The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Natural Wonders in the World

38 places in 24 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Aletsch Glacier

   Aletschgletscher

   Switzerland46.442° N 8.077° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The Great Aletsch Glacier is the largest glacier in the Alps: about 23 km long, covering some 80 square kilometres, and holding around 15 cubic kilometres of ice. It is born at Konkordiaplatz, a wide basin high in the Bernese Alps where four ice streams meet, fed from the flanks of the Jungfrau, the Mönch, the Fiescherhorn and the Aletschhorn. Here the ice is more than 900 metres thick.

   Did you know? In 1678 the villagers of Fiesch and Fieschertal vowed to pray against the advancing glacier; in 2010 the Vatican approved changing the prayer to ask for its survival.

   More about Aletsch Glacier →

2. 02 Cave of Altamira

   Cueva de Altamira

   Spain · 25.7 km from Santander43.383° N 4.117° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Cave of Altamira, near Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, holds some of the finest Palaeolithic art in the world, and no other cave in northern Spain has such complex and crowded painting. The cave is about 270 m long, a series of passages in the limestone of Mount Vispieres.

   More about Cave of Altamira →

3. 03 Geirangerfjord

   Norway62.094° N 7.081° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Geirangerfjord is a narrow blade of water, about 15 km long, cut into the mountains of Sunnmøre in western Norway. It branches off the Sunnylvsfjorden, itself an arm of the long Storfjorden, and ends at the small village of Geiranger, where the Geirangelva river runs into it.

   Did you know? The Seven Sisters drop about 410 metres in total, and the tallest of the seven strands falls freely for roughly 250 metres.

   More about Geirangerfjord →

4. 04 Tiger Leaping Gorge

   People's Republic of China27.230° N 100.140° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The Jinsha River — the upper Yangtze, before it earns that name downstream — has cut a 15-kilometer gorge between the Yulong and Haba snow-capped ranges so deep that the drop from the highest peaks to the river below runs to nearly 3,800 meters, making it one of the deepest canyons on the planet, whatever the exact ranking on any given list.

   Did you know? The gorge lies within the Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan, a World Heritage Site since 2003.

   More about Tiger Leaping Gorge →

5. 05 Mount Fuji

   Japan · 34.7 km from Kōfu35.361° N 138.727° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Mount Fuji is an active stratovolcano on Honshu, and at 3,776 metres the highest mountain in Japan. Its nearly symmetrical cone, snow-covered for about five months of the year, stands about 100 km southwest of Tokyo and can be seen from the capital on clear days. It straddles the border of Shizuoka and Yamanashi prefectures, ringed by the towns of Gotemba, Fujiyoshida, Fujinomiya and Fuji.

   Did you know? Everything above the eighth station belongs to the Fujisan Hongū Sengen Taisha shrine, a gift from the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1606.

   More about Mount Fuji →

6. 06 Meteora

   Μετέωρα

   Greece39.712° N 21.627° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Monastic life came here before any monastery did. From around the 11th century, hermits climbed into natural fissures and caves high in these sandstone pillars using removable rope ladders — inaccessibility itself was the point, a way of withdrawing from the world that the rock simply handed them.

   Did you know? The pillars are not volcanic but sandstone and conglomerate, laid down in a river delta and later uplifted and split by faults some 60 million years ago.

   More about Meteora →

7. 07 Giant's Causeway

   United Kingdom55.241° N 6.512° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Some 40,000 basalt columns step down from the cliff foot into the sea on the north coast of County Antrim, most of them six-sided, some with as few as four or as many as eight sides, the tallest about 12 metres high. They formed around 50 to 60 million years ago, when very fluid lava poured through fissures in the chalk and pooled in thick sheets.

   Did you know? The causeway was announced to the scientific world in 1693, when Sir Richard Bulkeley presented a paper on it to the Royal Society in London.

   More about Giant's Causeway →

8. 08 Nærøyfjord

   Norway60.944° N 6.931° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The Nærøyfjord is the narrowest and one of the most dramatic arms of Norway's Sognefjord system: about 17 km long, down to roughly 250 metres wide at its tightest point, and walled by mountains that rise to around 1,760 metres.

