The Most Beautiful Places in South America
168 places in 13 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in South America are Machu Picchu (Peru), Salar de Uyuni (Bolivia) and Iguaçu Falls (Brazil). The list covers 168 places in 13 countries. Brazil has the most, with 44. Last updated 14 October 2026.
South America is built along a single spine: the Andes, the longest continental mountain range in the world, pushed up where the Pacific plate dives beneath the continent. Its volcanoes, salt flats and high lakes lie beside the Amazon basin, the Atacama, one of the driest places on Earth, and the ancient table mountains of the Guiana Shield. Each of these worlds shaped its own cultures, from the desert people of Nazca to the Polynesian navigators of Rapa Nui.
The Andes supply the giants. Aconcagua in Argentina is the highest mountain in the Americas, and Chimborazo in Ecuador, thanks to the equatorial bulge, has the summit farthest from the centre of the Earth. Its neighbour Cotopaxi is one of the highest active volcanoes, while Licancabur rises as a near-perfect cone above the Atacama. In Patagonia, the granite spires of Mount Fitz Roy rise sheer from the ice fields, and in Bolivia's high plains Laguna Colorada turns red with algae and pink with flamingos.
Human works are just as varied. The Nazca Lines, drawn on the desert floor of southern Peru, reveal their animals and figures fully only from above. On Easter Island, the moai stand with their backs to the ocean, and in Colombia the Las Lajas Sanctuary bridges a deep river gorge. Mount Roraima, a sheer-walled tepui, is said to have inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Rio's Sugarloaf Mountain and Buenos Aires' Teatro Colón, famous for its acoustics, complete the range.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Machu Picchu | Archaeological site | Peru | |
| 2 | Salar de Uyuni | Salt flat | Bolivia | |
| 3 | Iguaçu Falls | Waterfall | Brazil | |
| 4 | Galápagos National Park | National park | Ecuador | ✓ |
| 5 | Mount Fitz Roy | Summit | Argentina | |
| 6 | Lençóis Maranhenses National Park | Dune | Brazil | ✓ |
| 7 | Angel Falls | Waterfall | Venezuela | |
| 8 | Amazon rainforest | Forest | Brazil | |
| 9 | Perito Moreno Glacier | Glacier | Argentina | |
| 10 | Torres del Paine National Park | National park | Chile | |
| 11 | Nazca Lines | Geoglyph | Peru | ✓ |
| 12 | Aconcagua | Mountain | Argentina | |
| 13 | Sugarloaf Mountain | Mountain | Brazil | |
| 14 | Easter Island | Island | Chile | |
| 15 | Cotopaxi | Volcano | Ecuador | |
| 16 | Licancabur | Volcano | Chile | |
| 17 | Chimborazo | Volcano | Ecuador | |
| 18 | Las Lajas Sanctuary | Pilgrimage site | Colombia | |
| 19 | Teatro Colón | Opera house | Argentina | |
| 20 | Mount Roraima | Tepui | Venezuela | |
| 21 | Laguna Colorada | Lake | Bolivia | |
| 22 | Colca Canyon | Canyon | Peru | |
| 23 | San Agustin archeological park | Archaeological site | Colombia | ✓ |
| 24 | Tiwanaku | Archaeological site | Bolivia | ✓ |
| 25 | Canaima National Park | National park | Venezuela | ✓ |
| 26 | Osorno Volcano | Volcano | Chile | |
| 27 | Christ the Redeemer | Sculpture | Brazil | |
| 28 | Cueva de las Manos | Cave | Argentina | ✓ |
| 29 | Villarrica Volcano | Volcano | Chile | |
| 30 | Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden | Botanical garden | Brazil |
01 Machu Picchu
Peru13.163° S 72.546° W
Draceane · CC BY-SA 4.0 Machu Picchu sits on a narrow saddle between two peaks in the Andes above the Urubamba River, which loops around the site on three sides at the foot of cliffs some 450 metres high.
Did you know? Hiram Bingham shipped thousands of artefacts, from ceramics to silver figurines and human bones, to Yale University, which returned the last of them in 2012.
02 Salar de Uyuni
Bolivia20.333° S 67.700° W
Image by WaSZI from Pixabay Salar de Uyuni is not a desert that happens to be white — it is the exposed, dried-out bottom of a chain of prehistoric lakes (geologists call the last big one Lake Tauca) that repeatedly filled and evaporated over tens of thousands of years.
Did you know? At about 10,582 square kilometres, it is roughly 100 times the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
03 Iguaçu Falls
Cataratas do Iguaçu
Brazil · 21.2 km from Foz do Iguaçu25.695° S 54.437° W
Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The rock under Iguaçu is 130 million years old and volcanic, laid down when massive flood-basalt eruptions covered a huge swath of what would become southern Brazil and Argentina in repeated lava flows, some sequences over a kilometre thick.
