The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in the World
580 places in 105 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful natural wonders in the world are Milford Sound / Piopiotahi (New Zealand), Lençóis Maranhenses National Park (Brazil) and Matterhorn (Switzerland). The list covers 580 natural wonders in 105 countries. The United States has the most, with 68. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Natural wonders are the shapes the planet makes when rock, ice, water and fire are given enough time. What lifts one above a pleasant view is usually a single extreme: a wall that drops a kilometre, a glacier long enough to fill a valley system, a volcano still smoking inside a caldera, columns of basalt split as if by a mason. Scale matters, but so does form, the clean line of a peak or the curve of a dune, and the way light falls on it at dawn and dusk.
This collection runs from the columnar cliffs of Tōjinbō on Japan's Sea of Japan coast to the Baltoro Glacier in the Karakoram, the ice road toward K2. Tiger Leaping Gorge squeezes the upper Yangtze between two snow mountains in Yunnan. Mount Bromo smokes inside the sand sea of the Tengger caldera on Java, and Milford Sound cuts into Fiordland in New Zealand. There are deserts too, such as Dasht-e Lut in Iran, and karst springs like the Blautopf in Germany, whose water is an improbable blue.
The places here were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the section also opens into separate pages by country and by type of place, from summits and gorges to caves and glaciers.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Milford Sound / Piopiotahi | Fjord | New Zealand | |
| 2 | Lençóis Maranhenses National Park | Dune | Brazil | ✓ |
| 3 | Matterhorn | Mountain | Switzerland | |
| 4 | Cuernos del Paine | Mountain | Chile | |
| 5 | Grand Canyon | Canyon | United States | |
| 6 | Vinicunca (Rainbow Mountain) | Mountain | Peru | |
| 7 | Deadvlei | Salt flat | Namibia | |
| 8 | Son Doong Cave | Cave | Vietnam | |
| 9 | Giant's Causeway | Rock formation | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 10 | Mount Fuji | Volcano | Japan | ✓ |
| 11 | Mount Elbrus | Mountain | Russia | |
| 12 | Mount Olympus | Mountain | Greece | |
| 13 | Cape of Good Hope | Cliff | South Africa | |
| 14 | Mount Vesuvius | Volcano | Italy | |
| 15 | Uluru | Rock formation | Australia | |
| 16 | Puncak Jaya | Mountain | Indonesia | |
| 17 | Aoraki / Mount Cook | Summit | New Zealand | |
| 18 | Mount Rainier | Volcano | United States | |
| 19 | Nanda Devi | Mountain | India | |
| 20 | Mount Everest | Mountain | Nepal | |
| 21 | Aconcagua | Mountain | Argentina | |
| 22 | Sugarloaf Mountain | Mountain | Brazil | |
| 23 | Loreley | Cliff | Germany | |
| 24 | Eiger | Mountain | Switzerland | |
| 25 | White Cliffs of Dover | Cliff | United Kingdom | |
| 26 | Mount Fitz Roy | Summit | Argentina | |
| 27 | Mount Bromo | Volcano | Indonesia | |
| 28 | Aletsch Glacier | Glacier | Switzerland | ✓ |
| 29 | Cave of Altamira | Cave | Spain | ✓ |
| 30 | Geirangerfjord | Fjord | Norway | ✓ |
01 Milford Sound / Piopiotahi
New Zealand44.617° S 167.867° E
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 Rain is part of its beauty. With an average of more than 6,400 mm a year, this is the wettest inhabited place in New Zealand, and after heavy rain hundreds of temporary waterfalls stream down the cliffs, some of them a thousand metres long; the smaller ones may be blown into spray before they ever reach the water. Two falls, Lady Bowen and Stirling, run all year.
Did you know? Lady Bowen Falls, at about 162 metres the taller of the two permanent waterfalls, honours the wife of Governor George Bowen, who sailed into the sound in 1871.
02 Lençóis Maranhenses National Park
Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses
Brazil2.483° S 43.133° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Julius Dadalti · CC BY-SA 4.0 The genuinely strange part is what lives in those lagoons. Visitors have long asked how fish end up in pools sitting on top of pure white sand, far from any river mouth — and the answer isn't that birds carry in eggs, as the popular story goes. Some lagoons connect underground to permanent waterways, letting fish move in once the water rises.
