The Most Beautiful National Parks in Spain
7 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful national parks in Spain are Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park, Teide National Park and Garajonay National Park. The list covers 7 national parks. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Spain packs an unusual range of landscapes into one country: limestone ranges along the Atlantic edge, the high Pyrenees on the French border, and, far to the south-west, the volcanic Canary Islands, which have more national parks than any other Spanish region. Atlantic islands off Galicia add sea cliffs and white beaches. Spain also created its first national parks early, in 1918, which helped keep some of these places largely intact.
Ordesa y Monte Perdido protects deep limestone canyons beneath Monte Perdido, the third-highest summit of the Pyrenees, and forms a World Heritage site together with the French side of the range. Picos de Europa, one of the two founding parks of 1918, rises in sharp grey massifs only a short distance from the Bay of Biscay.
In the Canaries the scenery is volcanic. Teide National Park on Tenerife surrounds the highest mountain in Spain, standing above a vast caldera of lava fields. Timanfaya on Lanzarote preserves the black and rust-coloured ground left by eruptions between 1730 and 1736. Caldera de Taburiente on La Palma is a huge erosion basin ringed by cliffs, and Garajonay on La Gomera shelters one of the best surviving laurel forests, a type of woodland that once covered much of southern Europe. On the Atlantic side of Galicia, the Cíes Islands are known for clear water and the curving sands of Rodas beach.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 2 | Teide National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 3 | Garajonay National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 4 | Cíes Islands | National park | |
| 5 | Caldera de Taburiente National Park | National park | |
| 6 | Timanfaya National Park | National park | |
| 7 | Picos de Europa National Park | National park |
01 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
Image by vilanchelo from Pixabay The park is one of the oldest in Spain: a small reserve of 21 km² in the Ordesa valley was protected in 1918, and it was enlarged to its present 156 km² in 1982. In 1997 it became part of the cross-border World Heritage Site Pyrénées – Mont Perdu, shared with the French cirques on the other side of the ridge. The park also carries a melancholy footnote in natural history: the last Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo, died here in January 2000, and the subspecies has been extinct since.
Did you know? Monte Perdido is the highest limestone massif in Europe, and it still holds a small glacier on its northern face.
02 Teide National Park
Parque Nacional del Teide
Spain28.276° N 16.643° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Barni1 from Pixabay Life has adapted to an environment of intense sun, cold nights and little water. The most famous plant is the Teide bugloss, whose red flower spikes can reach three metres in May and June; the white-and-pink Teide broom covers the slopes, and the Teide violet grows almost at the summit, making it the highest-flowering plant in Spain. Of the 168 vascular plant species recorded, 33 grow only on Tenerife, and many of its invertebrates occur nowhere else. For the aboriginal Guanches the mountain was sacred — they called it Echeyde and believed it was a gateway to the underworld — and archaeological sites have been found across the park.
03 Garajonay National Park
Parque nacional de Garajonay
Spain28.126° N 17.237° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by nike159 from Pixabay Above the trees rise volcanic plugs worn into towers by erosion, such as Roque de Agando, and the summit of Garajonay itself, at 1,487 metres the island's highest point, where remains of an ancient native sanctuary have been found. A romantic tale says the mountain is named after two lovers, Gara of La Gomera and Jonay of Tenerife, who died together on its slopes rather than be parted; the story in fact first appears in print only in 1924, and the name is more likely an old island word for a high crag. In August 2012 a fire burned 747 hectares, nearly a fifth of the park.
04 Cíes Islands
Illas Cíes
Spain · 14.1 km from Vigo42.233° N 8.900° W
Image by sitoruiz from Pixabay Visitor numbers are capped in season - close to 3,000 a day at the peak - and an authorisation is needed before boarding, so the islands never feel like a resort; everything you carry in, you carry out.
Did you know? Besides the gulls, around 2,500 pairs of European shags nest on the islands.
05 Caldera de Taburiente National Park
Parque nacional de la Caldera de Taburiente
Spain28.754° N 17.885° W
Luc Viatour · CC BY-SA 3.0 The caldera was also the last stronghold of the island's first people, who called La Palma Benahoare. When the Castilian forces of Alonso Fernández de Lugo landed in 1492, most of the island's cantons came to terms, but Aceró, the canton of the caldera, held out behind its walls of rock. Its chief, Tanausú, was captured only after being drawn out to negotiate under a promise of peace, and tradition says that he refused food on the ship carrying him to Spain and died of hunger. The caldera became a national park in 1954, at the urging of artists and scholars; it was enlarged in 1981 to around 4,700 hectares.
Did you know? The basin formed when the flank of a huge volcano collapsed in a landslide about half a million years ago, then was enlarged by erosion.
06 Timanfaya National Park
Parque Nacional de Timanfaya
Spain · 24.1 km from Arrecife29.014° N 13.780° W
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay The colours are what stay in the memory: rust-red and ochre cones, black and purple lava fields twisted into ropes and blades, and pale lichens, the first life to take hold, slowly colonising the bare rock. The Lanzarote-born artist César Manrique left his mark here too. He designed the El Diablo restaurant on the Islote de Hilario, where food is grilled over the volcanic heat, and the devil figure that became the park's emblem. The park was declared in 1974, and since 1993 it has been a core area of the UNESCO biosphere reserve that covers the whole of Lanzarote.
Did you know? Timanfaya is the only national park in Spain that is entirely geological in character.
07 Picos de Europa National Park
Parque nacional de Picos de Europa
Spain43.250° N 4.917° W
- biosphere reserve
Image by javierAlamo from Pixabay Pedro Pidal was also the driving force behind the park itself. Created in July 1918 as the Covadonga Mountain National Park, it was the first national park in Spain, centred on the glacial lakes of Enol and Ercina above the shrine of Covadonga, where tradition places the battle of 722 that began the Christian reconquest of the peninsula. The park was enlarged to its present extent in 1995 and later years, and UNESCO recognised it as a biosphere reserve in 2003. Shepherding communities still use the high meadows, and the strong blue cheese of Cabrales is still matured in the natural limestone caves of the area.
Did you know? The Naranjo de Bulnes was first climbed on 5 August 1904 by Pedro Pidal and the shepherd Gregorio Pérez.
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 Spain?
- On our list, Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park ranks first, followed by Teide National Park and Garajonay National Park.
- What is the oldest national park in Spain?
- Picos de Europa, first protected in 1918 as the Montaña de Covadonga National Park. Ordesa was declared a national park later the same year.
- How high is Mount Teide?
- Teide rises to 3,715 metres, making it the highest point in Spain and in any island of the Atlantic.
- What is the laurel forest of Garajonay?
- It is laurisilva, a humid evergreen forest of laurel-type trees fed by Atlantic mist. Forests like it covered much of southern Europe millions of years ago and now survive mainly on the Macaronesian islands.
- How many national parks are on this list in Spain?
- The list covers 7 national parks.