The Most Beautiful Places in North America
368 places in 24 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in North America are Moraine Lake (Canada), Horseshoe Bend (United States) and Crater Lake (United States). The list covers 368 places in 24 countries. The United States has the most, with 228. Last updated 14 October 2026.
North America's beauty is written on a continental scale. Glaciers scoured the north and left thousands of lakes, the Rocky Mountains and the Cascade volcanoes rose along the Pacific, and the dry plateaus of the Southwest eroded into canyons, arches and buttes of red sandstone. It was also the first place to protect such landscapes for the public: the national park idea began here and spread around the world.
Yellowstone, the first national park, sits on a supervolcano that powers its geysers and hot springs, and Banff did the same for Canada in the Rockies. Crater Lake fills the collapsed caldera of an ancient volcano and is the deepest lake in the United States, while Mount Rainier carries more glaciers than any other peak in the lower 48 states. Monument Valley's sandstone buttes rise from the desert of the Navajo Nation, and in the Sierra Nevada the giant sequoia General Sherman is the largest single-stem tree on Earth by volume.
Niagara Falls pours the overflow of the Great Lakes over a broad horseshoe of rock, and the Hoover Dam holds back the Colorado River in Black Canyon. Human landmarks span the 20th century: the faces of Mount Rushmore carved into granite, New York's wedge-shaped Flatiron Building, the Space Needle built for Seattle's 1962 World's Fair, and Frank Gehry's stainless-steel Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Rock formations and waterfalls are the commonest kinds here.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Moraine Lake | Lake | Canada | |
| 2 | Horseshoe Bend | Canyon | United States | |
| 3 | Crater Lake | Volcanic crater lake | United States | |
| 4 | Tikal | Archaeological site | Guatemala | ✓ |
| 5 | Grand Prismatic Spring | Hot spring | United States | |
| 6 | Great Blue Hole | Blue hole | Belize | ✓ |
| 7 | Ilulissat Icefjord | Fjord | Greenland | ✓ |
| 8 | Lake Atitlán | Lake | Guatemala | |
| 9 | Agua Azul Waterfalls | Waterfall | Mexico | |
| 10 | Mount Assiniboine | Mountain | Canada | |
| 11 | Mount Rushmore | Monument | United States | |
| 12 | Niagara Falls | Waterfall | Canada | |
| 13 | Hoover Dam | Dam | United States | |
| 14 | Mount Rainier | Volcano | United States | |
| 15 | Yellowstone National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 16 | Monument Valley | Protected area | United States | |
| 17 | Banff National Park | Protected area | Canada | |
| 18 | Space Needle | Observation tower | United States | |
| 19 | General Sherman | Remarkable tree | United States | |
| 20 | Walt Disney Concert Hall | Theatre building | United States | |
| 21 | Flatiron Building | Skyscraper | United States | |
| 22 | Grand Canyon | Canyon | United States | |
| 23 | El Capitan | Rock formation | United States | |
| 24 | Mount Robson | Mountain | Canada | |
| 25 | Bryce Canyon National Park | National park | United States | |
| 26 | Habitat 67 | Monument | Canada | |
| 27 | Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array | Radio telescope | United States | |
| 28 | Griffith Observatory | Observatory | United States | |
| 29 | Half Dome | Mountain | United States | |
| 30 | Yosemite Falls | Waterfall | United States |
01 Moraine Lake
Canada51.322° N 116.186° W
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Moraine Lake lies at about 1,884 metres in the Valley of the Ten Peaks in Banff National Park, a small lake of some 50 hectares held in a cirque of rock walls and glaciers. Its fame rests on its colour.
Did you know? The lake is fed almost entirely by melting snow and ice, so it only reaches its full level in mid to late June.
02 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.
03 Crater Lake
United States42.944° N 122.107° W
m01229 from USA · CC BY-SA 2.0 Roughly 7,700 years ago, the volcano Mount Mazama did not just erupt — it collapsed. A catastrophic eruption blew out enough magma to empty the mountain's internal plumbing, and the whole summit caved in on itself, leaving the basin that filled to become Crater Lake.
Did you know? The Old Man of the Lake, a whole tree trunk, has floated upright in the water for more than a century, preserved by the cold.
