The Most Beautiful Places in Africa
193 places in 37 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Africa are Deadvlei (Namibia), Victoria Falls (Zambia) and Serengeti National Park (Tanzania). The list covers 193 places in 37 countries. Egypt has the most, with 35. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Africa is the oldest stage of human history and one of the last places where great wildlife migrations still cross open plains. The Great Rift Valley split the east of the continent, raising volcanoes and leaving lakes and calderas in its path, while the Sahara and the Namib pressed deserts against the oceans. Along the Nile, the most enduring civilisation of the ancient world built in stone for eternity, and its monuments still define the image of antiquity.
Egypt supplies the oldest of them. The step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara is the earliest large stone building in the world, the pyramids of Giza followed about a century later, and the Valley of the Kings hid the tombs of the New Kingdom pharaohs. The Colossi of Memnon still guard the vanished temple of Amenhotep III, and the rock temples of Abu Simbel were cut apart and raised to escape the waters of Lake Nasser. In Algeria, the sandstone plateau of Tassili n'Ajjer preserves thousands of prehistoric rock paintings.
Further south, nature takes over. Victoria Falls drops the Zambezi into a narrow chasm, and Mount Kilimanjaro, a free-standing volcano, carries snow almost on the equator. The Ngorongoro Crater and the Masai Mara hold some of the greatest concentrations of large animals on Earth, while Etosha's salt pan draws herds to its waterholes. At the far end, the Cape of Good Hope marks the rocky headland that opened the sea route to Asia.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Deadvlei | Salt flat | Namibia | |
| 2 | Victoria Falls | Waterfall | Zambia | ✓ |
| 3 | Serengeti National Park | National park | Tanzania | ✓ |
| 4 | Abu Simbel | Rock-cut architecture | Egypt | ✓ |
| 5 | Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve | Nature reserve | Madagascar | ✓ |
| 6 | Anse Source d'Argent | Beach | Seychelles | |
| 7 | Church of Saint George, Lalibela | Rock-cut church | Ethiopia | |
| 8 | Chefchaouen | Most beautiful village | Morocco | |
| 9 | Avenue of the Baobabs | Remarkable tree | Madagascar | |
| 10 | Okavango Delta | Protected area | Botswana | |
| 11 | Cape of Good Hope | Cliff | South Africa | |
| 12 | Giza pyramid complex | Necropolis | Egypt | |
| 13 | Ngorongoro Conservation Area | Protected area | Tanzania | ✓ |
| 14 | Masai Mara | Protected area | Kenya | |
| 15 | Pyramid of Djoser | Archaeological site | Egypt | |
| 16 | Colossi of Memnon | Sculpture | Egypt | |
| 17 | Etosha National Park | Protected area | Namibia | |
| 18 | Valley of the Kings | Archaeological site | Egypt | ✓ |
| 19 | Mount Kilimanjaro | Volcano | Tanzania | |
| 20 | Tassili n'Ajjer | Archaeological site | Algeria | ✓ |
| 21 | Temple of Kom Ombo | Ruins | Egypt | |
| 22 | Namib-Naukluft National Park | National park | Namibia | |
| 23 | Koutoubia Mosque | Mosque | Morocco | ✓ |
| 24 | Lake Nakuru | Lake | Kenya | ✓ |
| 25 | Amboseli National Park | National park | Kenya | |
| 26 | Caves of Hercules | Cave | Morocco | |
| 27 | Djemila | Archaeological site | Algeria | ✓ |
| 28 | Great Mosque of Djenné | Mosque | Mali | ✓ |
| 29 | Richat Structure | Rock formation | Mauritania | |
| 30 | Volubilis | Archaeological site | Morocco | ✓ |
01 Deadvlei
Namibia24.763° S 15.295° E
Image by kuloser from Pixabay Deadvlei is a white clay pan enclosed by some of the highest dunes on Earth, deep in the Namib Desert of western Namibia, and it holds one of the most unearthly scenes on the planet.
Did you know? The deep red of the surrounding dunes comes from iron oxide coating the sand grains, which grows stronger as the sand ages.
