The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries in the World
91 places in 43 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful nature sanctuaries in the world are Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Tanzania), Monument Valley (United States) and Masai Mara (Kenya). The list covers 91 nature sanctuaries in 43 countries. The United States has the most, with 12. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A great nature sanctuary is not simply a large area with a fence around it. What lifts one to world rank is a landscape that could exist nowhere else: a volcanic caldera holding its own herds of wildlife, sandstone eroded into thousands of slender hoodoos, a bay where limestone towers rise straight out of green water. Protection matters here because the form itself is the treasure — the shape of the rock, the run of a river, the way light falls into a canyon at the end of the day.
The places in this collection span continents and very different ground. Seoraksan in South Korea is a range of granite peaks and ridges cut by forested valleys. In Tanzania, the Ngorongoro crater floor forms a sealed world of grassland, swamp and lake. Monument Valley lifts red sandstone buttes above the desert of the Navajo Nation, and Bryce Canyon fills its amphitheaters with orange spires. Ha Long Bay scatters limestone islands across the Gulf of Tonkin, while Huanglong in Sichuan steps down a valley in pale travertine pools tinted turquoise and gold. Banff, Canada's first national park, and New Zealand's Fiordland bring glaciers, lakes and sounds into the picture.
Every sanctuary here was chosen for how it looks and placed in order of beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the section also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ngorongoro Conservation Area | Protected area | Tanzania | ✓ |
| 2 | Monument Valley | Protected area | United States | |
| 3 | Masai Mara | Protected area | Kenya | |
| 4 | Ha Long Bay | Protected area | Vietnam | |
| 5 | Banff National Park | Protected area | Canada | |
| 6 | Etosha National Park | Protected area | Namibia | |
| 7 | Bryce Canyon National Park | National park | United States | |
| 8 | Viñales Valley | Protected area | Cuba | |
| 9 | Namib-Naukluft National Park | National park | Namibia | |
| 10 | Bardenas Reales | Protected area | Spain | |
| 11 | Amboseli National Park | National park | Kenya | |
| 12 | Huanglong | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 13 | Wulingyuan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 14 | Okavango Delta | Protected area | Botswana | |
| 15 | Canaima National Park | National park | Venezuela | ✓ |
| 16 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 17 | Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park | Nature reserve | Spain | |
| 18 | Fiordland National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 19 | El Torcal de Antequera | Nature reserve | Spain | ✓ |
| 20 | Isalo National Park | National park | Madagascar | |
| 21 | Jiuzhaigou Valley | National park | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 22 | Seoraksan National Park | National park | South Korea | |
| 23 | Adršpach-Teplice Rocks | Rock formation | Czech Republic | |
| 24 | K'gari | Island | Australia | ✓ |
| 25 | Zion National Park | National park | United States | |
| 26 | Huangshan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 27 | St Kilda | Nature reserve | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 28 | Karakul Lake | Lake | Tajikistan | ✓ |
| 29 | Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve | Nature reserve | Madagascar | ✓ |
| 30 | Sequoia National Park | National park | United States |
01 Ngorongoro Conservation Area
Tanzania · 8 km from Ngorongoro3.210° S 35.460° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
James Wagner · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ngorongoro Crater is the centrepiece of this protected area in northern Tanzania. It is a volcanic caldera about 610 metres deep with a floor of roughly 260 square kilometres, formed two to three million years ago when a large volcano collapsed on itself. It is often described as the world's largest intact, unflooded caldera. The crater floor lies at about 1,800 metres. Streams from the forested rim feed a seasonal soda lake, Makat or Magadi, along with the Lerai fever-tree forest and the swamp around Ngoitokitok Spring. The Maasai name is said to imitate the sound of a cowbell.
Did you know? Before it collapsed, the Ngorongoro volcano may have stood between 4,500 and 5,800 metres high, rivalling Kilimanjaro.
02 Monument Valley
United States36.983° N 110.100° W
Image by ArtTower from Pixabay Monument Valley is the landscape many people picture when they hear the words "the American West", even if they have never been there. Across a flat red plain on the border of Arizona and Utah, isolated buttes and mesas rise up to about 300 metres above the valley floor, their vertical walls standing on skirts of rubble. The Navajo name, Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii, is usually rendered as "valley of the rocks". The valley lies inside the Navajo Nation, and the Navajo Tribal Council set it aside as a tribal park in 1958.
