The Most Beautiful Places in Colorado
14 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Colorado are Cliff Palace, Red Rocks Amphitheatre and Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve. The list covers 14 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Colorado has the highest average elevation of any American state, and its beauty comes from three landscapes meeting. The Rocky Mountains run down its middle with more than fifty summits above 14,000 feet; the Great Plains roll in from the east and break against red sandstone at the foot of the range; and in the south-west the canyons and mesas of the Colorado Plateau hold the stone villages of the Ancestral Puebloans.
Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde is the largest of those cliff dwellings, a town of rooms and round kivas tucked into a sandstone alcove in the thirteenth century. Red Rocks Amphitheatre turns two tilted sandstone monoliths into a natural concert hall, and the Garden of the Gods sets similar red fins against the bulk of Pikes Peak, whose summit a cog railway has climbed since the 1890s. In the San Luis Valley the Great Sand Dunes pile up into the tallest dunes in North America beneath snowy peaks.
The mountains bring their own range of scenes: the Maroon Bells reflected in Maroon Lake near Aspen, the dark gneiss walls of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison plunging to a narrow river, the Crystal Mill clinging to a ledge above the Crystal River. Human ambition adds the rest, from the narrow-gauge line between Durango and Silverton to the Royal Gorge Bridge and the row of aluminium spires of the Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cliff Palace | Archaeological site | |
| 2 | Red Rocks Amphitheatre | Amphitheatre | |
| 3 | Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve | Dune | |
| 4 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | |
| 5 | Mesa Verde National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 6 | Maroon Bells | Mountain | |
| 7 | Crystal Mill | Watermill | |
| 8 | Bishop Castle | Folly | |
| 9 | Garden of the Gods | Rock formation | |
| 10 | Royal Gorge Bridge | Bridge | |
| 11 | Pikes Peak Cog Railway | Rack railway | |
| 12 | Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad | Heritage railway | |
| 13 | United States Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel | Church building | |
| 14 | Hanging Lake | Lake |
01 Cliff Palace
United States37.167° N 108.473° W
Tobi 87 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Cliff Palace fills a long sandstone alcove high in a canyon wall on the Mesa Verde plateau of south-western Colorado, and from the rim opposite it looks like a small town tucked under a stone brim.
Did you know? Its tallest structure is a four-storey tower about 27 feet high, which still keeps original wooden beams and painted plaster.
02 Red Rocks Amphitheatre
United States · 20.7 km from Denver39.665° N 105.206° W
Sascha Brück~commonswiki · CC BY-SA 3.0 Red Rocks is a concert stage set inside a geological formation, in the foothills of the Rockies above the plains of Colorado.
Did you know? The opera singer Mary Garden sang here in 1911 and declared she had never found better acoustics in any opera house in the world.
03 Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve
United States37.834° N 105.497° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by RJA1988 from Pixabay At the eastern edge of Colorado's broad San Luis Valley, a sea of sand rises against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as if it had been poured there.
Did you know? The Ute name for the dunes means "sand that moves", while the Jicarilla Apache name means "it goes up and down".
04 Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
United States · 16.6 km from Montrose38.580° N 107.728° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by misterfarmer from Pixabay Few canyons in North America combine such depth with such narrowness.
Did you know? The first full passage of the inner canyon came in August 1901, when Torrence and Fellows spent ten days working through about 30 miles of rapids and boulders.
05 Mesa Verde National Park
United States37.260° N 108.494° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- Dark Sky Place
Image by kaylee from Pixabay Tucked into the sandstone alcoves of a high, canyon-cut tableland in southwestern Colorado are entire villages that Ancestral Pueblo farmers built more than seven centuries ago and then left behind.
Did you know? Most of the cliff dwellings were built between about 1180 and 1300 CE, late in the long Ancestral Pueblo occupation of the mesa.
06 Maroon Bells
United States39.071° N 106.989° W
Image by stevesnyderphotography from Pixabay The Maroon Bells are two peaks of Colorado's Elk Mountains, Maroon Peak at 4,317 m and North Maroon Peak, just over 14,000 ft (about 4,270 m), standing side by side at the head of Maroon Creek valley.
Did you know? Maroon Peak ranks as the 27th highest summit in Colorado, while North Maroon Peak is about 0.3 miles away across a connecting ridge.
07 Crystal Mill
United States39.059° N 107.104° W
John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA · CC BY 2.0 Perched on a rock outcrop above the Crystal River, with water spilling from beneath its weathered timber walls, the Crystal Mill is a lone survivor of a silver-mining boom in the Elk Mountains of Colorado.