04 Tikal
Guatemala17.222° N 89.624° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JancickaL from Pixabay Tikal is the Maya city at its most theatrical: grey limestone pyramids breaking through the canopy of the Petén rainforest in northern Guatemala, with howler monkeys and ocellated turkeys for company.
Did you know? One reservoir, Corriental, was fitted with a filter of zeolite minerals more than two thousand years ago, among the oldest known water purification systems in the Americas.
05 Grand Prismatic Spring
United States44.525° N 110.838° W
Image by MikeGoad from Pixabay Seen from above, the Grand Prismatic Spring looks like an eye painted by a colourist: a deep blue pupil, a ring of pale turquoise, then bands of yellow, orange and rust-red spreading out over the grey sinter in rays of runoff.
Did you know? According to the National Park Service, the orange, sponge-like mats in alkaline springs like this one are typically built by cyanobacteria.
06 Great Blue Hole
Belize17.316° N 87.534° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
The TerraMar Project · CC BY 2.0 The Great Blue Hole is a near-perfect circle of deep indigo set in the pale turquoise of Lighthouse Reef, an atoll some 70 kilometres off the coast of Belize. Seen from the air it looks unreal: a ring of coral about 318 metres across, with the water inside dropping away to around 124 metres.
Did you know? Its surface covers about 70,650 square metres, close to the area of ten football pitches.
07 Ilulissat Icefjord
Greenland69.150° N 49.550° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by SarahNic from Pixabay Ilulissat Icefjord is where one of the fastest glaciers on the planet meets the sea. Sermeq Kujalleq, also called Jakobshavn Isbræ, pushes out of the Greenland ice sheet at a rate usually measured in tens of metres per day, and the fjord it feeds carries its icebergs some 40 km west to Disko Bay.
Did you know? The glacier drains about 6.5 percent of the entire Greenland ice sheet, the highest outflow of any glacier draining it.
08 Lake Atitlán
Guatemala · 8.3 km from Sololá14.700° N 91.200° W
Image by marcoreyes from Pixabay Lake Atitlán fills the crater of a supervolcano. Some 79,500 years ago the Los Chocoyos eruption emptied a vast magma chamber beneath the Guatemalan highlands and the ground collapsed into a caldera; water has filled it since.
Did you know? The lake has no outlet to the sea: it is an endorheic basin fed by two nearby rivers.
09 Agua Azul Waterfalls
Cascadas de Agua Azul
Mexico17.256° N 92.116° W
Own work · CC BY-SA 4.0 Agua Azul is not one waterfall but a long staircase of them.
Did you know? The area sits in one of Mexico's rainiest zones, where humid winds off the Gulf of Mexico are trapped by the mountain slopes.
10 Mount Assiniboine
Canada · 34.7 km from Banff50.870° N 115.651° W
Image by jkburton from Pixabay Rising 3,618 metres on the Continental Divide between British Columbia and Alberta, Mount Assiniboine is a steep, sharply cut pyramid whose likeness to the Swiss peak has earned it the name "Matterhorn of the Rockies".
Did you know? With a topographic prominence of about 2,086 metres, Assiniboine ranks among the 35 most prominent peaks in Canada.
11 Mount Rushmore
United States · 29 km from Rapid City43.879° N 103.459° W
Dean Franklin · Public domain The four faces on Mount Rushmore were not the original plan.
Did you know? Each of the four presidential heads is about 60 feet, or 18 metres, tall.
12 Niagara Falls
Canada · 3.2 km from Niagara Falls43.080° N 79.071° W
Image by NeilMorrell from Pixabay Niagara Falls hasn't stayed in one place. When the ice sheets retreated around 12,000 years ago and Lake Erie's outflow first cut through the Niagara Escarpment, the falls formed roughly 11 kilometres downstream from where they stand today, near what's now Lewiston and Queenston.
Did you know? Between half and three-quarters of the Niagara River is diverted through tunnels to hydroelectric plants before it ever reaches the brink.
13 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.
14 Mount Rainier
United States46.852° N 121.760° W
Image by Kranich17 from Pixabay On a clear day Mount Rainier floats over Seattle and Tacoma like a second horizon; locals simply call it "the Mountain". The volcano rises to about 4,391 metres, and because it stands alone above the lower Cascades it is the most topographically prominent peak in the contiguous United States.
Did you know? Before a huge collapse about 5,000 years ago, the volcano probably stood near 16,000 feet, well over a thousand feet higher than today.
