The Most Beautiful National Parks in the World

61 places in 30 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Yellowstone National Park

   United States44.600° N 110.500° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty
   • biosphere reserve

   

   On 1 March 1872, Ulysses S. Grant signed a piece of legislation that had no real precedent anywhere in the world: setting aside more than two million acres of Wyoming and Montana territory not for a king, a church, or a private estate, but simply to be left alone. Yellowstone wasn't just America's first national park — it was the first national park, period, the model every other country's park system has copied since.

   Did you know? Two-thirds of all the world's geysers are in Yellowstone, and at least 1,283 have erupted there, with around 465 active in a typical year.

   More about Yellowstone National Park →

2. 02 Serengeti National Park

   Tanzania2.400° S 34.600° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The Serengeti is the stage for the largest animal migration on land: roughly 1.5 million wildebeest, a quarter of a million zebra and hundreds of thousands of Thomson's gazelle moving in a yearly circuit between northern Tanzania and Kenya's Maasai Mara. The park itself covers nearly 15,000 square kilometres and was created in 1940; its boundaries were fixed in 1951, and in 1959 the eastern highlands were split off as the Ngorongoro Conservation Area so that the Maasai, excluded from the park, could keep grazing there. Bernhard and Michael Grzimek's book and film Serengeti Shall Not Die made it famous the same year, and UNESCO listed it in 1981.

   Did you know? The migration follows a circuit of roughly 800 km, and around 250,000 wildebeest and 30,000 zebras die along the way each year from predators, drowning, thirst and disease.

   More about Serengeti National Park →

3. 03 Banff National Park

   Canada · 2 km from Banff51.167° N 115.550° W

   

   Banff was Canada's first national park, created in 1885 when the government set aside a small reserve around hot springs that railway workers had stumbled on at Cave and Basin; it has since grown to about 6,641 square kilometres of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta. The peaks are slabs of sedimentary rock pushed eastward 80 to 55 million years ago and then sculpted by glaciers into horns, cirques and U-shaped valleys. Glaciers still hang on the high slopes, and the Columbia Icefield on the park's northern edge is the largest unbroken mass of ice in the Rockies. The park is part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site.

   Did you know? About 82 km of fencing along the Trans-Canada Highway, combined with wildlife overpasses and underpasses, has cut collisions between animals and vehicles by more than 80 per cent.

   More about Banff National Park →

4. 04 Etosha National Park

   Namibia18.785° S 16.264° E

   

   The heart of Etosha is an absence: a vast, flat, white depression of salt and clay, about 130 km long and up to 50 km wide, covering almost a quarter of the park. The name is usually translated from Oshindonga as "great white place". For most of the year the pan is bone-dry and shimmers in the heat; in good rainy seasons it holds a thin sheet of brackish water that draws flamingos and pelicans. Around it lie mopane woodland — some four trees in five in the park — and dolomite hills, across a protected area of more than 22,000 km².

   Did you know? When proclaimed in 1907 the reserve covered roughly 80,000 km², more than three and a half times the area of today's park.

   More about Etosha National Park →

5. 05 Kakadu National Park

   Australia13.005° S 132.520° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Kakadu, in the Top End of Australia's Northern Territory, is the country's largest national park after one desert reserve: about 19,800 square kilometres, roughly the size of Wales, running from tidal rivers on the coast to the sheer sandstone wall of the Arnhem Land escarpment. Most of the land belongs to its Aboriginal traditional owners, who manage it jointly with Parks Australia; their ancestors have lived here for tens of thousands of years, and archaeological sites in the region are among the oldest in Australia. UNESCO listed Kakadu in stages between 1981 and 1992 for both its natural and its cultural values.

   More about Kakadu National Park →

6. 06 Bryce Canyon National Park

   United States37.640° N 112.170° W

   • Dark Sky Place

   

   Bryce Canyon is not really a canyon. It is a chain of vast natural amphitheatres eaten into the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau in southern Utah, filled with thousands of hoodoos: slender spires and pinnacles of soft rock, some as tall as 60 m, coloured red, orange, pink and white. They were carved from old river and lake sediments by frost weathering and stream erosion, working back into the plateau edge rather than down from a central river. The largest amphitheatre, Bryce Amphitheater, is about 19 km long, 5 km wide and 240 m deep.

   Did you know? The Paiute called the hoodoos Anka-ku-was-a-wits, meaning red painted faces, and the plateau's name, Paunsaugunt, is Paiute for home of the beaver.