02 Victoria Falls
Zambia · 2 km from Victoria Falls17.925° S 25.858° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Jürgen_Bierlein from Pixabay The Zambezi reaches Victoria Falls as a broad, lazy river threaded with wooded islands, then drops in one sheer step into a crack in the basalt plateau. The curtain is about 1,708 metres wide and up to 108 metres deep at the centre.
Did you know? Under a full moon the spray can produce a lunar rainbow, or moonbow, alongside the daytime rainbows that gave the falls some of their older names.
03 Serengeti National Park
Tanzania2.400° S 34.600° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Giles Laurent · CC BY-SA 4.0 5 million wildebeest, a quarter of a million zebra and hundreds of thousands of Thomson's gazelle moving in a yearly circuit between northern Tanzania and Kenya's Maasai Mara.
Did you know? Poaching cut the park's eastern black rhinos to about ten animals in the 1980s, and fewer than 70 survive there today.
04 Abu Simbel
Egypt22.337° N 31.626° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Olaf Tausch · Public domain Abu Simbel is two temples cut into a sandstone hill on the west bank of Lake Nasser, in Egypt's far south close to the Sudanese border. Ramesses II had them carved in the 13th century BC, at the Second Cataract where Egypt met Nubia, and they were meant to be seen from the river as a statement of pharaonic power.
Did you know? Engineers cut the temples into blocks of up to 20 tonnes for the chambers and 30 tonnes for the façades, the smallest weighing seven tonnes.
05 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.
Did you know? The karst is carved into a Middle Jurassic limestone sequence some 300 to 500 metres thick of the Bajocian and Bathonian stages.
06 Anse Source d'Argent
Anse Source d'argent
Seychelles4.372° S 55.827° E
Tobias Alt, Tobi 87 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Anse Source d'Argent is a two-kilometre ribbon of white sand on the south-west coast of La Digue, the fourth-largest of the granitic islands of the Seychelles. It is often called the most photographed beach in the world, and the reason is geological rather than tropical.
Did you know? The beach has served as a backdrop for films and for the Bacardi rum advertisements of the 1990s.
07 Church of Saint George, Lalibela
Ethiopia12.032° N 39.041° E
Sailko · CC BY 3.0 Of the eleven churches cut from the rock at Lalibela, Bete Giyorgis, the Church of Saint George, is the one that has become the emblem of Ethiopia.
Did you know? It is thought to be the last built of Lalibela's eleven rock-hewn churches, and is often judged the most finely executed and best preserved of them.
08 Chefchaouen
Morocco35.169° N 5.268° W
Image by eyw2008 from Pixabay Chefchaouen climbs a slope in the western Rif mountains at about 600 metres, and the walls, stairways, doors and lanes of its old town are washed in every shade of blue against white. The effect has earned it the nickname of the Blue City, or the Blue Pearl.
Did you know? Sayyida al-Hurra, daughter of the town's founder, was born here in the early 1490s and later ruled Tétouan as governor while leading corsair fleets in the Mediterranean.
09 Avenue of the Baobabs
Madagascar · 14.6 km from Morondava20.251° S 44.418° E
Hiroki Ogawa · CC BY 3.0 A short stretch of road in western Madagascar holds one of the strangest and most photographed tree groups on earth.
Did you know? Trunks can reach about three metres across, topped by a flat crown of horizontal branches.
10 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.
Did you know? Its 71 fish species, from a 1.4-metre sharptooth catfish to a 3.2-centimetre sickle barb, also live in the Zambezi, hinting at an ancient link between the rivers.
11 Cape of Good Hope
South Africa34.358° S 18.472° E
Image by sharonang from Pixabay At the end of the Cape Peninsula, a ridge of Table Mountain sandstone drops into the Atlantic in a jumble of dark rock and surf.
Did you know? The meeting point of the warm Agulhas Current and the cold Benguela Current shifts back and forth between Cape Agulhas and Cape Point.
12 Giza pyramid complex
Egypt · 6.7 km from Giza29.976° N 31.133° E
Ricardo Liberato · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Giza plateau, on the edge of the Western Desert above modern Giza, holds the most famous group of monuments on Earth: the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, the Great Sphinx, and the temples, causeways and cemeteries that served them. All were built during Egypt's Fourth Dynasty, roughly 2600 to 2500 BC.
