The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Gardens, Parks and Forests in North America
5 places in 2 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in North America are Yellowstone National Park (United States), Gros Morne National Park (Canada) and Grand Canyon National Park (United States). The list covers 5 UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
North America's World Heritage parks protect landscapes on a continental scale: active volcanic systems, canyons cut through billions of years of rock, granite valleys sculpted by ice. The United States invented the national park in the nineteenth century, and its oldest parks were among the first places UNESCO listed in 1978. What the listing adds is a judgement that these places explain the Earth itself, or the cultures that lived in it.
Yellowstone, the world's first national park, sits on a volcanic caldera and contains more than half of the world's geysers, from Old Faithful to the rainbow-coloured Grand Prismatic Spring. The Grand Canyon exposes a vertical record of geological time, carved by the Colorado River about a mile deep. Yosemite, protected by a grant signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1864, frames El Capitan, Half Dome and some of the highest waterfalls on the continent.
In Newfoundland, Gros Morne National Park combines fjord-like lakes such as Western Brook Pond with the Tablelands, where rock from the Earth's mantle lies exposed at the surface, a key piece of evidence for plate tectonics. Mesa Verde, in Colorado, adds a human chapter: cliff dwellings built by Ancestral Puebloans in alcoves of the canyon walls, of which Cliff Palace is the best known.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yellowstone National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 2 | Gros Morne National Park | National park | Canada | ✓ |
| 3 | Grand Canyon National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 4 | Yosemite National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 5 | Mesa Verde National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
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 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.
03 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.
04 Yosemite National Park
United States37.742° N 119.537° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Few landscapes explain their own making as plainly as Yosemite. The park's 1,187 square miles sit on the granite of the Sierra Nevada batholith, rock that cooled deep underground, was lifted and tilted with the range some ten million years ago, and was then worked over by ice.
Did you know? On rare clear evenings in mid to late February, the setting sun backlights Horsetail Fall on the eastern edge of El Capitan so that it glows orange.
05 Mesa Verde National Park
United States37.260° N 108.494° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- Dark Sky Place
Image by kaylee from Pixabay Tucked into the sandstone alcoves of a high, canyon-cut tableland in southwestern Colorado are entire villages that Ancestral Pueblo farmers built more than seven centuries ago and then left behind. Mesa Verde – Spanish for "green table" – protects close to five thousand archaeological sites, around six hundred of them cliff dwellings, and it is often called the largest archaeological reserve in the United States.
Did you know? Mesa Verde was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978 and is the only one in Colorado.
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 North America?
- On our list, Yellowstone National Park (United States) ranks first, followed by Gros Morne National Park (Canada) and Grand Canyon National Park (United States).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (4) and Canada (1).
- What was the first national park in the world?
- Yellowstone, established by the United States Congress in 1872. It was also among the first sites inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1978.
- Why are the Tablelands of Gros Morne important?
- The Tablelands are made of peridotite from the Earth's mantle, pushed to the surface when ancient continents collided. The exposed rock helped geologists confirm the theory of plate tectonics.
- Who built the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde?
- The Ancestral Puebloans, who built them mainly in the thirteenth century in alcoves of the canyon walls. They left the area by around 1300.
- How many UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 5 UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 4.