   Did you know? The fjord was protected as a landscape conservation area in 2002, three years before UNESCO listed it.

   More about Nærøyfjord →

9. 09 Møns Klint

   Denmark54.964° N 12.552° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Møns Klint is a wall of white chalk cliffs along the eastern shore of the island of Møn, rising out of the Baltic in a line some six to seven kilometres long. The highest point, Dronningestolen, reaches about 128 metres, and in places the cliff face drops a sheer hundred metres or more to a narrow beach of flint and chalk.

   Did you know? The individual coccoliths that make up the chalk measure only about 2 to 25 micrometres across, invisible to the naked eye.

   More about Møns Klint →

10. 10 Tara River Canyon

    Кањон реке Таре

    Montenegro43.251° N 19.008° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Tara cuts one of the deepest river gorges on the continent: some 82 kilometres long and up to about 1,300 metres from rim to riverbed, it winds west from northern Montenegro and, for its last 36 kilometres, forms the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina before the Tara meets the Piva near Hum and together they become the Drina.

    Did you know? Nicknamed the Tear of Europe, the Tara gorge ranks among the deepest canyons on the continent, with only Russia's Sulak Canyon often cited as deeper.

    More about Tara River Canyon →

11. 11 Belukha

    Russia49.807° N 86.590° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Belukha is the highest mountain of the Altai and of Siberia, a double-headed massif of ice on the border between Russia and Kazakhstan. Its eastern summit reaches 4,509 metres and the western 4,435 metres, joined by a snow saddle at about 4,000 metres; the Altai name Üch-Sümer, "three-headed", and the Kazakh Kadyn-Bazhy, "the head of the Katun", both describe the same great white bulk that dominates the Katun Range.

    Did you know? In 1935 a climbing instructor carried a barometer to the eastern summit and read 4,630 metres, more than 100 metres too high.

    More about Belukha →

12. 12 Lençóis Maranhenses National Park

    Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses

    Brazil2.483° S 43.133° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Lençóis Maranhenses means "bedsheets of Maranhão" — the name comes straight from the shape of the dunes, whose parallel ridges look like a tangle of linens left out to dry. That image already hints at the park's real trick: this looks like a desert, but it isn't one.

    Did you know? The sand is carried to the coast by the Parnaíba and Preguiças rivers, then pushed back inland by the wind as far as 50 kilometres.

    More about Lençóis Maranhenses National Park →

13. 13 Cueva de las Manos

    Argentina47.150° S 70.667° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Most of the hand images at Cueva de las Manos weren't painted with a brush — they're negative stencils, made by pressing a hand flat against the rock and blowing pigment around it through a hollow bone or reed pipe, leaving a silhouette rather than a filled-in shape.

    Did you know? Of the hands that can be identified, 829 are left hands and only 31 right, suggesting most painters held the spray pipe in their right hand.

    More about Cueva de las Manos →

14. 14 Mogao Caves

    People's Republic of China · 16.9 km from Dunhuang40.037° N 94.804° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Mogao Caves are among the richest treasure houses of Buddhist art anywhere. For roughly a thousand years, from the fourth century to the fourteenth, monks, merchants and officials cut shrines into a cliff face on the edge of the desert near Dunhuang, an oasis town on the Silk Road where traders and pilgrims prepared for, or recovered from, the crossing of the Gobi and Taklamakan.

    Did you know? Aurel Stein left in 1907 with about 7,000 complete manuscripts and 6,000 fragments, paying only about £130.

    More about Mogao Caves →

15. 15 Škocjan Caves

    Škocjanske jame

    Slovenia · 15.3 km from Trieste45.665° N 13.995° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    At Škocjan the Reka River, after some 55 km on the surface and a final four-kilometre gorge, runs up against a limestone wall and disappears underground. 5 km long, 10 to 60 metres wide and in places well over 100 metres high. 2 million cubic metres. The river then flows on for 34 km out of sight and resurfaces at the springs of the Timavo near the Adriatic coast.

