The Most Beautiful Water Wonders in Spain
13 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful water wonders in Spain are Lanzarote, La Gomera and Praia das Catedrais. The list covers 13 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Spain's waters come from three very different worlds. The Atlantic coast of Galicia is a drowned landscape of rías, slate cliffs and rivers that reach the ocean in a hurry. The Balearic Islands sit in a clear, sheltered Mediterranean where meadows of Posidonia seagrass keep the sea glassy and the sand pale. And the Canary Islands, far to the south off Africa, are volcanoes still in the making, with black sand, lava lagoons and dunes blown in from the Sahara.
Lanzarote shows the volcanic side best: fire mountains of Timanfaya and, at El Golfo, Charco Verde, a lagoon turned vivid green by algae inside a half-eroded crater. On Fuerteventura, Playa de Cofete runs for kilometres beneath the bare ridge of Jandía. In Galicia, Praia das Catedrais reveals its arches and caves only at low tide, and the Ézaro waterfall is one of the very few in Europe that drops straight into the sea.
The Mediterranean side is gentler: Ses Illetes on Formentera, Cala Macarella on Menorca and Caló d'es Moro on Mallorca are narrow coves of white sand and turquoise water between pine-covered rocks, while Es Vedrà rises sheer from the sea off Ibiza. Inland, the lakes of Covadonga sit high in the Picos de Europa, and the Tinto River in Huelva runs red and acidic through a landscape mined since antiquity.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lanzarote | Island | |
| 2 | La Gomera | Island | |
| 3 | Praia das Catedrais | Beach | |
| 4 | Tinto River | River | |
| 5 | La Palma | Island | |
| 6 | Caló d'es Moro | Beach | |
| 7 | Charco Verde | Lagoon | |
| 8 | Es Vedrà | Island | |
| 9 | Fervenza do Ézaro | Waterfall | |
| 10 | Lagos de Covadonga | Lake | |
| 11 | Playa de Cofete | Beach | |
| 12 | Ses Illetes | Beach | |
| 13 | Cala Macarella | Beach |
01 Lanzarote
Spain · 12 km from Arrecife29.035° N 13.635° W
Bybbisch94, Christian Gebhardt · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes Lanzarote unusual among volcanic islands is that one artist got to decide, almost single-handedly, how the island would present that landscape to the world.
Did you know? A lava tube from Monte Corona, formed about 3,000 years ago, runs some 6 km inland and continues roughly 1.5 km under the sea as the so-called Tunnel of Atlantis.
02 La Gomera
Spain28.115° N 17.225° W
Image by guayota from Pixabay The summit plateau catches moisture from the trade-wind clouds and is often wrapped in mist. Here survives laurisilva, a dense laurel rainforest, protected as Garajonay National Park, a World Heritage Site since 1986 and the first in the Canaries. The whole island became a biosphere reserve in 2012. Among its rarities is the La Gomera giant lizard, thought extinct until a small population was found on the cliffs in 1999.
03 Praia das Catedrais
Playa de Las Catedrales
Spain43.554° N 7.157° W
Mikipons · CC BY-SA 4.0 The comparison with Gothic architecture is not a stretch. The rock here is laid down in steep, thin sheets, so erosion leaves tall ribs and narrow pointed openings rather than the rounded arches of limestone coasts. Between the ribs lie sea caves, passages that open onto the next cove, and pools that keep a mirror of the vault overhead. The beach runs for about 880 metres, and the white sand at the foot of the arches is reshaped by every storm.
Did you know? In several caves the roofs have already fallen in from wave erosion, showing that the arches are a passing stage rather than a permanent shape.
04 Tinto River
Spain · 4.7 km from Huelva37.209° N 6.939° W
LBM1948 · CC BY-SA 4.0 That chemistry made the river irresistible to NASA. Its combination of acidity, dissolved iron and the mineral jarosite turned out to closely match conditions later found on Mars, so in the early 2000s a joint NASA–Spanish project called MARTE drilled some 150 metres into the ground near the river's source, testing robotic techniques for detecting subsurface life — essentially rehearsing a Mars mission on a riverbank in Andalusia.
Did you know? Copper output peaked in 1930; copper mining ended in 1986 and gold and silver in 1996, before copper production restarted in 2016.
05 La Palma
Spain28.660° N 17.860° W
Image by b_gofron from Pixabay At the heart of the north lies the Caldera de Taburiente, a vast amphitheatre some nine kilometres across and up to 1,500 metres deep, ringed by cliffs and drained by a single gorge, the Barranco de las Angustias. Protected as a national park since 1954, it is where the German geologist Leopold von Buch, visiting in 1815, helped bring the Spanish word caldera into the language of science.
Did you know? The whole island was declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2002.
06 Caló d'es Moro
Spain39.314° N 3.121° E
Tommie Hansen from Stockholm, Sweden · CC BY 2.0 This is the Mallorca of the calas, the small drowned valleys that notch the island's southeastern coast, and Caló d'es Moro is one of the purest examples. Nothing is built at the water's edge; the only trace of people is the footpath that winds down the slope through the pines.
