The Most Beautiful Terraced Landscapes in the World
8 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful terraced landscapes in the world are Longji Rice Terraces (People's Republic of China), Honghe Hani Rice Terraces (People's Republic of China) and Banaue Rice Terraces (Philippines). The list covers 8 terraced landscapes in 6 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Terraced landscapes are slopes reshaped by generations of hands into stairways of level ground. Each step holds soil and water that would otherwise run downhill, and together they turn a mountainside into a contour map made real. Their beauty depends on the season and the light: flooded paddies mirror the sky in spring, ripening rice turns the curves green and gold, and low sun picks out every ridge, so that a working farmland reads as one of the most graphic sights on earth.
The collection shows how differently people have shaped hillsides. The Longji terraces in Guangxi wrap the mountains in coiling bands often compared to a dragon's spine, and the Honghe Hani terraces in Yunnan descend in hundreds of flooded steps. In Peru, the Maras salt pans fill a valley with shallow pools fed by a salty spring, while the concentric circular terraces of Moray sink into the ground like an amphitheatre. Shiroyone Senmaida on Japan's Noto Peninsula packs tiny paddies onto a slope above the sea, Jatiluwih in Bali is watered by the traditional subak system, and the Banaue terraces were carved into the mountains of northern Luzon by the Ifugao people.
Every landscape here was chosen for how it looks and the list is ordered by beauty. Each has its own description, a photograph credited to its author and a place on the map, and the section also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Longji Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | People's Republic of China | |
| 2 | Honghe Hani Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | People's Republic of China | |
| 3 | Banaue Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | Philippines | |
| 4 | Moray | Terraced fields | Peru | |
| 5 | Maras Salt Pans | Terraced fields | Peru | |
| 6 | Jatiluwih Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | Indonesia | |
| 7 | Shiroyone Senmaida | Terraced fields | Japan | |
| 8 | Daehan Dawon Boseong Green tea Plantation | Terraced fields | South Korea |
01 Longji Rice Terraces
People's Republic of China25.755° N 110.133° E
Image by mercierzeng from Pixabay The Longji terraces — the name means "Dragon's Backbone" — wrap the mountains of Longsheng County in northern Guangxi in thousands of thin, curving ledges, climbing from valley floors at around 300 metres to ridges above 1,100 metres across some 66 square kilometres. Seen from a ridge-top platform, the slopes read less like farmland than like contour lines drawn on the land itself: each paddy follows the shape of the hill exactly, so whole mountainsides become ribbed, rippling surfaces that catch light differently at every hour.
Did you know? In 2018 the FAO listed the Longji terraces as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System, one of four southern Chinese rice-terrace systems so honoured.
02 Honghe Hani Rice Terraces
People's Republic of China23.117° N 102.738° E
Jialiang Gao , www.peace-on-earth.org · CC BY-SA 3.0 On the southern flank of the Ailao Mountains, above the Red River in southern Yunnan, whole mountainsides have been reshaped into staircases of rice paddies. In places more than three thousand terraces step down a single slope between the edge of the forest and the floor of the valley, each one a thin ribbon of water held back by an earth wall that follows the contour of the hill. Seen from above, the lines curl around spurs and into ravines like the grain of an enormous piece of wood, and no two valleys look alike.
Did you know? Water is shared out with 'muke', wooden or stone bars carved with notches of different widths that split a channel's flow between households' fields.
03 Banaue Rice Terraces
Philippines16.935° N 121.135° E
Image by lester56 from Pixabay The terraces of Banaue climb the walls of a deep valley in the Cordillera of northern Luzon, around 1,500 metres above sea level, in flight after flight of narrow paddies that follow every fold of the mountainside. There is no single plan and no straight line: each terrace keeps to the contour of the slope, so that whole hillsides look as if they have been drawn over with a fine pen. In the planting season the paddies hold sheets of water that mirror the sky; as the rice grows they turn a vivid green, and before harvest they fade to gold.
Did you know? Archaeological dating by the Ifugao Archaeological Project suggests the terraces were built only about 400 to 500 years ago, during Spanish colonial pressure on the lowlands.
