The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in Russia
13 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful natural wonders in Russia are Mount Elbrus, Belukha and Klyuchevskaya Sopka. The list covers 13 natural wonders. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Russia spans so many climates and geological provinces that its natural wonders barely resemble each other. In the south, the Caucasus pushes up the highest peaks in the country. Kamchatka, on the Pacific, sits above a subduction zone and is one of the most volcanically active regions on Earth, with geysers, fumaroles and glaciers sharing the same slopes. Across Siberia the ground is locked in permafrost, and between them lie ancient worn-down ranges like the Urals and the Altai, where wind and frost have had a very long time to work.
Mount Elbrus, a dormant volcano with two snow-covered summits, is the highest peak of the Caucasus, and the two-peaked Belukha crowns the Altai, at the heart of the Golden Mountains of Altai. In Kamchatka, Klyuchevskaya Sopka rises as the peninsula's tallest volcano, Kronotsky forms a nearly perfect cone above its lake, and Mutnovsky holds steaming vents and ice inside its crater. Nearby, the Valley of Geysers packs dozens of geysers into a single river gorge.
Elsewhere the shapes are stranger still. The Manpupuner pillars stand on a plateau in the northern Urals as the remains of a long-eroded mountain. The Batagaika crater in Yakutia is a vast scar where thawing permafrost has collapsed, exposing layers of ancient frozen ground. The Kungur Ice Cave near Perm fills gypsum chambers with ice formations, the Sulak Canyon in Dagestan winds above a turquoise river, and the Sarykum dune rises out of the Dagestan foothills as a solitary hill of sand.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Elbrus | Mountain | |
| 2 | Belukha | Mountain | ✓ |
| 3 | Klyuchevskaya Sopka | Volcano | |
| 4 | Batagaika crater | Doline | |
| 5 | Valley of Geysers | Geyser | |
| 6 | Mutnovsky | Volcano | |
| 7 | Manpupuner rock formations | Rock formation | |
| 8 | Kungur Ice Cave | Ice cave | |
| 9 | Sulak Canyon | Canyon | |
| 10 | Cape Stolbchaty | Cliff | |
| 11 | Kronotsky Volcano | Volcano | |
| 12 | Sarykum | Dune | |
| 13 | Orda Cave | Cave |
01 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'.
02 Belukha
Russia49.807° N 86.590° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
No machine-readable author provided. Vitecek~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY-SA 3.0 From the Gebler (Katun) glacier on the south-western side flows the Katun River, which runs 688 km northwards before meeting the Biya to form the Ob. On the north side the mountain drops in the Akkem Wall, a near-vertical face of rock and ice that falls straight to the Akkem Glacier; at its foot lies the milky-turquoise Akkem Lake, the classic place to see the whole north face reflected on a still morning.
Did you know? With a prominence of about 3,345 metres, Belukha is one of the world's ultra-prominent peaks, ranked around 59th by prominence.
03 Klyuchevskaya Sopka
Russia56.067° N 160.633° E
Tamten at cs.wikipedia · Public domain For its size it is remarkably young. The cone began to grow only about 7,000 years ago and has been built almost entirely by its own eruptions — more than a hundred during the Holocene. Its first recorded eruption dates from 1697, and since then it has been in activity almost without a break; a new eruptive phase began in the summer of 2025.
Did you know? During the 1994 eruption the column rose 12–13 km, volcanic bombs flew over two kilometres above the crater, and mudflows ran 25–30 km to the Kamchatka River.
04 Batagaika crater
Russia · 10.3 km from Batagay67.580° N 134.771° E
NASA Earth Observatory images by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. · Public domain The collapse began in the 1960s, after the forest covering the slope was cleared; without the shade and insulation of the trees the ground warmed, the ice inside it melted, and meltwater and flooding carried the soil downhill. Since then the headwall has generally retreated by more than ten metres a year, and in some years by as much as thirty.
Did you know? The forest that once shaded the slope was cleared during road-building near Batagay, which set off the thaw in the 1960s.
05 Valley of Geysers
Russia54.431° N 160.139° E
Robert Nunn from London, UK · CC BY-SA 2.0 The field was found only in 1941, by the geologist Tatyana Ustinova, who published her discovery fourteen years later. Systematic study began in the 1970s, and more than thirty geysers received names; the best known, Velikan, the Giant, can throw a jet of water up to about 40 metres high. From the 1980s the valley became one of the great natural attractions of the Soviet Far East, and foreign visitors were admitted from 1991.
Did you know? The outbreak of war that summer halted the research: Moscow ordered the work stopped and Ustinova was dismissed from the reserve.
06 Mutnovsky
Russia52.453° N 158.195° E
Image by Natalia_Kollegova from Pixabay The activity is concentrated in the northwestern part of the massif, where two overlapping craters form a figure-of-eight about 2 km across and up to 600 metres deep. Mutnovsky has erupted many times in recorded history; its largest known eruption was in 1848, and an explosion in 2000, driven by hot gas underground, blasted out a new crater about 200 metres wide. It is also one of the largest geothermal fields in the world.
