The Most Beautiful Waterfalls in the World

90 places in 40 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Victoria Falls

   Zambia · 2 km from Victoria Falls17.925° S 25.858° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The Zambezi reaches Victoria Falls as a broad, lazy river threaded with wooded islands, then drops in one sheer step into a crack in the basalt plateau. The curtain is about 1,708 metres wide and up to 108 metres deep at the centre. By combined width and height, that makes it the largest single sheet of falling water on Earth. The Lozi name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, is usually translated as "the smoke that thunders". The name is literal: at high water the spray column climbs several hundred metres and can be seen from tens of kilometres away. The river here is the border, with Zambia on the north and east bank and Zimbabwe on the south.

   Did you know? The falls split the river's fish: about 84 species live in the Zambezi above them but only 39 below, so the drop works as a natural barrier.

   More about Victoria Falls →

2. 02 Niagara Falls

   Canada · 3.2 km from Niagara Falls43.080° N 79.071° W

   

   Niagara Falls hasn't stayed in one place. When the ice sheets retreated around 12,000 years ago and Lake Erie's outflow first cut through the Niagara Escarpment, the falls formed roughly 11 kilometres downstream from where they stand today, near what's now Lewiston and Queenston. The escarpment's caprock — hard Lockport dolomite sitting on much softer shale — erodes unevenly: the shale washes out from underneath, the dolomite ledge above loses its support and collapses, and the whole waterfall creeps upstream one collapse at a time. Do that for twelve millennia and you get an 11-kilometre gorge with the falls now sitting at its head.

   Did you know? The only recorded time the falls ran almost dry was 29 March 1848, when an ice jam upstream cut the flow to a trickle for up to about 40 hours.

   More about Niagara Falls →

3. 03 Rhine Falls

   Rheinfall

   Switzerland · 3.4 km from Schaffhausen47.677° N 8.616° E

   

   The Rhine Falls is the most powerful waterfall in Europe, not tall but immensely wide and loud: the young Rhine drops about 23 m over a ledge some 150 m wide, just below the town of Schaffhausen. In summer an average of 600 cubic metres of water a second pours over it, and the greatest flow ever measured, in 1965, was more than twice that. The falls formed at the end of the last ice age, between 14,000 and 17,000 years ago, when the river was pushed onto a bed of hard Jurassic limestone beside softer gravels; the Rheinfallfelsen, the rock that stands defiantly in the middle of the torrent, is a remnant of the old limestone cliff.

   Did you know? The weakest flow on record came in 1921, just 95 cubic metres a second, compared with the 1965 peak of about 1,250.

   More about Rhine Falls →

4. 04 Yosemite Falls

   United States37.755° N 119.597° W

   

   Yosemite Falls drops 2,425 feet from the rim of Yosemite Valley to the valley floor. It comes in three parts. The Upper Fall plunges 1,430 feet in a single leap, more than half the total. Below it the Middle Cascades tumble 675 feet through a series of smaller drops in a narrow gorge, and the Lower Fall finishes with a 320-foot plunge into a boulder-strewn pool. Seen from the valley meadows, the whole sequence reads as one white ribbon on the granite wall.

   Did you know? Yosemite Falls is often cited as the tallest waterfall in North America and ranks among the tallest in the world.

   More about Yosemite Falls →

5. 05 Seven Sisters (Geirangerfjord)

   Norway62.107° N 7.094° E

   

   Halfway along the Geirangerfjord, on its northern wall, a group of separate streams slides side by side down a cliff of bare rock into the water: the Seven Sisters, known locally as Knivsflåfossen. The streams are fed by the Knivsflå rivers on the plateau above, and together they descend some 410 metres, the tallest of them with a free fall of about 250 metres. The average flow is modest, around two cubic metres a second, so the falls read less as a torrent than as a set of white ribbons laid against the dark rock.

   Did you know? Until tourism reached Geiranger in the 19th century, the falls were known only as Knivsflåfossen or Knivsflåelvane; the romantic name Seven Sisters came later.