   More about Bryce Canyon National Park →

7. 07 Namib-Naukluft National Park

   Namibia24.546° S 15.330° E

   

   Namib-Naukluft is the park that holds the most famous desert landscapes in southern Africa. Covering nearly 50,000 square kilometres, it stretches from the Atlantic coast deep into the interior of Namibia, taking in part of the Namib — often described as the oldest desert on Earth — as well as the Naukluft mountains on its eastern side. Its history as a protected area goes back to 1907, when the German colonial administration declared a game reserve here; the modern boundaries were set in 1986, and for a time it was the largest game park in Africa.

   Did you know? The park runs roughly 600 kilometres from north to south, between the Atlantic coast and the edge of the Great Escarpment.

   More about Namib-Naukluft National Park →

8. 08 Valley of Flowers National Park

   India30.730° N 79.618° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty
   • biosphere reserve

   

   For a few weeks each summer, a high hanging valley in the Garhwal Himalaya turns into a sweep of alpine flowers. The Valley of Flowers lies at around 3,350 to 3,650 metres in the upper basin of the Pushpawati river in Uttarakhand, about eight kilometres long and two wide, below peaks that rise to Gauri Parbat at 6,719 metres. It is snowbound for most of the year and opens to visitors only in the warm season, roughly June to October.

   Did you know? A 1997 survey by the Wildlife Institute of India found five plant species in the valley that were new to science.

   More about Valley of Flowers National Park →

9. 09 Amboseli National Park

   Kenya2.650° S 37.250° E

   

   Amboseli is a flat, dusty basin in southern Kenya whose fame rests on something that stands outside it. Across the border in Tanzania, Kilimanjaro rises straight out of the plain, and on clear mornings its snow-capped dome hangs above the park like a backdrop painted too large for the stage. Herds of elephants walking beneath that mountain have become one of the defining images of East Africa, and here the picture is not staged: the animals are simply going about their day between the swamps and the dry lake bed.

   Did you know? The Amboseli Elephant Research Project, begun in 1972, is described as the longest-running study of wild elephant behaviour, with life histories of more than 2,000 individuals.

   More about Amboseli National Park →

10. 10 Gros Morne National Park

    Canada49.689° N 57.738° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Gros Morne National Park on the west coast of Newfoundland is one of the few places on Earth where you can walk on the planet's mantle. Its UNESCO listing in 1987 recognised a textbook of plate tectonics laid bare: slabs of ancient ocean floor and deep mantle rock pushed up onto the edge of the continent when an ocean closed hundreds of millions of years ago. Around them lie fjords, sea cliffs, bogs and the flat-topped Long Range Mountains, remnants of a range formed more than a billion years ago. The park covers about 1,805 square kilometres and takes its name from its second-highest peak, Gros Morne, at 806 metres.

    Did you know? Pissing Mare Falls plunges about 343 metres into Western Brook Pond, with an unbroken drop of some 250 metres, and is considered the highest waterfall in eastern North America.

    More about Gros Morne National Park →

11. 11 Canaima National Park

    Parque Nacional Canaima

    Venezuela5.319° N 61.795° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Canaima National Park covers about 30,000 square kilometres of south-eastern Venezuela, stretching to the borders with Brazil and Guyana and taking in most of the Gran Sabana. It is one of the largest national parks in the world, roughly the size of Belgium. Around two-thirds of it is taken up by tepuis — flat-topped mountains of ancient sandstone with sheer cliff walls, rising abruptly from the savanna and forest like islands. Their rock is among the oldest on Earth, laid down on granite nearly three billion years old, dating from a time when South America and Africa were still joined.

    Did you know? Angel Falls takes its name from American pilot Jimmie Angel, who flew over it in 1933 and crash-landed his plane on top of Auyán-tepui in 1937.

    More about Canaima National Park →

12. 12 Plitvice Lakes National Park

    Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera

    Croatia44.880° N 15.616° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The barriers that create Plitvice's sixteen terraced lakes are, in a very real sense, alive — or at least built by living things. As water flows over limestone, it releases dissolved carbon dioxide, which shifts the water's chemistry so that calcium carbonate starts crystallising out of solution. Left alone, that process would just leave mineral crusts. What actually happens here is that mosses, algae and cyanobacteria growing on every submerged surface trap those crystals and keep building on them, layer by layer, into travertine barriers that dam the river's flow and stack the lakes into their famous cascading terraces.

    Did you know? Plitvice was among the very first natural sites on the World Heritage List, inscribed in 1979 and extended in 2000.

