The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in South America
24 places in 10 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in South America are Nazca Lines (Peru), San Agustin archeological park (Colombia) and Tiwanaku (Bolivia). The list covers 24 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 10 countries. Argentina has the most, with 6. Last updated 14 October 2026.
South America's World Heritage reflects extremes: the dry coastal deserts of Peru that preserved ancient drawings and adobe cities, the Andes where civilisations rose at altitudes few others reached, and the tropical lowlands with some of the oldest rock on Earth. Few regions combine so much archaeology with such varied natural wonders.
The Nazca Lines, giant figures of a hummingbird, a monkey and a spider scratched into the desert floor, are best understood from the air. Chan Chan, capital of the Chimú, was the largest adobe city of the pre-Columbian Americas. Tiwanaku, near Lake Titicaca, is known for the Gateway of the Sun, and San Agustín in Colombia guards hundreds of carved stone figures on green hillsides. In Patagonia, Cueva de las Manos is covered with stencilled hands left by hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago.
The natural sites are just as varied. Canaima in Venezuela is the land of tepuis, the flat-topped mountains from which Angel Falls plunges. Iguazú spreads hundreds of cascades along a crescent of rainforest, Lençóis Maranhenses fills the hollows between white dunes with rain-fed lagoons, and Ischigualasto and Talampaya reveal red cliffs and Triassic fossils of the earliest dinosaurs. Huascarán protects the highest peaks of the tropical Andes, and the Galápagos remain the islands that shaped Darwin's thinking.
In this list
01 Nazca Lines
Líneas de Nazca
Peru · 25.6 km from Nasca14.697° S 75.135° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by monikawl999 from Pixabay Maria Reiche, a German mathematician, spent roughly forty years on foot in the Peruvian desert measuring, mapping and defending the Nazca Lines from a rented broom cupboard of a house nearby, and it was her work that popularized the idea that the lines formed a giant celestial calendar — tracking solstices, marking the paths of stars, even predicting eclipses.
Did you know? The lines and geoglyphs were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.
02 San Agustin archeological park
Parque Arqueológico de San Agustín
Colombia1.884° N 76.296° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0 In the green hills around the headwaters of the Magdalena River in southern Colombia, hundreds of stone figures stand guard over ancient tombs. San Agustín holds the largest group of religious monuments and megalithic sculpture in Latin America: more than 600 statues are known from the region, carved by a people whose name and language are unknown.
Did you know? The Fuente de Lavapatas is a network of channels cut into the rock of a stream bed, carved with human, amphibian and reptile figures.
03 Tiwanaku
Bolivia · 39.7 km from Desaguadero16.555° S 68.673° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Keyan Alejandro · CC BY 4.0 Tiwanaku, on the high plain south of Lake Titicaca, was the centre of one of the great civilisations of the Andes. The city grew in the first centuries AD, flourished from about 375 to 700, and at its peak covered some 4 square km with a population of well over 10,000. Tiwanaku imagery and trade spread across the southern Andes. Its society collapsed around 1000 AD, probably helped by a long drought.
Did you know? The builders locked stones together with I-shaped clamps of an unusual copper-arsenic-nickel bronze, some poured molten straight into the carved sockets.
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 Lençóis Maranhenses National Park
Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses
Brazil2.483° S 43.133° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Julius Dadalti · CC BY-SA 4.0 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.
06 Cueva de las Manos
Argentina47.150° S 70.667° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Mariano · Public domain 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 Chan Chan
Peru · 6.2 km from Trujillo8.111° S 79.075° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0 Chan Chan is a city made of earth. On the desert coast of northern Peru, in the Moche Valley, the capital of the Chimú kingdom spread across some 20 square kilometres, and it is regarded as the largest adobe-built city in the Americas.
Did you know? The Chimú believed the sun created three eggs: a gold one for rulers and nobles, a silver one for their wives, and a copper one for everyone else.