   More about Seven Sisters (Geirangerfjord) →

6. 06 Seljalandsfoss

   Iceland63.615° N 19.988° W

   

   Seljalandsfoss is the waterfall people walk behind. The Seljalandsá river, fed from the ice of the volcano-glacier Eyjafjallajökull, drops about 60 metres from the lip of an old cliff in south Iceland, and the rock face behind the curtain has been hollowed into a shallow cave. A path loops around and behind the fall, so that for a few steps the world is seen through a moving wall of water.

   Did you know? The pool at the foot of the fall is called Kerið, "the Tub", and is home to sea char and sea trout.

   More about Seljalandsfoss →

7. 07 Iguaçu Falls

   Cataratas do Iguaçu

   Brazil · 21.2 km from Foz do Iguaçu25.695° S 54.437° W

   

   The rock under Iguaçu is 130 million years old and volcanic, laid down when massive flood-basalt eruptions covered a huge swath of what would become southern Brazil and Argentina in repeated lava flows, some sequences over a kilometre thick. That same eruptive event, geologists now think, is tied to the breakup of Gondwana and the opening of the South Atlantic — basalts of the same family show up today across the ocean in Namibia's Etendeka region, meaning the rock the water is falling over here and rock exposed on another continent were once part of the same lava field.

   Did you know? The name comes from the Guarani or Tupi words for water and big.

   More about Iguaçu Falls →

8. 08 Plitvice Lakes National Park

   Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera

   Croatia44.880° N 15.616° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   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. What actually happens here is that mosses, algae and cyanobacteria growing on every submerged surface trap those crystals and keep building on them, layer by layer, into travertine barriers that dam the river's flow and stack the lakes into their famous cascading terraces.

   Did you know? Plitvice was among the very first natural sites on the World Heritage List, inscribed in 1979 and extended in 2000.

   More about Plitvice Lakes National Park →

9. 09 Goðafoss

   Iceland · 25.3 km from Akureyri65.683° N 17.550° W

   

   Goðafoss is not the highest or the most powerful waterfall in Iceland, but it may be the most perfectly shaped. The river Skjálfandafljót drops about 12 metres over a curved rim roughly 30 metres wide, splitting into broad white curtains around rocky outcrops before gathering again in a deep blue-green pool. Seen from the banks, the falls form an almost classical arc, and the cleanness of the shape is what makes them memorable.

   Did you know? Depending on where it is measured, the drop of Goðafoss ranges from about 9 to 17 metres.

   More about Goðafoss →

10. 10 Agua Azul Waterfalls

    Cascadas de Agua Azul

    Mexico17.256° N 92.116° W

    

    Agua Azul is not one waterfall but a long staircase of them. In the forested hills of northern Chiapas, where the municipalities of Tumbalá, Chilón and Salto de Agua meet, the Xanil River tumbles through a chain of cataracts and terraced pools, the largest drops only around six metres high but repeated again and again over a long stretch of river. For much of the way the water splits into two channels around small wooded islands, so that the scene is less a single curtain than a maze of foaming chutes, ledges and quiet basins framed by tropical forest.

    Did you know? Below the falls the water continues via the Shumulá and Tulijá rivers into the Grijalva system, one of Mexico's largest river basins.

    More about Agua Azul Waterfalls →

11. 11 Skógafoss

    Iceland63.530° N 19.514° W

    

    Skógafoss doesn't sit on a lava field or a fault line — it sits on what used to be the edge of Iceland itself. After the last Ice Age, as the ice sheets melted and the crust rebounded from their weight, Iceland's south coast retreated roughly five kilometres seawards, leaving a line of old sea cliffs standing inland. The Skógá river now spills over one of those fossil cliffs, which is why the waterfall looks less like a mountain torrent and more like water pouring off the edge of a table.

    Did you know? The name means 'forest waterfall', taken from the nearby farmstead of Skógar, whose name means 'forests' in Icelandic.

    More about Skógafoss →

12. 12 Angel Falls

    Salto Ángel

    Venezuela5.970° N 62.536° W

    

    Angel Falls drops from the rim of Auyán-tepui, one of the sheer-sided table mountains of south-eastern Venezuela, and is generally ranked as the tallest uninterrupted waterfall in the world: a total height of 979 metres, of which 807 metres is a single free fall. The rest is a steep run of cascades and rapids below the main drop. Because both it and South Africa's Tugela Falls were measured from a distance, the record is not beyond dispute. The stream feeds the Churún River, a tributary of the Carrao, which in turn drains to the Orinoco. The falls lie in Canaima National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site covering much of the Gran Sabana region of Bolívar State.