    More about Plitvice Lakes National Park →

13. 13 Gunung Mulu National Park

    Malaysia4.043° N 114.813° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    In the interior of northern Sarawak, close to the border with Brunei, three mountains rise out of the Borneo rainforest and hide beneath them some of the largest caves on earth. Gunung Mulu National Park covers 52,864 hectares and was gazetted in 1974, opened to visitors in 1985 and inscribed as a natural World Heritage Site in 2000. Mount Mulu itself, 2,376 metres high, is sandstone; its neighbours Mount Api and Mount Benarat are limestone, and it is inside this band of limestone that rivers have carved nearly 300 km of explored cave passages, surveyed by a long series of British-led expeditions since the Royal Geographical Society's fifteen-month expedition of 1977–1978.

    Did you know? The Sarawak Chamber encloses roughly 12 million cubic metres of space beneath a roof that spans about 300 metres without any supporting pillar.

    More about Gunung Mulu National Park →

14. 14 Fiordland National Park

    New Zealand45.386° S 167.347° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Fiordland is New Zealand's largest national park by a wide margin, 1.2 million hectares of temperate rainforest and 14 fjords gouged out by glaciers that retreated long enough ago for forest to reclaim nearly every slope down to the waterline. Rudyard Kipling once called Milford Sound the eighth wonder of the world, and the sound alone gets roughly 6,000 to 8,000 millimetres of rain a year — several times London's annual total — spread across some 180 days.

    Did you know? The park covers about 12,600 square kilometres and makes up nearly half of the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Site in south-west New Zealand.

    More about Fiordland National Park →

15. 15 Isalo National Park

    Parc national de l'Isalo

    Madagascar22.435° S 45.288° E

    

    Isalo is a sandstone massif rising out of the dry grass plains of south-central Madagascar, and the national park that protects it, created in 1962, covers some 815 km². The rock was laid down roughly 200 million years ago, around the turn of the Triassic and Jurassic, as sands carried by rivers onto a delta; once lifted up, it was attacked by seasonal streams and wind along its horizontal beds and vertical joints. The result is a ruined-city landscape of ridges, towers, arches and balanced boulders, cut by canyons up to 200 m deep, with the rock glowing ochre and rust-red at the ends of the day.

    Did you know? A 2024 archaeological study dated rock-cut niches at a site called Teniky, in the Isalo area, to the 10th to 12th centuries, possibly of Zoroastrian origin.

    More about Isalo National Park →

16. 16 Jiuzhaigou Valley

    People's Republic of China33.200° N 103.900° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The name means, roughly, "valley of nine villages," after the Tibetan settlements scattered through it — villages that predate its 1978 designation as a protected scenic reserve by centuries. The most-told explanation for its lakes has nothing to do with geology: a mountain god, in love with a goddess, gave her a mirror; she dropped it fleeing an attacking demon, and it shattered into over a hundred pieces that became the valley's lakes, each one a shard of that broken gift. It's a good story precisely because the real explanation is almost as strange. Most of Jiuzhaigou's lakes are barrier lakes — created when ancient earthquakes and landslides dumped enough rock and debris across the valley to dam sections of the river outright, backing up meltwater from the surrounding Minshan range into pool after pool rather than one continuous stream.

    Did you know? Long Lake, the highest, largest and deepest of the valley's lakes, stretches about 7.5 km and reaches a depth of around 103 metres.

    More about Jiuzhaigou Valley →

17. 17 Seoraksan National Park

    South Korea · 17.9 km from Sokcho38.125° N 128.416° E

    

    Seoraksan is the mountain that gives the national park its name, a ridge of pale granite in Gangwon Province on South Korea's east coast. Its highest point, Daecheongbong, reaches 1,708 metres, making it the tallest summit of the Taebaek range and the third highest mountain in the country after Hallasan and Jirisan. What sets it apart is not height but texture: the granite has weathered into needles, fins and serrated crests, and between them run clear streams over smooth slabs, small gorges and waterfalls. The area became a national park in March 1970 and a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1982, and its forests shelter rarities such as the long-tailed goral, a shy mountain goat-antelope.

    Did you know? Its 108-tonne gilt-bronze Unification Buddha cost about 3.8 billion won, raised over a decade from more than 300,000 donors.

    More about Seoraksan National Park →

18. 18 Zion National Park

    United States37.203° N 112.988° W

    • Dark Sky Place

    

    The cliffs that make Zion look otherworldly are, geologically speaking, fossilised weather. The dominant rock, Navajo Sandstone, started out around 180 million years ago as an enormous field of wind-blown sand dunes — think Sahara-scale — and the diagonal cross-bedding cutting through the rock faces is literally the shape of those ancient dune slopes, frozen in stone. Over roughly 150 million years, nine separate rock formations stacked up here, and then the Virgin River spent a comparatively short geological instant — a few million years — cutting straight down through all of them to produce the canyon, which is still an active process: the river is still carving, the walls are still shedding rock, and Zion Canyon is technically unfinished.

    Did you know? When President Taft protected the canyon in 1909, he gave it the Southern Paiute-derived name Mukuntuweap National Monument; it became Zion only later.

    More about Zion National Park →

19. 19 Simien Mountains National Park

    Ethiopia13.183° N 38.067° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Simien Mountains National Park protects the highest part of the Simien massif in northern Ethiopia, one of the most dramatic landscapes in Africa. The massif is the remnant of a huge shield volcano built of flood basalts around 30 million years ago; erosion has since carved it into jagged pinnacles, deep valleys and escarpments dropping up to 1,500 metres in sheer cliffs. The park includes Ras Dashen, Ethiopia's highest summit. Founded in 1969, it was among the first sites in the world inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list, in 1978, for its biodiversity and scenery.

    Did you know? Geladas are the only primates that live almost entirely on grass, which can make up about 90 percent of their diet.

    More about Simien Mountains National Park →

20. 20 Sequoia National Park

    United States36.565° N 118.773° W

    

    The General Sherman Tree, somewhere between 2,200 and 2,700 years old, is the largest living tree on Earth by trunk volume — not the tallest, and not the widest, but the one that wins once you multiply height by girth across its entire 275-foot length. Numbers like that are almost beside the point standing under it; what's harder to see is how deliberately the whole species is built around disaster.

    Did you know? Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet the highest summit in the contiguous United States, lies on the park's eastern edge, giving it nearly 13,000 feet of vertical relief.

    More about Sequoia National Park →

21. 21 Abel Tasman National Park

    New Zealand40.900° S 172.971° E

    

    Abel Tasman National Park is New Zealand's smallest national park, about 237 square kilometres of hills between Golden Bay and Tasman Bay at the top of the South Island, and one of the most visited. Its beauty is coastal: sandy beaches, headlands and estuaries backed by forested hills. Offshore lie Tonga Island, Adele Island and Fisherman Island, and the Tonga Island Marine Reserve protects part of the sea beside the park.

    Did you know? In December 1642 Māori of Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri rammed a Dutch boat in Golden Bay, killing four of Tasman's sailors, and he named it Murderers Bay.

    More about Abel Tasman National Park →

22. 22 Grand Canyon National Park

    United States36.055° N 112.122° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty
    • Dark Sky Place

    

    Grand Canyon National Park protects a chasm that the Colorado River and its tributaries cut into the Colorado Plateau after the plateau was lifted. The walls expose a staircase of coloured rock reaching back to Precambrian time, so that every viewpoint is also a cross-section through geological history — reds, buffs and greys banding the cliffs, and the river a thin line far below. The park was designated a World Heritage Site in 1979 and draws close to five million visitors a year.

    Did you know? The canyon's rocks span almost two billion years, from the Vishnu Schist in the Inner Gorge to the 270-million-year-old Kaibab Limestone on the rim.

    More about Grand Canyon National Park →

23. 23 Iguazú National Park

    Parque Nacional Iguazú

    Argentina · 34.7 km from Foz do Iguaçu25.705° S 54.248° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Argentina created Iguazú National Park in 1934 to protect the greater part of the Iguazú Falls and the subtropical forest around them, and UNESCO listed it in 1984, together with its Brazilian counterpart across the river. The park covers 677 square kilometres of the far north of Misiones province. The name comes from Guaraní words for "big water", and it is not an exaggeration: along a rim some 2.7 km long, the river splits into anything from 150 to 300 separate falls, depending on the season, dropping between 60 and 82 metres over two great steps of basalt.

    Did you know? On 9 June 2014 the falls carried a record flow of about 45,700 cubic metres per second, more than five times Niagara's highest recorded flow.

    More about Iguazú National Park →

24. 24 Torres del Paine National Park

    Parque Nacional Torres del Paine

    Chile50.983° S 72.966° W

    

    Torres del Paine takes its name from three granite pillars that rise almost vertically out of the Patagonian steppe: the Torre d'Agostini, the Torre Central and the Torre Monzino, each around 2,500 metres high. They are the most famous view in the park, seen at dawn from the moraine lake at their feet when the first sun turns the rock pink and orange. Beside them stand the Cuernos del Paine, the "horns", whose pale granite bodies are capped with dark sedimentary rock, a two-tone profile that makes them unmistakable from across the lakes. The massif's highest summit, Cerro Paine Grande, reaches 2,884 metres.

    Did you know? Paine means blue in the language of the Tehuelche people, and the name refers to the colour of the mountains and lakes.

