The Most Beautiful Places in Arizona
18 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Arizona are Hoover Dam, Monument Valley and Grand Canyon. The list covers 18 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Arizona lies across the Colorado Plateau and the deserts south of it, a landscape where dry climate leaves rock bare and time is written in exposed layers. The Colorado River and its tributaries have cut into sandstone and limestone laid down over hundreds of millions of years, wind has sculpted ancient sand dunes turned to stone, and much of the most remarkable scenery lies on the lands of the Navajo Nation and other Native peoples who have lived here for centuries.
The Grand Canyon is the definitive example, a mile-deep chasm whose lowest rocks are close to two billion years old. Upstream, the river loops around a sandstone spur at Horseshoe Bend, and nearby Antelope Canyon is a slot so narrow that light filters down its curved walls in beams. Monument Valley lifts its red buttes and mesas from the desert floor, and The Wave, in the Coyote Buttes, turns Jurassic dune sandstone into swirling bands of colour.
Canyon de Chelly shelters cliff dwellings of Ancestral Puebloans beneath sheer walls still farmed by Navajo families. Meteor Crater is one of the best-preserved impact craters on Earth, formed by an iron meteorite tens of thousands of years ago. Havasu Falls pours blue-green water over red travertine in a side canyon of the Grand Canyon. Human works answer in scale: Hoover Dam holds back the Colorado in a concrete arch, and in Sedona the Chapel of the Holy Cross rises from the red rocks.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hoover Dam | Dam | |
| 2 | Monument Valley | Protected area | |
| 3 | Grand Canyon | Canyon | |
| 4 | Horseshoe Bend | Canyon | |
| 5 | Meteor Crater | Impact crater | |
| 6 | Lake Powell | Reservoir | |
| 7 | Grand Canyon National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 8 | The Wave | Rock formation | |
| 9 | Canyon de Chelly National Monument | Canyon | |
| 10 | Antelope Canyon | Canyon | |
| 11 | Chapel of the Holy Cross | Church building | |
| 12 | Havasu Falls | Waterfall | |
| 13 | Desert View Watchtower | Watchtower | |
| 14 | Vermilion Cliffs | Cliff | |
| 15 | Cathedral Rock (Sedona) | Rock formation | |
| 16 | Montezuma Castle National Monument | Archaeological site | |
| 17 | Mission San Xavier del Bac | Church building | |
| 18 | Toroweap Overlook | Scenic viewpoint |
01 Hoover Dam
United States · 9.4 km from Boulder City36.016° N 114.738° W
Image by MrUweS from Pixabay Hoover Dam plugs the Black Canyon of the Colorado River on the border between Nevada and Arizona, a curved wall of concrete standing 726 feet (about 221 metres) from its foundation rock to the roadway on its crest. 25 million cubic yards went into the dam alone.
Did you know? In the summer of 1931, with daytime highs averaging around 49 °C, sixteen workers and nearby residents died of heat prostration in a single month.
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.
Did you know? Forrest Gump's famous cross-country run comes to an end in Monument Valley.
03 Grand Canyon
United States36.097° N 112.095° W
Image by balder815 from Pixabay The Grand Canyon is not the deepest gorge on Earth, but few landscapes expose so much of the planet's history in a single view. 8 km deep. At the bottom lies the Vishnu Schist, around two billion years old; at the rim, the Kaibab Limestone, laid down some 270 million years ago.
Did you know? On 28 August 1869 three of Powell’s men left the expedition on foot, fearing rapids that the rest of the crew ran safely the next day.
04 Horseshoe Bend
United States36.879° N 111.514° W
Image by Pexels from Pixabay Horseshoe Bend is a single, perfect loop of the Colorado River a few miles below Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona.
Did you know? The small dark iron concretions in the rock, often called Moqui marbles, are sandstone cemented by the iron minerals hematite and goethite.
05 Meteor Crater
United States · 29.8 km from Winslow35.028° N 111.023° W
Image by mattcaz from Pixabay Meteor Crater, also called Barringer Crater, is the best-preserved meteorite crater on Earth, a bowl about 1,200 metres across and 170 metres deep in the high desert of northern Arizona.
Did you know? Beneath the crater floor lies 210 to 240 metres of shattered rubble above the original bedrock.
06 Lake Powell
United States36.936° N 111.484° W
Image by ThuyHaBich from Pixabay Lake Powell is a flooded labyrinth.
Did you know? In 2022 the water fell to its lowest level since filling began, and the record was matched again in 2026.
07 Grand Canyon National Park
United States36.055° N 112.122° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Filio from Pixabay Grand Canyon National Park protects a chasm that the Colorado River and its tributaries cut into the Colorado Plateau after the plateau was lifted.
Did you know? In 1540 Spanish soldiers guided by Hopi people tried to reach the river, got a third of the way down and reported rocks bigger than Seville's Giralda tower.
08 The Wave
United States36.996° N 112.006° W
Image by 12019 from Pixabay In the Coyote Buttes of northern Arizona, on the border with Utah, the Navajo Sandstone has been eroded into a pair of intersecting troughs whose walls are banded in red, orange, pink and cream.
Did you know? Only 64 people a day may visit: 48 permits go by online lottery four months ahead and 16 by a geofenced lottery two days before.