Did you know? Endangered animals living in the park include the scarlet ibis, the West Indian manatee, the neotropical otter and the oncilla, a small wild cat.
03 Matterhorn
Switzerland · 37.5 km from Sion45.976° N 7.659° E
Image by moremilu from Pixabay Geologically the peak is a remnant of Africa. Its gneiss comes from the Dent Blanche nappe, fragments of the African plate that now lie over ophiolites and sediments of the Penninic nappes, and its horn shape was carved by several glaciers eroding cirques into it from different sides at once. Only small patches of snow and ice cling to the faces; avalanches strip them regularly and feed the glaciers at the foot of each wall.
Did you know? The French Cervin and Italian Cervino go back to a Latin name linked to forest; Saussure's spelling with a C reflects his guess that it meant deer.
04 Cuernos del Paine
Chile51.002° S 73.012° W
Image by jmarti20 from Pixabay The two-tone look is a geological snapshot. Around 12 to 13 million years ago a body of magma pushed up and spread sideways between layers of older mudstone and sandstone, cooling into granite and gabbro-diorite; the heat baked the surrounding sediments into dark metamorphic rock. Erosion later stripped away most of the covering layers, leaving the dark remnants perched on top of the granite.
Did you know? Cuerno Norte fell in 1971 to a party of six climbers, three years after the main horn.
05 Grand Canyon
United States36.097° N 112.095° W
Image by balder815 from Pixabay How and when the canyon formed is still debated. Many studies place the river's present course at 5 to 6 million years old, while others argue that parts of the canyon were carved much earlier and later linked together. People have lived here for thousands of years; the ancestors of the Havasupai and Hualapai, who still live along the southern side, occupied the area, and the Pueblo peoples regarded it as sacred.
Did you know? The North Rim receives about 144 inches of snow in a typical year, more than twice the South Rim’s 60 inches.
06 Vinicunca (Rainbow Mountain)
Vinicunca
Peru13.870° S 71.303° W
Image by jerzykwpodrozy from Pixabay Each band is a different kind of rock. The pink comes from red clays, muds and sands, the white from quartz-rich sandstone and marl, the deep red from claystones loaded with iron, the green from phyllites rich in iron and magnesium, the brown from a coarse conglomerate containing magnesium, and the mustard yellow from sulphur-bearing calcareous sandstones.
Did you know? After public outcry over the mining concession, President Martín Vizcarra decreed a twelve-month moratorium on all mining in the area in November 2018.
07 Deadvlei
Namibia24.763° S 15.295° E
Image by kuloser from Pixabay The trees tell the history of the pan. The Tsauchab river once flooded this hollow often enough to leave shallow pools, and camel thorns took root in the moist ground. When the climate grew drier, the advancing dunes cut the river off, the water stopped coming and the trees died, an estimated six to seven centuries ago. They have not decayed since: the air is so dry that the wood never rotted, and the sun has scorched it nearly black.
Did you know? The Tsauchab river never reaches the ocean: it ends in this dune-locked basin, which is why the pans are called dead-end marshes.
08 Son Doong Cave
Vietnam · 33.3 km from Đồng Hới17.457° N 106.288° E
Trantuanviet · CC BY-SA 4.0 A local man, Hồ Khanh, found the entrance in 1990 while searching for agarwood, but was put off by the roar of water and the wind blowing out of it, and later could not find it again. He relocated it in 2008 at the request of British cavers, and in April 2009 an expedition of the British Cave Research Association led by Howard Limbert surveyed the cave.
Did you know? The expedition named the first doline Watch Out for Dinosaurs, because its ferns, fog and sheer cliffs looked like a prehistoric scene.
09 Giant's Causeway
United Kingdom55.241° N 6.512° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Lindy Buckley from Nanjing, China · CC BY 2.0 Local tradition, of course, has a different explanation. In the best-known version, the giant Fionn mac Cumhaill built the causeway across the North Channel to fight the Scottish giant Benandonner, then took fright at his rival's size; his wife dressed Fionn as a baby, and Benandonner, imagining the size of the father of such an infant, fled home and tore up the road behind him.