    Did you know? The underground path crosses the gorge on Cerkvenik Bridge, which hangs about 50 metres above the roaring Reka.

    More about Škocjan Caves →

16. 16 Stromboli

    Isola di Stromboli

    Italy38.804° N 15.223° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Stromboli is a volcano you can watch breathing. The island is simply the top of a cone that rises 926 metres above the Tyrrhenian Sea and continues more than two and a half kilometres below it, and it has been erupting almost without pause for somewhere between two and five thousand years. Every few minutes to every hour or so, a crater near the summit throws up a burst of glowing fragments, then falls quiet again.

    Did you know? According to the scholar Clyde Kilby, J. R. R. Tolkien identified his fictional volcano Mount Doom with Stromboli.

    More about Stromboli →

17. 17 Ilulissat Icefjord

    Greenland69.150° N 49.550° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Ilulissat Icefjord is where one of the fastest glaciers on the planet meets the sea. Sermeq Kujalleq, also called Jakobshavn Isbræ, pushes out of the Greenland ice sheet at a rate usually measured in tens of metres per day, and the fjord it feeds carries its icebergs some 40 km west to Disko Bay.

    Did you know? Some icebergs leaving the glacier stand up to a kilometre tall, too deep to float out, so they ground on the fjord's shallows for years.

    More about Ilulissat Icefjord →

18. 18 Vulcano

    Isola di Vulcano

    Italy38.404° N 14.966° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Vulcano is the island that gave its name to every volcano on earth: the Romans believed it was the chimney of the fire god Vulcan's forge, and the Greeks thought Hephaestus worked here. It is the southernmost of the seven Aeolian Islands, about 20 km off Sicily and only 750 m across a strait from Lipari, and it is small — around 8 km by 4 km — with most of its few hundred residents at Vulcano Porto on the north side.

    More about Vulcano →

19. 19 Lascaux Cave

    Grotte de Lascaux

    France · 30.5 km from Brive-la-Gaillarde45.054° N 1.171° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Lascaux holds the most celebrated Ice Age paintings in the world. The cave opens into a wooded hillside above the Vézère valley near Montignac in the Dordogne, and its walls and ceilings carry some six hundred painted figures and around fifteen hundred engravings, made by Magdalenian hunters roughly 17,000 to 22,000 years ago.

    Did you know? Horses dominate the cave: of about 605 precisely identified animals, 364 are equines, while aurochs and bison each make up only about 4 to 5 percent.

    More about Lascaux Cave →

20. 20 Great Blue Hole

    Belize17.316° N 87.534° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The Great Blue Hole is a near-perfect circle of deep indigo set in the pale turquoise of Lighthouse Reef, an atoll some 70 kilometres off the coast of Belize. Seen from the air it looks unreal: a ring of coral about 318 metres across, with the water inside dropping away to around 124 metres.

    Did you know? A 30-metre sediment core drilled from its floor records 574 storms over 5,700 years, showing tropical cyclones becoming more frequent in recent decades.

    More about Great Blue Hole →

21. 21 Yungang Grottoes

    People's Republic of China · 15.3 km from Datong40.110° N 113.122° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Construction began under Emperor Wencheng in the 450s CE, right after a period of state persecution of Buddhism had ended, and the earliest group — the so-called Tanyao Five Caves, named for the monk who oversaw them — deliberately modelled their colossal Buddha statues on the faces of the Northern Wei emperors themselves.

    Did you know? The largest figure at Yungang, the seated Buddha of Cave 5, is about 17 metres tall, while the smallest carved figures measure only about 2 centimetres.

    More about Yungang Grottoes →

22. 22 Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka

    India22.939° N 77.614° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    On a forested ridge at the southern edge of the Vindhya Range, weathered sandstone outcrops form hundreds of overhangs, and on the walls of roughly four hundred of them people painted for thousands of years.

    Did you know? Fossils of the ancient animal Dickinsonia reported from Bhimbetka caused excitement among geologists until closer study showed they were the decayed remains of a beehive.

