The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries in Asia

18 places in 10 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Ha Long Bay

   Vietnam · 12.4 km from Hạ Long20.900° N 107.200° E

   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The scenery is the drowned end of a karst landscape. The rock itself is hundreds of millions of years old, but the shapes are the work of roughly twenty million years of tropical rain dissolving it: clusters of cone-shaped hills in some parts of the bay, isolated towers standing alone in others. When sea levels rose, the valleys between them filled with water, leaving the summits as islands. Rain and waves have also hollowed out caves.

   Did you know? Of the bay's roughly 1,969 islands, 989 have names, and only about 40 have permanent inhabitants.

   More about Ha Long Bay →

2. 02 Huanglong

   People's Republic of China32.741° N 103.831° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The pools are the spectacle. Depending on depth, algae and light, the water shifts from turquoise and emerald to deep blue, amber and pale yellow, and the terrace walls themselves glint gold. The largest set, the Five-Colour Pools near the head of the valley at around 3,500 metres, packs hundreds of small basins into one hillside beneath snowy peaks. Along the way are travertine falls, shallow sheets of water sliding over the rock and caves formed by the same deposits. At the head of the water stands an old temple, associated with both Buddhist and Bon traditions.

   Did you know? Just below lies the Zhengyan, or Flamboyant, group with 658 pools, and further down the Guests Welcome Pond group has about 350.

   More about Huanglong →

3. 03 Wulingyuan

   People's Republic of China29.346° N 110.467° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The pillars were shaped over hundreds of millions of years: the sandstone was laid down in the Devonian period and then lifted by tectonic forces, and erosion by water carved it into separate columns. The scenic area covers about 690 square kilometres of the Wuling Mountains and is made up of four parts: Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, the Suoxi Valley and Tianzi Mountain nature reserves, and the more recently added Yangjiajie. There are some 40 caves, many rich in calcite formations, and a natural arch, Tianqiaoshengkong, the "bridge across the sky", counted among the highest natural bridges in the world.

   Did you know? Zhangjiajie, one of the four parts of Wulingyuan, became China's very first national forest park in 1982.

   More about Wulingyuan →

4. 04 Jiuzhaigou Valley

   People's Republic of China33.200° N 103.900° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   That seismic origin isn't just history; it's ongoing risk the park has had to live with directly. In August 2017, a magnitude-7 earthquake tore through the region and damaged several of the valley's signature features, including draining much of the water from what had been one of its clearest pools — the same kind of violent, sudden geology that built the place in the first place came back to reshape it.

   Did you know? Nuorilang Falls is about 20 metres high but some 320 metres wide, often described as one of the widest highland waterfalls in China.

   More about Jiuzhaigou Valley →

5. 05 Seoraksan National Park

   South Korea · 17.9 km from Sokcho38.125° N 128.416° E

   

   The best-known silhouette is Ulsanbawi, a long, crenellated wall of granite rising above the eastern valley; reaching the top means a climb that ends on a staircase of roughly 888 steps, and from there the view runs down to Sokcho and the East Sea. Further inside, Gongnyongneungseon, the "Dinosaur Ridge", is a knife-edge of jagged spires that takes most of a day to traverse and is protected as one of Korea's scenic sites. There are quieter details too: Heundeulbawi, a boulder about five metres high that a few people can make rock gently on its base, and Biseondae, a broad rock platform in a mountain stream where the water slides over polished granite.

   Did you know? The great Buddha's forehead is set with eight amber stones and a jade centrepiece, and Buddha relics from Myanmar are enshrined inside it.

   More about Seoraksan National Park →

6. 06 Huangshan

   People's Republic of China30.125° N 118.167° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The pines are their own attraction, and their strangeness is easy to miss in photographs. Many grow directly out of bare granite, roots forced into cracks so narrow there's barely visible soil to speak of, twisting sideways along the rock to chase what little water and nutrient exists. Nearly a hundred individual trees have been given names by generations of visitors; the most famous, the thousand-year-old Guest-Greeting Pine at the foot of Yu'nv Peak, has become as much a symbol of the mountain as the peaks themselves.

   Did you know? Known in the Qin era as Yishan, the mountain was renamed Huangshan by imperial decree in 747 in honour of the Yellow Emperor.