Did you know? In places the solidified lava in the surrounding cliffs reaches a thickness of about 28 metres.
10 Mount Fuji
Japan · 34.7 km from Kōfu35.361° N 138.727° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
名古屋太郎, (edited by Hannes_24 ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 UNESCO inscribed Fuji in 2013 not as a natural site but as a cultural one, a mountain that has inspired artists and poets and drawn pilgrims for centuries. The listing covers 25 places, among them the Fujisan Hongū Sengen Taisha shrine, dedicated to the Shinto goddess Konohanasakuya-hime, and the mountain is ringed by the Fuji Five Lakes.
Did you know? The summit crater is about 780 metres across and 240 metres deep, ringed by eight peaks regarded as sacred.
11 Mount Elbrus
Russia43.353° N 42.438° E
Image by vishstudio from Pixabay From its ice cap spread around two dozen glaciers covering well over a hundred square kilometres, the largest of them the Bolshoi Azau on the south side. They feed three of the region's major rivers, the Kuban, the Malka and the Baksan, and like almost every glacier in the Caucasus they have been shrinking for a century.
Did you know? Its Karachay-Balkar name, Mingi Taw, means 'eternal mountain', while the Kabardian name is usually rendered as 'mountain of happiness'.
12 Mount Olympus
Όλυμπος
Greece · 24.7 km from Katerini40.083° N 22.350° E
- biosphere reserve
Image by zremus from Pixabay The mountain is formed of marine sediments laid down some 200 million years ago and later sculpted by glaciers, which left high plateaus such as the Muses' Plateau at around 2,550 metres and deep gorges like that of the Enipeas above Litochoro.
Did you know? With a topographic prominence of about 2,353 metres, Olympus ranks among the most prominent peaks in Europe.
13 Cape of Good Hope
South Africa34.358° S 18.472° E
Image by sharonang from Pixabay The first European known to reach it was the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias in 1488. He named it the Cape of Storms; King John II of Portugal is said to have renamed it the Cape of Good Hope for the promise it held of a sea route to India, a promise Vasco da Gama fulfilled a decade later. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company set up a supply station on Table Bay, about 50 km to the north, which grew into Cape Town.
Did you know? Because the water temperatures differ so much, sea life west of Cape Point is noticeably different from that found to the east.
14 Mount Vesuvius
Vesuvio
Italy · 15.8 km from Naples40.823° N 14.429° E
Image by stostank from Pixabay The eruption of AD 79 buried Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabiae. A column of ash, pumice and gas rose to about 33 km, and pyroclastic surges swept down the slopes on the second day. The only eyewitness account to survive is a pair of letters by Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus, describing the black cloud over the bay and the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder, who had sailed across from Misenum to help and died at Stabiae.
Did you know? Household shrines in Pompeii often show Vesuvius as a serpent, and an inscription from Capua honours the mountain as a form of Jupiter.
15 Uluru
Australia25.345° S 131.036° E
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay For the Aṉangu, the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people of the area, Uluru is not scenery but law. Its caves, waterholes and rock art are tied to Tjukurpa, the body of ancestral stories that governs land and conduct. Some sections of the rock are linked to ceremonies restricted to men or to women, and visitors are asked not to photograph them. European explorers reached the area in the 1870s.
Did you know? Archaeological finds east and west of the rock show that people were living in the area more than 10,000 years ago.
16 Puncak Jaya
Indonesia4.083° S 137.183° E
Alfindra Primaldhi · CC BY 2.0 Its name recalls the Dutch navigator Jan Carstenszoon, who reported glaciers on the mountain in 1623 and was mocked in Europe for claiming snow in the tropics. A Dutch expedition in 1936 reached the neighbouring Ngga Pulu and East Carstensz summits but not the rock pyramid, which was first climbed in 1962 by a party led by Heinrich Harrer with Philip Temple, Russell Kippax and Bert Huizenga.
Did you know? After Indonesia took control in 1963 the peak was renamed Puncak Sukarno after the president, before becoming Puncak Jaya, meaning victorious or glorious peak.
