The Most Beautiful Nature Reserves in the World

16 places in 11 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park

   Parque natural del Cabo de Gata-Níjar

   Spain · 36.5 km from Almería36.900° N 2.030° W

   • UNESCO Global Geopark
   • biosphere reserve

   

   Cabo de Gata-Níjar is the wild south-eastern corner of Spain: a coast of dark volcanic headlands, pale coves and desert light that somehow escaped the concrete that lines most of the Mediterranean. It was declared Andalusia's first combined land-and-sea natural park in December 1987, and it remains the largest protected coastal area in the region. The climate is the driest in Europe outside the Canaries, with well under 200 mm of rain a year, and the vegetation shows it: dwarf fan palms, prickly pear, esparto grass and drought-hardened shrubs, some of them found nowhere else. Even the tall agaves that seem so emblematic are relatively recent arrivals, planted in the 1950s for a rope industry that never took off.

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2. 02 El Torcal de Antequera

   Torcal de Antequera

   Spain · 29.2 km from Málaga36.964° N 4.546° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   El Torcal is a small limestone massif between Antequera and Málaga whose summit has been eroded into one of the strangest landscapes in Europe: a maze of stacked, weathered blocks that look like towers of giant plates or piles of books. It was declared a Natural Site of National Interest in July 1929, and a natural park of about 17 square kilometres was created in 1978. The highest point, Camorro de las Siete Mesas, reaches 1,336 metres.

   Did you know? Since 2016 El Torcal has been part of the UNESCO-listed Antequera Dolmens Site, because the El Romeral tomb is aligned towards its summit.

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3. 03 Adršpach-Teplice Rocks

   Czech Republic50.611° N 16.115° E

   

   The Adršpach-Teplice Rocks in north-eastern Bohemia are the largest rock city in Central Europe: a labyrinth of sandstone towers, walls and gorges formed when a continuous plateau of sandstone, laid down in a Cretaceous sea, was split by tectonic movement and then carved by water, frost and wind. The result is two separate rock cities, Adršpach and Teplice, divided by the deep, seven-kilometre canyon called Wolf's Gorge. Some of the towers rise to around 90 metres.

   Did you know? In 1824 a forest fire smouldered among the rocks for several weeks and destroyed the entire forest around the rock city.

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4. 04 Maspalomas Dunes

   Dunas de Maspalomas

   Spain27.743° N 15.583° W

   

   At the southern tip of Gran Canaria the island suddenly turns into a small Sahara. The Maspalomas Dunes cover about 404 hectares between the resort towns and the Atlantic: ridges of pale gold sand, some around ten metres high, that the north-east trade winds push forward a few metres every year, so that the shapes never repeat. There is no other dune system of this kind on the island. The sand itself is a relic of the last ice age, when the lowered sea exposed the marine shelf and the wind blew its sediment onto the coast.

   Did you know? Roughly 45,000 cubic metres of sand are estimated to vanish from the dune system each year, much of it ending up on the sea floor.

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5. 05 St Kilda

   United Kingdom57.815° N 8.588° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   St Kilda is the far edge of the British Isles: a scatter of islands and sea stacks about 65 km west-northwest of North Uist, the westernmost ground of the Outer Hebrides. The group is what remains of a long-extinct ring volcano, and the sea has carved it into a landscape of extremes. The north face of Conachair on Hirta drops roughly 427 m straight into the Atlantic, the highest sea cliff in the United Kingdom, while Stac an Armin (196 m) and Stac Lee (172 m) are the tallest sea stacks in Britain. Hirta, the main island, makes up most of the land; Soay, Boreray and Dùn, which shelters Village Bay from south-westerly gales, complete the archipelago.

   Did you know? There never was a Saint Kilda: the name may stem from a copying error of Skildar on a 1583 map, first appearing in a 1592 Dutch pilot book.

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6. 06 Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve

   Madagascar18.667° S 44.751° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Tsingy is a Malagasy word usually glossed as "where one cannot walk barefoot", and the landscape it names in western Madagascar earns it. On the Bemaraha plateau, rain has etched a thick limestone bed from above while groundwater dissolved it along fractures from below. When cave roofs collapsed, what remained was a labyrinth of narrow canyons and blade-edged pinnacles. The rock is sharp enough to cut clothing and skin. The Manambolo River cuts across the plateau in a gorge several hundred metres deep, and around the karst are dry deciduous forest, lakes and mangroves.

   Did you know? Some of the limestone pinnacles here rise as high as about 100 metres, forming a stone forest often likened to rows of cathedrals.

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7. 07 Mount Pico

   Montanha do Pico

   Portugal · 22.6 km from Horta38.469° N 28.399° W

   

   Rising straight out of the Atlantic to 2,351 metres, Mount Pico is the highest point of Portugal and stands more than twice as tall as any other summit in the Azores. Its near-perfect cone fills the skyline of the island that shares its name and dominates the views from the neighbouring island of Faial across a narrow channel.

   Did you know? Measured from the surrounding abyssal seafloor, the volcano rises nearly 5,000 m, with almost half of its bulk hidden beneath the Atlantic.

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8. 08 Scandola Nature Reserve

   France42.357° N 8.567° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The Scandola peninsula, on the west coast of Corsica, is what remains of an ancient volcano that collapsed into the sea. The result is one of the most dramatic stretches of coast in the Mediterranean: sheer cliffs of rust-red and purple rock, columns of volcanic stone standing like organ pipes, sea caves, arches, and needles of rock rising out of water so clear that the seabed shows many metres down. Red granite glows in the late afternoon sun above slopes of dense maquis.

   Did you know? In 1985 Scandola received the Council of Europe's European Diploma of Protected Areas, which was withdrawn in 2020 over the pressure of mass boat tourism on its wildlife.

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9. 09 Ningaloo Reef

   Australia22.739° S 113.628° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Ningaloo is a reef you can wade out to. Along the coast of Western Australia's North West Cape, the coral grows not far beyond the beach — in places less than 500 metres offshore — so that you can step off white sand into a lagoon and float straight over coral gardens. Running for about 260 km, it is Australia's largest fringing reef, and its meeting of arid cape, rugged ranges and a vivid turquoise lagoon makes it one of the most striking coastlines on the continent.

   Did you know? In December 2015 the short-nosed sea snake, feared extinct for 17 years, was rediscovered on Ningaloo Reef.

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10. 10 Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove

    Osun-Osogbo Grove

    Nigeria · 2 km from Osogbo7.755° N 4.551° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, on the edge of the city of Osogbo in south-western Nigeria, is one of the last of the sacred forests that once bordered almost every Yoruba town. Its 75 hectares of forest line the meanders of the Osun River and are considered the dwelling of Osun, the Yoruba goddess of the river itself. Scattered through the trees are shrines, sanctuaries and sculptures raised to her and to other deities, and in 2005 the grove was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

    Did you know? The Osun-Osogbo Festival is believed to have been celebrated for more than 700 years.

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11. 11 Vallée de Mai

    Seychelles4.329° S 55.737° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    In a valley in the middle of Praslin, the second-largest island of the Seychelles, a forest of giant palms grows much as it did before people reached the islands. The Vallée de Mai covers only 19.5 hectares, which makes it one of the smallest natural World Heritage Sites, but UNESCO listed it in 1983 on all four natural criteria. It is the stronghold of the coco de mer, the palm whose double nut is the largest seed produced by any plant, and it is the only place where all six palm species endemic to the Seychelles grow together.

    Did you know? A coco de mer fruit takes roughly six to seven years to ripen, and the seed may then need about two more years to germinate.

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12. 12 Suncheon Bay

    South Korea · 24.9 km from Yeosu34.843° N 127.506° E

    

    Where the Dongcheon River meets the sea on Korea's southern coast, Suncheon Bay spreads out as a vast tidal landscape: a broad sweep of mudflat, a sea of reeds that turns gold in autumn, colonies of seepweed spreading over the salt marsh, and a river channel winding through it all in a great S-curve. Seen from the observation point above the bay at sunset, with the tide filling the channels and flocks of birds lifting off the flats, it is one of the most admired coastal views in the country, and Korean photographers have named its S-shaped waterway among the ten finest sunset scenes in Korea.

    Did you know? In the early 1990s the bay's reed beds and mudflats were slated for sand extraction, a plan that local campaigners succeeded in stopping by 1998.

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13. 13 Picos de Europa National Park

    Parque nacional de Picos de Europa

    Spain43.250° N 4.917° W

    • biosphere reserve

    

    Barely twenty kilometres from the Bay of Biscay, the Picos de Europa rise as a wall of grey limestone pinnacles, the most dramatic stretch of the Cantabrian Mountains. Local tradition holds that the name comes from sailors returning from the Americas, for whom these jagged summits were the first sight of Europe. The national park that protects them spreads across about 670 square kilometres shared by Asturias, Cantabria and Castile and León, and few places in Europe pack such contrasts into so little space: from 75 metres above sea level on the Deva river to 2,648 metres on the Torre de Cerredo, the range's highest peak, the drop is more than two and a half kilometres.

    Did you know? Created in 1918 as Covadonga Mountain National Park, it was the first national park in Spain.

    More about Picos de Europa National Park →

14. 14 Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon

    People's Republic of China29.770° N 94.990° E

    

    Where the Yarlung Tsangpo, the great river of southern Tibet, breaks through the eastern end of the Himalaya, it cuts the deepest canyon on land. Between two snow peaks, Namcha Barwa at 7,782 metres and Gyala Peri at 7,234 metres, the river swings in a tight hairpin around the flank of Namcha Barwa and drops into a gorge whose greatest depth reaches 6,009 metres. Over the length of the canyon the river falls from about 2,900 metres near the village of Pei, where it enters the gorge, to about 660 metres where it leaves Tibet for India. One measurement gives the whole canyon a length of some 505 km, slightly more than the Grand Canyon in the United States, and an average depth of more than 2,200 metres.

    Did you know? In 1880 the Sikkimese explorer Kinthup was sent to float 500 marked logs down the river to prove it became the Brahmaputra, but he was sold into slavery.

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15. 15 Yading Nature Reserve

    People's Republic of China28.463° N 100.281° E

    

    Yading is a high-mountain reserve in Daocheng County, in the Tibetan uplands of western Sichuan, built around three snow peaks that Tibetans have venerated for centuries as the abode of three bodhisattvas. The northern peak, Chenresig (Xiannairi), about 6,032 metres, is identified with Avalokiteshvara, compassion; Jampelyang (Yangmaiyong) to the south with Manjushri, wisdom; and Chanadorje (Xiaruoduoji) to the east with Vajrapani, power. Local tradition says the mountains were consecrated by Padmasambhava in the eighth century, and pilgrims walk the circuit around them as an act of devotion.

    Did you know? Yading became a national-level nature reserve in 2001 and joined UNESCO's World Network of Biosphere Reserves in 2003.

    More about Yading Nature Reserve →

16. 16 Red Seabeach

    People's Republic of China40.903° N 121.824° E

    

    Every autumn a stretch of coast on the Bohai Sea in northeast China turns crimson. The colour comes not from sand or rock but from Suaeda salsa, a small seepweed that is one of the few plants able to live on these salty, alkaline tidal flats. It sprouts in spring a pale red, deepens through the summer, and by September and October covers the mudflats in solid red, threaded by tidal creeks and edged by shallow sea and reed beds.

    Did you know? The crimson comes from betalain, a pigment the seepweed builds up in autumn as rainfall and tides leave the flats saltier and cooler.

    More about Red Seabeach →