The Most Beautiful Islands in North America
5 places in 5 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful islands in North America are Cocos Island (Costa Rica), Belize Barrier Reef (Belize) and Ometepe (Nicaragua). The list covers 5 islands in 5 countries. Belize has the most, with 1. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The islands of North and Central America span the full climatic range of the continent, from coral cays in warm Caribbean water to volcanic peaks in a freshwater lake and granite mountains in the Arctic. Each owes its character to a different force: oceanic volcanoes, reef-building corals, the cold currents that feed seabirds, and the ice that shaped Greenland's coast.
Cocos Island, far out in the Pacific off Costa Rica, is a rainforest island ringed by waterfalls and famous for schools of hammerhead sharks; it is a UNESCO site. The Belize Barrier Reef, also World Heritage, is the second-largest barrier reef system on Earth, strung with cays, atolls and mangroves. Ometepe rises from Lake Nicaragua as two volcanoes, Concepción and Maderas, joined by a low isthmus. Bonaventure Island, off the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec, hosts one of the largest colonies of northern gannets in the world. Uummannaq in Greenland is a small island crowned by a heart-shaped mountain of rock rising above its fjord.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cocos Island | Island | Costa Rica | |
| 2 | Belize Barrier Reef | Coral reef | Belize | ✓ |
| 3 | Ometepe | Island | Nicaragua | |
| 4 | Bonaventure Island | Island | Canada | |
| 5 | Uummannaq Island | Island | Greenland |
01 Cocos Island
Costa Rica5.528° N 87.061° W
The TerraMar Project · CC BY-SA 2.0 Its isolation has made it a laboratory of evolution. Three land birds live nowhere else on Earth, the Cocos cuckoo, the Cocos flycatcher and the Cocos finch, the last a relative of Darwin's finches of the Galápagos. Beneath the water the island is even more famous. The seamounts and pinnacles around it draw the largest schools of hammerhead sharks reported anywhere in the world, along with a crowd of other big ocean fish. Costa Rica declared the island a national park in 1978, and in 1997 it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site; it is regularly counted among the finest dive sites in the world.
Did you know? Counting oceanic islands, it is the southernmost point of geopolitical North America.
02 Belize Barrier Reef
Belize · 29.9 km from Belize City17.262° N 88.053° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
SentinelHub · CC BY 2.0 What sets it apart is variety. Besides the barrier itself, the protected area takes in some 450 cayes — from mangrove islets to sandy islands like Caye Caulker and Ambergris Caye — and three offshore atolls: Turneffe, Glover's Reef and Lighthouse Reef. In the middle of Lighthouse Reef lies the Great Blue Hole, a near-perfect circle about 318 metres across and 124 metres deep, a drowned sinkhole that Jacques Cousteau brought to world attention when he took his ship Calypso there in 1971. From the air it is one of the most striking shapes in any ocean.
Did you know? In December 2010 Belize became the first country in the world to ban bottom trawling completely.
03 Ometepe
Nicaragua · 22.2 km from Rivas11.498° N 85.626° W
Image by Praesentator from Pixabay The two cones are geologically young, both believed to have formed in the Holocene. Concepción woke in December 1880 after a long quiet spell and erupted again in 1883, 1889, 1902, 1907 and 1924, and it has had smaller outbursts in recent decades. A local farmer named Casimiro Murillo first reported the crater lake on Maderas in 1930. Volcanic ash has made the island's soil so fertile that it can be farmed year after year without lying fallow, and plantains are the main crop. In 2022 the International Union of Geological Sciences named Ometepe one of its first 100 geological heritage sites, as a textbook case of volcanoes spreading and interacting with the sedimentary basin of the lake.
Did you know? One petroglyph site on Maderas, recorded as N-RIO-19, covers more than 180,000 square metres and includes over 30 house mounds.
04 Bonaventure Island
Canada48.495° N 64.160° W
Gilbertus · Public domain People came to the island long before it became a sanctuary. With nearby Percé, it was among the early seasonal fishing stations of New France, linked to the family of Nicolas Denys; the name is traditionally attributed to Recollect friars honouring Saint Bonaventure. Irish settlers arrived in the 1790s, and cod fishing companies, including one founded by the Jersey-born Peter Du Val and later the Le Boutillier brothers' fishery, shaped island life through the nineteenth century. Bonaventure was declared a migratory bird sanctuary in 1919.
Did you know? Only about 30 percent of the gannets nest on the cliffs; the rest crowd the plateau above them.
05 Uummannaq Island
Greenland70.703° N 52.133° W
Image by jonasmtbxdk from Pixabay The island is small, about 12 square kilometres, and almost entirely rock. Its northern half is occupied by the base of Uummannaq Mountain, which climbs to 1,170 metres; the two summits are of similar height, the eastern one slightly higher, and the Greenlandic name, meaning "heart-shaped", comes from this double profile. The mountain is the most prominent on the Arctic stretch of Greenland's west coast. Its eastern face falls in one uniform cliff into Assorput Strait, the summits are separated by deep gullies, and the upper slopes are reachable only by technical climbing.
Did you know? Uummannaq's church, raised in 1935 from granite blocks cut on the spot, is one of very few stone churches in Greenland.
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 islands in North America?
- On our list, Cocos Island (Costa Rica) ranks first, followed by Belize Barrier Reef (Belize) and Ometepe (Nicaragua).
- Which country has the most islands in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from Belize (1), Canada (1) and Costa Rica (1).
- Why is Cocos Island famous for sharks?
- Cocos lies where nutrient-rich ocean currents meet around an isolated seamount, attracting large schools of scalloped hammerhead sharks along with whitetip reef sharks and rays.
- What is Ometepe made of?
- Ometepe is formed by two volcanoes, Concepción and Maderas, rising from Lake Nicaragua and linked by a narrow isthmus. It is often described as the largest volcanic island in a freshwater lake.
- How many islands are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 5 islands in 5 countries. Belize has the most, with 1.