The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Gardens, Parks and Forests in the World
61 places in 33 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in the world are Yellowstone National Park (United States), Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Tanzania) and Serengeti National Park (Tanzania). The list covers 61 UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in 33 countries. Australia has the most, with 7. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A World Heritage listing asks a landscape to prove something beyond prettiness: a geological process seen nowhere else, an ecosystem that still works as a whole, or, for designed gardens, a moment in the history of how people shaped nature. That is why the places gathered here range from wilderness the size of a small country to walled gardens a few hours' walk across, yet each one carries a clear reason for being on the list.
Yellowstone, the first national park anywhere, sits on top of a volcanic hotspot that feeds Old Faithful and the rainbow rings of Grand Prismatic Spring. Ngorongoro is a collapsed volcano whose caldera floor holds lions, elephants and black rhino within its rim. In Newfoundland, Gros Morne exposes the Earth's mantle in the bare orange Tablelands, a textbook case of plate tectonics, while the travertine terraces of Huanglong in Sichuan and the stepped lakes of Plitvice show the same chemistry, calcium carbonate building dams out of water.
The designed gardens answer in another voice. Boboli spreads up the hill behind Florence's Pitti Palace as the Medici court garden, Generalife was the summer retreat of the Nasrid rulers above the Alhambra, and Park Güell is Gaudí's mosaic-clad hillside in Barcelona. Further out, Wulingyuan raises quartz-sandstone pillars out of the Hunan forest, Canaima's flat-topped tepuis send Angel Falls into the Venezuelan jungle, and Gunung Mulu in Sarawak hides some of the largest cave chambers known.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yellowstone National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 2 | Ngorongoro Conservation Area | Protected area | Tanzania | ✓ |
| 3 | Serengeti National Park | National park | Tanzania | ✓ |
| 4 | Park Güell | Urban park | Spain | ✓ |
| 5 | Kakadu National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 6 | Boboli Gardens | Historic garden | Italy | ✓ |
| 7 | Valley of Flowers National Park | National park | India | ✓ |
| 8 | Gros Morne National Park | National park | Canada | ✓ |
| 9 | Huanglong | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 10 | Wulingyuan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 11 | Canaima National Park | National park | Venezuela | ✓ |
| 12 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 13 | Generalife | Historic garden | Spain | ✓ |
| 14 | Gunung Mulu National Park | National park | Malaysia | ✓ |
| 15 | Fiordland National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 16 | El Torcal de Antequera | Nature reserve | Spain | ✓ |
| 17 | Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe | Urban park | Germany | ✓ |
| 18 | Jiuzhaigou Valley | National park | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 19 | K'gari | Island | Australia | ✓ |
| 20 | Huangshan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 21 | St Kilda | Nature reserve | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 22 | Karakul Lake | Lake | Tajikistan | ✓ |
| 23 | Simien Mountains National Park | National park | Ethiopia | ✓ |
| 24 | Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve | Nature reserve | Madagascar | ✓ |
| 25 | Grand Canyon National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 26 | Göreme National Park | Protected area | Turkey | ✓ |
| 27 | Iguazú National Park | National park | Argentina | ✓ |
| 28 | Wadi Rum | Protected area | Jordan | ✓ |
| 29 | Ischigualasto Provincial Park | Protected area | Argentina | ✓ |
| 30 | Huascarán National Park | National park | Peru | ✓ |
01 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? Two-thirds of all the world's geysers are in Yellowstone, and at least 1,283 have erupted there, with around 465 active in a typical year.
02 Ngorongoro Conservation Area
Tanzania · 8 km from Ngorongoro3.210° S 35.460° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
James Wagner · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ngorongoro Crater is the centrepiece of this protected area in northern Tanzania. It is a volcanic caldera about 610 metres deep with a floor of roughly 260 square kilometres, formed two to three million years ago when a large volcano collapsed on itself. It is often described as the world's largest intact, unflooded caldera. The crater floor lies at about 1,800 metres.