Did you know? Workers cut the softer limestone with copper tools, but wore down hard granite with abrasive sand and powders before finishing it with copper.
13 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.
Did you know? No European is known to have entered the crater before 1892, when the Austrian explorer Oscar Baumann reached it.
14 Masai Mara
Kenya1.490° S 35.140° E
Image by sprinter1973 from Pixabay The reserve's name comes from two different languages layered together.
Did you know? Alongside some 1.3 million wildebeest, the great migration carries roughly 500,000 Thomson's gazelles, about 97,000 topi and around 18,000 eland.
15 Pyramid of Djoser
Egypt · 15.6 km from Giza29.871° N 31.217° E
Olaf Tausch · CC BY 3.0 On the plateau of Saqqara, above the ruins of ancient Memphis, stands the building where Egyptian monumental architecture begins. The Step Pyramid was raised in the 27th century BC for Djoser, a king of the Third Dynasty known in his own time by his Horus name Netjerikhet.
Did you know? The entrance colonnade has 40 ribbed limestone columns, each almost 6 metres tall and carved with 17 to 19 ribs.
16 Colossi of Memnon
Egypt · 4.6 km from Luxor25.721° N 32.611° E
MusikAnimal · CC BY-SA 4.0 These two seated figures — about 18 metres tall, roughly 720 tons of quartzite sandstone apiece — are nearly all that remains standing of what was once Egypt's largest mortuary temple, built for Amenhotep III around 1350 BC.
Did you know? The sides of the thrones are carved with reliefs of Hapi, the god of the Nile flood.
17 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".
Did you know? By 1881 hunting had all but wiped out elephants, rhinos and lions in the region, long before the reserve was created.
18 Valley of the Kings
Egypt · 6.5 km from Luxor25.740° N 32.602° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Freiheitsjunkie from Pixabay For nearly five centuries, from about 1539 to 1075 BC, the pharaohs of the New Kingdom were buried not under pyramids but in tombs cut deep into a dry valley on the west bank of the Nile opposite Thebes, modern Luxor.
Did you know? Tutankhamun's entrance stayed hidden partly because rubble from cutting the tomb of Ramesses V and VI, plus workmen's huts, was heaped right on top of it.
19 Mount Kilimanjaro
Tanzania · 30.3 km from Moshi3.067° S 37.359° E
Image by Squirrel_photos from Pixabay Kilimanjaro rises alone out of the plains of northern Tanzania, 5,895 metres high and some 4,900 metres above its own base. It is the highest mountain in Africa and the highest free-standing mountain on Earth, a dormant stratovolcano built by more than two million years of eruptions along the East African Rift.
Did you know? Ice cores from the summit's Northern Ice Field show the ice there began forming about 11,700 years ago.
20 Tassili n'Ajjer
Algeria25.667° N 9.000° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Djaren-Sefar from Pixabay Tassili n'Ajjer — "plateau of rivers" in Berber — is a sandstone upland of more than 72,000 square kilometres in south-eastern Algeria, near the borders with Libya and Niger, and it holds one of the densest concentrations of prehistoric rock art on Earth.
Did you know? One of the best-known paintings is the Horned Goddess, a running woman from the Round Head period with horns, fringed armbands and a dotted body.
21 Temple of Kom Ombo
Egypt · 3 km from Kom Ombo24.452° N 32.928° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay The Temple of Kom Ombo is a double temple: two complete sanctuaries built side by side under one roof, above the east bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt. Every element is mirrored along the central axis — two entrances, two sets of halls, two inner shrines — because the temple served two gods at once.
Did you know? Before Jacques de Morgan's work in 1893, more than half of the ruins lay buried under sand.
22 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.
Did you know? The name Sossusvlei mixes Afrikaans and Nama and roughly means a dead-end marsh, because the Tsauchab river ends there.
23 Koutoubia Mosque
Morocco · 1.2 km from Marrakesh31.624° N 7.994° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay The minaret of the Koutoubia is the landmark by which Marrakesh has measured itself for eight centuries. It rises about 77 m, its main square shaft almost 13 m wide, built of rubble masonry and sandstone that takes on a pink-gold tone in the evening.
