancos, radiate from the central plateau to the sea, with steep ridges between them. The island is about twelve million years old and its last eruptions happened some two million years ago, so erosion rather than fresh lava has made the landscape — sheer coastal cliffs, eroded volcanic plugs such as the Roque de Agando, and on the north coast Los Órganos, a wall of basalt columns formed by lava cooling slowly in an old crater.

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24. 24 Bora Bora

    Bora-Bora

    French Polynesia16.498° S 151.736° W

    

    Bora Bora is what remains of a volcano that was active roughly three and a half to three million years ago and has since been sinking slowly into the Pacific. What is left above water is a green, broken crown of basalt, about 8 km long and 5 km wide, whose summit, Mount Otemanu, rises in a sheer dark tooth to 727 metres, with Mount Pahia (661 m) beside it. Around this core lies the thing that makes the island famous: a wide lagoon, shading from deep blue to a milky turquoise over the sand flats, closed off from the ocean by a barrier reef and a ring of low, palm-covered islets, the motu, with a single deep-water opening, the Teavanui Pass, on the west side.

    Did you know? Bora Bora was an independent Polynesian kingdom until 1888, when France annexed it and forced its last queen, Teriimaevarua III, to abdicate.

    More about Bora Bora →

25. 25 Christmas Island

    Australia10.490° S 105.627° E

    

    Christmas Island is the tip of an extinct volcano that climbs more than 4,500 metres from the floor of the Indian Ocean, capped with limestone laid down by ancient coral. Sheer cliffs ring a raised plateau whose highest point, Murray Hill, reaches 361 metres. About 350 km south of Java and some 2,600 km north-west of Perth, the island covers only 135 square kilometres, yet around two thirds of it is national park, most of it tall tropical rainforest that grows right up to the cliff edges.

    More about Christmas Island →

26. 26 Matsushima

    Japan · 20.5 km from Sendai38.356° N 141.076° E

    

    Matsushima is a bay on the Pacific coast of Miyagi Prefecture scattered with some 260 small islands, each a knob of rock crowned with twisted pines, which give the place its name: matsu means pine. For centuries it has counted among the Three Views of Japan, a ranking traced to a 1643 book by the scholar Hayashi Gahō that set Matsushima beside the sandbar of Amanohashidate and the shrine island of Itsukushima.

    Did you know? Matsushima has four classic viewpoints, named the Magnificent, Beautiful, Enchanting and Grand Views, on the hills of Otakamori, Tomiyama, Ogitani and Tamonzan.

    More about Matsushima →

27. 27 Aldabra

    Seychelles9.416° S 46.416° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Aldabra is one of the great natural wonders of the Indian Ocean: a ring of low coral islands around a vast, shallow lagoon, far out in the south-western corner of the Seychelles. It is the second-largest coral atoll on Earth after Kiritimati and the largest raised coral reef, about 34 km long and 13 km wide. Its lagoon covers nearly 200 square kilometres and empties by some two-thirds at low tide, when the sea rushes out through deep channels between the islands. Four larger islands, Grande Terre, Malabar, Picard and Polymnie, form the rim, their surface a jagged, pitted limestone known locally as champignon, fringed by mangroves.

    Did you know? The atoll is made up of some 46 islands, and its highest point is an unnamed sand dune only about 16 metres above the sea.

    More about Aldabra →

28. 28 Belize Barrier Reef

    Belize · 29.9 km from Belize City17.262° N 88.053° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The Belize Barrier Reef runs for roughly 300 km parallel to the Caribbean coast of Belize, a long pale line of breaking surf a few kilometres to some tens of kilometres offshore, with a shallow turquoise lagoon behind it and deep blue water beyond. It is the centrepiece of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, which stretches about 900 km from Mexico's Yucatán to Honduras and ranks as the second-longest coral reef system in the world. In 1842, in his book on coral reefs, Charles Darwin described it as the most remarkable reef in the West Indies.

    Did you know? In the north the reef runs as little as 300 metres offshore, while in the south it lies up to about 40 km from the coast.

    More about Belize Barrier Reef →

29. 29 Akdamar Island

    Turkey · 36.1 km from Van38.342° N 43.036° E

    

    Akdamar is a small island in Lake Van — about 0.7 km², ending in a limestone cliff some 80 m high — and on it stands one of the masterpieces of medieval Armenian art, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. In the early 10th century the island was the royal seat of King Gagik I Artsruni of Vaspurakan, who surrounded himself here with a palace, a harbour, streets and gardens. Of all that, only the church survives: built between 915 and 921 by the architect-monk Manuel in warm pinkish volcanic tufa, it is compact — the interior only about 15 by 11.5 m, the dome rising to some 20 m — and set against the vast blue of the lake and the mountains of the far shore.

    Did you know? A demolition order hit the church in 1951; the novelist Yaşar Kemal raised the alarm, and the ministry halted the work on 25 June 1951.

    More about Akdamar Island →

30. 30 Ometepe

    Nicaragua · 22.2 km from Rivas11.498° N 85.626° W

    

    Two volcanoes rise from the fresh water of Lake Nicaragua, joined by a low, narrow isthmus into a single island shaped like an hourglass. The name Ometepe comes from the Nawat words for "two" and "mountain". To the northwest stands Concepción, an active volcano with an unusually regular cone, 1,610 metres high above a base about 16 km across. To the southeast is Maderas, 1,394 metres high, considered extinct or dormant, with a lagoon in its crater and its slopes covered in rainforest and coffee and tobacco plantations. Ometepe is the largest island in the lake: about 31 km long, 5 to 10 km wide and 276 square kilometres in area.

    Did you know? The bull sharks of the surrounding lake were long thought to be a unique freshwater species, until they were shown to belong to ocean populations.

    More about Ometepe →