The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries in North America

17 places in 5 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Monument Valley

   United States36.983° N 110.100° W

   

   The shapes are a lesson in layered geology. At the bottom is soft Organ Rock Shale, which weathers into the sloping aprons; above it sits the thick, cliff-forming de Chelly Sandstone that makes the sheer faces; and many summits are protected by a hard cap of Shinarump conglomerate over Moenkopi beds. Where the cap survives, a butte keeps its flat top; where it has gone, the sandstone is whittled down into spires. The deep red comes from iron oxide in the weathered rock. The best-known silhouettes are the West and East Mitten Buttes, whose narrow side pinnacles look like thumbs on a pair of mittens, Merrick Butte beside them, and the slender, heavily eroded Totem Pole.

   Did you know? Goulding bought 640 acres here in 1921 and built his trading post in 1928; it later became a lodge listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

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2. 02 Banff National Park

   Canada · 2 km from Banff51.167° N 115.550° W

   

   The lakes are what people come for. Lake Louise, with the Chateau Lake Louise hotel at one end and a glacier at the other, and Moraine Lake, about 15 km away beneath the Valley of the Ten Peaks, are among the most photographed views in Canada. North of Lake Louise the 230-km Icefields Parkway runs up the Bow Valley past Hector, Bow and Peyto lakes, with around a hundred glaciers visible from the road, before crossing into Jasper National Park at Sunwapta Pass.

   Did you know? During the First World War the park held an internment camp at Castle Mountain, moved to Cave and Basin in winter; a pavilion about it opened in 2013.

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3. 03 Bryce Canyon National Park

   United States37.640° N 112.170° W

   • Dark Sky Place

   

   The park lies high, with its rim at about 2,400 to 2,700 m, and its rim looks out over the Paria valley to the Kaiparowits Plateau. An 18-mile (29 km) scenic drive runs south along the rim to Rainbow Point, the highest spot at 2,775 m, and on clear days the view from there and from Yovimpa Point reaches Navajo Mountain and the Kaibab Plateau in Arizona, about 145 km away. Short trails drop from the rim into the hoodoos: the Navajo Loop from Sunset Point and the Queens Garden trail from Sunrise Point wind among the columns, and the Bristlecone Loop circles Rainbow Point.

   Did you know? The rocks owe their palette to trace minerals: hematite gives the oranges and reds, limonite the yellows, and manganese-rich pyrolusite the purples.

   More about Bryce Canyon National Park →

4. 04 Viñales Valley

   Valle de Viñales

   Cuba · 22.1 km from Pinar del Rio22.617° N 83.717° W

   

   It is also a working landscape. The valley lies in the Sierra de los Órganos in Pinar del Río, the province that grows Cuba's finest tobacco, and farmers here still work in traditional ways: ploughing with oxen, planting and harvesting by hand, and curing the leaves in wooden drying houses that stand among the fields. Growers hold that this labour-intensive method produces better tobacco than machines would. UNESCO inscribed the valley in 1999 as a cultural landscape, recognising the farms, the scattered houses and the village of Viñales as much as the hills themselves, and the area is also protected as a national park.

   Did you know? The cork palm, a cycad so distinct that it is the only species in its genus, grows wild only in Pinar del Río and the western edge of neighbouring Artemisa.

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5. 05 Zion National Park

   United States37.203° N 112.988° W

   • Dark Sky Place

   

   Long before it was a park, it was a landscape with a name problem. Mormon pioneers who settled the area in the 1860s and 70s named it "Zion," the biblical term for a place of refuge, but not everyone agreed it deserved the name — one prominent local dissenter is said to have insisted it should be called "Not Zion," on the grounds that no ordinary canyon, however striking, should claim a name reserved for paradise. The federal government settled the argument in its own way, designating the area a national monument in 1909 and upgrading it to full national park status in 1919, making it one of Utah's, and America's, earlier parks.

   Did you know? In the Narrows the Virgin River runs through a gorge as little as 20 feet wide between walls up to 2,000 feet high.

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6. 06 Sequoia National Park

   United States36.565° N 118.773° W

   

   Giant sequoia cones are serotinous, meaning they stay sealed until heat forces them open. For thousands of years, that heat came from frequent, low-intensity fires that swept through the groves, cracking cones, clearing out competing brush, and exposing the bare mineral soil sequoia seedlings need to take root — while the mature trees shrugged off the flames thanks to bark that can be over a foot thick and spongy enough to insulate against real heat. Fire, for a giant sequoia, isn't a threat. It's how the species reproduces.

