The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in Chile
11 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful natural wonders in Chile are Licancabur, Osorno Volcano and Villarrica Volcano. The list covers 11 natural wonders. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Chile is a ribbon of land squeezed between the Pacific and the crest of the Andes, and its whole length sits above a subduction zone where the ocean floor dives beneath South America. That produces one of the longest volcanic chains on Earth, from the high plateau of the north to the lakes of the south. Climate adds the contrast: the Atacama in the north is among the driest places on the planet, while the far south is wet, windswept and covered by the great Patagonian ice fields.
In the north, Licancabur rises as an almost perfect cone above the salt flats, and Parinacota with its twin Pomerape stands over the high Lake Chungará in Lauca National Park. Near San Pedro de Atacama, the Valle de la Luna is a maze of salt-crusted ridges and dunes, the Salar de Tara adds lagoons and wind-carved rock pillars at high altitude, and El Tatio sends up columns of steam from one of the highest geyser fields in the world.
The Lake District has its own volcanoes: Osorno, a snow-capped cone mirrored in Lake Llanquihue, and Villarrica above Pucón, one of the most active volcanoes in South America with a lava lake inside its crater. Further south, the Marble Caves on General Carrera Lake are hollows that waves have worn into veined marble, reflecting the blue of the water. The San Rafael Glacier pours from the Northern Patagonian Ice Field into a lagoon, and in Torres del Paine the Cuernos lift pale granite capped with dark rock above turquoise lakes.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Licancabur | Volcano | |
| 2 | Osorno Volcano | Volcano | |
| 3 | Villarrica Volcano | Volcano | |
| 4 | Parinacota | Volcano | |
| 5 | El Tatio | Geyser | |
| 6 | Valle de la Luna, Atacama | Rock formation | |
| 7 | Marble Caves (General Carrera Lake) | Show cave | |
| 8 | San Rafael Glacier | Glacier | |
| 9 | Salar de Tara | Salt flat | |
| 10 | Cuernos del Paine | Mountain | |
| 11 | Cascada de Ventisquero Colgante | Glacier |
01 Licancabur
Volcán Licancabur
Chile22.834° S 67.883° W
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the summit lies one of the highest lakes on Earth. The crater, around 400 to 500 metres across, holds a small freshwater pool of roughly 70 by 90 metres, a sheet of water sitting almost six kilometres up, in thin air under an intense high-altitude sun. The top of the mountain is also an archaeological site.
Did you know? Climbers first reported the summit lake in 1953, and scientists discovered plankton living in it in 1981.
02 Osorno Volcano
Volcán Osorno
Chile41.100° S 72.493° W
Draceane · CC BY-SA 4.0 The perfect cone stands on older foundations: Osorno is a stratovolcano built atop La Picada, a much-eroded volcano some 250,000 years old with a caldera six kilometres wide.
Did you know? The first recorded ascent was made in 1848 by Jean Renous, who climbed the western flank over rock, snow and ice.
03 Villarrica Volcano
Volcán Villarrica
Chile · 29.5 km from Villarrica39.420° S 71.939° W
Image by Quimantu from Pixabay The Mapuche call the mountain Ruka Pillañ, the house of the pillán, a powerful spirit of the volcanoes. Geologically it is a basaltic-andesitic stratovolcano of the upper Pleistocene or younger, built inside the remains of two older calderas that collapsed about 100,000 and 13,700 years ago; around 26 scoria cones dot its flanks, and the whole edifice covers some 400 km².
Did you know? Villarrica, Quetrupillán and Lanín line up along an ancient crustal fracture, an alignment unusual because it cuts across the main north-south fault of the region.
04 Parinacota
Volcán Parinacota
Chile18.166° S 69.142° W
Gerd Breitenbach · CC BY-SA 3.0 The symmetry is deceptive, because Parinacota once lost a whole side of itself. Sometime between about 8,000 and 20,000 years ago its western flank collapsed, sending some 5-6 cubic kilometres of rock racing more than 20 km west across the plateau. The avalanche dammed the drainage and created Lake Chungará, which lies at about 4,517 m, one of the highest large lakes in the world.