    Did you know? Jimmie Angel's ashes were scattered over the falls that bear his name on 2 July 1960.

    More about Angel Falls →

13. 13 Jog Falls

    India14.230° N 74.813° E

    

    In the Western Ghats of Karnataka, the Sharavathi River reaches the edge of a gorge and falls about 253 metres in four separate streams, which local tradition has named Raja, Rani, Roarer and Rocket. It is among the highest waterfalls in India, and the four names describe it well: Raja drops in a single unbroken column, Roarer crashes into a rocky cup before tumbling on, Rocket shoots out in jets, and Rani slides down the rock face more quietly in a sheet of foam.

    Did you know? The Sharavathi plunges into a rocky chasm about 290 metres deep, and the Raja stream falls in a single unbroken column of roughly 253 metres.

    More about Jog Falls →

14. 14 Vøringsfossen

    Norway60.427° N 7.251° E

    

    Vøringsfossen is the waterfall with which Norway introduced itself to the world. The river Bjoreio, draining off the high plateau of Hardangervidda, reaches the lip of the Måbødalen canyon and falls about 182 metres in total, the greater part of it in a single free plunge of well over 140 metres into a narrow, spray-filled pool. The setting is as important as the water: the canyon is a raw cleft in the edge of the plateau, with sheer walls on both sides, so the fall is seen not from below but from the rim, looking down into a gorge that seems too deep for its width.

    Did you know? When the astronomer Christopher Hansteen first saw the fall in 1821, he timed stones dropped over the edge with his pocket watch and estimated the drop at about 280 metres.

    More about Vøringsfossen →

15. 15 Krimml Waterfalls

    Krimmler Wasserfälle

    Austria47.198° N 12.171° E

    

    In the Hohe Tauern mountains of the Austrian state of Salzburg, the Krimmler Ache leaves its high glacial valley by throwing itself over a rock wall in three great leaps. Together they drop about 380 metres, which makes the Krimml Waterfalls the highest in Austria. The upper cascade falls roughly 140 metres, the middle one about 100 and the lowest about 140, each with its own character: the bottom fall is a broad, roaring curtain you can feel before you see it, while higher up the water narrows and splinters into white ribbons against dark rock and forest.

    Did you know? The daily peak of the falls arrives between 9 pm and midnight, because meltwater takes 9 to 12 hours to travel the 18 km from the glacier snout.

    More about Krimml Waterfalls →

16. 16 Montmorency Falls

    Canada · 9.4 km from Quebec City46.891° N 71.147° W

    

    Just before the Montmorency River meets the St. Lawrence it drops over a cliff in a single white curtain 83 metres high, some 30 metres taller than Niagara. It is not a wide fall, and that is part of its drama: the whole river is squeezed into a narrow chute and thrown down a dark cliff into a basin about 17 metres deep, with a thinner cascade at one side known as the Bride's Veil. On average around 130 cubic metres of water pass every second, and in the warm months the iron in the river tints the spray a faint yellow. It is the highest waterfall in Quebec, and it sits almost at the gates of Quebec City.

    Did you know? In winter the frozen spray builds an ice cone at the foot of the falls, and since the 19th century people have climbed it and slid down it on sleds.

    More about Montmorency Falls →

17. 17 Hraunfossar

    Iceland64.703° N 20.980° W

    

    Hraunfossar is a waterfall without a river above it. Along roughly 900 metres to a kilometre of the north bank of the Hvítá in Borgarfjörður, west Iceland, water simply appears out of the edge of an old lava flow and spills over the dark rock into the river in hundreds of small cascades, veils and threads. The name means "lava falls", and it is exact: the water has travelled underground through the porous Hallmundarhraun lava field, which came from vents beneath the Langjökull ice cap and emerges here at the lava's edge.

    Did you know? The springs pour out about 5 cubic metres of water per second and keep running all year round.