09 Canyon de Chelly National Monument
United States36.155° N 109.509° W
Image by ducken99 from Pixabay Canyon de Chelly is not one gorge but a branching system of them — Canyon de Chelly itself, Canyon del Muerto and Monument Canyon — cut into the Defiance Plateau of northeastern Arizona by streams running off the Chuska Mountains.
Did you know? In the winter of 1864, Navajo bands under Barboncito and Manuelito held out on Fortress Rock, a butte at the junction of the canyons, living on stockpiled food.
10 Antelope Canyon
United States36.858° N 111.372° W
Image by Lenzatic from Pixabay The same force that makes Antelope Canyon beautiful is the one that makes it dangerous.
Did you know? Upper Antelope is A-shaped, wider at the bottom than the top, while Lower Antelope is a narrow V-shaped slot reached by several flights of stairs.
11 Chapel of the Holy Cross
United States34.832° N 111.767° W
Matthew P. Del Buono · CC BY-SA 3.0 The chapel exists because of an optical illusion on a skyscraper. In 1932, sculptor Marguerite Brunswig Staude was visiting the newly finished Empire State Building when, from a certain angle, the steel framework of the building seemed to resolve into an enormous cross.
Did you know? The walls are a single foot of reinforced coarse-aggregate concrete, set against red rock cliffs that rise about 1,500 feet behind them.
12 Havasu Falls
United States36.255° N 112.698° W
Jeremy Evans · CC BY-SA 2.0 Havasu Falls pours over a cliff of roughly 90 to 100 feet deep inside a side canyon of the Grand Canyon, and what makes it famous is colour. Havasu Creek carries so much dissolved calcium carbonate that its water turns a vivid blue-green, strikingly bright against the rust-red canyon walls.
Did you know? A flood on 17 August 2008, after the Redlands Dam upstream burst, led to about 400 people being airlifted out of the canyon.
13 Desert View Watchtower
United States36.044° N 111.826° W
TeKappa · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Desert View Watchtower rises on the eastern end of the Grand Canyon's South Rim, a round stone tower 70 feet high that looks as if it had been standing there for centuries.
Did you know? Some stones set into the walls carry genuine petroglyphs, brought to the site from near Ash Fork, Arizona.
14 Vermilion Cliffs
United States · 31.3 km from Kanab36.925° N 112.842° W
Image by igormattio from Pixabay The Vermilion Cliffs are one of the long, stepped escarpments that make the Colorado Plateau look like a staircase built for giants.
15 Cathedral Rock (Sedona)
Cathedral Rock
United States34.820° N 111.793° W
Image by Sunfellow from Pixabay Cathedral Rock is the most recognisable of the red sandstone buttes around Sedona, Arizona: a long, narrow mass of rock that ends in a cluster of free-standing spires, rising to about 4,967 feet (1,514 m).
Did you know? The rock layer that forms the butte is named after Sedona Schnebly, the pioneer woman whose name was also given to the town itself.
16 Montezuma Castle National Monument
United States34.613° N 111.840° W
Image by minnick36 from Pixabay Set into a recess about 27 metres (90 feet) up a pale limestone cliff above Beaver Creek, Montezuma Castle is one of the best-preserved cliff dwellings in North America. The five-storey building of stone and mud mortar holds at least twenty rooms and was home to perhaps thirty people at its peak.
Did you know? Studies of the walls show the builders mixed several different mud mortars, each suited to a particular need such as strength, durability or colour.
17 Mission San Xavier del Bac
United States · 15.6 km from Tucson32.107° N 111.008° W
Keyany · CC BY-SA 4.0 Mission San Xavier del Bac rises out of the flat desert south of Tucson like something misplaced from central Mexico: a white facade flanked by two towers, a dome over the crossing, and a richly carved entrance set into otherwise plain lime-washed walls.
Did you know? The walls are of locally fired adobe brick filled with basalt rock, about six feet thick in the towers.
18 Toroweap Overlook
United States36.214° N 113.057° W
John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA · CC BY 2.0 At Toroweap the Grand Canyon has no gentle viewpoint railings and no layered foreground: the rock simply stops, and the Colorado River runs some 3,000 feet (about 900 metres) straight below.
Did you know? Lava Falls Rapid, just downstream, is widely regarded as the most severe rapid in the Grand Canyon, and on some days its roar carries up to the overlook.
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 Arizona?
- On our list, Hoover Dam ranks first, followed by Monument Valley and Grand Canyon.
- How old is the Grand Canyon?
- The Colorado River carved most of the canyon over the past five to six million years, but the rocks it exposes are much older. Those at the bottom of the inner gorge are close to two billion years old.
- Why is the water at Havasu Falls blue-green?
- Havasu Creek carries a high load of dissolved calcium carbonate from the limestone it flows through. The minerals reflect blue-green light and also build up the reddish travertine terraces over which the falls pour.
- How was Meteor Crater formed?
- Meteor Crater was formed about 50,000 years ago when an iron-nickel meteorite tens of metres across struck the plateau. It was the first crater on Earth to be proven to come from an impact.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Arizona?
- In our collection, the places in Arizona are most often canyons and gorges (4), nature sanctuaries (3), rock formations (2) and churches (2).
- How many places are on this list in Arizona?
- The list covers 18 places.