10 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.
11 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.
12 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.
13 São Miguel das Missões
Brazil · 38.6 km from Santo Ângelo28.549° S 54.556° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Vini Araujo Landscapher Photographer · CC BY-SA 4.0 A tall stone façade stands alone on a grassy plain in the far south of Brazil, its arched portal and single bell tower glowing reddish in the late sun. These are the remains of São Miguel Arcanjo, one of the Jesuit missions that once gathered thousands of Guarani people into planned towns across the borderlands of present-day Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
Did you know? The Mbyá-Guarani call the ruins Tava Miri, the sacred stone village, and in 2015 Brazil registered the site as national heritage for that meaning.
14 Church of San Francisco, Castro
Iglesia de San Francisco
Chile · 0.1 km from Castro42.481° S 73.764° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Rjcastillo · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Church of San Francisco fills one side of the Plaza de Armas in Castro, the capital of Chiloé, and it is impossible to miss: a neo-Gothic church with two 42-metre towers, a 32-metre dome over the sanctuary and a facade that is usually painted in bright colours. It is often called a cathedral, wrongly, since the diocese is based in Ancud, and it is also known as the Church of the Apostle Santiago.
Did you know? The original design called for statues on the towers, but the idea was dropped after a storm toppled some of them.
15 Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works
Chile · 6.8 km from Pozo Almonte20.208° S 69.794° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 In the bone-dry pampa of the Atacama Desert east of Iquique, two abandoned company towns preserve the world of the nitrate boom that made northern Chile one of the richest mining regions on earth. From the late 19th century saltpetre from here was shipped worldwide as fertiliser, and the pampinos, the workers of the nitrate fields, created a distinctive culture around it.
Did you know? La Palma, the original name of Humberstone, commemorated the 1858 Battle of La Palma fought near Lima, a reminder that the works began on Peruvian soil.
16 Bartolomé Island
Ecuador · 35.3 km from Santa Cruz0.285° S 90.549° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Stephen Montgomery from Kallangur, Australia · CC BY-SA 2.0 Bartolomé Island is the image many people carry of the Galápagos: a small, bare volcanic island of red, orange and black cinder, with a crescent of pale sand on either side of a narrow isthmus and, at the edge of the water, the jagged spire of Pinnacle Rock.
Did you know? Pinnacle Rock is a volcanic plug, part of a largely eroded volcanic dike that once connected Bartolomé to neighbouring Santiago Island.
17 San Ignacio Miní
Ruinas Jesuíticas de San Ignacio Mini
Argentina · 21.6 km from Hohenau27.255° S 55.532° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Fernando · CC BY-SA 4.0 Thick walls of red sandstone standing among the trees of northeastern Argentina are what remain of San Ignacio Miní, one of the Jesuit mission towns founded among the Guaraní people in the seventeenth century.
Did you know? The ruins first joined UNESCO's list as an extension of São Miguel das Missões in Brazil, which had been inscribed a year earlier, in 1983.
18 Quebrada de Humahuaca
Argentina · 0.1 km from Humahuaca23.200° S 65.349° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Jonny_Joka from Pixabay The Quebrada de Humahuaca is a narrow mountain valley in Jujuy province in Argentina's far north-west, running north to south for about 155 km between the high plateau of the Altiplano and the lower hills to the east. The Río Grande flows through it, dry in winter and a torrent in the summer rains.
Did you know? The World Heritage cultural landscape covers about 172,000 hectares, ringed by a buffer zone more than twice that size.
19 El Fuerte de Samaipata
Bolivia · 5.2 km from Samaipata18.178° S 63.819° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Dpasten · CC BY-SA 4.0 El Fuerte de Samaipata is not a fortress at all but a single enormous sandstone ridge, about 220 metres long and 60 metres wide, whose back has been carved almost entirely into geometric and animal figures, niches and long canal-like grooves, one of which is known as the "spine of the serpent".