Did you know? The international border runs along the rim of the summit crater, so the crater itself lies in Bolivia while most of the mountain stands in Chile.
05 El Tatio
Chile22.331° S 68.010° W
Image by michellebranco11 from Pixabay The time to see it is dawn. In the freezing air of early morning the steam from dozens of vents condenses into white columns that stand above the plain and glow as the sun comes over the ridges; later in the day, as the air warms, they fade to little more than shimmer.
Did you know? The 2009 blowout produced a steam fountain that roared from 8 September until the well was finally plugged on 4 October.
06 Valle de la Luna, Atacama
Valle de la Luna
Chile22.911° S 68.323° W
Image by rumpelstilzken from Pixabay The salt range itself was born when movements of the Earth's crust pushed up and folded ancient lake and sea deposits, layers of salt, gypsum and clay that now stand on edge for about a hundred kilometres. In a climate where rain is extremely rare, wind and the occasional flood have worked these soft layers into strange forms. White salt crusts on the ground look like frost or snow, and some of the ridges are cut by narrow canyons and caves.
Did you know? Gypsum towers up to ten metres tall stand in lines along fractures and are thought to be still growing as groundwater evaporates beneath them.
07 Marble Caves (General Carrera Lake)
Catedral de Mármol
Chile46.646° S 72.609° W
Dentren at en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 The colours are what people come for. The marble is mostly white and pale grey, veined and banded with blue and pink, and the smooth, scalloped walls inside the arches pick up the colour of the glacial water beneath them. Depending on the light and the season, the stone shifts from cream to blue to aquamarine, and the ceilings ripple with reflected light.
Did you know? The Marble Chapel is an islet about 25 metres high, eroded so deeply that its base stands on slender columns of stone.
08 San Rafael Glacier
Glaciar San Rafael
Chile46.700° S 73.833° W
Vincent Huang · CC BY 2.0 The lagoon is connected to the sea, and the glacier calves into it along a broad, jagged front. The lagoon is littered with icebergs of every size, from small floes to great sculpted blocks, their undersides in that intense glacial blue that appears where old dense ice has been washed by water.
Did you know? The lagoon covers about 123 square kilometres and drains north to the Moraleda Channel through the aptly named Río Témpanos, 'Iceberg River'.
09 Salar de Tara
Chile23.017° S 67.300° W
Carlos Urzua · CC BY 2.0 The salar occupies the caldera of the Vilama volcano and is the low point of a closed drainage basin of roughly 1,800 to 2,000 square kilometres, unusual in being shared among three countries.
Did you know? Besides the Río Zapaleri, a smaller stream, the Río Chico, also drains into the salar.
10 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.
11 Cascada de Ventisquero Colgante
Chile44.437° S 72.504° W
LBM1948 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The glacier spills from the Queulat ice cap, an icefield of about 80 square kilometres centred on a summit of 1,889 metres, the largest of the two small ice fields in the park. Its meltwater runs into the Témpanos River and on to the Puyuhuapi Channel and the Pacific.
Did you know? Since a 1989 decree the park's subsoil is a protected zone of scientific interest, where mining needs a permit signed by Chile's president.
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 Chile?
- On our list, Licancabur ranks first, followed by Osorno Volcano and Villarrica Volcano.
- Why does Chile have so many volcanoes?
- Chile lies along the boundary where the Nazca Plate slides beneath the South American Plate. Rock melting at depth rises to feed a chain of volcanoes running nearly the full length of the Andes, many of them still active.
- Why are the Cuernos del Paine two colors?
- The pale lower part of the peaks is granite that intruded as molten rock and cooled underground, while the dark caps are older sedimentary rock that it pushed into. Glaciers later carved both into the horn shapes seen today.
- How were the Marble Caves formed?
- Over thousands of years, the waters of General Carrera Lake wore into a peninsula of marble, carving caverns, columns and tunnels. The smooth, veined walls reflect the lake's color, which changes with water level and light.
- How many natural wonders are on this list in Chile?
- The list covers 11 natural wonders.