Did you know? On seeing the falls, Eleanor Roosevelt is said to have exclaimed simply, Poor Niagara!
04 Galápagos National Park
Parque nacional Galápagos
Ecuador0.333° S 90.000° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Jonathan Green · CC BY 4.0 Galápagos National Park covers about 97 percent of the land of the Galápagos archipelago, a scatter of more than a hundred volcanic islands, islets and rocks straddling the equator some 900 km west of mainland Ecuador. Only the settled corners of Santa Cruz, San Cristóbal, Isabela and Baltra lie outside it.
Did you know? Between 1997 and 2006, Project Isabela removed more than 140,000 feral goats from Isabela, Santiago and Pinta to save native vegetation.
05 Mount Fitz Roy
Monte Fitz Roy
Argentina49.271° S 73.043° W
Prissantenbär · Public domain Few mountains are shaped as purely for looking at as Fitz Roy. Its granite tower, 3,405 metres high, stands on the border between Argentina and Chile in southern Patagonia, within Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park, and it rises in sheer, smooth walls well above the ice fields and spires that surround it.
Did you know? Under a 1998 agreement, the border between Argentina and Chile detours eastward specifically so that it passes over the main summit.
06 Lençóis Maranhenses National Park
Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses
Brazil2.483° S 43.133° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Julius Dadalti · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lençóis Maranhenses means "bedsheets of Maranhão" — the name comes straight from the shape of the dunes, whose parallel ridges look like a tangle of linens left out to dry. That image already hints at the park's real trick: this looks like a desert, but it isn't one.
Did you know? In the rainy season the lagoons cover around 41 percent of the park's area of some 155,000 hectares.
07 Angel Falls
Salto Ángel
Venezuela5.970° N 62.536° W
JhonnyCatanho · CC BY-SA 3.0 Angel Falls drops from the rim of Auyán-tepui, one of the sheer-sided table mountains of south-eastern Venezuela, and is generally ranked as the tallest uninterrupted waterfall in the world: a total height of 979 metres, of which 807 metres is a single free fall.
Did you know? Earlier climbs failed on slippery rock in the wet season of 1968 and, a year later, on an overhang about 120 m below the top.
08 Amazon rainforest
Floresta amazônica
Brazil · 7.5 km from Manaus3.160° S 60.030° W
Lula Oficial · CC BY-SA 4.0 Manaus sits at a junction that looks wrong even once you know why it happens.
Did you know? Water in the western basin once flowed toward the Pacific; only within the last 5 to 10 million years did it break through to drain east into the Atlantic.
09 Perito Moreno Glacier
Glaciar Perito Moreno
Argentina50.493° S 73.128° W
Image by Barescar90 from Pixabay While roughly ninety percent of the world's glaciers are shrinking, Perito Moreno spent most of the twentieth century doing something almost nobody's glacier does: holding its ground, even pushing forward by a couple of meters some days, fed by heavy Andean snowfall high on the Southern Patagonian Ice Field and kept in…
Did you know? The Southern Patagonian Ice Field that feeds it holds the world's third-largest reserve of fresh water.
10 Torres del Paine National Park
Parque Nacional Torres del Paine
Chile50.983° S 72.966° W
Image by plutozoom from Pixabay Torres del Paine takes its name from three granite pillars that rise almost vertically out of the Patagonian steppe: the Torre d'Agostini, the Torre Central and the Torre Monzino, each around 2,500 metres high.
Did you know? The North Tower takes its name from Guido Monzino, whose Italian expedition made its first ascent in January 1958.
11 Nazca Lines
Líneas de Nazca
Peru · 25.6 km from Nasca14.697° S 75.135° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by monikawl999 from Pixabay Maria Reiche, a German mathematician, spent roughly forty years on foot in the Peruvian desert measuring, mapping and defending the Nazca Lines from a rented broom cupboard of a house nearby, and it was her work that popularized the idea that the lines formed a giant celestial calendar — tracking solstices, marking the…
Did you know? More than 70 of the figures depict animals, including a spider, fish, heron, lizard, dog and cat, alongside a human figure.
12 Aconcagua
Argentina32.653° S 70.012° W
Image by magicaltravelling from Pixabay Aconcagua, at about 6,960 metres, is the highest mountain outside Asia and one of the Seven Summits — the high points of the seven continents. It stands in Argentina's Mendoza Province, about 15 km from the Chilean border and 112 km northwest of the city of Mendoza, protected within Aconcagua Provincial Park.
Did you know? The Ecuadorian-Swiss runner Karl Egloff went from the trailhead to the summit and back in under 12 hours.