15 Yellowstone National Park
United States44.600° N 110.500° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- biosphere reserve
James St. John from Newark, Ohio · CC BY 2.0 On 1 March 1872, Ulysses S. Grant signed a piece of legislation that had no real precedent anywhere in the world: setting aside more than two million acres of Wyoming and Montana territory not for a king, a church, or a private estate, but simply to be left alone.
Did you know? The largest known eruption of the hotspot, 2.1 million years ago, ejected about 2,450 cubic kilometres of material.
16 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.
17 Banff National Park
Canada · 2 km from Banff51.167° N 115.550° W
Image by NUNZG from Pixabay Banff was Canada's first national park, created in 1885 when the government set aside a small reserve around hot springs that railway workers had stumbled on at Cave and Basin; it has since grown to about 6,641 square kilometres of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta.
Did you know? The park began life in 1885 under the name Rocky Mountains Park.
18 Space Needle
United States · 3.4 km from Seattle47.620° N 122.349° W
Image by Sebastian_127 from Pixabay The Space Needle was built for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and finished in under a year: work began in April 1961 and the last elevator car was installed the day before the fair opened in April 1962. Its shape came from a compromise.
Did you know? The underground foundation weighs about as much as the entire tower standing above it, and 72 bolts, each 30 feet long, hold the two together.
19 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.
20 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.
21 Flatiron Building
United States · 2.2 km from New York City40.741° N 73.990° W
Image by kokygonzalez from Pixabay Few buildings have a better site than the Flatiron.
Did you know? Its steel bracing was designed to resist four times the strongest wind it could ever be expected to face.
22 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.
23 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.
24 Mount Robson
Canada53.111° N 119.157° W
Image by udumbara from Pixabay Drivers on the Yellowhead Highway see Mount Robson the way few great mountains are ever seen: whole, from the valley floor to the summit, with nothing in front of it.
Did you know? No higher summit lies within roughly 460 km of Mount Robson, an unusually large topographic isolation for a Rocky Mountain peak.
25 Bryce Canyon National Park
United States37.640° N 112.170° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay Bryce Canyon is not really a canyon. It is a chain of vast natural amphitheatres eaten into the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau in southern Utah, filled with thousands of hoodoos: slender spires and pinnacles of soft rock, some as tall as 60 m, coloured red, orange, pink and white.
Did you know? Ebenezer Bryce's homestead did not last: drought, overgrazing and flooding drove him to move his family to Arizona in 1880, just six years after arriving.
26 Habitat 67
Canada · 3.2 km from Montreal45.500° N 73.544° W
Image by ifinnsson from Pixabay On a spit of land in the St. Lawrence River, opposite Old Montreal, hundreds of concrete boxes are stacked at angles into three stepped hills, so that the roof of one home becomes the garden of the next.
Did you know? Each home is made of one to eight of the identical concrete boxes, and private terraces range from roughly 20 to 90 square metres.
27 Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array
United States34.079° N 107.618° W
The Modern Polymath · CC BY-SA 4.0 Twenty-seven white dish antennas, each 25 metres across, stand in a vast Y shape on the Plains of San Agustin, a high, flat basin in western New Mexico. Together they form the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), one of the most productive radio observatories ever built.
Did you know? There are actually 28 antennas on site: one is always rotated out for maintenance while the other 27 observe.
28 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.
29 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.
30 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.
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 North America?
- On our list, Moraine Lake (Canada) ranks first, followed by Horseshoe Bend (United States) and Crater Lake (United States).
- Which country has the most places in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (228), Mexico (56) and Canada (43).
- What was the first national park in the world?
- Yellowstone, established by the United States Congress in 1872, is widely regarded as the first national park in the world.
- Why is Crater Lake so blue?
- Crater Lake is very deep and is fed almost entirely by rain and snow, with no rivers carrying in sediment. The clear water absorbs other colours and reflects back an intense blue.
- What is the largest tree in the world?
- By volume, the largest single-stem tree is General Sherman, a giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park, California, with a trunk volume of roughly 1,500 cubic metres.
- What kinds of places are there to see in North America?
- In our collection, the places in North America are most often rock formations (24), waterfalls (23), archaeological sites (21) and nature sanctuaries (17).
- How many places are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 368 places in 24 countries. The United States has the most, with 228.