   More about Huangshan →

7. 07 Karakul Lake

   Tajikistan39.040° N 73.420° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   A peninsula reaching out from the southern shore and an island off the northern shore divide the lake into two very different basins. The eastern one is shallow, about 13 to 19 metres deep, while the western basin plunges to around 230 metres. Karakul has no outlet, and its water is brackish; after the last ice age its level stood some 35 metres higher than today. Only one species of fish, a loach of the genus Triplophysa, lives in it. The lake is a Ramsar wetland, listed in 2001, and an Important Bird Area for migratory and breeding birds, and it lies within Tajik National Park.

   Did you know? The lake's only fish, a small loach, is named Triplophysa lacusnigri, a scientific name meaning roughly the loach of the black lake.

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8. 08 Göreme National Park

   Göreme Tarihî Millî Parkı

   Turkey · 12.5 km from Nevşehir38.653° N 34.863° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   What makes the valleys extraordinary is that people moved into the rock. From the 4th century small groups of hermits cut cells into the tuff, and over time these were linked into monastic communities with chapels, refectories and storerooms carved rather than built. The area around Göreme is said to have held some 400 churches. Many of them were painted: some decoration goes back to the 6th and 7th centuries, while the most accomplished cycles belong to the 10th and 11th. The cluster now presented as the Göreme Open Air Museum holds the best of them.

   Did you know? An inscription in Tokalı names its painter, Nikephoros, and its patrons, Constantine and his son Leon, a rare case of known donors among the rock churches.

   More about Göreme National Park →

9. 09 Wadi Rum

   Jordan · 33.6 km from Aqaba29.576° N 35.420° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   People have passed through here for thousands of years, and they have left their mark on the rock. Petroglyphs of hunters and antelope, inscriptions in the scripts of ancient Arabia, and a small Nabataean temple excavated near Rum village all testify to an old route between Arabia and the Levant. In 2025 a hieroglyphic inscription bearing the cartouches of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III was announced, the first royal inscription of its kind found in Wadi Rum. At the spring of Ain Shalaaleh, water still drips from a crevice beneath Nabataean carvings.

   Did you know? The valley's name is traditionally linked to Iram of the Pillars, a lost city mentioned in the Quran.

   More about Wadi Rum →

10. 10 Lena Pillars

    Russia61.107° N 127.362° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The single most striking layer is the Sinsk Biota, a reef ecosystem roughly ten million years older than Canada's famous Burgess Shale — and preserved by an unusual process called phosphatisation, which fossilises soft tissue in a level of detail that limestone rarely allows. Between the pillars themselves and this reef record, the site documents an almost continuous timeline: the diversification of the first skeletal animals, the appearance of the first metazoan reefs, right through to the first mass extinction of the Cambrian period. Few places on the planet let you read that transition in one rock face.

    Did you know? Slow uplift of the Siberian Platform opened faults and deep river valleys, letting karst dissolution and frost weathering cut the rock into towers.

    More about Lena Pillars →

11. 11 Zhangye Danxia Geopark

    People's Republic of China · 27.5 km from Zhangye38.916° N 100.133° E

    

    The colours are a record of time. Over millions of years rivers and lakes laid down layer after layer of sandstone, siltstone and mudstone, each coloured by the minerals and climate of its age. Later the same tectonic forces that raised the Himalaya tilted and folded the layers, and wind and rare rain then carved them into ridges, towers and ravines. The result is something between geology and painting: sharp-edged slopes where every layer is exposed in cross-section.

    Did you know? Strictly speaking, the rainbow hills of Linze are colourful hills of soft siltstone and mudstone, while true danxia cliffs dominate the Sunan side.

    More about Zhangye Danxia Geopark →

12. 12 Gobustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve

    Azerbaijan40.106° N 49.389° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The carvings record a very different world. When the first were made, the climate was far wetter and the hills were grazed by wild cattle, horses, deer and goats. Hunters with bows, groups of dancers linked hand in hand, bulls, boats crewed by oarsmen, camel caravans and suns and stars cover the faces of fallen blocks and rock shelters, often with newer images cut over older ones. Some human figures have small featureless heads, while others are detailed; carvings in the Seven Beauties cave suggest that women took part in hunting. The reed boats fascinated Thor Heyerdahl, who visited several times between 1981 and his death in 2002.