13 Sugarloaf Mountain
Pão de Açúcar
Brazil · 7.4 km from Rio de Janeiro22.949° S 43.157° W
Image by guertzen from Pixabay Sugarloaf Mountain is the rock that makes Rio's harbour instantly recognisable: a bare, rounded dome of gneiss rising 396 metres straight out of the sea at the mouth of Guanabara Bay.
Did you know? The cable car has carried around 40 million passengers since it opened, and each current cabin holds up to 65 people.
14 Easter Island
Chile27.120° S 109.350° W
Image by 3282700 from Pixabay The single biggest puzzle Easter Island still hands visitors is how a Polynesian society without draft animals, wheels or metal tools moved statues weighing as much as 80 tons for kilometres over rough ground. For decades the default answer was rollers and ropes, dragged flat.
Did you know? A tsunami from the great 1960 Chilean earthquake swept Ahu Tongariki inland; a Japanese crane maker helped re-erect it in the 1990s.
15 Cotopaxi
Volcán Cotopaxi
Ecuador · 33.5 km from Latacunga0.681° S 78.438° W
Image by tvtommyec from Pixabay Cotopaxi is the volcano children would draw: a nearly symmetrical cone rising alone from a high Andean plain at about 3,800 m to 5,897 m, capped with one of the few glaciers on the equator. It stands in Cotopaxi National Park about 50 km south of Quito and is the second-highest summit in Ecuador after Chimborazo.
Did you know? The greatest danger is meltwater rather than lava: a sudden melt of the summit glacier could send mudflows down the valleys towards Quito's southern suburbs.
16 Licancabur
Volcán Licancabur
Chile22.834° S 67.883° W
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Licancabur is the volcano that closes the eastern horizon of San Pedro de Atacama: a near-perfect cone of 5,916 metres standing exactly on the border between Chile and Bolivia, dark against a sky that is almost always cloudless. Its symmetry is what makes it so compelling.
Did you know? Scientists study the lake as a stand-in for ancient lakes on Mars, and in 2006 a NASA-supported team led by Nathalie Cabrol made scuba dives in it at record altitude.
17 Chimborazo
Volcán Chimborazo
Ecuador · 26.5 km from Guaranda1.469° S 78.817° W
Dabit100 / David Torres Costales Riobamba · CC BY-SA 3.0 Chimborazo is Ecuador's highest mountain, an ice-capped stratovolcano of 6,263 metres in the western range of the Andes, and it holds a record no Himalayan peak can match.
Did you know? The French Geodesic Mission worked on the mountain in the 1740s while trying to determine the true shape of the Earth.
18 Las Lajas Sanctuary
Colombia · 7.6 km from Ipiales0.805° N 77.586° W
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 In 1754 a woman named María Mueses de Quiñones was caught in a storm in the Guáitara canyon with her deaf-mute daughter Rosa.
Did you know? The first shrine on the site was a hut of wood and straw that stood for about 40 years before a brick chapel replaced it.
19 Teatro Colón
Argentina · 4.7 km from Buenos Aires34.601° S 58.383° W
EEJCC · CC0 The Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires is one of the great opera houses of the world, and for acoustics it has few equals: in a survey of conductors and musicians carried out by the acoustician Leo Beranek it came out as the best hall for opera anywhere and the second best for concerts.
Did you know? In 1938 the underground floors were extended beneath the neighbouring square and linked to the theatre by a tunnel to house the workshops.
20 Mount Roraima
Venezuela5.142° N 60.764° W
Tinhojv · CC BY-SA 4.0 Geologists call formations like this a tepui — "house of the gods" in the language of the Pemón, the Indigenous people who have lived around it the longest — and the name fits better than most translated place-names do.
Did you know? The name is usually traced to Pemón words meaning "blue-green" and "great".
21 Laguna Colorada
Bolivia22.199° S 67.781° W
Image by TravelCoffeeBook from Pixabay Laguna Colorada is barely a lake in depth — under a meter across roughly 60 square kilometers — but it packs an unusual amount going on in that shallow water.
Did you know? It was listed as a Ramsar wetland of international importance in 1990; in 2009 the Los Lípez site was enlarged from about 513 to more than 14,000 square kilometres.
22 Colca Canyon
Valle del Colca
Peru15.597° S 72.056° W
Image by pvdberg from Pixabay The Colca Canyon cuts through the volcanic highlands of southern Peru for around a hundred kilometres, and in places the land drops more than three thousand metres from the surrounding peaks to the river.
Did you know? The Incas are thought to have arrived around 1320 and secured the valley through marriage alliances rather than war.
