The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Gardens, Parks and Forests in Europe
17 places in 8 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in Europe are Park Güell (Spain), Boboli Gardens (Italy) and Plitvice Lakes National Park (Croatia). The list covers 17 UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in 8 countries. Spain has the most, with 6. Last updated 14 October 2026.
When a garden, park or forest is listed by UNESCO in Europe, it usually means one of two things: a landscape shaped by centuries of human design, or a piece of nature so particular that nothing like it survives elsewhere. Europe holds both in abundance, from Renaissance terraces and Moorish courtyards to travertine lakes, laurel forests and remote seabird islands, and the combination of art and wild nature is what sets the continent apart.
The designed landscapes are among the most influential ever made. Florence's Boboli Gardens, laid out for the Medici behind the Pitti Palace, set a model for the Italian formal garden. In Granada, the Generalife was the summer retreat of the Nasrid rulers, its long pool framed by fountains and clipped hedges. Antoni Gaudí's Park Güell in Barcelona wraps a hillside in mosaic and serpentine benches, Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel sends its water cascading down from the Hercules monument, and Kew Gardens in London holds one of the largest collections of living plants in the world.
The natural sites are just as varied. Plitvice Lakes in Croatia step down through travertine barriers in a chain of waterfalls, Ordesa y Monte Perdido opens a glacial canyon in the Pyrenees, and El Torcal de Antequera is a labyrinth of eroded limestone. The Laurisilva of Madeira is the largest surviving laurel forest of a type that once covered much of southern Europe, Scandola on Corsica rises in red volcanic cliffs from the sea, Pico's vineyards grow inside walls of black basalt, and St Kilda holds vast seabird colonies.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Park Güell | Urban park | Spain | ✓ |
| 2 | Boboli Gardens | Historic garden | Italy | ✓ |
| 3 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 4 | Generalife | Historic garden | Spain | ✓ |
| 5 | El Torcal de Antequera | Nature reserve | Spain | ✓ |
| 6 | Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe | Urban park | Germany | ✓ |
| 7 | St Kilda | Nature reserve | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 8 | Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 9 | Teide National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 10 | Garajonay National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 11 | Scandola Nature Reserve | Nature reserve | France | ✓ |
| 12 | Pico Island Vineyards | Vineyard landscape | Portugal | ✓ |
| 13 | Laurisilva of Madeira | Forest | Portugal | ✓ |
| 14 | Kew Gardens | Botanical garden | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 15 | Villa d'Este | Historic garden | Italy | ✓ |
| 16 | Dobšinská Ice Cave | Ice cave | Slovakia | ✓ |
| 17 | Ochtinská Aragonite Cave | Show cave | Slovakia | ✓ |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park
Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido
Spain42.672° N 0.056° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by vilanchelo from Pixabay Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park lies on the Spanish side of the central Pyrenees in the province of Huesca, and it is a landscape made of limestone. Around Monte Perdido, 3,355 m high, great beds of Cretaceous and Eocene rock have been folded, lifted and then cut by ice and water into deep canyons, stepped cliffs and high cirques.
Did you know? In 2003 scientists cloned the extinct Pyrenean ibex, but the kid lived only minutes, making it the only animal to go extinct twice.
09 Teide National Park
Parque Nacional del Teide
Spain28.276° N 16.643° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Barni1 from Pixabay Teide National Park covers the high heart of Tenerife: a vast volcanic caldera, Las Cañadas, and the cone of Teide rising out of it to 3,718 metres, the highest point in Spain. Measured from the ocean floor, Teide is one of the tallest volcanoes on the planet, and together with its neighbour Pico Viejo it forms the only pair of peaks in the Canaries above 3,000 metres.
10 Garajonay National Park
Parque nacional de Garajonay
Spain28.126° N 17.237° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by nike159 from Pixabay Garajonay, spread across the high centre of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, protects the finest surviving example of laurisilva — the humid laurel forest that covered much of southern Europe millions of years ago and now survives only on a handful of Atlantic islands.
11 Scandola Nature Reserve
France42.357° N 8.567° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by jackmac34 from Pixabay The Scandola peninsula, on the west coast of Corsica, is what remains of an ancient volcano that collapsed into the sea. The result is one of the most dramatic stretches of coast in the Mediterranean: sheer cliffs of rust-red and purple rock, columns of volcanic stone standing like organ pipes, sea caves, arches, and needles of rock rising out of water so clear that the seabed shows many metres down.