Did you know? Before it collapsed, the Ngorongoro volcano may have stood between 4,500 and 5,800 metres high, rivalling Kilimanjaro.
03 Serengeti National Park
Tanzania2.400° S 34.600° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Giles Laurent · CC BY-SA 4.0 5 million wildebeest, a quarter of a million zebra and hundreds of thousands of Thomson's gazelle moving in a yearly circuit between northern Tanzania and Kenya's Maasai Mara.
Did you know? The migration follows a circuit of roughly 800 km, and around 250,000 wildebeest and 30,000 zebras die along the way each year from predators, drowning, thirst and disease.
04 Park Güell
Spain · 4 km from Barcelona41.414° N 2.153° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nikolaus_bader from Pixabay Park Güell was supposed to be a real estate project, and by that measure it was a total failure. In 1900 the industrialist Eusebi Güell hired Antoni Gaudí to lay out an exclusive gated community of sixty houses on a hillside above Barcelona, loosely modelled on the English garden-city idea Güell admired abroad.
Did you know? Rain falling on the great terrace soaks through its unpaved surface into the columns and a cistern of about 1,200 cubic metres, and overflow pours from the dragon's mouth.
05 Kakadu National Park
Australia13.005° S 132.520° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Squirrel_photos from Pixabay Kakadu, in the Top End of Australia's Northern Territory, is the country's largest national park after one desert reserve: about 19,800 square kilometres, roughly the size of Wales, running from tidal rivers on the coast to the sheer sandstone wall of the Arnhem Land escarpment.
06 Boboli Gardens
Giardino di Boboli
Italy · 1.6 km from Florence43.765° N 11.250° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by psychographism from Pixabay Florence is the city of the Medici, and the Boboli Gardens are where that family turned a hillside into a statement of power. Rising behind the Pitti Palace, the main residence of the grand dukes of Tuscany, the garden was begun in the mid-16th century for Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de' Medici.
Did you know? Despite their lavishness, the gardens were reserved for the Medici family, and no parties are known to have been held in them.
07 Valley of Flowers National Park
India30.730° N 79.618° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- biosphere reserve
Naresh Chandra · CC BY-SA 4.0 For a few weeks each summer, a high hanging valley in the Garhwal Himalaya turns into a sweep of alpine flowers. The Valley of Flowers lies at around 3,350 to 3,650 metres in the upper basin of the Pushpawati river in Uttarakhand, about eight kilometres long and two wide, below peaks that rise to Gauri Parbat at 6,719 metres.
Did you know? In 2005 UNESCO added the valley to the Nanda Devi World Heritage Site, which had been inscribed in 1988.
08 Gros Morne National Park
Canada49.689° N 57.738° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Canadian-Nature-Visions from Pixabay Gros Morne National Park on the west coast of Newfoundland is one of the few places on Earth where you can walk on the planet's mantle. Its UNESCO listing in 1987 recognised a textbook of plate tectonics laid bare: slabs of ancient ocean floor and deep mantle rock pushed up onto the edge of the continent when an ocean closed hundreds of millions of years ago.
Did you know? Pissing Mare Falls plunges about 343 metres into Western Brook Pond, with an unbroken drop of some 250 metres, and is considered the highest waterfall in eastern North America.
09 Huanglong
People's Republic of China32.741° N 103.831° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by ymyphoto from Pixabay Huanglong, the Yellow Dragon, is a high valley in the Minshan range of northern Sichuan where mineral-rich water has built one of the finest travertine landscapes on Earth. Snowmelt and springs saturated with calcium carbonate run down the valley floor and deposit it as they flow, forming a golden, scaly ribbon of rimmed terraces, pools and frozen-looking cascades.
Did you know? Huanglong was inscribed by UNESCO in December 1992, the same year as Jiuzhaigou, which lies only about 100 km away.
10 Wulingyuan
People's Republic of China29.346° N 110.467° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Vined from Pixabay Wulingyuan is a forest of stone. More than 3,000 pillars and peaks of quartz sandstone rise from the valleys of north-western Hunan, many of them over 200 metres tall. Between them run gorges, streams, pools and waterfalls. The landscape is so improbable that it looks invented; UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1992.
Did you know? Construction of the Bailong Elevator began in 1999 and stirred debate over its effect on a World Heritage landscape; it opened in 2002.
11 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? Angel Falls takes its name from American pilot Jimmie Angel, who flew over it in 1933 and crash-landed his plane on top of Auyán-tepui in 1937.
12 Plitvice Lakes National Park
Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera
Croatia44.880° N 15.616° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Hobbyfotography from Pixabay The barriers that create Plitvice's sixteen terraced lakes are, in a very real sense, alive — or at least built by living things. As water flows over limestone, it releases dissolved carbon dioxide, which shifts the water's chemistry so that calcium carbonate starts crystallising out of solution. Left alone, that process would just leave mineral crusts.
Did you know? Plitvice was among the very first natural sites on the World Heritage List, inscribed in 1979 and extended in 2000.
13 Generalife
Spain · 1.3 km from Granada37.177° N 3.585° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Braunecker from Pixabay The Generalife was the country retreat of the Nasrid sultans of Granada, a palace of gardens and water set on the slope of the Cerro del Sol, a short walk uphill and to the east of the Alhambra. It was built in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, most likely under Muhammad II or Muhammad III, and an inscription gives it a poetic official name, the House of the Felicitous Kingdom.
Did you know? Water reaches the gardens through the Acequia Real, a channel drawing from the Darro River about 6 km east of the Alhambra.
14 Gunung Mulu National Park
Malaysia4.043° N 114.813° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Nur Nafis Naim · CC BY-SA 4.0 In the interior of northern Sarawak, close to the border with Brunei, three mountains rise out of the Borneo rainforest and hide beneath them some of the largest caves on earth. Gunung Mulu National Park covers 52,864 hectares and was gazetted in 1974, opened to visitors in 1985 and inscribed as a natural World Heritage Site in 2000.
Did you know? The Sarawak Chamber encloses roughly 12 million cubic metres of space beneath a roof that spans about 300 metres without any supporting pillar.
15 Fiordland National Park
New Zealand45.386° S 167.347° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay 2 million hectares of temperate rainforest and 14 fjords gouged out by glaciers that retreated long enough ago for forest to reclaim nearly every slope down to the waterline. Rudyard Kipling once called Milford Sound the eighth wonder of the world, and the sound alone gets roughly 6,000 to 8,000 millimetres of rain a year — several times London's annual total — spread across some 180 days.
Did you know? The park covers about 12,600 square kilometres and makes up nearly half of the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Site in south-west New Zealand.
16 El Torcal de Antequera
Torcal de Antequera
Spain · 29.2 km from Málaga36.964° N 4.546° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Makalu from Pixabay El Torcal is a small limestone massif between Antequera and Málaga whose summit has been eroded into one of the strangest landscapes in Europe: a maze of stacked, weathered blocks that look like towers of giant plates or piles of books. It was declared a Natural Site of National Interest in July 1929, and a natural park of about 17 square kilometres was created in 1978.
Did you know? Since 2016 El Torcal has been part of the UNESCO-listed Antequera Dolmens Site, because the El Romeral tomb is aligned towards its summit.
17 Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe
Germany · 7.2 km from Kassel51.317° N 9.400° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Barni1 from Pixabay Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe climbs the whole eastern face of the Habichtswald above Kassel, and it was built to be read from the top down. 5 metres tall, a copy of the ancient Farnese Hercules made by the Augsburg goldsmith Johann Jacob Anthoni.
Did you know? The copper skin of the Hercules statue is made of hand-forged sheets only two to three millimetres thick, riveted over a wrought-iron skeleton.