    More about Torres del Paine National Park →

25. 25 Huascarán National Park

    Parque nacional Huascarán

    Peru · 20.3 km from Huaraz9.400° S 77.400° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Huascarán National Park protects almost the whole of the Cordillera Blanca, the highest tropical mountain range on Earth, a wall of ice-capped peaks running some 150 km along the central Andes of Peru. Its highest summit, Huascarán, reaches 6,768 metres, the top of Peru, and around it rise Huandoy, Copa, Huantsán and dozens of other peaks above 6,000 metres. The park covers 340,000 hectares, and within that space lie around 660 tropical glaciers, the largest glaciated area in the tropics, and some 300 glacial lakes of startling turquoise, set in U-shaped valleys carved by ice. It was created in 1975, declared a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1977 and a World Heritage Site in 1985.

    Did you know? In 1970 an earthquake broke away part of Huascarán's north face, sending some 80 million cubic metres of ice and rock down onto the towns of Yungay and Ranrahirca.

    More about Huascarán National Park →

26. 26 Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park

    Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido

    Spain42.672° N 0.056° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park lies on the Spanish side of the central Pyrenees in the province of Huesca, and it is a landscape made of limestone. Around Monte Perdido, 3,355 m high, great beds of Cretaceous and Eocene rock have been folded, lifted and then cut by ice and water into deep canyons, stepped cliffs and high cirques. The contrast is the point: from forested valley floors at around 750 m, walls of banded rock rise hundreds of metres to plateaus of bare karst, pitted with sinkholes, fissures and caves.

    Did you know? In 2003 scientists cloned the extinct Pyrenean ibex, but the kid lived only minutes, making it the only animal to go extinct twice.

    More about Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park →

27. 27 Teide National Park

    Parque Nacional del Teide

    Spain28.276° N 16.643° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Teide National Park covers the high heart of Tenerife: a vast volcanic caldera, Las Cañadas, and the cone of Teide rising out of it to 3,718 metres, the highest point in Spain. Measured from the ocean floor, Teide is one of the tallest volcanoes on the planet, and together with its neighbour Pico Viejo it forms the only pair of peaks in the Canaries above 3,000 metres. The park was declared in 1954, received the Council of Europe's diploma for protected areas in 1989, and became a World Heritage Site in 2007 for both its scenery and its value as a record of how oceanic islands evolve.

    More about Teide National Park →

28. 28 Galápagos National Park

    Parque nacional Galápagos

    Ecuador0.333° S 90.000° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Galápagos National Park covers about 97 percent of the land of the Galápagos archipelago, a scatter of more than a hundred volcanic islands, islets and rocks straddling the equator some 900 km west of mainland Ecuador. Only the settled corners of Santa Cruz, San Cristóbal, Isabela and Baltra lie outside it. The islands have been built by a hotspot beneath the Pacific floor, and they are young in geological terms: the oldest are around three million years old, while Fernandina, in the west, is only about 65,000 years old and still erupts regularly. Landscapes of lava and ash change from island to island, and the cold Humboldt Current gives this equatorial sea surprisingly cool water.

    Did you know? The Galápagos Islands were the very first entry on UNESCO's World Heritage List, inscribed in 1978 as site number 1.

    More about Galápagos National Park →

29. 29 White Desert

    Egypt · 32.9 km from Farafra27.277° N 28.200° E

    

    Sixty million years ago, this stretch of Egypt sat under a shallow sea. Over the following 30 million years, the shells and skeletons of marine organisms settled to the bottom, compacting into thick beds of chalk and limestone. When the sea eventually withdrew, it left that soft white rock exposed to a completely different set of forces — wind, sand, and the region's rare but real rainfall — that have been carving it ever since.

    Did you know? The White Desert was declared a protected area in 2002, in the Farafra Depression about 570 kilometres south-west of Cairo.

    More about White Desert →

30. 30 Yosemite National Park

    United States37.742° N 119.537° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Few landscapes explain their own making as plainly as Yosemite. The park's 1,187 square miles sit on the granite of the Sierra Nevada batholith, rock that cooled deep underground, was lifted and tilted with the range some ten million years ago, and was then worked over by ice. Glaciers of roughly the last million years scoured Yosemite Valley into its U-shaped trough, leaving sheer walls where the rock was solid and hanging side valleys from which streams now fall free. The valley itself covers only about one percent of the park, yet it gathers nearly everything the name brings to mind.

    Did you know? On rare clear evenings in mid to late February, the setting sun backlights Horsetail Fall on the eastern edge of El Capitan so that it glows orange.

    More about Yosemite National Park →