Did you know? A fumarole temperature of 540 °C was recorded on the volcano in 1983.
07 Manpupuner rock formations
Russia62.258° N 59.298° E
Aleksandr Chazov · CC BY-SA 4.0 Each pillar has its own shape, weathered and cracked in its own way, and their outlines change dramatically as you walk around them, which is why they have gathered so many names. Russians call them the Seven Strong Men or the Poles of the Komi Republic; in the Mansi language Manpupuner means "small idol mountain", and the Komi name translates as "idol stone".
Did you know? The pillars won a place among the Seven Wonders of Russia in a national vote whose results were announced on Red Square on 12 June 2008.
08 Kungur Ice Cave
Russia · 3.2 km from Kungur57.440° N 57.007° E
Владимир Чуприков / reworked by A.Savin · CC BY-SA 4.0 The cave has a long written history. In 1703, on the orders of Peter the Great, the Siberian cartographer Semyon Remezov came to map the Kungur district and drew the first plan of the cave, noting crosses and an icon left inside. Vasily Tatishchev visited in the 1720s and 1730s and correctly explained how the voids had formed, rejecting the local belief that a giant beast had dug them.
Did you know? Perennial ice up to two metres thick covers the floors of the Diamond, Polar, Dante and Cross grottoes.
09 Sulak Canyon
Russia · 30.4 km from Buynaksk43.010° N 46.828° E
Папанина Александра · CC BY-SA 4.0 Erosion here has exposed a long sequence of rock layers: deposits from the Jurassic, Cretaceous and Tertiary periods come to the surface along the walls, and fossils occur in each of them. The river has also been harnessed for power.
Did you know? Three months after work began in 1963, a rockfall dammed the gorge; the water rose 22 metres in five hours before bursting through.
10 Cape Stolbchaty
Russia44.024° N 145.676° E
Екатерина Васягина · CC BY-SA 4.0 The columns were formed by volcanic activity in the island's distant past, associated with the nearby Mendeleev volcano; the scientists of the Kurilsky nature reserve describe the rock as andesite–dacite lava that was squeezed out and solidified in place.
Did you know? Mendeleev sits within two nested calderas, the larger of them six to seven kilometres across.
11 Kronotsky Volcano
Russia54.753° N 160.532° E
Malupasic · CC BY-SA 4.0 The summit crater is sealed by a solidified volcanic neck, which is part of why Kronotsky spent the twentieth century so quietly — local accounts describe smoke and a humming mountain in 1922–1923 and a dark plume in 1942, but little more. That long sleep ended in October 2025, when the volcano sent an ash column to around 9 km. The name is usually traced to the Itelmen language, where it is said to mean a high stone mountain.
Did you know? A line of seven cinder cones and three explosion craters runs east to west across the volcano's southern slope.
12 Sarykum
Russia · 21.5 km from Buynaksk43.007° N 47.229° E
Saintinessa · CC BY-SA 4.0 How it came to be here is still debated. One explanation, put forward by scientists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, credits wind working the sands over an immense span of time; another traces the sand to the breakdown of the sandstones of the surrounding hills. Either way, the dune is very old, and wind still carves its crest into ripples and sharp ridges.
Did you know? Around 170 bird species have been recorded at the dune and its surroundings.
13 Orda Cave
Russia · 28.4 km from Kungur57.182° N 56.888° E
Maximovich Nikolay · CC BY 3.0 The dry part, only about 300 metres long, is itself striking: the Crystal Grotto, the Ice Lake, and the chamber called the Ice Palace, where the Main and Warm lakes are the entrances to the flooded world. Beyond them, the main galleries are named after the cities of the cavers who first explored them — Chelyabinsk, Krasnoyarsk, Moscow and Sverdlovsk passages.
Did you know? In December 2012 a freediver swam 100 metres through the flooded galleries on a single breath in about two minutes.
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 Russia?
- On our list, Mount Elbrus ranks first, followed by Belukha and Klyuchevskaya Sopka.
- What is the Batagaika crater?
- The Batagaika crater in Yakutia is not an impact crater but a thaw slump: once the forest was cleared, the permafrost beneath began to melt and the ground collapsed. It keeps growing each year, and its walls expose frozen layers that preserve evidence of ancient climates.
- How was the Valley of Geysers discovered?
- The Valley of Geysers in the Kronotsky Nature Reserve on Kamchatka was found in 1941 by the geologist Tatyana Ustinova and her guide Anisifor Krupenin. It is one of the largest geyser fields in the world.
- What are the Manpupuner rock formations?
- They are seven stone pillars, each tens of metres tall, standing on a plateau in the northern Urals in the Komi Republic. They are the hard remains of a mountain range that weathering has otherwise worn away, and they are sacred in Mansi tradition.
- How many natural wonders are on this list in Russia?
- The list covers 13 natural wonders.