The Most Beautiful National Parks in North America
16 places in 5 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful national parks in North America are Yellowstone National Park (United States), Banff National Park (Canada) and Bryce Canyon National Park (United States). The list covers 16 national parks in 5 countries. The United States has the most, with 9. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The national park as an idea was born in North America. The United States set aside Yellowstone in 1872, Canada followed with Banff in 1885, and both countries went on to protect landscapes of a size and variety few regions can match: geothermal basins, glaciated ranges, sandstone canyons, ancient forests and coastal fjords. South of the border, Mexico and Central America add volcanic islands and tropical limestone rivers.
Yellowstone sits on top of a vast volcanic system, which is why it holds more geysers and hot springs than anywhere else on Earth. Banff wraps turquoise glacial lakes in the peaks of the Canadian Rockies. In the American Southwest, the parks read like a lesson in erosion: Bryce Canyon's amphitheatres are crowded with orange hoodoos, Zion's cliffs of Navajo sandstone rise above the Virgin River, and the Grand Canyon exposes nearly two billion years of rock. Black Canyon of the Gunnison is so narrow and deep that parts of its floor see only minutes of sunlight a day.
Other parks are about scale of a different kind. Sequoia protects the General Sherman Tree, the largest living tree on Earth by volume, and Yosemite combines granite walls with some of the tallest waterfalls in North America. Gros Morne in Newfoundland lets visitors walk on rock from the Earth's mantle, and Badlands is a maze of eroded buttes. Further south, the Marieta Islands hide a beach inside a collapsed crater, and Semuc Champey stacks turquoise pools on a natural limestone bridge over the Cahabón River.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yellowstone National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 2 | Banff National Park | Protected area | Canada | |
| 3 | Bryce Canyon National Park | National park | United States | |
| 4 | Gros Morne National Park | National park | Canada | ✓ |
| 5 | Zion National Park | National park | United States | |
| 6 | Sequoia National Park | National park | United States | |
| 7 | Grand Canyon National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 8 | Yosemite National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 9 | Badlands National Park | National park | United States | |
| 10 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | United States | |
| 11 | Marieta Islands | National park | Mexico | |
| 12 | Mesa Verde National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 13 | Semuc Champey | River | Guatemala | |
| 14 | Arenal Volcano National Park | National park | Costa Rica | |
| 15 | Grutas de Cacahuamilpa | Cave | Mexico | |
| 16 | Río Celeste, Tenorio Volcano National Park | National park | Costa Rica |
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. Old Faithful gets the crowds, but the more revealing feature is Grand Prismatic Spring, whose rainbow rings of colour come from heat-loving bacteria living in water too hot and too mineral-rich for almost anything else to survive in.
Did you know? About 96 per cent of the park lies in Wyoming, three per cent in Montana and one per cent in Idaho.
02 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. North of Lake Louise the 230-km Icefields Parkway runs up the Bow Valley past Hector, Bow and Peyto lakes, with around a hundred glaciers visible from the road, before crossing into Jasper National Park at Sunwapta Pass.
Did you know? During the First World War the park held an internment camp at Castle Mountain, moved to Cave and Basin in winter; a pavilion about it opened in 2013.
03 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. Short trails drop from the rim into the hoodoos: the Navajo Loop from Sunset Point and the Queens Garden trail from Sunrise Point wind among the columns, and the Bristlecone Loop circles Rainbow Point.
Did you know? The rocks owe their palette to trace minerals: hematite gives the oranges and reds, limonite the yellows, and manganese-rich pyrolusite the purples.
04 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? Western Brook Pond reaches a depth of about 165 metres, with an average depth of over 70 metres.
05 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. The federal government settled the argument in its own way, designating the area a national monument in 1909 and upgrading it to full national park status in 1919, making it one of Utah's, and America's, earlier parks.
Did you know? In the Narrows the Virgin River runs through a gorge as little as 20 feet wide between walls up to 2,000 feet high.
06 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. For thousands of years, that heat came from frequent, low-intensity fires that swept through the groves, cracking cones, clearing out competing brush, and exposing the bare mineral soil sequoia seedlings need to take root — while the mature trees shrugged off the flames thanks to bark that can be over a foot thick and spongy enough to insulate against real heat. Fire, for a giant sequoia, isn't a threat. It's how the species reproduces.
Did you know? Established on 25 September 1890 by President Benjamin Harrison, Sequoia was the second national park created in the United States, after Yellowstone.
07 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. In 1975 it was enlarged to take in Marble Canyon and a second monument to the west, and its status helped defeat proposals to dam the river inside its boundaries.
Did you know? Within the layers lies the Great Unconformity, a gap where about 500 million years of rock record is simply missing.
08 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. At the valley's head Half Dome rises some 4,800 feet above the floor, its sheared face turned to the west, and across from it Yosemite Falls drops about 2,425 feet in three linked stages — at its best in late spring, when snowmelt is heaviest.
Did you know? The name Yosemite comes from a Miwok word meaning they are killers, given to the valley's people by neighbours; the old grizzly-bear translation is a misconception.