   Did you know? Established on 25 September 1890 by President Benjamin Harrison, Sequoia was the second national park created in the United States, after Yellowstone.

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7. 07 Grand Canyon National Park

   United States36.055° N 112.122° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty
   • Dark Sky Place

   

   Protection came slowly. Benjamin Harrison introduced the first bill for a national park here in 1882 and failed three times; as president he made the area a forest reserve in 1893. Theodore Roosevelt, who visited in 1903 and urged Americans to leave the canyon as it was, declared a national monument in 1908. Only on 26 February 1919 did Woodrow Wilson sign the act creating the national park, the fifteenth in the country. In 1975 it was enlarged to take in Marble Canyon and a second monument to the west, and its status helped defeat proposals to dam the river inside its boundaries.

   Did you know? Within the layers lies the Great Unconformity, a gap where about 500 million years of rock record is simply missing.

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8. 08 Yosemite National Park

   United States37.742° N 119.537° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   On its north side stands El Capitan, a single face of granite about 3,000 feet from base to rim, which became the proving ground of modern big-wall climbing: The Nose was first climbed in 1958 over 47 days of fixed ropes, freed by Lynn Hill in 1993, and in 2017 Alex Honnold climbed the Freerider route alone and without a rope in under four hours. At the valley's head Half Dome rises some 4,800 feet above the floor, its sheared face turned to the west, and across from it Yosemite Falls drops about 2,425 feet in three linked stages — at its best in late spring, when snowmelt is heaviest.

   Did you know? The name Yosemite comes from a Miwok word meaning they are killers, given to the valley's people by neighbours; the old grizzly-bear translation is a misconception.

   More about Yosemite National Park →

9. 09 Sumidero Canyon

   Cañón del Sumidero

   Mexico · 11.9 km from Tuxtla Gutiérrez16.848° N 93.106° W

   

   Most people see it from a boat. Launches run upstream from the old colonial town of Chiapa de Corzo, and the cliffs grow taller with every bend until the sky becomes a strip overhead. Crocodiles bask on the narrow banks, spider monkeys move through the trees clinging to the rock. The most striking single sight is the Árbol de Navidad, a tall waterfall that spills over a cone of rock and vegetation jutting from the cliff, so that the whole thing looks like a giant Christmas tree hung on the canyon wall; in the rainy season, when the flow is strongest, it seems to sparkle.

   Did you know? A group of Frenchmen drowned trying to explore the canyon in the nineteenth century, and a Spanish explorer vanished on a solo attempt in 1959.

   More about Sumidero Canyon →

10. 10 Actun Tunichil Muknal

    Belize · 18.3 km from Belmopan17.114° N 88.862° W

    

    The cave lies within the Tapir Mountain Nature Reserve. Its main system runs for about 5 km: a river passage of roughly 3 km ends at a flooded sump, and a series of upper passages continues beyond it through huge fallen boulders and broad chambers, finally opening into a collapsed sinkhole in the jungle. The upper levels are richly hung with formations, and the cave is home to bats, freshwater crabs, crayfish, catfish and large whip spiders.

    Did you know? More than 1,400 artefacts have been catalogued in the main chamber alone, ranging from pottery to stone tools and obsidian blades.

    More about Actun Tunichil Muknal →

11. 11 Badlands National Park

    United States43.750° N 102.500° W

    

    What makes the Badlands unusual is how fast it is changing. In bare areas the soft rock erodes at about an inch a year, a pace that is visible within a human lifetime: formations soften, gullies deepen, and new fossils are washed out every spring. Those fossils are the other reason the place matters. The White River beds hold what are often described as the richest deposits of Oligocene mammals known anywhere, the bones of mammals that roamed a warm, wooded floodplain some 33 million years ago. By the 1850s, 77 of the 84 fossil mammal species then described from North America had come from this region, and today the park runs its own fossil preparation work in public view.

    Did you know? During the Second World War the US military used a vast area here, over 340,000 acres, as a bombing and gunnery range from 1942 to 1945.