    More about Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka →

23. 23 Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park

    Philippines10.167° N 118.917° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park, on the west coast of Palawan, protects a river that disappears into a mountain and reaches the sea through a cave. 2 km underground beneath the limestone of the Saint Paul Mountain Range before flowing straight out into the South China Sea, through a cave system at least 32 km long.

    Did you know? Besides its UNESCO listing, the park was designated a Ramsar wetland of international importance in 2012.

    More about Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park →

24. 24 Madara Rider

    Мадарски конник

    Bulgaria · 15.4 km from Shumen43.277° N 27.119° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    On a sheer cliff face above the village of Madara in north-eastern Bulgaria, a horseman rides to the right, spearing a lion that lies beneath his horse's hooves while a dog runs behind him. The relief is almost life-size and is carved about 23 m above the ground into a near-vertical rock wall roughly 100 m high.

    Did you know? The relief itself is about 2.6 metres high and 3.1 metres wide at the base.

    More about Madara Rider →

25. 25 Le Morne Brabant

    Mauritius · 26.5 km from Curepipe20.461° S 57.314° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Le Morne Brabant is the great basalt block that anchors the south-western tip of Mauritius. It rises 556 m from a peninsula almost entirely ringed by a turquoise lagoon, its steep walls pitted with caves and overhangs, and its flat summit covers more than 12 ha. The peninsula has its own microclimate, and the mountain is a refuge for two rare plants, the mandrinette and the boucle d'oreille.

    Did you know? The World Heritage property covers about 350 hectares around the mountain, set within a buffer zone of roughly 24 square kilometres.

    More about Le Morne Brabant →

26. 26 Pitons

    Saint Lucia · 23.7 km from Castries13.807° N 61.070° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The Pitons are the image most people have of Saint Lucia: two steep, forested spires rising almost directly from the Caribbean on the island's south-west coast. Petit Piton reaches 743 m and Gros Piton about 798 m, and the two are joined by the ridge of Piton Mitan. They are volcanic plugs, the hardened cores of old volcanoes, now left standing as the softer rock around them eroded away.

    Did you know? Two endemic shrubs grow only on the summit of Petit Piton, which also shelters the rare pencil cedar, a juniper of the Caribbean.

    More about Pitons →

27. 27 Sacred Cenote

    Cenote sagrado de Chichén Itzá

    Mexico · 38.4 km from Valladolid20.688° N 88.568° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Sacred Cenote is a round shaft of green water sunk into the limestone at the northern edge of Chichén Itzá, and for the Maya it was nothing less than a doorway to the underworld. The northern Yucatán has no rivers or lakes on its surface; water sits underground, and where a cave roof collapses it appears in these natural wells.

    More about Sacred Cenote →

28. 28 Chauvet Cave

    Grotte Chauvet

    France44.388° N 4.416° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    High in a limestone cliff above the Ardèche gorges, a cave sealed by a rockfall for tens of thousands of years holds some of the oldest and finest figurative paintings ever made. When three cavers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel-Deschamps and Christian Hillaire, squeezed into it in December 1994, they found walls covered with animals drawn in charcoal and red ochre.

    Did you know? UNESCO inscribed the cave on the World Heritage List in June 2014, twenty years after its discovery.

    More about Chauvet Cave →

29. 29 Mount Sanqing

    People's Republic of China28.952° N 118.052° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Mount Sanqing in northeastern Jiangxi is a forest of granite. Out of steep, wooded slopes rise dozens of bare stone peaks and pillars — 48 named granite peaks and 89 pillars, many of them shaped by weathering into figures of people and animals — and when cloud fills the valleys, as it often does in this humid subtropical climate, the summits stand out of a white sea like islands.

    Did you know? Before its World Heritage listing, Sanqingshan was declared a national geopark of China in 2005.

    More about Mount Sanqing →

30. 30 Les Combarelles

    Grotte des Combarelles I

    France44.944° N 1.042° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Les Combarelles is not a cave of great halls and painted ceilings. It is a narrow, winding passage, on average about a metre wide, cut through the limestone by an underground stream, and its walls carry one of the major collections of engraved Ice Age images in Europe: more than 600 figures scratched and incised into the rock by Magdalenian hunters.

    More about Les Combarelles →