Did you know? According to legend, the copper orbs on the finial are solid gold, one of them cast from a queen's jewellery as penance for breaking her Ramadan fast.
24 Lake Nakuru
Kenya · 9.7 km from Nakuru0.367° S 36.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Nick115 from Pixabay For most of the twentieth century, Lake Nakuru was described by ornithologists in almost hyperbolic terms — one famous account called the sight of its flamingo flocks "the greatest bird spectacle on Earth," with counts at times estimated well over a million birds packed onto a single shallow lake.
Did you know? The lake has almost dried up several times in the past half-century, and its area has swung from around 5 to 68 square kilometres.
25 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.
Did you know? Echo, the park's most famous matriarch, was the subject of the 2010 documentary Echo: An Elephant to Remember.
26 Caves of Hercules
Morocco · 12.1 km from Tangier35.760° N 5.939° W
Image by Bennobam from Pixabay The Caves of Hercules sit on Cape Spartel, the headland where the Atlantic meets the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, about 14 km west of Tangier.
Did you know? Roman sources tell that Hercules smashed through a mountain here instead of climbing it, opening the Strait of Gibraltar and creating the Pillars of Hercules.
27 Djemila
Algeria · 34 km from Sétif36.321° N 5.737° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ramdanidjamel from Pixabay Djemila is the Roman town of Cuicul, laid out in the 1st century AD as a garrison colony on a narrow triangular spur some 900 metres up in the hills of north-eastern Algeria, where two streams meet.
Did you know? The Arch of Caracalla was raised in 216, and the Septimian temple beside it was dedicated in 229 under Severus Alexander.
28 Great Mosque of Djenné
Mali · 0.8 km from Djenné13.905° N 4.556° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
BluesyPete · CC BY-SA 3.0 This is the largest mud-brick building on Earth, raised on a platform above the Bani River floodplain to keep it above the annual floodwaters. Its present form dates to a 1907 reconstruction, built on foundations going back to the 13th century.
Did you know? The mosque stands on a platform of about 75 by 75 metres, raised some three metres above the market square and reached by six stairways.
29 Richat Structure
Mauritania21.124° N 11.402° W
DHQ · CC BY-SA 4.0 From orbit the Richat Structure looks like a target painted on the Sahara: a set of concentric rings some 40 kilometres across, laid out on the Adrar plateau of Mauritania with a precision that seems too perfect to be natural.
Did you know? The two gabbro ring dikes sit about 3 km and 8 km from the centre, the inner one roughly 30 m wide and the outer about 70 m.
30 Volubilis
Morocco · 19.1 km from Meknes34.071° N 5.554° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Yolanda from Pixabay Volubilis sits on a gentle ridge below the Zerhoun massif, looking over a plain of olive groves north of Meknes, and the olive is the key to the whole place.
Did you know? The city's name may come from the Berber word Walilt, meaning oleander, a flower that still grows along the valley.
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 places in Africa?
- On our list, Deadvlei (Namibia) ranks first, followed by Victoria Falls (Zambia) and Serengeti National Park (Tanzania).
- Which country has the most places in Africa?
- In our collection, the most come from Egypt (35), Morocco (21) and South Africa (15).
- Is the Cape of Good Hope the southernmost point of Africa?
- No. The southernmost point is Cape Agulhas, about 150 kilometres to the southeast, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans are conventionally divided.
- Why was Abu Simbel moved?
- The building of the Aswan High Dam would have flooded the temples. Between 1964 and 1968 they were cut into large blocks and reassembled on higher ground in an international rescue campaign led by UNESCO.
- What is the oldest pyramid in Egypt?
- The Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, built in the 27th century BC and attributed to the architect Imhotep, is the oldest Egyptian pyramid and the earliest large-scale cut-stone building.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Africa?
- In our collection, the places in Africa are most often archaeological sites (26), nature sanctuaries (13), mosques (13) and mountains (11).
- How many places are on this list in Africa?
- The list covers 193 places in 37 countries. Egypt has the most, with 35.