The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Nature Sanctuaries in the World
43 places in 24 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed nature sanctuaries in the world are Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Tanzania), Huanglong (People's Republic of China) and Wulingyuan (People's Republic of China). The list covers 43 UNESCO-listed nature sanctuaries in 24 countries. Australia has the most, with 6. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A nature sanctuary exists to keep a place working as it always has: herds following the rains, water laying down stone, forests and seabird colonies left to themselves. When UNESCO adds one to the World Heritage List, it is because that process or that landscape is exceptional on a global scale — and protection is what allows it to stay that way.
Ngorongoro in Tanzania is centred on the largest unbroken, unflooded volcanic caldera on Earth, its floor grazed by wildebeest, zebra and black rhino, while Maasai herders live within the wider conservation area. China contributes landscapes that shaped its art: the granite peaks, wind-bent pines and seas of cloud of Huangshan, the thousands of sandstone pillars of Wulingyuan, and the terraced travertine pools of Huanglong, coloured gold and turquoise by minerals and algae.
The range extends far beyond Asia and Africa. Canaima in Venezuela rises in sheer-sided tepuis, Fiordland in New Zealand in glacier-cut fiords, and the Tsingy de Bemaraha in Madagascar in a forest of razor-sharp limestone needles. El Torcal de Antequera in Andalusia is a labyrinth of Jurassic limestone sculpted into stacked, pancake-like forms. St Kilda, far out in the Atlantic off the Outer Hebrides, is one of the few places listed for both nature and culture: huge seabird colonies and the stone houses of a community that left the islands in 1930.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ngorongoro Conservation Area | Protected area | Tanzania | ✓ |
| 2 | Huanglong | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 3 | Wulingyuan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 4 | Canaima National Park | National park | Venezuela | ✓ |
| 5 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 6 | Fiordland National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 7 | El Torcal de Antequera | Nature reserve | Spain | ✓ |
| 8 | Jiuzhaigou Valley | National park | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 9 | K'gari | Island | Australia | ✓ |
| 10 | Huangshan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 11 | St Kilda | Nature reserve | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 12 | Karakul Lake | Lake | Tajikistan | ✓ |
| 13 | Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve | Nature reserve | Madagascar | ✓ |
| 14 | Grand Canyon National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 15 | Göreme National Park | Protected area | Turkey | ✓ |
| 16 | Iguazú National Park | National park | Argentina | ✓ |
| 17 | Wadi Rum | Protected area | Jordan | ✓ |
| 18 | Ischigualasto Provincial Park | Protected area | Argentina | ✓ |
| 19 | Lena Pillars | Protected area | Russia | ✓ |
| 20 | Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 21 | Teide National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 22 | Galápagos National Park | National park | Ecuador | ✓ |
| 23 | Yosemite National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 24 | Talampaya National Park | National park | Argentina | ✓ |
| 25 | Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 26 | Wadi Al-Hitan | Protected area | Egypt | ✓ |
| 27 | Blue Mountains National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 28 | Gobustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve | Protected area | Azerbaijan | ✓ |
| 29 | Scandola Nature Reserve | Nature reserve | France | ✓ |
| 30 | Tubbataha Reef | Coral reef | Philippines | ✓ |
01 Ngorongoro Conservation Area
Tanzania · 8 km from Ngorongoro3.210° S 35.460° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
James Wagner · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ngorongoro Crater is the centrepiece of this protected area in northern Tanzania. It is a volcanic caldera about 610 metres deep with a floor of roughly 260 square kilometres, formed two to three million years ago when a large volcano collapsed on itself. It is often described as the world's largest intact, unflooded caldera. The crater floor lies at about 1,800 metres.
Did you know? Before it collapsed, the Ngorongoro volcano may have stood between 4,500 and 5,800 metres high, rivalling Kilimanjaro.
02 Huanglong
People's Republic of China32.741° N 103.831° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by ymyphoto from Pixabay Huanglong, the Yellow Dragon, is a high valley in the Minshan range of northern Sichuan where mineral-rich water has built one of the finest travertine landscapes on Earth. Snowmelt and springs saturated with calcium carbonate run down the valley floor and deposit it as they flow, forming a golden, scaly ribbon of rimmed terraces, pools and frozen-looking cascades.
Did you know? Huanglong was inscribed by UNESCO in December 1992, the same year as Jiuzhaigou, which lies only about 100 km away.
03 Wulingyuan
People's Republic of China29.346° N 110.467° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Vined from Pixabay Wulingyuan is a forest of stone. More than 3,000 pillars and peaks of quartz sandstone rise from the valleys of north-western Hunan, many of them over 200 metres tall. Between them run gorges, streams, pools and waterfalls. The landscape is so improbable that it looks invented; UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1992.
Did you know? Construction of the Bailong Elevator began in 1999 and stirred debate over its effect on a World Heritage landscape; it opened in 2002.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 K'gari
Australia · 31.6 km from Hervey Bay25.240° S 153.150° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Poidabro · CC BY-SA 4.0 K'gari, known for a century and a half as Fraser Island, is the largest sand island in the world: some 123 km of dunes, forest and lakes off the coast of Queensland, built up over roughly 750,000 years from sand carried north by coastal currents onto a volcanic bedrock base.
10 Huangshan
People's Republic of China30.125° N 118.167° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12412158 from Pixabay Huangshan's peaks are granite, not the limestone karst that shapes so much of scenic China, and that matters: granite fractures into sheer, blocky faces rather than smooth curves, which is why the mountain reads as a forest of vertical spires rather than rolling hills.