Did you know? At its peak in the mid-1880s Crystal had more than 500 residents, a newspaper, the Crystal River Current, a pool hall and an exclusive men's club.
08 Bishop Castle
United States38.062° N 105.094° W
Matt Trush · CC BY-SA 3.0 Bishop Castle is what happens when one person refuses to stop building. In 1969 Jim Bishop started laying up a stone cottage on his plot in the Wet Mountains of southern Colorado; by 1973 it had become a castle, and he kept going, largely alone and without formal plans, for the rest of his working life.
Did you know? Jim Bishop bought the land at the age of fifteen for 450 dollars, years before he began laying the first stones.
09 Garden of the Gods
United States · 7 km from Colorado Springs38.878° N 104.871° W
Image by bwellen from Pixabay Garden of the Gods is a gathering of tall red sandstone fins on the western edge of Colorado Springs, rising abruptly from the grassland with the bulk of Pikes Peak behind them.
Did you know? The two surveyors credited with naming the place in August 1859 were Melancthon S. Beach and Rufus Cable.
10 Royal Gorge Bridge
United States38.462° N 105.325° W
Image by Lexus_ from Pixabay For more than seventy years the highest bridge on earth stood not on a highway but at a tourist park in the Colorado Rockies. The Royal Gorge Bridge hangs across the Royal Gorge, a narrow canyon cut by the Arkansas River west of Cañon City, with its wooden deck about 955 feet (291 metres) above the water.
Did you know? Those air rights had cost the bridge only $200 a year since 1929; after he demanded $750,000 a year, the city settled for a one-time $99,000.
11 Pikes Peak Cog Railway
The Broadmoor Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway
United States · 12.1 km from Colorado Springs38.856° N 104.931° W
Milan Suvajac · CC BY-SA 4.0 Few railways anywhere climb as hard as this one. From a depot in Manitou Springs at roughly 1,930 metres, the line runs about 14 kilometres up the flank of Pikes Peak to a summit terminus at 4,302 metres (14,115 feet).
Did you know? Until 2017 the trains climbed on an Abt rack; after the rebuild it was replaced by the heavier Strub system.
12 Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad
United States · 2.6 km from Durango37.297° N 107.871° W
Image by DavidMcConnell from Pixabay Few railways in the world still do the job they were built for with the same kind of machines. The line from Durango up to Silverton was laid by the Denver and Rio Grande in 1881–82 to haul silver and gold ore out of the San Juan Mountains, and trains have run over it ever since.
Did you know? The famous cliff jump in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was filmed near Baker's Bridge on the Animas River, close to the line.
13 United States Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel
United States · 18.3 km from Colorado Springs39.008° N 104.890° W
Image by 1778011 from Pixabay Seventeen aluminium-clad spires rising in a single sharp row make the Cadet Chapel at the United States Air Force Academy one of the boldest religious buildings of American modernism.
Did you know? A 46-foot aluminium cross hangs above the Protestant chancel, in front of a reredos set with semi-precious Colorado stones and Italian marble.
14 Hanging Lake
United States · 12.9 km from Glenwood Springs39.602° N 107.192° W
Joshuahicks ( talk · contribs ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 Hanging Lake is small enough to take in at a single glance, and that is part of its spell. Tucked into a side gorge of Glenwood Canyon in western Colorado, at about 2,230 metres, it is a pool of startlingly clear turquoise water held in place by a lip of travertine, with fallen logs lying visible on the pale bottom.
Did you know? In 1972 the lake passed to the protection of the US Forest Service as part of the White River National Forest.
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 Colorado?
- On our list, Cliff Palace ranks first, followed by Red Rocks Amphitheatre and Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve.
- Why are there sand dunes in Colorado?
- Sand eroded from the surrounding mountains collects on the floor of the San Luis Valley, and prevailing winds push it towards the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where opposing storm winds pile it back up. The dunes are held in place by that tug of war and by the creeks that return sand to the valley.
- What is a fourteener?
- A fourteener is a mountain summit above 14,000 feet, about 4,267 metres. Colorado has more of them than any other US state, among them Pikes Peak and the two Maroon Bells.
- Who built Cliff Palace?
- Cliff Palace was built by the Ancestral Puebloans, mostly during the 1200s, and was abandoned before the end of that century. Its builders are ancestors of today's Pueblo peoples of the Southwest.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Colorado?
- In our collection, the places in Colorado are most often national parks (2), nature sanctuaries (2), archaeological sites (2) and mountains (1).
- How many places are on this list in Colorado?
- The list covers 14 places.