18 Jiuzhaigou Valley
People's Republic of China33.200° N 103.900° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by HI-MXWG from Pixabay The name means, roughly, "valley of nine villages," after the Tibetan settlements scattered through it — villages that predate its 1978 designation as a protected scenic reserve by centuries.
Did you know? It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992 and became a World Biosphere Reserve in 1997.
19 K'gari
Australia · 31.6 km from Hervey Bay25.240° S 153.150° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Poidabro · CC BY-SA 4.0 K'gari, known for a century and a half as Fraser Island, is the largest sand island in the world: some 123 km of dunes, forest and lakes off the coast of Queensland, built up over roughly 750,000 years from sand carried north by coastal currents onto a volcanic bedrock base.
20 Huangshan
People's Republic of China30.125° N 118.167° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12412158 from Pixabay Huangshan's peaks are granite, not the limestone karst that shapes so much of scenic China, and that matters: granite fractures into sheer, blocky faces rather than smooth curves, which is why the mountain reads as a forest of vertical spires rather than rolling hills.
Did you know? Inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1990, Huangshan became a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2004 and a sister mountain of Switzerland's Jungfrau in 2002.
21 St Kilda
United Kingdom57.815° N 8.588° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Hugh Venables · CC BY-SA 2.0 St Kilda is the far edge of the British Isles: a scatter of islands and sea stacks about 65 km west-northwest of North Uist, the westernmost ground of the Outer Hebrides. The group is what remains of a long-extinct ring volcano, and the sea has carved it into a landscape of extremes.
Did you know? There never was a Saint Kilda: the name may stem from a copying error of Skildar on a 1583 map, first appearing in a 1592 Dutch pilot book.
22 Karakul Lake
Tajikistan39.040° N 73.420° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Makalu from Pixabay Karakul is a great sheet of blue water lying at 3,960 metres in the high, bare plateau of the eastern Pamirs, ringed by snow peaks and almost without vegetation. Its name means "black lake" in Kyrgyz. It covers about 380 square kilometres and sits inside a circular basin some 52 kilometres across that geologists identified from satellite images around 1987 as an impact crater.
Did you know? The age of the impact crater is still debated: early estimates put it at about 25 million years, while later work suggests it is younger than 5 million years.
23 Simien Mountains National Park
Ethiopia13.183° N 38.067° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Ondřej Žváček · CC BY 2.5 Simien Mountains National Park protects the highest part of the Simien massif in northern Ethiopia, one of the most dramatic landscapes in Africa. The massif is the remnant of a huge shield volcano built of flood basalts around 30 million years ago; erosion has since carved it into jagged pinnacles, deep valleys and escarpments dropping up to 1,500 metres in sheer cliffs.
Did you know? Geladas are the only primates that live almost entirely on grass, which can make up about 90 percent of their diet.
24 Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve
Madagascar18.667° S 44.751° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Rod Waddington · CC BY-SA 2.0 Tsingy is a Malagasy word usually glossed as "where one cannot walk barefoot", and the landscape it names in western Madagascar earns it. On the Bemaraha plateau, rain has etched a thick limestone bed from above while groundwater dissolved it along fractures from below. When cave roofs collapsed, what remained was a labyrinth of narrow canyons and blade-edged pinnacles.
Did you know? In 1990 the Tsingy became Madagascar's very first World Heritage Site, inscribed at a committee session held in Banff, Canada.
25 Grand Canyon National Park
United States36.055° N 112.122° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Filio from Pixabay Grand Canyon National Park protects a chasm that the Colorado River and its tributaries cut into the Colorado Plateau after the plateau was lifted. The walls expose a staircase of coloured rock reaching back to Precambrian time, so that every viewpoint is also a cross-section through geological history — reds, buffs and greys banding the cliffs, and the river a thin line far below.
