The Most Beautiful Modern Gardens, Parks and Forests in the World
8 places in 7 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful modern gardens, parks and forests in the world are L'Oceanogràfic (Spain), Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan (Japan) and Taronga Zoo (Australia). The list covers 8 modern gardens, parks and forests in 7 countries. Japan has the most, with 2. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The modern aquarium and zoo are as much works of architecture as collections of animals. Since the late twentieth century, acrylic panels strong enough to hold back whole oceans, climate-controlled glasshouses and careful habitat design have let cities build places where visitors walk through reefs, under sharks and among plants from distant cloud forests.
Valencia's L'Oceanogràfic, part of the City of Arts and Sciences, is entered through a white shell roof by Félix Candela and leads to tunnels beneath Mediterranean, Arctic and tropical tanks. Lisbon Oceanarium, built for Expo 98, surrounds one great central tank with separate coastal habitats, so the open ocean is always visible beyond them. In Copenhagen, Den Blå Planet spreads its aluminium-clad arms in the shape of a whirlpool.
Japan has two of the most celebrated. At Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan, visitors spiral down around a vast Pacific Ocean tank where a whale shark swims, and Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium shows whale sharks and manta rays in its Kuroshio Sea tank. Gardens by the Bay in Singapore turns the idea to plants, with its Flower Dome, Cloud Forest and grove of steel Supertrees covered in living vertical gardens. Sydney's Taronga Zoo, opened in 1916, looks out over the harbour toward the Opera House.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | L'Oceanogràfic | Public aquarium | Spain | |
| 2 | Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan | Public aquarium | Japan | |
| 3 | Taronga Zoo | Zoo | Australia | |
| 4 | Gardens by the Bay | Urban park | Singapore | |
| 5 | Tongass National Forest | Forest | United States | |
| 6 | Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium | Public aquarium | Japan | |
| 7 | Lisbon Oceanarium | Public aquarium | Portugal | |
| 8 | Den Blå Planet, Copenhagen | Public aquarium | Denmark |
01 L'Oceanogràfic
Oceanográfico
Spain · 6 km from Valencia39.453° N 0.348° W
Diliff · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Oceanogràfic is an aquarium that is worth seeing before you look into a single tank. Its entrance buildings are crowned by thin concrete shells curved into hyperbolic paraboloids, the saddle-shaped surfaces that the Spanish-Mexican engineer Félix Candela made his life's work; he designed the complex in 1997, at the age of 87, with Alberto Domingo and Carlos Lázaro. The largest of the shells opens like a water lily, its petals touching the ground at only a few points, and its edges are so fine that the whole roof seems folded from paper rather than cast. It is a late and very pure statement of the principle behind all his work: that geometry, not mass, can make concrete stand.
Did you know? It is the only major building of Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences not designed by Santiago Calatrava.
02 Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan
Japan · 8 km from Osaka34.654° N 135.429° E
663highland · CC BY 2.5 Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan opened in 1990 on the Tempozan waterfront of Osaka Bay, and at the time it was the largest public aquarium in the world. Its conceptual and exhibit design came from Peter Chermayeff of the Cambridge Seven Associates practice in the United States. The building announces itself from a distance: a tall block in three bands of colour meant to evoke the union of earth, water and fire, with a mural of fish painted on the outer wall by the designer's father, the English-born designer Serge Chermayeff.
Did you know? The name Kaiyukan was picked by TV personality Emiko Kaminuma on the naming committee, although it had received only a single public vote.
03 Taronga Zoo
Australia · 4.1 km from Sydney33.843° S 151.241° E
istolethetv · CC BY 2.0 Taronga Zoo occupies one of the most enviable pieces of land in Sydney: a steep, wooded slope on the northern shore of the harbour at Mosman, looking straight across the water to the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and the towers of the city. The name is said to come from an Aboriginal word meaning "beautiful view", and the setting delivers it.
Did you know? From 1999 to 2014 Taronga cared for three leopard seals rescued sick or injured from New South Wales beaches, at the time the only ones held by any zoo.