Did you know? Harry Goulding, who ran a trading post at the edge of the valley, sent photographs of it to John Ford during the Depression, and Ford chose it for Stagecoach.
03 Masai Mara
Kenya1.490° S 35.140° E
Image by sprinter1973 from Pixabay The reserve's name comes from two different languages layered together. "Maasai" is how the people call themselves; "Mara," in the Maa language, means "spotted" — a description of how the grassland looks from a distance, dotted with the scattered, low trees (mostly Balanites aegyptiaca, the desert date, rather than true acacia) that break up the plain into a mottled pattern. Fly over it and the name still fits exactly.
Did you know? The Mara is the only protected area in Kenya whose black rhinos are an original native population, never topped up by animals moved in from elsewhere.
04 Ha Long Bay
Vietnam · 12.4 km from Hạ Long20.900° N 107.200° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xuanduongvan87 from Pixabay Nearly two thousand limestone islets rise straight out of the green water of Ha Long Bay, in Vietnam's far north-east, spread over some 1,550 square kilometres of the Gulf of Tonkin. Most are uninhabited and many are little more than sheer-sided pillars capped with jungle, their bases undercut by the sea into overhangs and notches. Seen from a boat, they overlap in receding ranks that grow paler with every layer of haze, which is exactly the effect that has made the bay one of the most painted and photographed seascapes in Asia.
Did you know? Ti Top Island was renamed in 1962 after the Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, who visited it with Ho Chi Minh; a statue of Titov was added in 2015.
05 Banff National Park
Canada · 2 km from Banff51.167° N 115.550° W
Image by NUNZG from Pixabay Banff was Canada's first national park, created in 1885 when the government set aside a small reserve around hot springs that railway workers had stumbled on at Cave and Basin; it has since grown to about 6,641 square kilometres of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta. The peaks are slabs of sedimentary rock pushed eastward 80 to 55 million years ago and then sculpted by glaciers into horns, cirques and U-shaped valleys. Glaciers still hang on the high slopes, and the Columbia Icefield on the park's northern edge is the largest unbroken mass of ice in the Rockies. The park is part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site.
Did you know? About 82 km of fencing along the Trans-Canada Highway, combined with wildlife overpasses and underpasses, has cut collisions between animals and vehicles by more than 80 per cent.
06 Etosha National Park
Namibia18.785° S 16.264° E
Thomas Schoch · CC BY-SA 3.0 The heart of Etosha is an absence: a vast, flat, white depression of salt and clay, about 130 km long and up to 50 km wide, covering almost a quarter of the park. The name is usually translated from Oshindonga as "great white place". For most of the year the pan is bone-dry and shimmers in the heat; in good rainy seasons it holds a thin sheet of brackish water that draws flamingos and pelicans. Around it lie mopane woodland — some four trees in five in the park — and dolomite hills, across a protected area of more than 22,000 km².
Did you know? When proclaimed in 1907 the reserve covered roughly 80,000 km², more than three and a half times the area of today's park.
07 Bryce Canyon National Park
United States37.640° N 112.170° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay Bryce Canyon is not really a canyon. It is a chain of vast natural amphitheatres eaten into the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau in southern Utah, filled with thousands of hoodoos: slender spires and pinnacles of soft rock, some as tall as 60 m, coloured red, orange, pink and white. They were carved from old river and lake sediments by frost weathering and stream erosion, working back into the plateau edge rather than down from a central river. The largest amphitheatre, Bryce Amphitheater, is about 19 km long, 5 km wide and 240 m deep.
Did you know? The Paiute called the hoodoos Anka-ku-was-a-wits, meaning red painted faces, and the plateau's name, Paunsaugunt, is Paiute for home of the beaver.
08 Viñales Valley
Valle de Viñales
Cuba · 22.1 km from Pinar del Rio22.617° N 83.717° W
Image by madfab from Pixabay The Viñales Valley is a flat floor of red earth and tobacco fields ringed by mogotes, steep-sided limestone hills with rounded, forest-covered tops that rise abruptly from the plain, some of them as high as 300 metres. They are the remnants of an ancient karst landscape, honeycombed with caves, and nothing quite like them is found elsewhere in the Caribbean; the closest relatives of this scenery are in South-East Asia. In the morning mist, with the hills floating above the fields the valley is one of the most beautiful landscapes in Cuba.
Did you know? The Gran Caverna de Santo Tomás, about 17 km west of Viñales village, has some 46 km of passages on seven levels and was long ranked Cuba's longest cave.