Did you know? The inlet faces east-southeast, so it is sheltered from most winds but open to swells from that one direction.
07 Charco Verde
Spain · 28.3 km from Arrecife28.977° N 13.828° W
Chrumps · CC BY-SA 4.0 The lagoon is roughly 100 metres long and covers about 7,100 square metres, running parallel to the shoreline. It formed in an old volcanic crater that subsided under its own weight and was invaded by the sea; the crater rim, whose last eruption dates to the eighteenth century, still rises as a curved wall of layered rock on the eastern side. The pool is fed by seawater seeping through the beach rather than by an open channel.
Did you know? The black beach that separates the lagoon from the ocean is about 320 metres long and around 30 metres wide.
08 Es Vedrà
Isla de Es Vedrá
Spain38.867° N 1.199° E
Image by piquar from Pixabay Es Vedrà is made largely of Mesozoic limestone. It is a fragment of the same mountain system that gave rise to the Balearic Islands, an outlying offshoot of the Betic ranges of southern Spain, separated from the main island by tectonic movement and erosion; the smaller islet of Es Vedranell lies alongside it. The rock and the surrounding sea belong to the Cala d'Hort nature reserve.
Did you know? Besides Eleonora's falcons, the cliffs shelter the Balearic shearwater, Audouin's gull and the shag.
09 Fervenza do Ézaro
Cascada del Ézaro
Spain42.913° N 9.117° W
Tanja Freibott · CC BY-SA 3.0 es People have been struck by it for centuries. Texts from 1724 already describe the waterfall, comparing its spray to a great column of smoke that could be seen from several kilometres out at sea. Its old popular name, O Cadoiro, has been in use at least since the time of the 18th-century scholar Martín Sarmiento.
Did you know? Monte Pindo's granite formed during the Hercynian mountain-building of the Palaeozoic, and its highest point is known as A Moa.
10 Lagos de Covadonga
Spain43.268° N 4.986° W
80kmh · CC BY 4.0 Enol is the larger of the two: about 750 metres long and 400 metres wide, at roughly 1,070 metres, and up to some 25 metres deep. It was left behind by a retreating glacier, whose terminal moraine still holds the water in like a plug. Ercina, slightly higher at about 1,108 metres, is a shallow lake, barely more than two metres deep, spreading over some eight hectares of meadow.
Did you know? Dutch rider Demi Vollering won the first women's stage finish at the lakes, during La Vuelta Femenina in 2023.
11 Playa de Cofete
Spain28.112° N 14.390° W
dronepicr · CC BY 2.0 The whole landscape lies within the Jandía Natural Park, and it feels empty in the best sense. The light changes constantly as clouds catch on the ridge; the wind is a near-permanent presence, combing the sand into ripples and streaming spray off the breakers. Along the shore the eye is drawn to El Islote, a small rocky cape that breaks the long line of the beach, while in the other direction the sand continues as the beach of Barlovento.
Did you know? Gustav Winter, born in 1893 in Germany's Black Forest, had worked in Spain since 1915; the land is reputed to have been granted to him by Franco.
12 Ses Illetes
Spain38.750° N 1.433° E
Freedom IS Paradise - Ibiza · CC BY-SA 4.0 The beach takes its name, which means the islets in Catalan, from the scatter of small islands and reefs just off the shore. Behind the sand, low dunes of fine sand rise gently towards the centre of the spit. The whole area belongs to the Ses Salines Natural Park of Ibiza and Formentera, which covers the south of Ibiza, the north of Formentera and the strait between them.
Did you know? Platja de n'Adolf takes its name from a Swedish ship that was wrecked on this stretch of coast in 1882.
13 Cala Macarella
Spain39.938° N 3.937° E
Image by matressa_ from Pixabay Its smaller twin is part of the attraction. Around the rocks on the eastern side of the inlet lies Macarelleta, a narrower beach whose name is simply the Menorcan diminutive of its neighbour. From the cliff path between them you look down on both at once, two pale arcs set in green against blue water, and this is the view that made the pair famous.
Did you know? Macarella and Macarelleta lie on stage 13 of the Camí de Cavalls, the coastal path divided into twenty stages and waymarked as the GR 223.
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 water wonders in Spain?
- On our list, Lanzarote ranks first, followed by La Gomera and Praia das Catedrais.
- Why is the Tinto River red?
- The Tinto flows through the Iberian Pyrite Belt, and the breakdown of iron sulfide minerals makes its water highly acidic and rich in dissolved iron, which gives it its red colour. Its extreme chemistry has made it a reference site for scientists studying life in Mars-like conditions.
- When can you see the arches at Praia das Catedrais?
- The rock arches and caves of Praia das Catedrais in Galicia are only fully accessible from the sand at low tide; at high tide the sea covers most of the beach.
- Which waterfall in Spain falls into the sea?
- The Ézaro waterfall in Galicia, where the Xallas River ends, drops directly into the Atlantic estuary, a rarity among European waterfalls.
- How many lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches are on this list in Spain?
- The list covers 13 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches.