The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries in Spain
9 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful nature sanctuaries in Spain are Bardenas Reales, Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park and El Torcal de Antequera. The list covers 9 nature sanctuaries. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Spain is one of the most mountainous countries in Europe and one of the most varied in climate, from Atlantic islands to semi-desert badlands and the high Pyrenees. Its protected areas reflect that range: eroded clay steppes, karst plateaus carved like sculpture, glacial canyons, and island archipelagos where seabird colonies and dunes have been left to themselves.
Bardenas Reales in Navarre is a semi-desert of clay and sandstone buttes, its lone chimney of Castildetierra a symbol of the region; it also stood in for the Dothraki Sea in Game of Thrones. El Torcal de Antequera near Málaga is a maze of limestone stacked like piles of plates, formed from an ancient Jurassic seabed. Ordesa y Monte Perdido in the Pyrenees, one of Spain's first national parks, is a glacial valley under walls rising toward Monte Perdido. The Cíes Islands at the mouth of the Ría de Vigo are known for Rodas beach, a white sand arc joining two islands.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bardenas Reales | Protected area | |
| 2 | Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park | Nature reserve | |
| 3 | El Torcal de Antequera | Nature reserve | ✓ |
| 4 | Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 5 | Teide National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 6 | Cíes Islands | National park | |
| 7 | Caldera de Taburiente National Park | National park | |
| 8 | Timanfaya National Park | National park | |
| 9 | Picos de Europa National Park | National park |
01 Bardenas Reales
Spain42.190° N 1.500° W
Image by alterRPC from Pixabay The name "Reales" reflects an unusual history. The land belonged to the Navarrese Crown and belongs to no municipality; since the Middle Ages its grazing and farming rights have been shared by a fixed community of 22 bodies, today 19 towns, two Pyrenean valleys and a monastery, confirmed in perpetuity by Philip V in 1705. Flocks from the Pyrenean valleys of Roncal and Salazar have wintered here since at least the ninth century, and transhumance along the old drove roads continues. On a butte stand the ruins of Peñaflor castle, which legend links to Queen Blanca I of Navarre.
Did you know? The name first surfaces around 915–916 in an Arabic chronicle of a battle, which records the place as jabal al-Bardà.
02 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 Underwater the park is as rich as on land. A marine reserve of around 12,000 hectares runs along the coast, with Posidonia seagrass meadows that begin in the shallows. Among the coves, Mónsul and Los Genoveses are the best known, and whitewashed villages such as San José, Las Negras and Agua Amarga keep a low profile along the shore. Inland, the abandoned mining village around Rodalquilar and the lonely Cortijo del Fraile, whose real-life crime inspired Lorca's Blood Wedding, add a haunted note, and the desert light has drawn film-makers from Sergio Leone to Steven Spielberg.
03 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 Look down as well as around. The crevices shelter a remarkable flora, including rock-dwelling toadflaxes and saxifrages, red peonies, wild roses and some thirty kinds of orchid in spring. Spanish ibex clamber across the blocks, griffon vultures circle overhead and Montpellier snakes and ocellated lizards bask on the stone. Summer heat and winter cold are both fierce at this height, so spring and autumn are the best seasons to come.
Did you know? More than a hundred shafts and caves have been explored in the massif; the deepest, the Sima de la Unión, drops about 225 metres.
04 Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park
Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido
Spain42.672° N 0.056° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by vilanchelo from Pixabay The park is one of the oldest in Spain: a small reserve of 21 km² in the Ordesa valley was protected in 1918, and it was enlarged to its present 156 km² in 1982. In 1997 it became part of the cross-border World Heritage Site Pyrénées – Mont Perdu, shared with the French cirques on the other side of the ridge. The park also carries a melancholy footnote in natural history: the last Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo, died here in January 2000, and the subspecies has been extinct since.
Did you know? Monte Perdido is the highest limestone massif in Europe, and it still holds a small glacier on its northern face.