09 Namib-Naukluft National Park
Namibia24.546° S 15.330° E
Image by pvdberg from Pixabay Namib-Naukluft is the park that holds the most famous desert landscapes in southern Africa. Covering nearly 50,000 square kilometres, it stretches from the Atlantic coast deep into the interior of Namibia, taking in part of the Namib — often described as the oldest desert on Earth — as well as the Naukluft mountains on its eastern side. Its history as a protected area goes back to 1907, when the German colonial administration declared a game reserve here; the modern boundaries were set in 1986, and for a time it was the largest game park in Africa.
Did you know? The park runs roughly 600 kilometres from north to south, between the Atlantic coast and the edge of the Great Escarpment.
10 Bardenas Reales
Spain42.190° N 1.500° W
Image by alterRPC from Pixabay The Bardenas Reales are a pocket of desert in the south-east of Navarre: some 42,000 hectares of clay, chalk and sandstone carved by rain and wind into canyons, flat-topped mesas and solitary buttes, the cabezos. There are no towns inside and almost no permanent water; streams run only after storms.
Did you know? On screen the Bardenas became the Dothraki Sea in Game of Thrones and a Kazakh nuclear site in the 1999 Bond film The World Is Not Enough.
11 Amboseli National Park
Kenya2.650° S 37.250° E
Image by herbert2512 from Pixabay Amboseli is a flat, dusty basin in southern Kenya whose fame rests on something that stands outside it. Across the border in Tanzania, Kilimanjaro rises straight out of the plain, and on clear mornings its snow-capped dome hangs above the park like a backdrop painted too large for the stage. Herds of elephants walking beneath that mountain have become one of the defining images of East Africa, and here the picture is not staged: the animals are simply going about their day between the swamps and the dry lake bed.
Did you know? The Amboseli Elephant Research Project, begun in 1972, is described as the longest-running study of wild elephant behaviour, with life histories of more than 2,000 individuals.
12 Huanglong
People's Republic of China32.741° N 103.831° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by ymyphoto from Pixabay Huanglong, the Yellow Dragon, is a high valley in the Minshan range of northern Sichuan where mineral-rich water has built one of the finest travertine landscapes on Earth. Snowmelt and springs saturated with calcium carbonate run down the valley floor and deposit it as they flow, forming a golden, scaly ribbon of rimmed terraces, pools and frozen-looking cascades. Seen from above, the 3.6-kilometre band of travertine really does look like a yellow dragon winding down through the forest, and the name has stuck for centuries.
Did you know? The Five-Colour Pools at the head of the valley number 693 separate basins, the largest single group in Huanglong.
13 Wulingyuan
People's Republic of China29.346° N 110.467° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Vined from Pixabay Wulingyuan is a forest of stone. More than 3,000 pillars and peaks of quartz sandstone rise from the valleys of north-western Hunan, many of them over 200 metres tall. Between them run gorges, streams, pools and waterfalls. The landscape is so improbable that it looks invented; UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1992.
Did you know? In January 2010 one of the pillars, the Southern Sky Column, was officially renamed Avatar Hallelujah Mountain after the film's floating mountains.
14 Okavango Delta
Botswana19.400° S 22.900° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by LionMountain from Pixabay The Okavango is a river that never reaches the sea. Rising in the highlands of Angola, it flows south-east into Botswana and then simply spreads out and disappears into the sands of the Kalahari, forming a vast inland delta of channels, lagoons, reed beds and islands. Its extent swings between roughly 6,000 and 15,000 square kilometres through the year, and almost all of the water that arrives – well over 95 per cent – ends up evaporating or being drawn up by plants rather than flowing onwards. When UNESCO inscribed it in 2014, it became the thousandth site on the World Heritage List.
Did you know? Across some 15,000 square kilometres the surface of the delta varies in height by less than 2 metres.
15 Canaima National Park
Parque Nacional Canaima
Venezuela5.319° N 61.795° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Jrafave from Pixabay Canaima National Park covers about 30,000 square kilometres of south-eastern Venezuela, stretching to the borders with Brazil and Guyana and taking in most of the Gran Sabana. It is one of the largest national parks in the world, roughly the size of Belgium. Around two-thirds of it is taken up by tepuis — flat-topped mountains of ancient sandstone with sheer cliff walls, rising abruptly from the savanna and forest like islands. Their rock is among the oldest on Earth, laid down on granite nearly three billion years old, dating from a time when South America and Africa were still joined.