17 Aoraki / Mount Cook
New Zealand43.595° S 170.142° E
Image by kewl from Pixabay Aoraki is the mountain's name in the tradition of Ngāi Tahu, in which an early name for the South Island means Aoraki's canoe. The English name was given in 1851 by Captain John Lort Stokes in honour of James Cook, who never actually saw the peak. Under the Ngāi Tahu settlement of 1998 the official name became Aoraki / Mount Cook, the only one of the renamed places where the Māori name comes first.
Did you know? Under the 1998 settlement the Crown agreed to return the mountain to Ngāi Tahu, who would then gift it back to the nation, though neither transfer has yet taken place.
18 Mount Rainier
United States46.852° N 121.760° W
Image by Kranich17 from Pixabay Rainier is very much alive. It is on the list of Decade Volcanoes, the handful worldwide judged most dangerous to people, not so much because of lava as because of lahars: fast-moving slurries of mud, rock and meltwater. About 5,000 years ago a collapse of the summit sent the Osceola Mudflow all the way to the Puget Sound lowlands, and the US Geological Survey estimates that about 80,000 people and their homes lie in today's lahar-hazard zones.
Did you know? The present cone is more than 500,000 years old.
19 Nanda Devi
India30.374° N 79.971° E
No machine-readable author provided. Amir85~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY 2.5 The name is usually rendered as "Bliss-Giving Goddess", and the peak is revered as the patron deity of the Garhwal and Kumaon hills. Until surveys in 1808 showed Dhaulagiri to be taller, Nanda Devi was believed to be the highest mountain on Earth. Simply reaching its foot took half a century: W. W.
Did you know? The 1936 expedition was strikingly light: just seven climbers, no fixed ropes, and no Sherpa support above roughly 6,200 metres.
20 Mount Everest
Nepal27.988° N 86.925° E
Image by peteranta from Pixabay The top of the world was once the floor of a sea. The summit pyramid is Ordovician limestone, and geologists have found microscopic fragments of crinoids, ancient marine animals, in rock taken from high on the peak. Below it lies the Yellow Band, a tawny layer of marble and schist around 8,200 to 8,600 metres that climbers on the Nepali route must traverse with fixed ropes.
Did you know? Many European mapmakers once wrongly believed the mountain's local name was Gaurishankar, which actually belongs to a different peak to the west.
21 Aconcagua
Argentina32.653° S 70.012° W
Image by magicaltravelling from Pixabay For mountaineers its appeal is that the normal route from the north is not technically difficult: no ropes or ice climbing are strictly needed. The difficulty is altitude. At the summit, air pressure is about 40 percent of sea level, most climbers suffer from altitude sickness to some degree, and around three people die on the mountain in an average year. Only an estimated 30 to 40 percent of those who set out reach the top.
Did you know? A nine-year-old boy reached the summit in 2013, while the oldest recorded summiter was 87.
22 Sugarloaf Mountain
Pão de Açúcar
Brazil · 7.4 km from Rio de Janeiro22.949° S 43.157° W
Image by guertzen from Pixabay The summit is reached by one of the world's oldest passenger cableways. Engineer Augusto Ferreira Ramos conceived it in 1907; German-made equipment was hauled up the rock by hand and on steel cables, and the first section, from Praia Vermelha to Morro da Urca, opened in 1912 — the first cable car in Brazil.
Did you know? The first recorded ascent is said to have been made in 1817 by an Englishwoman, Henrietta Carstairs, by the eastern face.
23 Loreley
Germany · 25.2 km from Koblenz50.139° N 7.729° E
Image by Katzenfee50 from Pixabay The name is usually traced to an old dialect word for murmuring combined with "ley", rock: the strong current, a small waterfall and a remarkable echo once made the cliff seem to hum. An older tale placed dwarfs in caves inside the rock. The figure everyone now associates with it, however, is a literary invention.
Did you know? The rock was once credited with a sevenfold echo, which old tales blamed on dwarfs living inside it.
24 Eiger
Switzerland46.578° N 8.005° E
Image by Atarythm from Pixabay The north face, the Nordwand, was a different story. Attempts in the 1930s ended in deaths watched through the telescopes of the hotels at Kleine Scheidegg, and the Bernese authorities at one point banned attempts altogether.