Did you know? In 1985 Scandola received the Council of Europe's European Diploma of Protected Areas, which was withdrawn in 2020 over the pressure of mass boat tourism on its wildlife.
12 Pico Island Vineyards
Portugal · 9.3 km from Horta38.513° N 28.541° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Navin75 · CC BY-SA 2.0 On the west coast of Pico, in the middle of the Atlantic, the ground is black lava, and the vineyards are built out of it. For five centuries islanders cleared the broken basalt by hand and stacked it into long, low dry-stone walls that divide the slopes into thousands of tiny rectangles called currais.
Did you know? At the end of the 18th century Pico had an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 hectares of walled vines, enough stone wall to wrap around the equator about twice.
13 Laurisilva of Madeira
Floresta Laurissilva na Madeira
Portugal · 17.1 km from Funchal32.767° N 17.000° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by adege from Pixabay Millions of years ago, forests of evergreen laurel-type trees covered much of southern Europe; the ice ages and a drying climate wiped them out on the continent, and they survived only on a few Atlantic islands. Madeira holds the largest remaining stand.
Did you know? Madeira means wood in Portuguese, the name settlers gave the island for the dense laurel forest that covered it.
14 Kew Gardens
United Kingdom · 12.4 km from London51.479° N 0.294° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by RichardMc from Pixabay Kew Gardens, in south-west London, holds what it describes as the largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world, spread over 132 hectares beside the Thames. It began in 1759 as an exotic garden for Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales, grew under George III with the help of Sir Joseph Banks, and became the national botanic garden in 1840.
Did you know? In 2022 Kew scientists described Victoria boliviana, a new species of giant waterlily that had been growing unrecognised in the gardens for more than 170 years.
15 Villa d'Este
Italy · 27.1 km from Rome41.962° N 12.796° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by lapping from Pixabay Villa d'Este is less a palace with a garden than a machine for turning a river into theatre. Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este, son of the Duke of Ferrara and a grandson of Lucrezia Borgia, commissioned it in 1560, and the antiquarian Pirro Ligorio devised its programme of myth and allegory while the engineer Alberto Galvani built it. The work ran until the cardinal's death in 1572.
Did you know? The cardinal's builders stripped marble and statues from the ruins of Hadrian's Villa nearby to furnish the garden.
16 Dobšinská Ice Cave
Dobšinská ľadová jaskyňa
Slovakia48.868° N 20.304° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Michal Klajban · CC BY-SA 3.0 Dobšinská Ice Cave, in the Slovak Paradise National Park, is one of the largest ice caves in the world and has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage site Caves of Aggtelek Karst and Slovak Karst since 2000. Its entrance, long known to shepherds as the "Cold Hole", sits at about 970 metres on the northern slope of the Duča hill, some 130 metres above the Hnilec River, and is remarkably low for a cave of its kind.
Did you know? The cave was added to the World Heritage list at the committee's 24th session, held in Cairns, Australia, in November 2000.
17 Ochtinská Aragonite Cave
Ochtinská aragonitová jaskyňa
Slovakia48.665° N 20.309° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jojo , en:Jojo_1 , pl:Jojo · CC BY-SA 3.0 Inside a low hill in southern Slovakia, white needles and branching clusters of aragonite spread across the ceilings and walls like frost, so dense in places that they recall a starry sky.
Did you know? The cave's main generation of aragonite is still growing, which is why its needles and bushes stay white and clean instead of dulling with age.
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 Europe?
- On our list, Park Güell (Spain) ranks first, followed by Boboli Gardens (Italy) and Plitvice Lakes National Park (Croatia).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Spain (6), Italy (2) and Portugal (2).
- What is laurisilva?
- Laurisilva is a humid subtropical forest dominated by evergreen laurel-type trees. It covered much of southern Europe millions of years ago and now survives mainly on Atlantic islands, with Madeira holding the largest remaining area.
- How were the Plitvice Lakes formed?
- The lakes are dammed by barriers of travertine, a rock deposited as calcium carbonate from the water settles on mosses and algae. The barriers keep growing, so the lakes and waterfalls are still changing.
- Why was St Kilda abandoned?
- The last residents of St Kilda asked to be evacuated and left the islands in 1930, after decades of population decline, illness and isolation made island life unsustainable.
- How many UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 17 UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in 8 countries. Spain has the most, with 6.