The Most Beautiful Places in the United States
228 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in the United States are Horseshoe Bend, Nā Pali Coast and Grand Prismatic Spring. The list covers 228 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The United States spans glaciers and volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest, the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, the hot springs of Yellowstone and the old mountains of the East. It was here that the idea of the national park took hold, and the protected landscapes sit alongside a century and a half of bold engineering and architecture, from early skyscrapers to dams on a continental scale.
Yellowstone, the world's first national park, sits on a volcanic hotspot, and its Grand Prismatic Spring rings deep blue water with bands of orange and yellow. Crater Lake fills the caldera of the collapsed volcano Mount Mazama and is the deepest lake in the country. Mount Rainier rises as a glaciated volcanic cone over Seattle's horizon, the Grand Canyon exposes nearly two billion years of rock along the Colorado River, and the sandstone buttes of Monument Valley stand on Navajo land. In the Sierra Nevada, the giant sequoia General Sherman is the largest single-stem tree on earth by volume.
Human works match that scale. Mount Rushmore carves the faces of four presidents into the granite of the Black Hills, and the Hoover Dam, completed in 1936, holds back the Colorado in a concrete arch-gravity wall. New York's Flatiron Building of 1902 squeezes a skyscraper onto a triangular block, Seattle's Space Needle was built for the 1962 World's Fair, and Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles wraps its auditorium in curving stainless steel sails.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Horseshoe Bend | Canyon | |
| 2 | Nā Pali Coast | Cliff | |
| 3 | Grand Prismatic Spring | Hot spring | |
| 4 | Portland Head Light | Lighthouse | |
| 5 | Tunnel View, Yosemite | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 6 | Bixby Creek Bridge | Bridge | |
| 7 | Monument Valley | Protected area | |
| 8 | Crater Lake | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 9 | Mount Rushmore | Monument | |
| 10 | Hoover Dam | Dam | |
| 11 | Mount Rainier | Volcano | |
| 12 | Yellowstone National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 13 | Space Needle | Observation tower | |
| 14 | General Sherman | Remarkable tree | |
| 15 | Walt Disney Concert Hall | Theatre building | |
| 16 | Flatiron Building | Skyscraper | |
| 17 | Grand Canyon | Canyon | |
| 18 | El Capitan | Rock formation | |
| 19 | Bryce Canyon National Park | National park | |
| 20 | Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array | Radio telescope | |
| 21 | Griffith Observatory | Observatory | |
| 22 | Half Dome | Mountain | |
| 23 | Yosemite Falls | Waterfall | |
| 24 | Metropolitan Museum of Art | Museum | |
| 25 | Statue of Liberty | Monument | ✓ |
| 26 | Maunakea Observatories | Observatory | |
| 27 | Badwater Basin | Salt flat | |
| 28 | Golden Gate Bridge | Bridge | |
| 29 | Palace of Fine Arts | Folly | |
| 30 | Delicate Arch | Natural arch |
01 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.
02 Nā Pali Coast
Nā Pali Coast State Park
United States · 36.3 km from Līhuʻe22.183° N 159.642° W
Jmblanco74 · CC BY-SA 3.0 On the north-west side of Kauaʻi the land ends in a wall of fluted green cliffs that rise as much as 4,000 feet straight out of the Pacific.
Did you know? Producer Dino De Laurentiis liked the coast so much that he shot all the beach scenes of the 1976 King Kong at Honopū and Kalalau.
03 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.
04 Portland Head Light
United States43.623° N 70.208° W
Image by rhondaVL from Pixabay Portland Head Light is the lighthouse New England puts on its postcards, and it earns the place. A white conical tower rises from a ledge of dark rock at the entrance to Portland Harbor, with the keepers' house beside it and the Atlantic breaking on the rocks below.
Did you know? The first keeper, Joseph Greenleaf, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, initially received no salary, only the right to live there, fish and farm.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 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.
10 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.
11 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.
12 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.
13 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.
14 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.
15 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.
16 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.
17 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.
18 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.
19 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.
20 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.
21 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.
22 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.
23 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.
24 Metropolitan Museum of Art
United States · 7 km from New York City40.779° N 73.963° W
Image by marekr from Pixabay The Metropolitan Museum of Art occupies almost a quarter of a mile of Fifth Avenue along the eastern edge of Central Park, and inside it holds something close to the whole history of art. 5 million works across 17 curatorial departments, from Palaeolithic flints to contemporary painting.
25 Statue of Liberty
United States · 5.5 km from New York City40.689° N 74.044° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by itou365 from Pixabay The name most people reach for is Bartholdi, and that's correct as far as it goes — Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi conceived the whole figure, from her raised torch to the broken chains at her feet, and sculpted the copper skin that visitors actually see, a figure standing some 46 metres from base to torch.
Did you know? Broken shackles and chains lie at her feet, half hidden by her robes and hard to see from the ground.
26 Maunakea Observatories
United States19.822° N 155.475° W
Image by doctor-a from Pixabay Near the summit of Mauna Kea, at about 4,200 metres, a cluster of white and silver domes stands on red-brown cinder cones high above the cloud layer. This is one of the world's great observatory sites: twelve facilities housing thirteen telescopes, including the twin 10-metre mirrors of the W. M.
Did you know? Canada and France agreed in 1973 to build the 3.6-metre telescope that they operate jointly with the University of Hawaiʻi.
27 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.
28 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.
29 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.
30 Delicate Arch
United States · 19.4 km from Moab38.744° N 109.499° W
Image by ISchneider from Pixabay Delicate Arch is a free-standing sandstone arch about 16 metres (52 feet) high, standing alone on the rim of a slickrock bowl in Arches National Park in eastern Utah.
Did you know? In September 2000 a photographer lit a fire beneath the arch that scarred the rock and was fined 10,900 dollars in restitution.
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 the United States?
- On our list, Horseshoe Bend ranks first, followed by Nā Pali Coast and Grand Prismatic Spring.
- Why is Grand Prismatic Spring so colourful?
- The deep centre is blue because the hot water is clear and sterile, while the outer rings of yellow, orange and red come from mats of heat-loving microbes, each colour thriving at a different water temperature. It is the largest hot spring in the United States.
- How was Crater Lake formed?
- Crater Lake fills a caldera created about 7,700 years ago when the volcano Mount Mazama erupted and collapsed. Rain and snowmelt filled the basin, making it the deepest lake in the United States.
- Who carved Mount Rushmore?
- The sculptor Gutzon Borglum designed the monument and led the work from 1927, and his son Lincoln completed it in 1941. It shows George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
- What kinds of places are there to see in the United States?
- In our collection, the places in the United States are most often rock formations (18), waterfalls (13), canyons and gorges (12) and nature sanctuaries (12).
- How many places are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 228 places.