Did you know? Angel Falls takes its name from American pilot Jimmie Angel, who flew over it in 1933 and crash-landed his plane on top of Auyán-tepui in 1937.
16 Plitvice Lakes National Park
Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera
Croatia44.880° N 15.616° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Hobbyfotography from Pixabay The barriers that create Plitvice's sixteen terraced lakes are, in a very real sense, alive — or at least built by living things. As water flows over limestone, it releases dissolved carbon dioxide, which shifts the water's chemistry so that calcium carbonate starts crystallising out of solution. Left alone, that process would just leave mineral crusts. What actually happens here is that mosses, algae and cyanobacteria growing on every submerged surface trap those crystals and keep building on them, layer by layer, into travertine barriers that dam the river's flow and stack the lakes into their famous cascading terraces.
Did you know? Plitvice was among the very first natural sites on the World Heritage List, inscribed in 1979 and extended in 2000.
17 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
Image by WildFox from Pixabay 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.
18 Fiordland National Park
New Zealand45.386° S 167.347° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay Fiordland is New Zealand's largest national park by a wide margin, 1.2 million hectares of temperate rainforest and 14 fjords gouged out by glaciers that retreated long enough ago for forest to reclaim nearly every slope down to the waterline. Rudyard Kipling once called Milford Sound the eighth wonder of the world, and the sound alone gets roughly 6,000 to 8,000 millimetres of rain a year — several times London's annual total — spread across some 180 days.
Did you know? The park covers about 12,600 square kilometres and makes up nearly half of the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Site in south-west New Zealand.
19 El Torcal de Antequera
Torcal de Antequera
Spain · 29.2 km from Málaga36.964° N 4.546° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Makalu from Pixabay 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.
20 Isalo National Park
Parc national de l'Isalo
Madagascar22.435° S 45.288° E
Zigomar · CC BY-SA 3.0 Isalo is a sandstone massif rising out of the dry grass plains of south-central Madagascar, and the national park that protects it, created in 1962, covers some 815 km². The rock was laid down roughly 200 million years ago, around the turn of the Triassic and Jurassic, as sands carried by rivers onto a delta; once lifted up, it was attacked by seasonal streams and wind along its horizontal beds and vertical joints. The result is a ruined-city landscape of ridges, towers, arches and balanced boulders, cut by canyons up to 200 m deep, with the rock glowing ochre and rust-red at the ends of the day.
Did you know? A 2024 archaeological study dated rock-cut niches at a site called Teniky, in the Isalo area, to the 10th to 12th centuries, possibly of Zoroastrian origin.
21 Jiuzhaigou Valley
People's Republic of China33.200° N 103.900° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by HI-MXWG from Pixabay The name means, roughly, "valley of nine villages," after the Tibetan settlements scattered through it — villages that predate its 1978 designation as a protected scenic reserve by centuries. The most-told explanation for its lakes has nothing to do with geology: a mountain god, in love with a goddess, gave her a mirror; she dropped it fleeing an attacking demon, and it shattered into over a hundred pieces that became the valley's lakes, each one a shard of that broken gift. It's a good story precisely because the real explanation is almost as strange. Most of Jiuzhaigou's lakes are barrier lakes — created when ancient earthquakes and landslides dumped enough rock and debris across the valley to dam sections of the river outright, backing up meltwater from the surrounding Minshan range into pool after pool rather than one continuous stream.
Did you know? Long Lake, the highest, largest and deepest of the valley's lakes, stretches about 7.5 km and reaches a depth of around 103 metres.
22 Seoraksan National Park
South Korea · 17.9 km from Sokcho38.125° N 128.416° E
kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0 Seoraksan is the mountain that gives the national park its name, a ridge of pale granite in Gangwon Province on South Korea's east coast. Its highest point, Daecheongbong, reaches 1,708 metres, making it the tallest summit of the Taebaek range and the third highest mountain in the country after Hallasan and Jirisan. What sets it apart is not height but texture: the granite has weathered into needles, fins and serrated crests, and between them run clear streams over smooth slabs, small gorges and waterfalls. The area became a national park in March 1970 and a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1982, and its forests shelter rarities such as the long-tailed goral, a shy mountain goat-antelope.
Did you know? Its 108-tonne gilt-bronze Unification Buddha cost about 3.8 billion won, raised over a decade from more than 300,000 donors.