    More about Badlands National Park →

12. 12 Goosenecks State Park

    United States37.175° N 109.927° W

    • Dark Sky Place

    

    The shape is inherited. Millions of years ago the San Juan wandered across a nearly level plain, swinging in lazy bends as lowland rivers do. Then the Monument Upwarp, part of the broader uplift of the Colorado Plateau, slowly raised the land beneath it. Rather than straightening out, the river held its course and cut downward as the ground rose, locking its old bends into solid rock. Water, frost, wind and gravity have since widened the gorge into the stepped walls seen today. The San Juan itself rises in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado and travels about 360 miles to its meeting with the Colorado River.

    Did you know? The Monument Upwarp is a broad fold of the crust roughly 90 miles long and 35 miles wide, made of parallel arches and troughs running north to south.

    More about Goosenecks State Park →

13. 13 Canyon de Chelly National Monument

    United States36.155° N 109.509° W

    

    What sets the place apart from other red-rock canyons is that it has never stopped being lived in. People have farmed here for more than four thousand years. Ancestral Puebloans built their houses into alcoves in the cliffs and left the canyons around the mid-1300s; Hopi farmers came after them, and then the Navajo, for whom the canyon remains home. About forty Navajo families still live and farm inside the monument. The land is held in trust for the Navajo Nation — none of it is federally owned — and the National Park Service, which has managed the monument since 1931, does so in partnership with the tribe.

    Did you know? It is the only National Park Service unit whose land is owned by a tribe and managed cooperatively with it.

    More about Canyon de Chelly National Monument →

14. 14 Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

    United States · 16.6 km from Montrose38.580° N 107.728° W

    • Dark Sky Place

    

    The rock is what gives the place its gravity. The walls expose Precambrian gneiss and schist, metamorphic "basement" rock close to two billion years old, which resists erosion far better than the softer layers that once lay above it. The river began cutting into this hard core roughly two million years ago, and because it could not widen its course, it could only deepen it. Across the canyon from the South Rim, the Painted Wall rises about 2,250 feet, the tallest sheer cliff in Colorado; its dark face is laced with pale, branching stripes of pegmatite — molten rock that once forced its way into cracks and cooled there, leaving a marbling visible from miles away.

    Did you know? Hidden beneath the canyon runs the Gunnison Tunnel, a 5.8-mile irrigation tunnel that was the longest of its kind in the world when it opened in 1909.

    More about Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park →

15. 15 Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park

    Canada · 32.6 km from Moncton45.823° N 64.573° W

    

    The result is the Flowerpot Rocks: sea stacks of soft sandstone and conglomerate, standing 12 to 21 metres tall, undercut at the base by that relentless tidal erosion while trees keep growing improbably out of the flat tops, giving each formation the look of a plant crammed into a clay pot. The undercutting never stops, which means the rocks aren't a fixed exhibit — several have collapsed or changed shape over past decades, and the ones standing now are on the same slow schedule.

    Did you know? The name Flowerpot Rocks is often credited to Ripley's Believe It or Not, which featured the stacks as the world's largest flowerpots.

    More about Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park →

16. 16 Mesa Verde National Park

    United States37.260° N 108.494° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • Dark Sky Place

    

    People used the mesa for thousands of years before the famous houses appeared. Hunters passed through in the Archaic era, Basketmaker families later farmed corn on the mesa top and lived in pithouses, and from roughly 750 CE their descendants began grouping into above-ground pueblos with ceremonial chambers known as kivas. The spectacular phase came late: most cliff dwellings were raised between about 1180 and 1300, when households moved off the open mesa into the overhangs beneath it, close to seeping springs.

    Did you know? The park holds close to 5,000 archaeological sites, about 600 of them cliff dwellings.

    More about Mesa Verde National Park →

17. 17 Goblin Valley State Park

    United States38.567° N 110.710° W

    • Dark Sky Place

    

    The goblins are carved from Entrada sandstone, laid down in the Jurassic around 170 million years ago on an ancient tidal flat, in alternating bands of sandstone, siltstone and shale. Networks of joints split the beds into blocks; their edges and corners, exposed on more sides, weathered faster than their faces, rounding each block into a knob. A harder layer on top shields the softer rock beneath, which is why so many goblins wear caps like mushrooms. Wild Horse Butte, about 1,756 metres high, rises within the park, built of four exposed Jurassic formations.

    Did you know? Arthur Chaffin and two companions first glimpsed the valley from a viewpoint about a mile to the west, seeing five buttes above a floor crowded with strange rock figures.

    More about Goblin Valley State Park →