The Most Beautiful Places in California
36 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in California are General Sherman, Walt Disney Concert Hall and El Capitan. The list covers 36 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
California packs extremes into one state. The granite of the Sierra Nevada was carved by glaciers into Yosemite's walls and domes, the western slopes hold the largest trees on Earth, and in the rain shadow on the other side lies Death Valley, the lowest and hottest corner of North America. Add a long Pacific coast and a century of cities shaped by film, technology and bold architecture, and few regions anywhere offer such range.
In Yosemite Valley, El Capitan rises as a sheer granite monolith, Half Dome shows its sliced face above the valley, and Yosemite Falls is among the tallest waterfalls in North America. In Sequoia National Park, the General Sherman tree is the largest living tree by volume. In Death Valley, Badwater Basin is a salt flat below sea level, and Zabriskie Point looks over eroded golden badlands.
The Sierra also holds lakes of very different character: Lake Tahoe, deep and clear at the Nevada border, and Mono Lake, a salty lake ringed with towers of tufa. The cities answer in their own way: Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in steel curves, Griffith Observatory overlooking Los Angeles, and San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, a colonnaded rotunda built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | General Sherman | Remarkable tree | |
| 2 | Walt Disney Concert Hall | Theatre building | |
| 3 | El Capitan | Rock formation | |
| 4 | Griffith Observatory | Observatory | |
| 5 | Half Dome | Mountain | |
| 6 | Yosemite Falls | Waterfall | |
| 7 | Badwater Basin | Salt flat | |
| 8 | Golden Gate Bridge | Bridge | |
| 9 | Palace of Fine Arts | Folly | |
| 10 | Zabriskie Point | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 11 | Lake Tahoe | Lake | |
| 12 | Mono Lake | Lake | |
| 13 | Sequoia National Park | National park | |
| 14 | Bodie | Ghost town | |
| 15 | Hearst Castle | Palace | |
| 16 | Bixby Creek Bridge | Bridge | |
| 17 | Yosemite National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 18 | McWay Falls | Waterfall | |
| 19 | Watts Towers | Sculpture | |
| 20 | Tunnel View, Yosemite | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 21 | Grizzly Giant | Remarkable tree | |
| 22 | Lone Cypress | Remarkable tree | |
| 23 | General Grant Tree | Remarkable tree | |
| 24 | Glacier Point | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 25 | Monticello Dam | Dam | |
| 26 | Dante's View | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 27 | Devils Postpile National Monument | Rock formation | |
| 28 | Trona Pinnacles | Rock formation | |
| 29 | Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest | Forest | |
| 30 | Horsetail Fall | Waterfall |
01 General Sherman
United States36.582° N 118.751° W
Roman Tokman · CC BY-SA 4.0 General Sherman is a giant sequoia in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park, and by volume it is the largest known living single-stem tree on Earth. 8 m tall, measures about 31 m around at the ground, and its first large branch springs out roughly 40 m above the base.
Did you know? General Sherman is the largest living tree, not the largest ever: the Crannell Creek Giant, a coast redwood felled in the 1940s, is thought to have been 15–25% bigger.
02 Walt Disney Concert Hall
United States · 1.8 km from Los Angeles34.055° N 118.250° W
Image by WikiImages from Pixabay Sheets of brushed stainless steel curl and billow above Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles like sails caught in a gust. Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, opened on 23 October 2003, is the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.
Did you know? Gehry has said the clients turned down his stone cladding because, after seeing his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, they wanted metal.
03 El Capitan
United States37.734° N 119.637° W
Image by carelbron0 from Pixabay El Capitan is the granite wall that greets you at the western end of Yosemite Valley: a single, almost unjointed monolith rising roughly 900 metres from the valley floor to its rounded top.
Did you know? Royal Robbins made the first solo ascent of El Capitan in 1968, spending ten days alone on the wall.