Did you know? Inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1990, Huangshan became a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2004 and a sister mountain of Switzerland's Jungfrau in 2002.
11 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.
12 Karakul Lake
Tajikistan39.040° N 73.420° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Makalu from Pixabay Karakul is a great sheet of blue water lying at 3,960 metres in the high, bare plateau of the eastern Pamirs, ringed by snow peaks and almost without vegetation. Its name means "black lake" in Kyrgyz. It covers about 380 square kilometres and sits inside a circular basin some 52 kilometres across that geologists identified from satellite images around 1987 as an impact crater.
Did you know? The age of the impact crater is still debated: early estimates put it at about 25 million years, while later work suggests it is younger than 5 million years.
13 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.
14 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.
15 Göreme National Park
Göreme Tarihî Millî Parkı
Turkey · 12.5 km from Nevşehir38.653° N 34.863° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 Central Anatolia seems to have been sculpted rather than formed. Millions of years ago the volcanoes of the region buried the plateau under thick beds of ash, which hardened into soft tuff, and in places a lid of harder lava settled on top.
Did you know? The deep blue of the New Church at Tokalı, the largest church in Göreme, comes from Badakhshan lapis lazuli, its value estimated at about 31.5 pounds of gold.
16 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.
17 Wadi Rum
Jordan · 33.6 km from Aqaba29.576° N 35.420° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by mailanmaik from Pixabay Wadi Rum is a desert valley in the far south of Jordan, east of Aqaba near the Saudi border, where sheer mountains of sandstone and granite rise out of flat floors of red and apricot sand. Covering about 720 square kilometres, it is the largest wadi in the country.
Did you know? Wadi Rum has stood in for several fictional worlds: Jedha in Rogue One, Pasaana in The Rise of Skywalker and Arrakis in Dune.
18 Ischigualasto Provincial Park
Argentina30.117° S 67.912° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
M.Bustos · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ischigualasto is a dry basin in northeastern San Juan province where the ground itself reads like a book of the Late Triassic. Here, in rocks laid down roughly 231 to 226 million years ago, lie some of the earliest dinosaurs known anywhere — and around them a landscape so stripped and strange that by the 1940s it was already being called the Valle de la Luna, the Valley of the Moon.
Did you know? Dinosaurs are surprisingly rare here: estimates put them at only about 5 to 11 percent of all the four-limbed animals found.
19 Lena Pillars
Russia61.107° N 127.362° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
VasilyevaED · CC BY-SA 4.0 The pillars along the Lena River are limestone, not granite, and that's the point — this rock records life from before there were skeletons to speak of.
Did you know? The pillars were inscribed as a World Heritage Site in July 2012 at a committee session held in Saint Petersburg, after a first bid failed in 2009.
20 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.
21 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.
22 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.
23 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.
24 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.
25 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.
26 Wadi Al-Hitan
Egypt29.271° N 30.044° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Tom Horton from Shanghai, China · CC BY-SA 2.0 Wadi Al-Hitan, the "Valley of the Whales", lies in the Western Desert about 150 km south-west of Cairo, in the Faiyum Governorate. Here, in an empty landscape of sand and wind-cut sandstone, lie the fossil skeletons of whales that swam in a shallow sea some 40 million years ago, in the Eocene epoch.
Did you know? The protected World Heritage area covers about 200 square kilometres yet receives only around a thousand visitors a year.
27 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.
28 Gobustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve
Azerbaijan40.106° N 49.389° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 About 70 km south-west of Baku, where the dry hills of the Caspian coast break up into boulder fields and flat-topped mesas, Gobustan preserves one of the richest bodies of rock art in the world. The reserve protects more than 6,000 carvings spread over 537 hectares of the Gobustan Rock Art Cultural Landscape, inscribed by UNESCO in 2007; the oldest were cut some 20,000 years ago and the youngest about 5,000.
Did you know? The Latin inscription was found in June 1948 and names a centurion, Lucius Julius Maximus, of the Twelfth Legion, dating it to 84–96 AD.
29 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.
30 Tubbataha Reef
Philippines8.953° N 119.868° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Anna Varona · CC BY 4.0 Tubbataha sits in the middle of the Sulu Sea, about 150 km southeast of Puerto Princesa, with nothing around it but open water. The protected area spans roughly 970 km² and takes in two large atolls, the North and South Atolls, and the smaller Jessie Beazley Reef some 20 km to the north. The name comes from Sama-Bajau words meaning a long reef that surfaces at low tide.
Did you know? A subspecies of the black noddy, a small dark tern, breeds nowhere in the world except Tubbataha, nesting in the few trees and bushes of its islets.
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 sanctuaries in the world?
- On our list, Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Tanzania) ranks first, followed by Huanglong (People's Republic of China) and Wulingyuan (People's Republic of China).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed nature sanctuaries in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Australia (6), the People's Republic of China (6) and Argentina (3).
- How was the Ngorongoro Crater formed?
- Ngorongoro is a caldera. It formed when a large volcano collapsed in on itself after an eruption some two to three million years ago, leaving a broad, steep-walled basin whose floor now supports a dense population of wildlife.
- What does tsingy mean?
- Tsingy is a Malagasy word usually translated as where one cannot walk barefoot, a fitting name for the fields of knife-edged limestone pinnacles in Madagascar's Tsingy de Bemaraha.
- Why was St Kilda abandoned?
- By 1930 the island community had shrunk through emigration and illness, and the remaining residents asked to be evacuated to the Scottish mainland. St Kilda has had no permanent population since.
- How many UNESCO-listed nature sanctuaries are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 43 UNESCO-listed nature sanctuaries in 24 countries. Australia has the most, with 6.