04 Moray
Peru · 9.1 km from Urubamba13.329° S 72.196° W
Image by JustinW from Pixabay Moray looks decorative from above — a series of perfect concentric rings sunk into a natural depression in the Andean plateau — but it was built to measure something. The temperature difference between the exposed uppermost ring and the sheltered terrace at the bottom of the bowl can reach roughly 15°C, which means the Inca compressed an entire empire's worth of growing conditions, from cold high-altitude plateau to a comparatively mild valley floor, into one walkable site.
Did you know? Moray first reached the scientific world from the air: the 1931 Shippee-Johnson expedition photographed its rings, and the images were published in 1932.
05 Maras Salt Pans
Salineras de Maras
Peru · 4.2 km from Urubamba13.302° S 72.155° W
Image by jdbenthien from Pixabay On a steep slope in the Peruvian Andes, about 3,200 metres above the sea, some 4,500 small pools step down the side of a ravine like a honeycomb poured over the hill. These are the salt pans of Maras. Each is roughly five square metres and only about thirty centimetres deep, and together they form a patchwork in shades of white, cream, ochre and brown that shifts with the season and the hour. From the viewpoint above, the terraces look less like an industry than a vast mosaic.
Did you know? In the sixteenth century colonial records list descendants of the Inca nobility, among them Felipe Topa Yupanqui and Alonso Titu Atauchi, as owners of salt pans here.
06 Jatiluwih Rice Terraces
Indonesia · 28.1 km from Singaraja8.367° S 115.131° E
Imacim · CC BY-SA 4.0 Jatiluwih is where Bali's rice terraces are at their most expansive. Instead of a single photogenic valley, the fields here spread across the lower slopes of Mount Batukaru, the island's second-highest volcano, in waves of curving terraces covering more than 600 hectares, broken by palms, footpaths and the forest of the mountain above. At around 700 metres above sea level the air is cooler and often misty, and on a clear morning the terraces step down towards the south with the volcano rising behind them.
Did you know? When UNESCO assessed the nomination in 2008, the original Jatiluwih site was enlarged into the Catur Angga Batukaru landscape, taking in two lakes and mountain forests.
07 Shiroyone Senmaida
Japan37.425° N 137.000° E
Totti · CC BY-SA 4.0 Shiroyone Senmaida drops toward the Sea of Japan in more than a thousand tiny paddies, stacked down a slope of about 4 hectares with a fall of some 50 metres between the coastal highway and the shore. The name means "a thousand rice fields of Shiroyone", and before the 2024 earthquake the plots numbered 1,004. Some are minuscule: the smallest measure about a fifth of a square metre, and a local folk song jokes that after planting 999 paddies the farmer found the last one hiding under his straw raincoat. Seen from above, the curving terraces follow the contours of the cliff like a topographic map made of water and green rice.
Did you know? Some historians think the slope was first cleared as kakushida, hidden paddies kept off the domain's tax registers, as well as openly declared new fields.
08 Daehan Dawon Boseong Green tea Plantation
South Korea34.715° N 127.079° E
Image by YHBae from Pixabay Rows of clipped tea bushes run in tight contour lines up the slopes of Mount Hwangseong, so that a whole hillside reads as a single green fingerprint. Daehan Dawon is the largest tea estate in Boseong County, the corner of South Jeolla Province that Korea itself calls its green tea capital, and the view from the upper terraces down over the curving hedges is the image most Koreans associate with the region.
Did you know? Daehan Dawon alone accounts for more than a third of all the tea produced in Boseong County.
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 rice terraces in the world?
- On our list, Longji Rice Terraces (People's Republic of China) ranks first, followed by Honghe Hani Rice Terraces (People's Republic of China) and Banaue Rice Terraces (Philippines).
- Which country has the most beautiful terraced landscapes?
- In our collection, the most come from the People's Republic of China (2), Peru (2) and Indonesia (1).
- Why are rice terraces built on mountains?
- Terraces create flat fields on steep ground, holding soil in place and letting water flow from one level to the next. For wet rice, this allows paddies to stay flooded even on slopes that would otherwise erode.
- What were the circular terraces at Moray used for?
- Moray is an Inca site of concentric terraced depressions near Cusco. A widely held theory is that it served as an agricultural testing ground, since temperature differs noticeably between the top and bottom levels.
- How many terraced landscapes are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 8 terraced landscapes in 6 countries. The People's Republic of China has the most, with 2.