04 Griffith Observatory
United States · 9.9 km from Los Angeles34.119° N 118.300° W
Image by igorelick from Pixabay Griffith Observatory sits on the south-facing slope of Mount Hollywood, its domes and terraces looking out over the endless grid of Los Angeles. From its terraces the view sweeps from Downtown to the south-east across Hollywood to the Pacific, and the Hollywood Sign is close enough to feel like a neighbour.
Did you know? Nearby, a bronze Albert Einstein sits on a bench holding up a finger, showing how tiny a patch of sky The Big Picture actually covers.
05 Half Dome
United States37.746° N 119.533° W
Image by cyndipadilla from Pixabay Seen from the floor of Yosemite Valley, Half Dome looks as if a giant granite dome had been sliced cleanly in two and one half carried away. Three sides are smooth and rounded; the fourth, facing north-west, falls as a sheer, nearly vertical wall of pale rock.
Did you know? The 1957 first ascent of the Northwest Face took Robbins, Sherrick and Gallwas five days of climbing.
06 Yosemite Falls
United States37.755° N 119.597° W
Mike McBey · CC BY 2.0 Yosemite Falls drops 2,425 feet from the rim of Yosemite Valley to the valley floor. It comes in three parts. The Upper Fall plunges 1,430 feet in a single leap, more than half the total.
Did you know? On bright full-moon nights in spring, the spray at the base of the falls can produce a moonbow, a rainbow lit by moonlight.
07 Badwater Basin
United States36.250° N 116.826° W
Tuxyso · CC BY-SA 3.0 Badwater Basin is the bottom of the continent: a salt pan in Death Valley lying 86 metres (282 feet) below sea level, the lowest point in North America. The scale of the place only becomes clear when you look up.
Did you know? The actual lowest point is not at the pool by the road but several miles out on the salt flat to the west.
08 Golden Gate Bridge
United States · 8 km from San Francisco37.820° N 122.479° W
Image by Pexels from Pixabay The bridge's color exists because nobody could agree on one. The steel arrived from the fabricators already coated in a burnt-orange sealant primer meant only to protect it from rust during shipping and assembly.
Did you know? The day before cars were allowed on in 1937, some 200,000 people crossed the new bridge on foot or on roller skates.
09 Palace of Fine Arts
United States · 4.8 km from San Francisco37.803° N 122.448° W
Kevin Cole ( en:User:Kevinlcole ) · CC BY 2.0 The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco was meant to look like a ruin from the start.
Did you know? Philanthropist Walter S. Johnson pledged 2 million dollars in 1959 and ultimately gave about 4.5 million of the roughly 7.6 million rebuilding cost.
10 Zabriskie Point
United States36.420° N 116.811° W
Image by Abhardphoto from Pixabay Zabriskie Point is a short climb above Highway 190 in Death Valley, and from the top a whole landscape of eroded badlands spreads out below: rippled hills of pale gold and darker brown, cut by countless gullies, with the sharp fin of Manly Beacon standing above them and the white floor of Death Valley and the Panamint…
Did you know? The dark rock capping some of the ridges is lava from eruptions about three to five million years ago.
11 Lake Tahoe
United States · 24.8 km from Carson City39.083° N 120.033° W
Image by Anwic from Pixabay Lake Tahoe fills a fault-block basin high in the Sierra Nevada, its surface sitting about 1,897 metres above sea level with California on two-thirds of the shore and Nevada on the rest.
Did you know? Evaporation, not the river, removes most of the water: an estimated 40 to 60 percent of the outflow simply rises into the air.
12 Mono Lake
United States38.017° N 119.009° W
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Mono Lake is older than the Sierra Nevada range towering beside it — geologists estimate it at more than 760,000 years old, making it one of the oldest lakes in North America.
Did you know? A nematode of the genus Auanema discovered here tolerates arsenic at roughly 500 times the dose a human could survive.
13 Sequoia National Park
United States36.565° N 118.773° W
Image by Kjjj3 from Pixabay The General Sherman Tree, somewhere between 2,200 and 2,700 years old, is the largest living tree on Earth by trunk volume — not the tallest, and not the widest, but the one that wins once you multiply height by girth across its entire 275-foot length.
