The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed National Parks in the World
27 places in 15 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed national parks in the world are Yellowstone National Park (United States), Serengeti National Park (Tanzania) and Kakadu National Park (Australia). The list covers 27 UNESCO-listed national parks in 15 countries. Australia has the most, with 5. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A national park is a decision made by one country; World Heritage status is the judgement that the same landscape matters to all of humanity. Where the two overlap, the bar is higher: the land has to show something the planet has nowhere else — a chapter of the Earth's history laid bare, a geological process still at work, an evolutionary story or a natural phenomenon of rare scale and beauty.
Yellowstone, established in 1872 as the first national park in the world, was among the first sites placed on the World Heritage List in 1978; it holds more than half of the world's active geysers. Gros Morne in Newfoundland exposes rock from the Earth's mantle in the bare, ochre Tablelands, a textbook illustration of plate tectonics. Canaima in Venezuela is the land of tepuis, sheer table mountains from which Angel Falls drops. In Borneo, Gunung Mulu hides the Sarawak Chamber, one of the largest cave chambers known.
Elsewhere the list moves between ice, water and flowers. Fiordland in New Zealand, carved by glaciers into fiords such as Milford Sound, is the heart of Te Wāhipounamu. Jiuzhaigou in Sichuan is a valley of turquoise lakes and travertine cascades; the Valley of Flowers in the western Himalaya fills with alpine blooms during the monsoon; and the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia fall away in sheer escarpments where gelada monkeys and the Walia ibex live. Plitvice, Iguazú and the Grand Canyon add travertine terraces, rainforest cascades and a mile-deep desert gorge.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yellowstone National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 2 | Serengeti National Park | National park | Tanzania | ✓ |
| 3 | Kakadu National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 4 | Valley of Flowers National Park | National park | India | ✓ |
| 5 | Gros Morne National Park | National park | Canada | ✓ |
| 6 | Canaima National Park | National park | Venezuela | ✓ |
| 7 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 8 | Gunung Mulu National Park | National park | Malaysia | ✓ |
| 9 | Fiordland National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 10 | Jiuzhaigou Valley | National park | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 11 | Simien Mountains National Park | National park | Ethiopia | ✓ |
| 12 | Grand Canyon National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 13 | Iguazú National Park | National park | Argentina | ✓ |
| 14 | Huascarán National Park | National park | Peru | ✓ |
| 15 | Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 16 | Teide National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 17 | Galápagos National Park | National park | Ecuador | ✓ |
| 18 | Yosemite National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 19 | Talampaya National Park | National park | Argentina | ✓ |
| 20 | Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 21 | Garajonay National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 22 | Blue Mountains National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 23 | Lamington National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 24 | Mesa Verde National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 25 | Westland Tai Poutini National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 26 | Purnululu National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 27 | Mount Aspiring National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
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 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 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.
10 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.
11 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.
12 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.
13 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.
14 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.
15 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.
16 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.
17 Galápagos National Park
Parque nacional Galápagos
Ecuador0.333° S 90.000° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Jonathan Green · CC BY 4.0 Galápagos National Park covers about 97 percent of the land of the Galápagos archipelago, a scatter of more than a hundred volcanic islands, islets and rocks straddling the equator some 900 km west of mainland Ecuador. Only the settled corners of Santa Cruz, San Cristóbal, Isabela and Baltra lie outside it.
Did you know? The Galápagos Islands were the very first entry on UNESCO's World Heritage List, inscribed in 1978 as site number 1.
18 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.
19 Talampaya National Park
Parque Nacional Talampaya
Argentina29.796° S 67.811° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Gino Lucas T. · CC BY-SA 2.5 Talampaya is a dry river that left behind a cathedral. Over millions of years water and wind cut down through layers of red Triassic sandstone in the far west of La Rioja province, and the result is a canyon whose sheer walls rise to around 145 metres, stained in iron reds and streaked with dark desert varnish, narrowing at one point to only about 80 metres wide.
Did you know? Among the park's fossils is Palaeochersis talampayensis, one of the oldest turtles known anywhere, which lived here in the Late Triassic more than 210 million years ago.