23 Adršpach-Teplice Rocks
Czech Republic50.611° N 16.115° E
Lestat (Jan Mehlich) · CC BY-SA 3.0 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.
24 K'gari
Australia · 31.6 km from Hervey Bay25.240° S 153.150° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Poidabro · CC BY-SA 4.0 K'gari, known for a century and a half as Fraser Island, is the largest sand island in the world: some 123 km of dunes, forest and lakes off the coast of Queensland, built up over roughly 750,000 years from sand carried north by coastal currents onto a volcanic bedrock base. Its name comes from the language of the Butchulla people, whose creation story tells of a white spirit, K'gari, who loved the land she had helped to make so much that she was turned into it — an island of trees, lakes and creeks to keep her company. The state government restored the name officially in 2023, and the island has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1992.
25 Zion National Park
United States37.203° N 112.988° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Pexels from Pixabay The cliffs that make Zion look otherworldly are, geologically speaking, fossilised weather. The dominant rock, Navajo Sandstone, started out around 180 million years ago as an enormous field of wind-blown sand dunes — think Sahara-scale — and the diagonal cross-bedding cutting through the rock faces is literally the shape of those ancient dune slopes, frozen in stone. Over roughly 150 million years, nine separate rock formations stacked up here, and then the Virgin River spent a comparatively short geological instant — a few million years — cutting straight down through all of them to produce the canyon, which is still an active process: the river is still carving, the walls are still shedding rock, and Zion Canyon is technically unfinished.
Did you know? When President Taft protected the canyon in 1909, he gave it the Southern Paiute-derived name Mukuntuweap National Monument; it became Zion only later.
26 Huangshan
People's Republic of China30.125° N 118.167° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12412158 from Pixabay Huangshan's peaks are granite, not the limestone karst that shapes so much of scenic China, and that matters: granite fractures into sheer, blocky faces rather than smooth curves, which is why the mountain reads as a forest of vertical spires rather than rolling hills. Seventy-two named summits rise above the clouds here, the tallest, Lotus Peak, reaching 1,864 metres, and on the right morning the valleys below fill with a solid white sea of cloud that laps against the rock like tide against islands.
Did you know? Some 60,000 stone steps have been cut into the mountain, and nobody knows exactly when the oldest of them were laid.
27 St Kilda
United Kingdom57.815° N 8.588° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Hugh Venables · CC BY-SA 2.0 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.
28 Karakul Lake
Tajikistan39.040° N 73.420° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Makalu from Pixabay Karakul is a great sheet of blue water lying at 3,960 metres in the high, bare plateau of the eastern Pamirs, ringed by snow peaks and almost without vegetation. Its name means "black lake" in Kyrgyz. It covers about 380 square kilometres and sits inside a circular basin some 52 kilometres across that geologists identified from satellite images around 1987 as an impact crater.
Did you know? The age of the impact crater is still debated: early estimates put it at about 25 million years, while later work suggests it is younger than 5 million years.
29 Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve
Madagascar18.667° S 44.751° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Rod Waddington · CC BY-SA 2.0 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.
30 Sequoia National Park
United States36.565° N 118.773° W
Image by Kjjj3 from Pixabay The General Sherman Tree, somewhere between 2,200 and 2,700 years old, is the largest living tree on Earth by trunk volume — not the tallest, and not the widest, but the one that wins once you multiply height by girth across its entire 275-foot length. Numbers like that are almost beside the point standing under it; what's harder to see is how deliberately the whole species is built around disaster.
Did you know? Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet the highest summit in the contiguous United States, lies on the park's eastern edge, giving it nearly 13,000 feet of vertical relief.
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 is the most beautiful national park in the world?
- Among national parks on our list, Yellowstone National Park (United States) ranks first, followed by Serengeti National Park (Tanzania) and Banff National Park (Canada).
- Which country has the most beautiful protected natural areas?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (12), Spain (9) and the People's Republic of China (8).
- What is the difference between a national park and a nature reserve?
- A national park usually protects a large landscape for both conservation and public enjoyment. A nature reserve is typically managed more strictly for wildlife, plants or geology, and access may be limited to protect them.
- What is the Ngorongoro Crater?
- It is a vast volcanic caldera in northern Tanzania, formed when a large volcano collapsed in on itself. Its floor supports grassland, swamps and a soda lake, home to large populations of African wildlife.
- How many nature sanctuaries are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 91 nature sanctuaries in 43 countries. The United States has the most, with 12.