Did you know? More than 270 caves are known beneath the park, among them Lilburn Cave, the longest in California at nearly 17 miles of passages.
14 Bodie
United States38.212° N 119.012° W
Image by Jmezes from Pixabay Bodie sits in a bare, wind-scoured basin at about 8,379 feet in California's Mono County, and the first thing that strikes you is how complete it still looks. Roughly 110 wooden buildings stand along the dusty grid of streets, their paint long gone to silver, many of their interiors still holding what was left behind.
Did you know? The Standard Company's 1892 hydroelectric plant, about 13 miles away at Dynamo Pond, sent 3,530-volt alternating current to power its 20-stamp mill.
15 Hearst Castle
United States35.685° N 121.168° W
Image by sarangib from Pixabay Hearst Castle crowns a hill above the Pacific near San Simeon, on the empty stretch of California coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Did you know? Morgan and Hearst exchanged around 3,700 letters and telegrams about the project, now kept in an archive at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
16 Bixby Creek Bridge
United States · 25.4 km from Monterey36.371° N 121.902° W
King of Hearts · CC BY-SA 3.0 Bixby Creek Bridge carries California's Highway 1 across a deep coastal canyon on the Big Sur coast, and it is the rare road bridge that improves the landscape it crosses.
Did you know? The contract was won with a bid of $203,334, and the bridge was finished for $199,861.
17 Yosemite National Park
United States37.742° N 119.537° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Few landscapes explain their own making as plainly as Yosemite. The park's 1,187 square miles sit on the granite of the Sierra Nevada batholith, rock that cooled deep underground, was lifted and tilted with the range some ten million years ago, and was then worked over by ice.
Did you know? In May 1903 John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt camped together near Glacier Point for three days, and the valley soon returned to federal control.
18 McWay Falls
United States36.159° N 121.672° W
Image by dianes_sunshine from Pixabay McWay Falls is small by the standards of this collection — a single ribbon of about 80 feet — but its setting is hard to match anywhere on the Pacific coast. McWay Creek leaps from a coastal cliff straight onto a small sandy cove in Big Sur, and at high tide the water falls directly into the ocean.
Did you know? Hélène Brown's gift required the Waterfall House to become a museum of the Big Sur coast or be demolished; the museum never happened and the house was razed in 1965.
19 Watts Towers
United States · 12.3 km from Los Angeles33.939° N 118.241° W
Carol M. Highsmith · Public domain Seventeen spires of steel and mortar rise over a small corner lot in Watts, their lacy ribs glittering with fragments of green soda bottles, blue glass, seashells, broken plates and tiles. 5 feet).
Did you know? In 1959 actor Nicholas King and film editor William Cartwright bought the abandoned site from Rodia's neighbour for $2,000 to save it from demolition.
20 Tunnel View, Yosemite
Tunnel View
United States37.716° N 119.677° W
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay Drive north towards Yosemite on the Wawona Road and the last stretch before the valley runs through solid granite, inside the Wawona Tunnel. Then it bursts out into daylight, and the whole of Yosemite Valley is laid out ahead at once.
Did you know? In peak season an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 people a day stop at the overlook.
21 Grizzly Giant
United States37.504° N 119.601° W
Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Grizzly Giant is the tree people picture when they think of Yosemite's sequoias.
22 Lone Cypress
United States · 7.3 km from Monterey36.569° N 121.965° W
Image by sarahtipton79 from Pixabay On a granite outcrop above the surf at Pebble Beach, a single Monterey cypress leans out over the Pacific with nothing around it but rock, spray and sky.
Did you know? Monterey cypress is a glacial relict listed as Vulnerable; fossils from Drakes Bay and Rancho La Brea show it once grew far beyond its tiny present range.
23 General Grant Tree
General Grant
United States36.748° N 118.971° W
Eric Kilby from Somerville, MA, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0 The General Grant Tree is a giant sequoia in Kings Canyon National Park, high on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada in California, and it is one of the largest living things on Earth.