09 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. The White River beds hold what are often described as the richest deposits of Oligocene mammals known anywhere, the bones of mammals that roamed a warm, wooded floodplain some 33 million years ago. By the 1850s, 77 of the 84 fossil mammal species then described from North America had come from this region, and today the park runs its own fossil preparation work in public view.
Did you know? During the Second World War the US military used a vast area here, over 340,000 acres, as a bombing and gunnery range from 1942 to 1945.
10 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. Across the canyon from the South Rim, the Painted Wall rises about 2,250 feet, the tallest sheer cliff in Colorado; its dark face is laced with pale, branching stripes of pegmatite — molten rock that once forced its way into cracks and cooled there, leaving a marbling visible from miles away.
Did you know? Hidden beneath the canyon runs the Gunnison Tunnel, a 5.8-mile irrigation tunnel that was the longest of its kind in the world when it opened in 1909.
11 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 hold a major breeding colony of brown boobies, and about half the region's bridled terns nest here.
12 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. The spectacular phase came late: most cliff dwellings were raised between about 1180 and 1300, when households moved off the open mesa into the overhangs beneath it, close to seeping springs.
Did you know? The park holds close to 5,000 archaeological sites, about 600 of them cliff dwellings.
13 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. Downstream, the Cahabón re-emerges from beneath the bridge and the two waters meet again. The setting is a deep, steep-sided valley of jungle at an elevation of only about 380 metres, humid and green throughout the year.
Did you know? After vanishing into El Sumidero, the Cahabón runs underground for roughly 300 metres before bursting back into daylight at a spot called El Resurgidero.
14 Arenal Volcano National Park
Parque nacional Volcán Arenal
Costa Rica · 32.3 km from Quesada10.463° N 84.703° W
Image by InfiniteThought from Pixabay What remains is one of the most perfectly shaped volcanoes on the planet. Arenal is a young stratovolcano, around 7,000 years old, the youngest in Costa Rica, and it rises to 1,633 metres in a near-symmetrical cone with a summit crater about 140 metres across. Seen from the lowlands of San Carlos, with cloud catching on the summit and rainforest climbing its lower slopes, it has the textbook silhouette that children draw when they draw a volcano. Its older neighbour, Cerro Chato, has been dormant for around 3,500 years; its crater holds a green lagoon hidden in forest.
Did you know? The summit remained largely unexplored until a documented expedition finally reached it in 1937.
15 Grutas de Cacahuamilpa
Parque nacional Grutas de Cacahuamilpa
Mexico · 16 km from Taxco18.670° N 99.510° W
A270503 · CC0 The caves lie beneath the Cerro de la Corona ridge in northern Guerrero and extend into the neighbouring state of Morelos. Around ninety chambers have been identified, linked by a central gallery, of which about twenty are fully explored. Pottery fragments show the caves were used before the Spanish conquest, and indigenous peoples of the area are said to have held ceremonies in them. The name Cacahuamilpa comes from a place near the entrance and is usually translated as "peanut field". By tradition, the local population kept the caves hidden from the Spaniards; their "discovery" is credited to Manuel Sainz de la Peña Miranda, who sheltered here in 1834.
Did you know? One dry chamber, called the Auditorium, has a flat floor fitted with seats and has hosted concerts, including one by the Acapulco Philharmonic Orchestra in 2009.
16 Río Celeste, Tenorio Volcano National Park
Parque Nacional Volcán Tenorio
Costa Rica · 28.4 km from Cañas10.667° N 85.000° W
Cephas · CC BY-SA 4.0 The park was created in 1995 and covers a little over 18,400 hectares around Tenorio volcano, which rises to about 1,916 metres and carries several craters, among them Montezuma and Olla de Carne. The upper slopes are cloud forest, lower down it gives way to rainforest, and the park counts well over a hundred species each of mammals and reptiles and dozens of amphibians, among them the tapir and the rarely seen puma. It is managed by the Arenal-Tempisque Conservation Area of Costa Rica's national park service.
Did you know? The Quebrada Agria, literally the sour creek, has a pH of about 3.1, while the Buenavista is close to neutral at about 6.8; mixed, the river settles near 5.
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 national parks in North America?
- On our list, Yellowstone National Park (United States) ranks first, followed by Banff National Park (Canada) and Bryce Canyon National Park (United States).
- Which country has the most national parks in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (9), Canada (2) and Costa Rica (2).
- What was the first national park in the world?
- Yellowstone, established by the United States Congress in 1872, is widely regarded as the world's first national park. Banff, created in 1885, was Canada's first.
- Why is Bryce Canyon not actually a canyon?
- Bryce Canyon was not cut by a river. It is a series of natural amphitheatres eroded into the edge of a plateau by frost, rain and gravity, which left behind its forests of hoodoos.
- Why is Gros Morne National Park geologically famous?
- Its Tablelands are a block of the Earth's mantle pushed to the surface when an ancient ocean closed, offering clear evidence for plate tectonics. That geology was a main reason for its UNESCO listing.
- How many national parks are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 16 national parks in 5 countries. The United States has the most, with 9.