20 Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park
Australia25.322° S 130.986° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay Few landscapes are as instantly recognisable as the one protected here: a single sandstone mass rising out of red sand plains in the centre of Australia, and, to the west, a cluster of great rounded domes. Uluṟu stands 348 metres above the plain with most of its bulk hidden underground, and its surface shifts colour through the day, glowing deep red at dawn and dusk because of iron oxide in the rock.
Did you know? Mount Olga, the highest dome of Kata Tjuṯa, rises about 546 metres above the plain, nearly 200 metres higher than Uluṟu.
21 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.
22 Blue Mountains National Park
Australia · 13.6 km from Katoomba33.615° S 150.418° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by anncapictures from Pixabay Barely a couple of hours inland from Sydney, the land rises into a sandstone plateau cut by gorges so deep and sheer that early colonists took a quarter of a century to find a way across. Blue Mountains National Park protects the heart of this country: more than 260,000 hectares of cliffs, waterfalls, hanging swamps and eucalypt forest stretching along the eastern flank of the Great Dividing Range.
Did you know? The park is the central of eight reserves that make up the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, listed in 2000.
23 Lamington National Park
Australia · 33.4 km from Gold Coast28.142° S 153.115° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Alan Wigginton · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lamington spreads across the high plateau of the McPherson Range on the border between Queensland and New South Wales, its rim standing around 900 metres above sea level only a short distance inland from the Pacific surf of the Gold Coast.
Did you know? Lamington National Park was established in 1915 and named after Lord Lamington, Governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1902.
24 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.
25 Westland Tai Poutini National Park
New Zealand43.567° S 170.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by ThierryBEUVE from Pixabay Westland Tai Poutini National Park runs from the crest of the Southern Alps down to the Tasman Sea on the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island, and within a short distance it goes from peaks over 3,000 m to lowland rainforest and coastal lagoons. The highest point is Mount Tasman at 3,498 m.
Did you know? Franz Josef Glacier's Māori name means 'the tears of Hine Hukatere': according to legend, her tears for her lover Tuawe, killed by an avalanche, froze into ice.
26 Purnululu National Park
Australia17.449° S 128.546° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 Until 1983 the Bungle Bungle Range was known almost only to its Aboriginal owners and a few pastoralists. That year an aerial film crew making a documentary on the wonders of Western Australia flew over it, and the images of hundreds of striped, beehive-shaped domes rising from the savannah stunned the country.
Did you know? Purnululu means 'sandstone' in the local Kija (Gija) language; the origin of the name Bungle Bungle is uncertain and may come from a misheard word or a local grass.
27 Mount Aspiring National Park
New Zealand44.383° S 168.733° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Tomas Sobek · CC BY 2.0 Mount Aspiring National Park covers more than 3,500 square kilometres of the southern end of the Southern Alps, a wilderness of ice-capped peaks, hanging glaciers, deep U-shaped valleys and beech forest that stretches from the head of Lake Wānaka toward Fiordland.
Did you know? Since 1990 the park has been part of the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Area.
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 national parks in the world?
- On our list, Yellowstone National Park (United States) ranks first, followed by Serengeti National Park (Tanzania) and Kakadu National Park (Australia).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed national parks in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Australia (5), the United States (4) and New Zealand (3).
- What was the first national park in the world?
- Yellowstone, created by an act of the United States Congress signed by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. It is generally regarded as the first national park anywhere.
- Why is Gros Morne National Park a World Heritage Site?
- Its rocks show the process of plate tectonics with rare clarity. In the Tablelands, a slab of the Earth's mantle was pushed up to the surface, where its bare, iron-rich rock still supports almost no vegetation.
- What is the difference between a national park and a World Heritage Site?
- A national park is designated by a country under its own laws. A World Heritage Site is inscribed by UNESCO under the 1972 World Heritage Convention for outstanding universal value, and one place can be both.
- How many UNESCO-listed national parks are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 27 UNESCO-listed national parks in 15 countries. Australia has the most, with 5.