04 Gardens by the Bay
Singapore · 1.8 km from Singapore1.283° N 103.865° E
Shiny Things . · CC BY 2.0 The eighteen Supertrees at Gardens by the Bay look like sculpture, but they're closer to infrastructure disguised as sculpture. Each one is a reinforced-concrete trunk, 25 to 50 metres tall, wrapped in a steel frame and dressed with planting panels holding some of the more than 162,900 plants — over 200 species of bromeliads, orchids, ferns and flowering climbers — spread across a vegetative surface nearly eight times larger than the trees' actual footprint on the ground. That's the visible part.
Did you know? The Flower Dome was listed by Guinness World Records in 2015 as the largest glass greenhouse in the world, covering 1.2 hectares without a single interior column.
05 Tongass National Forest
United States56.750° N 133.000° W
Forest Service Photography · Public domain 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.
06 Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium
Japan26.694° N 127.878° E
Image by Yukaloha from Pixabay The reason to come is a single wall of water. The Kuroshio Sea, the aquarium's main tank, is 35 metres long, 27 metres wide and 10 metres deep, holds 7,500 cubic metres of seawater and is viewed through an acrylic panel 8.2 by 22.5 metres and 60 centimetres thick – the largest such panel in the world when the building opened in 2002. Named after the warm current that sweeps past the Ryukyu Islands, it is stocked with the open-ocean giants of these waters: whale sharks gliding slowly across the glass, manta rays banking beneath them, and schools of fish that turn the whole tank into one moving surface. Standing in the dim hall in front of it feels less like looking into a tank than like looking out of a submarine.
Did you know? In 2020 its researchers became the first to raise shark embryos to birth in an artificial uterus, hatching two deep-sea lanternsharks after five months.
07 Lisbon Oceanarium
Oceanário de Lisboa
Portugal · 6.3 km from Lisbon38.764° N 9.094° W
Alvesgaspar · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Lisbon Oceanarium was built for Expo '98, the world's fair that created the riverside district of Parque das Nações, and it has outlived the exhibition to draw around a million visitors a year. The architect, Peter Chermayeff, set the building on a pier in the middle of an artificial lagoon, so that it seems to float on the water like a moored ship; its angular silhouette has often been compared to an aircraft carrier. The watery approach is part of the design: you cross to the aquarium as if boarding a vessel.
Did you know? The Oceanarium stands on the former site of Cabo Ruivo, Lisbon's old seaplane airport on the Tagus estuary.
08 Den Blå Planet, Copenhagen
Den Blå Planet
Denmark · 7.6 km from Copenhagen55.638° N 12.656° E
Image by StudioKlick from Pixabay The Blue Planet begins before you are inside. Seen from the air, or from a plane dropping into Copenhagen Airport next door, the building is a spiral of curved arms unwinding from a central core, like water swirling into a drain. The Danish practice 3XN took the whirlpool as its idea and followed it through: the facade is clad in tens of thousands of small diamond-shaped aluminium shingles that shift in tone with the angle and the weather, the building stands on a headland on the Øresund shore ringed by a reflecting pool, and visitors enter at the eye of the vortex, a curving lobby from which the exhibits spin off along each arm.
Did you know? Its oldest fish is an Australian lungfish that arrived at the old Charlottenlund aquarium in 1967 as a young adult, so its true age is unknown.
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 modern gardens, parks and forests in the world?
- On our list, L'Oceanogràfic (Spain) ranks first, followed by Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan (Japan) and Taronga Zoo (Australia).
- Which country has the most modern gardens, parks and forests in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (2), Australia (1) and Denmark (1).
- What are the Supertrees at Gardens by the Bay?
- Tree-shaped steel structures between 25 and 50 metres tall, clad in climbing plants, ferns and orchids. Some collect rainwater or vent air from the garden's conservatories, and an aerial walkway links two of them.
- Which aquariums in Japan have whale sharks?
- Both Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium and Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan keep whale sharks in their largest tanks, the Kuroshio Sea and the Pacific Ocean tank respectively.
- How many modern gardens, parks and forests are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 8 modern gardens, parks and forests in 7 countries. Japan has the most, with 2.