24 Glacier Point
United States37.731° N 119.573° W
Image by Pexels from Pixabay Glacier Point stands on the south rim of Yosemite Valley at about 7,214 feet, roughly 3,200 feet straight above the floor of the valley near Curry Village. What makes it extraordinary is not height alone but alignment: from the railing the whole architecture of the upper valley opens at once.
Did you know? In 1962 the Firefall was held up by about half an hour because President John F. Kennedy, visiting Yosemite, was still on the telephone at 9 p.m.
25 Monticello Dam
United States38.513° N 122.105° W
Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States · CC BY-SA 2.0 Monticello Dam is best known not for its wall but for a hole in the lake beside it. The dam, a concrete arch 304 feet high and 1,023 feet long across the narrow canyon of Putah Creek in the Vaca Mountains, was built between 1953 and 1957 by the Bureau of Reclamation.
Did you know? The valley was once part of Rancho Las Putas, an 1843 land grant to José and Sixto Berryessa, after whom the lake is named.
26 Dante's View
United States36.221° N 116.726° W
Image by TuendeBede from Pixabay Dante's View is a perch on the crest of the Black Mountains, 1,669 metres up on the north shoulder of Coffin Peak, and what it frames is the whole architecture of Death Valley in a single glance.
Did you know? The viewpoint sits on the Black Mountains, part of the Amargosa Range, a block of crust pushed up as the Earth's surface was pulled apart to open the valley.
27 Devils Postpile National Monument
United States37.624° N 119.084° W
Frank Kovalchek from Anchorage, Alaska, USA · CC BY 2.0 High in the Sierra Nevada, on the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River, a wall of grey stone columns rises like a giant's stack of fence posts.
Did you know? The thickest column measures about 3.5 ft (1.1 m) across, while most range from 10 to 30 inches.
28 Trona Pinnacles
United States35.617° N 117.368° W
Image by Hear2heaL from Pixabay The Trona Pinnacles are a forest of more than 500 rough stone spires rising from the dry bed of the Searles Lake basin in the Mojave Desert of California, some of them as tall as 140 ft (43 m).
Did you know? The three groups of pinnacles grew during three separate ice ages, as Searles Lake rose and fell with Sierra Nevada glaciers.
29 Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest
United States · 19.2 km from Bishop37.386° N 118.179° W
Image by PatternPictures from Pixabay High on the dry eastern slope of California's White Mountains, between about 3,000 and 3,400 metres, grow some of the oldest living trees on Earth.
Did you know? In the White Mountains the oldest trees tend to grow on north-facing slopes, where they average about 2,000 years, roughly twice the average on south-facing slopes.
30 Horsetail Fall
United States37.729° N 119.628° W
Ambitious Wench · CC BY-SA 2.0 Horsetail Fall is a seasonal waterfall that only exists when there's enough snow up on El Capitan to feed it — for much of the year the streak down the cliff's east face is simply dry rock.
Did you know? Ansel Adams photographed the waterfall in black and white decades before it became famous, under the title El Capitan Fall.
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 California?
- On our list, General Sherman ranks first, followed by Walt Disney Concert Hall and El Capitan.
- What is the lowest point in North America?
- Badwater Basin in Death Valley is the lowest point in North America, about 86 metres below sea level.
- How were Half Dome and El Capitan formed?
- Both are granite formed deep underground and later exposed by erosion. Glaciers deepened Yosemite Valley and steepened its walls, while the rock split along joints into the cliffs and domes seen today.
- What are the towers in Mono Lake?
- They are tufa towers, columns of calcium carbonate that formed underwater where freshwater springs met the alkaline lake. They became exposed when the lake level dropped.
- What kinds of places are there to see in California?
- In our collection, the places in California are most often waterfalls (4), trees (4), viewpoints (4) and rock formations (3).
- How many places are on this list in California?
- The list covers 36 places.