Did you know? The canyon's rocks span almost two billion years, from the Vishnu Schist in the Inner Gorge to the 270-million-year-old Kaibab Limestone on the rim.
26 Göreme National Park
Göreme Tarihî Millî Parkı
Turkey · 12.5 km from Nevşehir38.653° N 34.863° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 Central Anatolia seems to have been sculpted rather than formed. Millions of years ago the volcanoes of the region buried the plateau under thick beds of ash, which hardened into soft tuff, and in places a lid of harder lava settled on top.
Did you know? The deep blue of the New Church at Tokalı, the largest church in Göreme, comes from Badakhshan lapis lazuli, its value estimated at about 31.5 pounds of gold.
27 Iguazú National Park
Parque Nacional Iguazú
Argentina · 34.7 km from Foz do Iguaçu25.705° S 54.248° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by AndreaRochas from Pixabay Argentina created Iguazú National Park in 1934 to protect the greater part of the Iguazú Falls and the subtropical forest around them, and UNESCO listed it in 1984, together with its Brazilian counterpart across the river. The park covers 677 square kilometres of the far north of Misiones province.
Did you know? On 9 June 2014 the falls carried a record flow of about 45,700 cubic metres per second, more than five times Niagara's highest recorded flow.
28 Wadi Rum
Jordan · 33.6 km from Aqaba29.576° N 35.420° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by mailanmaik from Pixabay Wadi Rum is a desert valley in the far south of Jordan, east of Aqaba near the Saudi border, where sheer mountains of sandstone and granite rise out of flat floors of red and apricot sand. Covering about 720 square kilometres, it is the largest wadi in the country.
Did you know? Wadi Rum has stood in for several fictional worlds: Jedha in Rogue One, Pasaana in The Rise of Skywalker and Arrakis in Dune.
29 Ischigualasto Provincial Park
Argentina30.117° S 67.912° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
M.Bustos · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ischigualasto is a dry basin in northeastern San Juan province where the ground itself reads like a book of the Late Triassic. Here, in rocks laid down roughly 231 to 226 million years ago, lie some of the earliest dinosaurs known anywhere — and around them a landscape so stripped and strange that by the 1940s it was already being called the Valle de la Luna, the Valley of the Moon.
Did you know? Dinosaurs are surprisingly rare here: estimates put them at only about 5 to 11 percent of all the four-limbed animals found.
30 Huascarán National Park
Parque nacional Huascarán
Peru · 20.3 km from Huaraz9.400° S 77.400° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by vincecroos from Pixabay Huascarán National Park protects almost the whole of the Cordillera Blanca, the highest tropical mountain range on Earth, a wall of ice-capped peaks running some 150 km along the central Andes of Peru. Its highest summit, Huascarán, reaches 6,768 metres, the top of Peru, and around it rise Huandoy, Copa, Huantsán and dozens of other peaks above 6,000 metres.
Did you know? In 1970 an earthquake broke away part of Huascarán's north face, sending some 80 million cubic metres of ice and rock down onto the towns of Yungay and Ranrahirca.
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 UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in the world?
- On our list, Yellowstone National Park (United States) ranks first, followed by Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Tanzania) and Serengeti National Park (Tanzania).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Australia (7), the People's Republic of China (6) and Spain (6).
- Was Yellowstone the first national park in the world?
- Yes. Yellowstone was established in 1872 and is generally regarded as the world's first national park; it was also among the first sites placed on the World Heritage List in 1978.
- Is Park Güell a UNESCO World Heritage Site?
- Yes. Park Güell is one of the buildings inscribed together as the Works of Antoni Gaudí, first listed in 1984 alongside Palau Güell and Casa Milà.
- Why are the lakes of Plitvice and Huanglong so colourful?
- Water rich in dissolved calcium carbonate deposits travertine as it flows, building natural dams and terraces. The mineral content, depth and algae give each pool its own shade of turquoise, green or blue.
- How many UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 61 UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in 33 countries. Australia has the most, with 7.