05 Teide National Park
Parque Nacional del Teide
Spain28.276° N 16.643° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Barni1 from Pixabay Life has adapted to an environment of intense sun, cold nights and little water. The most famous plant is the Teide bugloss, whose red flower spikes can reach three metres in May and June; the white-and-pink Teide broom covers the slopes, and the Teide violet grows almost at the summit, making it the highest-flowering plant in Spain. Of the 168 vascular plant species recorded, 33 grow only on Tenerife, and many of its invertebrates occur nowhere else. For the aboriginal Guanches the mountain was sacred — they called it Echeyde and believed it was a gateway to the underworld — and archaeological sites have been found across the park.
06 Cíes Islands
Illas Cíes
Spain · 14.1 km from Vigo42.233° N 8.900° W
Image by sitoruiz from Pixabay Visitor numbers are capped in season - close to 3,000 a day at the peak - and an authorisation is needed before boarding, so the islands never feel like a resort; everything you carry in, you carry out.
Did you know? Besides the gulls, around 2,500 pairs of European shags nest on the islands.
07 Caldera de Taburiente National Park
Parque nacional de la Caldera de Taburiente
Spain28.754° N 17.885° W
Luc Viatour · CC BY-SA 3.0 The caldera was also the last stronghold of the island's first people, who called La Palma Benahoare. When the Castilian forces of Alonso Fernández de Lugo landed in 1492, most of the island's cantons came to terms, but Aceró, the canton of the caldera, held out behind its walls of rock. Its chief, Tanausú, was captured only after being drawn out to negotiate under a promise of peace, and tradition says that he refused food on the ship carrying him to Spain and died of hunger. The caldera became a national park in 1954, at the urging of artists and scholars; it was enlarged in 1981 to around 4,700 hectares.
Did you know? The basin formed when the flank of a huge volcano collapsed in a landslide about half a million years ago, then was enlarged by erosion.
08 Timanfaya National Park
Parque Nacional de Timanfaya
Spain · 24.1 km from Arrecife29.014° N 13.780° W
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay The colours are what stay in the memory: rust-red and ochre cones, black and purple lava fields twisted into ropes and blades, and pale lichens, the first life to take hold, slowly colonising the bare rock. The Lanzarote-born artist César Manrique left his mark here too. He designed the El Diablo restaurant on the Islote de Hilario, where food is grilled over the volcanic heat, and the devil figure that became the park's emblem. The park was declared in 1974, and since 1993 it has been a core area of the UNESCO biosphere reserve that covers the whole of Lanzarote.
Did you know? Timanfaya is the only national park in Spain that is entirely geological in character.
09 Picos de Europa National Park
Parque nacional de Picos de Europa
Spain43.250° N 4.917° W
- biosphere reserve
Image by javierAlamo from Pixabay Pedro Pidal was also the driving force behind the park itself. Created in July 1918 as the Covadonga Mountain National Park, it was the first national park in Spain, centred on the glacial lakes of Enol and Ercina above the shrine of Covadonga, where tradition places the battle of 722 that began the Christian reconquest of the peninsula. The park was enlarged to its present extent in 1995 and later years, and UNESCO recognised it as a biosphere reserve in 2003. Shepherding communities still use the high meadows, and the strong blue cheese of Cabrales is still matured in the natural limestone caves of the area.
Did you know? The Naranjo de Bulnes was first climbed on 5 August 1904 by Pedro Pidal and the shepherd Gregorio Pérez.
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 nature sanctuaries in Spain?
- On our list, Bardenas Reales ranks first, followed by Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park and El Torcal de Antequera.
- Was Game of Thrones filmed in Bardenas Reales?
- Yes. Scenes for the sixth season were filmed in Bardenas Reales, where its badlands represented the Dothraki Sea grasslands on the series' eastern continent.
- When was Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park created?
- It was established in 1918 as the Ordesa Valley National Park, the second national park in Spain after Covadonga. Together with the French side of the massif, Pyrénées – Mont Perdu is also a World Heritage Site.
- How many nature sanctuaries are on this list in Spain?
- The list covers 9 nature sanctuaries.