The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in Brazil
8 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful natural wonders in Brazil are Sugarloaf Mountain, Lençóis Maranhenses National Park and Corcovado. The list covers 8 natural wonders. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Brazil's landforms are old rather than high. Most of the country rests on ancient crystalline shields and sandstone plateaus that have been weathered for hundreds of millions of years, so instead of jagged ranges there are smooth granite domes, quartzite valleys and limestone riddled with caves and collapse sinkholes. Heavy tropical rain shapes all of it, rounding the coastal mountains of Rio and filling the northern dunes with water.
Rio de Janeiro shows the granite at its most famous. Sugarloaf Mountain rises straight from the water at the mouth of Guanabara Bay, and Corcovado lifts the statue of Christ the Redeemer above the city. In the Serra dos Órgãos, Dedo de Deus points skyward like a raised finger. On the northern coast, Lençóis Maranhenses spreads white dunes for kilometres, and after the rainy season clear lagoons collect in the hollows between them.
Inland, the landscape turns underground. Vale da Lua in Chapada dos Veadeiros is a river valley of rock worn into pits and curves that recall a lunar surface. In Mato Grosso do Sul, Buraco das Araras is a huge sinkhole where red-and-green macaws nest in the walls, and Abismo Anhumas opens into a cavern with a flooded lake of clear water. In Minas Gerais, Gruta do Janelão in the Peruaçu valley is a vast cave lit by openings in its roof, with a forest growing inside.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sugarloaf Mountain | Mountain | |
| 2 | Lençóis Maranhenses National Park | Dune | ✓ |
| 3 | Corcovado | Mountain | |
| 4 | Vale da Lua | Rock formation | |
| 5 | Buraco das Araras | Doline | |
| 6 | Gruta do Janelão | Cave | |
| 7 | Dedo de Deus | Summit | |
| 8 | Abismo Anhumas | Cave |
01 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.
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 Corcovado
Brazil · 5 km from Rio de Janeiro22.953° S 43.212° W
Image by guertzen from Pixabay The statue of Christ the Redeemer was built between 1922 and 1931 after a campaign by the Catholic Circle of Rio, funded mainly by donations from Brazilian Catholics. The Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa led the project, the French sculptor Paul Landowski created the figure, the Romanian sculptor Gheorghe Leonida modelled the face, and the French engineer Albert Caquot designed the reinforced-concrete structure.
Did you know? Early designs for the summit statue showed Christ holding a globe and a cross; the open-armed figure was chosen only later.
04 Vale da Lua
Brazil14.187° S 47.790° W
Cristiamara Giordani · CC BY-SA 4.0 The sculpting is the work of the river itself. Over an immense span of time, pebbles and sand carried by fast-flowing water have been spun in eddies against the rock, drilling cylindrical hollows that merge into one another as they deepen and widen.
Did you know? Enlarged in 2017 to about 240,000 hectares, the park protects 466 springs in a region known as the water tank of Brazil's Central Plateau.
05 Buraco das Araras
Reserva Particular do Patrimônio Natural Buraco das Araras
Brazil · 26.3 km from Jardim21.492° S 56.404° W
Mauricio ximenez · CC BY-SA 3.0 The sinkhole was known to the indigenous peoples of the region and was rediscovered by outsiders in 1912, when a local worker came upon it. In 1986 the land was bought by the farmer Modesto Sampaio, who in 1996 opened the site to nature tourism. In 2007 it was declared a Private Natural Heritage Reserve (RPPN) covering about 29 hectares. The macaw population has grown since the reserve's creation, and by 2016 around seventy birds were counted.
Did you know? From 1996 the owners hauled rubbish out of the sinkhole and replanted it with native forest, and a year later the first pair of macaws was released nearby.
06 Gruta do Janelão
Brazil15.117° S 44.241° W
Manu Alves · CC BY-SA 4.0 It is the largest cave in the Peruaçu valley, with a horizontal development of about 4,740 metres and a vertical range of some 176 metres. Among its formations is a stalactite around 28 metres long, often cited as the largest ever recorded.
Did you know? In the northern sinkhole the rock walls rise about 150 metres from the cave floor to the plateau above.
07 Dedo de Deus
Brazil · 15.5 km from Petrópolis22.500° S 43.050° W
Eurico Zimbres FGEL/UERJ · CC BY-SA 2.5 The shape is a lesson in geology. The Serra dos Órgãos is built of Neoproterozoic granitic gneiss, roughly 620 million years old, and the Portuguese named it after church organs, whose rows of pipes they saw in its eroded vertical rock. Dedo de Deus owes its extreme form to a thick dyke of younger granite, harder than the surrounding stone, which was left standing while the land around it wore away.
Did you know? Its silhouette has featured in the heraldry of Rio de Janeiro state since 1892, and the peak is protected as a heritage site by Brazil's IPHAN.
08 Abismo Anhumas
Brazil21.153° S 56.599° W
Marcel Favery · CC BY-SA 3.0 What lies under the surface is the real wonder. The lake reaches depths of around 80 metres, and rising from its floor is a field of limestone cones — tall, pointed speleothems that grew in the dark and are now submerged — some of them close to 20 metres high. Seen from above while snorkelling or from below by divers, they form a kind of underwater city of spires.
Did you know? The lake level is not fixed: it rises in the rainy season and falls in the dry season along with the regional groundwater.
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 natural wonders in Brazil?
- On our list, Sugarloaf Mountain ranks first, followed by Lençóis Maranhenses National Park and Corcovado.
- How do the lagoons of Lençóis Maranhenses form?
- Rain falling in the first half of the year collects in the hollows between the dunes, held up by an impermeable layer of rock beneath the sand. The lagoons are at their fullest around July and shrink in the dry months that follow.
- Why is it called Sugarloaf Mountain?
- The peak's rounded, conical shape resembles the traditional loaf in which refined sugar was once moulded and sold. It is a single dome of granite and gneiss rising about 396 metres above the bay.
- Where is Buraco das Araras?
- Buraco das Araras is a large sinkhole near Jardim in Mato Grosso do Sul, close to Bonito. Its sandstone walls are nesting ground for red-and-green macaws, which give the place its name.
- How many natural wonders are on this list in Brazil?
- The list covers 8 natural wonders.