Did you know? The name Samaipata is usually translated from Quechua as "the heights of rest".
20 Church of Cristo Obrero, Atlántida
Iglesia de Cristo Obrero y Nuestra Señora de Lourdes
Uruguay34.744° S 55.766° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
María Beatriz Rodriguez · CC BY-SA 3.0 The church in Estación Atlántida, a small town in Uruguay's Canelones department, is the building that made the engineer Eladio Dieste famous, and one of the most original pieces of twentieth-century architecture in Latin America. Designed in 1958 and consecrated in 1960, it is built almost entirely of ordinary brick — but brick used in a way no one had tried before.
Did you know? The nave is a single rectangle of about 16 by 30 metres, enclosed by brick walls 7 metres high, with no interior columns or beams at all.
21 Pedra Furada
Brazil8.833° S 42.553° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Thiagomarcelcampi · CC BY-SA 4.0 Pedra Furada, "the pierced rock", takes its name from a stone arch in the hills of southeastern Piauí, but its fame comes from the great rock shelter beneath the cliffs of the Boqueirão da Pedra Furada. It is the best known of the hundreds of prehistoric sites inside Serra da Capivara National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991.
Did you know? A series of 63 radiocarbon dates from the shelter built a sequence stretching from about 59,000 to 5,000 years ago.
22 Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos
Santuário do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos
Brazil · 19.4 km from Conselheiro Lafaiete20.508° S 43.861° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by bea_marques from Pixabay The Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos crowns a hill above the old mining town of Congonhas in Minas Gerais, and it holds the most important body of work by the Brazilian sculptor and architect known as Aleijadinho.
Did you know? Of the twelve soapstone prophets, only Daniel is believed to have been carved entirely by Aleijadinho himself, judging by its superior finish.
23 Jesuit Mission of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná
Paraguay · 7.2 km from Hohenau27.132° S 55.702° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
P. Hughes · CC BY 4.0 The sandstone church at La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná is the largest temple ever raised in the Jesuit missions of South America, and its surviving walls still carry a carved frieze of angels caught in the act of making music, each holding an instrument.
Did you know? The musician angels of the church frieze play instruments such as the clavichord, pipe organ, trumpets, flute and Paraguayan harp.
More about Jesuit Mission of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná →
24 Tierradentro
Parque Arqueológico Nacional de Tierradentro
Colombia2.583° N 76.033° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Anfecaro · CC0 Spiral stairways cut into the soft rock of a hilltop lead several metres down into dark chambers whose walls and ceilings are painted with red, black and white diamonds, zigzags and faces, so that standing inside feels like stepping into a painted house underground.
Did you know? The chambers of the largest hypogea can be 10 to 12 metres wide, some held up by two or three free-standing central columns with painted pilasters along the walls.
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 World Heritage Sites in South America?
- On our list, Nazca Lines (Peru) ranks first, followed by San Agustin archeological park (Colombia) and Tiwanaku (Bolivia).
- Which country has the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites in South America?
- In our collection, the most come from Argentina (6), Brazil (4) and Peru (3).
- Why were the Nazca Lines made?
- Their purpose is still debated. Leading explanations link them to ritual and water: many lines may have been walked as ceremonial paths, and some appear connected to the search for water in one of the driest places on Earth.
- What is a tepui?
- A tepui is a flat-topped table mountain with sheer cliffs, typical of the Guiana Highlands. Canaima National Park in Venezuela is famous for them, and Angel Falls, the tallest uninterrupted waterfall in the world, drops from Auyán-tepui.
- What fossils are found at Ischigualasto?
- Ischigualasto, together with neighbouring Talampaya, preserves a nearly complete sequence of Triassic rocks containing some of the earliest known dinosaurs, such as Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus, along with plants and other reptiles of the period.
- How many UNESCO World Heritage Sites are on this list in South America?
- The list covers 24 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 10 countries. Argentina has the most, with 6.