23 San Agustin archeological park
Parque Arqueológico de San Agustín
Colombia1.884° N 76.296° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0 In the green hills around the headwaters of the Magdalena River in southern Colombia, hundreds of stone figures stand guard over ancient tombs.
Did you know? Konrad Theodor Preuss was the first to photograph the sculptures, documenting 120 statues during his 1913–1914 expedition.
24 Tiwanaku
Bolivia · 39.7 km from Desaguadero16.555° S 68.673° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Keyan Alejandro · CC BY 4.0 Tiwanaku, on the high plain south of Lake Titicaca, was the centre of one of the great civilisations of the Andes. The city grew in the first centuries AD, flourished from about 375 to 700, and at its peak covered some 4 square km with a population of well over 10,000.
Did you know? The Gateway of the Sun was carved from a single block of about 10 tonnes; European explorers in the mid-19th century found it lying flat and cracked.
25 Canaima National Park
Parque Nacional Canaima
Venezuela5.319° N 61.795° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Jrafave from Pixabay Canaima National Park covers about 30,000 square kilometres of south-eastern Venezuela, stretching to the borders with Brazil and Guyana and taking in most of the Gran Sabana. It is one of the largest national parks in the world, roughly the size of Belgium.
Did you know? Of the falls' 979 metres, the single uninterrupted plunge accounts for about 807 metres.
26 Osorno Volcano
Volcán Osorno
Chile41.100° S 72.493° W
Draceane · CC BY-SA 4.0 Few volcanoes on earth come closer to the ideal drawn by a child than Osorno. It rises to 2,652 metres in a cone so regular that it is constantly compared with Mount Fuji, and its upper third wears a permanent cap of ice that stays white even at the end of the southern summer.
Did you know? Darwin watched the 1835 eruption from Ancud on Chiloé, though some of his reports of simultaneous eruptions elsewhere later proved mistaken.
27 Christ the Redeemer
Cristo Redentor
Brazil · 4.9 km from Rio de Janeiro22.952° S 43.210° W
Image by FlaviaPadula from Pixabay The statue is as much a French project as a Brazilian one.
Did you know? Building it cost the equivalent of about US$250,000 at the time.
28 Cueva de las Manos
Argentina47.150° S 70.667° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Mariano · Public domain Most of the hand images at Cueva de las Manos weren't painted with a brush — they're negative stencils, made by pressing a hand flat against the rock and blowing pigment around it through a hollow bone or reed pipe, leaving a silhouette rather than a filled-in shape.
Did you know? An eruption of the Hudson volcano around 4700 BC ended the earliest style of painting and led to the area being abandoned for a time.
29 Villarrica Volcano
Volcán Villarrica
Chile · 29.5 km from Villarrica39.420° S 71.939° W
Image by Quimantu from Pixabay Villarrica is one of the most perfectly shaped volcanoes in the southern Andes: a snow- and ice-covered cone of 2,847 metres (some sources give 2,860) that rises directly above Lake Villarrica and the town of Pucón, frequently trailing a thin plume of gas from its summit.
Did you know? Constant degassing from the lava lake makes the magma more viscous, which in turn raises the volcano's potential for explosive eruptions.
30 Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden
Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro
Brazil · 6.8 km from Rio de Janeiro22.968° S 43.224° W
Image by anapaulafelic from Pixabay The garden began as a royal experiment. In 1808, soon after the Portuguese court fled Napoleon's armies and settled in Rio, the prince regent João, later King John VI, founded it as a place to acclimatise spices and other useful plants brought from the East Indies.
Did you know? The herbarium held some 600,000 dried specimens in 2014 and was adding about 20,000 more each year.
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 South America?
- On our list, Machu Picchu (Peru) ranks first, followed by Salar de Uyuni (Bolivia) and Iguaçu Falls (Brazil).
- Which country has the most places in South America?
- In our collection, the most come from Brazil (44), Peru (28) and Argentina (27).
- How were the Nazca Lines made?
- The makers removed the reddish, iron-oxide-coated stones that cover the desert surface, exposing the lighter ground beneath. The dry, windless climate has preserved the lines for around two thousand years.
- Why is Chimborazo's summit the farthest point from the centre of the Earth?
- The Earth bulges at the equator, and Chimborazo stands almost on it. Although it is far lower than Everest above sea level, its summit is about 2 kilometres farther from the planet's centre.
- What is the highest mountain in the Americas?
- Aconcagua in the Argentine Andes, at about 6,961 metres, is the highest mountain in both the Southern and Western Hemispheres.
- What kinds of places are there to see in South America?
- In our collection, the places in South America are most often archaeological sites (19), mountains (12), churches (10) and waterfalls (9).
- How many places are on this list in South America?
- The list covers 168 places in 13 countries. Brazil has the most, with 44.