The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Nature Reserves in the World
7 places in 7 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed nature reserves in the world are El Torcal de Antequera (Spain), St Kilda (United Kingdom) and Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve (Madagascar). The list covers 7 UNESCO-listed nature reserves in 7 countries. Australia has the most, with 1. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A nature reserve is the strictest form of protection most countries offer: land and sea set aside first for their rocks, plants and animals, with people admitted as guests if at all. When such a reserve is also on the World Heritage List, the reason is usually a single extraordinary feature — a landform found nowhere else, a species with no relatives, or a bond between a landscape and the people who hold it sacred.
El Torcal de Antequera in Andalusia is a labyrinth of Jurassic limestone, laid down in an ancient sea some 150 million years ago and weathered into towers of stacked, flattened blocks; it forms part of the Antequera Dolmens site. In Madagascar, the Tsingy de Bemaraha bristles with razor-edged limestone pinnacles that shelter lemurs and plants adapted to life in the cracks. Scandola on the west coast of Corsica, a reserve since 1975, rises in red volcanic cliffs and sea caves above clear water.
Far out in the Atlantic, St Kilda combines enormous seabird colonies with the stone remains of a vanished island community. Ningaloo off Western Australia is a fringing reef that grows close to shore and draws whale sharks every year. The Vallée de Mai on Praslin in the Seychelles is a palm forest of coco de mer, which bears the largest seed of any plant, and the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in Nigeria is one of the last sacred forests of the Yoruba, filled with shrines and sculptures beside the Osun River.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | El Torcal de Antequera | Nature reserve | Spain | ✓ |
| 2 | St Kilda | Nature reserve | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 3 | Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve | Nature reserve | Madagascar | ✓ |
| 4 | Scandola Nature Reserve | Nature reserve | France | ✓ |
| 5 | Ningaloo Reef | Coral reef | Australia | ✓ |
| 6 | Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove | Nature reserve | Nigeria | ✓ |
| 7 | Vallée de Mai | Nature reserve | Seychelles | ✓ |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 Ningaloo Reef
Australia22.739° S 113.628° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ningaloo is a reef you can wade out to. Along the coast of Western Australia's North West Cape, the coral grows not far beyond the beach — in places less than 500 metres offshore — so that you can step off white sand into a lagoon and float straight over coral gardens.
Did you know? The World Heritage area protects more than 700,000 hectares of reef, sea and arid cape, some 1,200 km north of Perth.
06 Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove
Osun-Osogbo Grove
Nigeria · 2 km from Osogbo7.755° N 4.551° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jean-fidele E. Ananou · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, on the edge of the city of Osogbo in south-western Nigeria, is one of the last of the sacred forests that once bordered almost every Yoruba town. Its 75 hectares of forest line the meanders of the Osun River and are considered the dwelling of Osun, the Yoruba goddess of the river itself.
Did you know? Thanks largely to Susanne Wenger's campaigning, the grove was declared a Nigerian national monument in 1965, forty years before UNESCO listed it.
07 Vallée de Mai
Seychelles4.329° S 55.737° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
WL~commonswiki · CC BY-SA 3.0 In a valley in the middle of Praslin, the second-largest island of the Seychelles, a forest of giant palms grows much as it did before people reached the islands. 5 hectares, which makes it one of the smallest natural World Heritage Sites, but UNESCO listed it in 1983 on all four natural criteria.
Did you know? A coco de mer fruit takes roughly six to seven years to ripen, and the seed may then need about two more years to germinate.
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 nature reserves in the world?
- On our list, El Torcal de Antequera (Spain) ranks first, followed by St Kilda (United Kingdom) and Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve (Madagascar).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed nature reserves in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Australia (1), France (1) and Madagascar (1).
- What is the coco de mer?
- The coco de mer is a palm found naturally only on the Seychelles islands of Praslin and Curieuse. It produces the largest and heaviest seed of any plant, and its forests in the Vallée de Mai are home to the rare Seychelles black parrot.
- How were the rocks of El Torcal formed?
- El Torcal is made of Jurassic marine limestone laid down in horizontal layers. After the seabed was lifted into mountains, rain, frost and wind dissolved and split the rock along its joints, leaving towers of stacked, flattened blocks.
- What is the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove?
- It is a dense forest on the edge of Osogbo in south-west Nigeria, regarded as the home of the Yoruba river goddess Osun. Its shrines and modern sculptures are the focus of the annual Osun-Osogbo festival, and it was inscribed by UNESCO in 2005.
- How many UNESCO-listed nature reserves are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 7 UNESCO-listed nature reserves in 7 countries. Australia has the most, with 1.