    Did you know? Systematic study of the carvings began with archaeologist Ishag Jafarzadeh, who recorded about 3,500 images in 1939–40.

    More about Gobustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve →

13. 13 Tubbataha Reef

    Philippines8.953° N 119.868° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    This is a true atoll system, built on an extinct submarine volcano on the Cagayan Ridge: as the old volcanic islands sank, the corals kept growing towards the light. The result is a shallow reef top that ends abruptly in walls dropping more than 100 metres into blue water, and those walls are what divers come for. Surveys have counted around 600 fish species and 360 coral species, along with sharks (whitetip reef sharks are the familiar sight, hammerheads the prize), manta rays, turtles, schools of barracuda and jacks, and Napoleon wrasse. The North Islet is a nesting ground for seabirds and marine turtles.

    Did you know? Records of the reef's seabirds go back to 1911, and around eight species breed here, including red-footed and brown boobies and sooty terns.

    More about Tubbataha Reef →

14. 14 Ein Gedi Nature Reserve

    Israel · 29.6 km from Hebron31.467° N 35.394° E

    

    The walk up Nahal David is the classic introduction: a path along the stream through shady vegetation to a series of cascades, ending at David's Falls dropping into a pool beneath the cliff. Nubian ibex move with startling ease over the rock faces, and rock hyraxes bask on the boulders by the path. The Arugot canyon is wilder and longer, its stream running between tall walls of pale stone.

    Did you know? That scroll is the earliest copy of a book of the Torah ever found in a synagogue's Torah ark, and its text matches the later standard Hebrew Bible.

    More about Ein Gedi Nature Reserve →

15. 15 Mount Sanqing

    People's Republic of China28.952° N 118.052° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The name means "Three Pure Ones", after the trinity of the highest deities of Taoism, because the three main summits — Yujing, the highest at 1,817 metres, Yuxu and Yuhua — were likened to them sitting side by side. The mountain has been a Taoist place for many centuries, and the Ming dynasty was its heyday: at its heart, in a high basin at about 1,530 metres, stands the Sanqing Palace, rebuilt in the 1450s, the centre of a cluster of old Taoist buildings on the mountain.

    Did you know? The mountain sits on an ancient suture where crustal blocks of South China joined about 850 million years ago; its granite peaks are far younger, from the Mesozoic.

    More about Mount Sanqing →

16. 16 Kungur Ice Cave

    Russia · 3.2 km from Kungur57.440° N 57.007° E

    

    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. Local tradition holds that early Russian settlers sheltered here from raids and frost, and remains of settlements of the 7th–9th centuries have been found on the Ice Mountain above.

    Did you know? The tallest organ pipe, in the Ethereal Grotto, rises about 22 metres; in all some 146 such shafts pierce the cave roof.

    More about Kungur Ice Cave →

17. 17 Shilin Stone Forest

    People's Republic of China24.818° N 103.325° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty
    • UNESCO Global Geopark

    

    The protected area spreads over roughly 500 km² and is divided into several zones, which include caves, lakes and waterfalls as well as the pillar fields. The most visited part, near the main entrance, is a dense maze of peaks with smooth, fluted sides; another section holds the formation everyone comes to find — a single pillar said to be Ashima. In the story told by the Sani, a branch of the Yi people who live around Shilin, Ashima was a girl forbidden to marry the man she loved and turned to stone; local tradition still points to her silhouette among the rocks.

    Did you know? The main pillar fields are carved from Permian Makou limestone, while the Naigu Stone Forest formed in dolomite and dolomitic limestone of the older Qixia Formation.

    More about Shilin Stone Forest →

18. 18 Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon

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

    

    That vertical range compresses a whole continent of climates into a single valley. Lowland tropical forest at the bottom gives way, belt by belt, to subalpine coniferous forest and finally to alpine shrubland and tundra beneath the glaciers. The forests hold some of the tallest trees in Asia: in 2023 Chinese scientists measured a South Tibetan cypress here at 102.3 metres, then the tallest tree recorded on the continent. The Chinese government has protected the area as the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon nature reserve.

    Did you know? Kinthup eventually escaped and launched the logs four years late, but his warning letter went astray and nobody downstream was watching for them.

    More about Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon →