The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in the Canary Islands
7 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful natural wonders in the Canary Islands are Teide, Roque Nublo and Cueva de los Verdes. The list covers 7 natural wonders. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The Canary Islands are volcanoes rising from the Atlantic floor off the coast of Africa, built over millions of years by a hotspot beneath the ocean crust. The older eastern islands have been worn down into deserts and broad plains, while the younger ones in the west still stand tall and steep. Trade winds bring a sea of cloud to the northern slopes, so lava fields, pine forests and laurel woods can lie within a few kilometres of each other.
Teide on Tenerife is the highest mountain in Spain, a cone above a vast caldera of lava flows and coloured rock. On the same island, the cliffs of Los Gigantes drop hundreds of metres straight into the sea, and the Masca Gorge cuts through the old Teno massif in a narrow ravine down to the coast. On Gran Canaria, Roque Nublo stands as a single volcanic monolith on the island's central heights, long a sacred place for the island's original inhabitants.
Lanzarote shows how recent much of this landscape is. The Montañas del Fuego in Timanfaya were formed by eruptions that lasted from 1730 to 1736 and buried villages under lava and ash; heat still rises close to the surface. Further north, the Cueva de los Verdes runs through a lava tube left by the eruption of the Corona volcano, part of a tunnel system that continues out under the sea.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Teide | Volcano | |
| 2 | Roque Nublo | Rock formation | |
| 3 | Cueva de los Verdes | Lava tube | |
| 4 | Jameos del Agua | Lava tube | |
| 5 | Acantilados de Los Gigantes | Cliff | |
| 6 | Masca Gorge | Canyon | |
| 7 | Montañas del Fuego | Volcano |
01 Teide
Spain28.273° N 16.644° W
Image by javierAlamo from Pixabay Teide is an active volcano. Its most recent eruption, in 1909, came from the Chinyero vent on the north-west rift, and the Narices del Teide eruption of 1798 poured lava from the flank of Pico Viejo. Because towns such as Garachico, Icod de los Vinos and Puerto de la Cruz lie below it, the United Nations listed it among its Decade Volcanoes for special study.
Did you know? More than 40% of the park's invertebrate species are endemic, and 70 of them live nowhere else on Earth.
02 Roque Nublo
Spain · 23 km from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria27.971° N 15.613° W
Image by WunschbrunnenEla from Pixabay That texture tells how it was made. 4 million years ago. Softer material around it has washed away over the ages, leaving the hardened core standing alone, with smaller companions nearby: the slender Roque del Fraile, "the Friar", and the rounded formation called La Rana, "the Frog". Long before hikers arrived, the island's pre-Hispanic inhabitants treated the rock as a place of worship.
Did you know? Since 2019 the rock has been part of the UNESCO cultural landscape of Risco Caído and the Sacred Mountains of Gran Canaria.
03 Cueva de los Verdes
Spain · 23.3 km from Arrecife29.161° N 13.439° W
Lviatour · CC BY-SA 3.0 For centuries the cave was a hiding place: islanders sheltered here from the Berber corsairs who periodically struck Lanzarote, and the name is said to come from a local family, the Verdes, who kept animals in it.
Did you know? Its chambers carry evocative names such as the Hall of the Aesthetes, the Gorge of Death and the Moorish Door.
04 Jameos del Agua
Spain · 23.2 km from Arrecife29.157° N 13.432° W
Image by lapping from Pixabay In the early 1960s the Lanzarote-born artist César Manrique began clearing the neglected site, and over the following fifteen years turned it into the first of his centres of art, culture and tourism. His idea was to change as little as possible and frame what the volcano had made.
Did you know? The auditorium uses the volcanic chamber itself for its walls, vault and acoustics, with the seating following the natural slope of the cave floor.
05 Acantilados de Los Gigantes
Spain28.297° N 16.856° W
Image by marcelkessler from Pixabay Where those ravines meet the water they leave small coves of sand or gravel that are hard to reach on foot and are mostly visited by boat. The cliffs lie within the Teno Rural Park and are shared between the municipalities of Buenavista del Norte, which holds most of them, and Santiago del Teide.
Did you know? Around 28 species of whales and dolphins have been recorded in Tenerife's waters, among them resident sperm whales and bottlenose dolphins.
06 Masca Gorge
Barranco de Masca
Spain28.295° N 16.851° W
Image by Thunderstorm from Pixabay The Teno massif is a volcanic block built in the Miocene from countless basaltic lava flows. In the walls of the gorge these flows are clearly visible as thin, steeply tilted layers, most less than a metre thick, often of rough, scoriaceous rock. They are cut through by swarms of dykes, sheets of once-molten rock that forced their way up through cracks and now stand out as dark ribs across the cliffs.
Did you know? Masca is protected as a Bien de Interés Cultural in the historic ensemble category, and engravings carved by early inhabitants survive in the surrounding Teno Rural Park.
07 Montañas del Fuego
Monumento Natural de Las Montañas del Fuego
Spain · 20.6 km from Arrecife29.000° N 13.746° W
H. Zell · CC BY-SA 3.0 The mountains were born in one of the longest and largest basaltic eruptions in recorded history. On 1 September 1730 the ground opened near Caldera de los Cuervos, and for almost six years, until April 1736, a chain of vents along a fissure some 18 kilometres long built 32 new volcanoes. The parish priest of Yaiza, Andrés Lorenzo Curbelo, kept a detailed account of the first months.
Did you know? The 1730 eruption began between nine and ten at night, and its lava buried villages including Tingafa, Mancha Blanca, Santa Catalina and Las Maretas.
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 the Canary Islands?
- On our list, Teide ranks first, followed by Roque Nublo and Cueva de los Verdes.
- How high is Mount Teide?
- Teide rises to 3,715 metres, making it the highest point in Spain and in any Atlantic island. Measured from the ocean floor, it is one of the tallest volcanoes on Earth.
- Why are the Canary Islands volcanic?
- They sit above a volcanic hotspot in the Atlantic, where molten rock rising from deep below has built up islands over millions of years. The western islands are younger and still volcanically active.
- When did Timanfaya erupt?
- The great eruption of Timanfaya on Lanzarote lasted six years, from 1730 to 1736, and covered about a quarter of the island. A smaller eruption followed in 1824.
- How many natural wonders are on this list in the Canary Islands?
- The list covers 7 natural wonders.