Did you know? In 1966 the American John Harlin fell to his death when his rope snapped during an attempt on a direct line up the north face.
25 White Cliffs of Dover
United Kingdom · 4 km from Dover51.135° N 1.357° E
Image by vjkombajn from Pixabay The cliffs are the first sight of England from the sea and have been read as a symbol for as long as people have written about them. Julius Caesar, arriving in 55 BC, found them lined with armed Britons and sailed on to land elsewhere. The old name Albion is thought to come from the Latin for white. Shakespeare set a scene of King Lear on a Dover cliff.
Did you know? During the Napoleonic Wars, tunnels were cut into the chalk beneath Dover Castle to house around 2,000 extra soldiers.
26 Mount Fitz Roy
Monte Fitz Roy
Argentina49.271° S 73.043° W
Prissantenbär · Public domain The mountain's reputation among climbers is as severe as its looks. It was first climbed on 2 February 1952 by the French alpinists Lionel Terray and Guido Magnone, by the south-east ridge, and it remains a technical ascent of steep rock and ice, made harder by the ferocious Patagonian wind and weather that can shut the summit off for days. Its silhouette is the emblem of the region: it appears on the flag and coat of arms of Santa Cruz Province.
Did you know? The first free solo ascent of the mountain was made by the American climber Dean Potter in 2002.
27 Mount Bromo
Indonesia · 30.4 km from Probolinggo7.943° S 112.954° E
Image by Gustomak from Pixabay The surrounding Tengger people trace their claim to this landscape to a legend from the fall of the Majapahit Empire: a princess and her husband fled to the mountain's upper slopes, prayed for children, and were granted twenty-five on the condition that the youngest be sacrificed to the volcano.
Did you know? It is the only conservation area in Indonesia that contains a sand sea.
28 Aletsch Glacier
Aletschgletscher
Switzerland46.442° N 8.077° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Christian David · CC BY-SA 4.0 The glacier's signature is its dark medial moraines, two stripes of rock debris that run down the middle of the ice for almost its entire length, traces of the tributary glaciers that merged upstream. Seen from the ridge above, the white river of ice with its dark lines, framed by peaks of four thousand metres, is one of the great sights of the Alps.
Did you know? Projections suggest that by 2100 the glacier will keep only around a tenth of the ice mass it held in 2018.
29 Cave of Altamira
Cueva de Altamira
Spain · 25.7 km from Santander43.383° N 4.117° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by janeb13 from Pixabay The Polychrome Ceiling of the main hall shows a herd of extinct steppe bison in red and black, together with horses, a large doe and possibly a boar. The painters used charcoal, ochre and haematite, thinning the pigments to create shading, and placed each animal so that the natural bulges of the rock became its shoulders and flanks, giving the figures a sculptural volume.
30 Geirangerfjord
Norway62.094° N 7.081° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ArvidO from Pixabay Seen from the water, the fjord's signature is its waterfalls. The Seven Sisters pour down one side in separate strands, and directly opposite falls the Suitor, which local legend casts as trying in vain to woo them. A third fall, the Bridal Veil, spreads so thinly over a rock edge that backlit by the sun it looks like gauze.
Did you know? A rockslide in 1873 destroyed much of Skageflå's cultivated land.
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 is the most beautiful natural wonder in the world?
- On our list, Milford Sound / Piopiotahi (New Zealand) ranks first, followed by Lençóis Maranhenses National Park (Brazil) and Matterhorn (Switzerland).
- Which country has the most natural wonders?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (68), France (34) and the People's Republic of China (32).
- What is the hottest place on Earth?
- Satellite measurements of land surface temperature have recorded the highest readings on the planet in the Lut Desert (Dasht-e Lut) in Iran, around 70 °C.
- Is Milford Sound a sound or a fjord?
- Milford Sound is a fjord: it was carved by glaciers and later flooded by the sea. A sound in the strict sense is a river valley drowned by the sea.
- How many natural wonders are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 580 natural wonders in 105 countries. The United States has the most, with 68.