    More about Hraunfossar →

18. 18 Kegon Falls

    Japan · 39 km from Utsunomiya36.738° N 139.502° E

    

    A single column of water drops 97 metres down a sheer volcanic wall, while a curtain of a dozen thinner streams seeps out of the cliff face around it. Kegon Falls is the only outlet of Lake Chūzenji, high in the mountains above Nikkō, and it is counted among the three most celebrated waterfalls in Japan, alongside Fukuroda and Nachi.

    Did you know? A dam at the outlet of Lake Chūzenji sets the flow over Kegon, usually 1 to 2.5 tonnes of water per second by day and about 0.5 at night.

    More about Kegon Falls →

19. 19 Gullfoss

    Iceland64.326° N 20.121° W

    

    Gullfoss looks like a natural monument, but it survived as one only because a farmer's daughter refused to let it be sold. In the early 1900s, an English investor negotiated a lease with the landowner, Tómas Tómasson, intending to dam the river and build a hydroelectric plant that would have drowned the falls entirely — a deal Tómasson apparently didn't fully grasp the implications of when he signed it. His daughter, Sigríður Tómasdóttir, who had grown up on the neighboring farm and had personally cut the first walking path to the waterfall, spent her own savings hiring a lawyer and made repeated trips on foot to Reykjavík — a journey of roughly 120 kilometres each way, on foot, over unpaved terrain — to challenge the lease in court. She reportedly threatened to throw herself into the falls if construction went ahead.

    Did you know? The falls drop in two stages, first about 11 metres and then about 21 metres, for a total of some 32 metres.

    More about Gullfoss →

20. 20 Augrabies Falls

    South Africa28.591° S 20.341° E

    

    At Augrabies the Orange River, the largest river in South Africa, gathers itself and drops about 56 metres in a thundering cascade into a narrow granite chasm. The Khoikhoi called the place Ankoerebis, "place of great noise", and the name was later reshaped by Trek Boers into Augrabies. The falls lie in the arid Northern Cape, where the green ribbon of the river cuts through a landscape of bare rock and scrub.

    Did you know? In the early 1920s the soldier and statesman Deneys Reitz swam across the plunge pool into the cavern behind the falls, claiming to be the first to survive it.

    More about Augrabies Falls →

21. 21 Kravica Waterfall

    Kravica

    Bosnia and Herzegovina · 27.6 km from Mostar43.156° N 17.608° E

    

    Kravica is a broad amphitheatre of falling water in the karst country of Herzegovina. The Trebižat River, after crossing a dry, stony landscape, spills over a curved barrier of tufa about 25 metres high in many separate streams and curtains, into a wide green pool roughly 120 metres across. The fringe of trees and moss along the rim, and the mist rising from the basin, make it look less like a single waterfall than a whole wall of cascades.

    Did you know? Sources differ on the height of the falls, giving figures between about 25 and 28 metres.

    More about Kravica Waterfall →

22. 22 Multnomah Falls

    United States45.576° N 122.115° W

    

    Multnomah drops in two stages off a basalt cliff in the Columbia River Gorge, a total fall of about 189 metres — 165 of them in the upper tier — split by the Benson Bridge — a footbridge built in 1914 that crosses the gorge between the upper and lower tiers, close enough to the lower plunge that its spray reaches the rail. It's one of the few major waterfalls anywhere where the standard viewpoint puts you inside the fall's own microclimate rather than looking at it from a respectful distance.

    Did you know? On Labor Day 1995 a boulder of about 400 tons fell some 225 feet from the cliff, slightly injuring about 20 wedding guests on Benson Bridge.

    More about Multnomah Falls →

23. 23 Kuang Si Falls

    Laos · 21.7 km from Luang Prabang19.749° N 101.992° E

    

    The turquoise that makes Kuang Si look almost artificial is a straightforward chemistry lesson: the stream picks up dissolved limestone upstream, and as it cascades and aerates over each tier the calcium carbonate comes back out of solution, coating rocks and roots in pale travertine and suspending fine mineral particles in the water that scatter light into that milky blue-green. The same process builds the terraces themselves — each pool is really a travertine dam that grew, deposit by deposit, thick enough to hold water back before the stream spills over into the next one down.

    Did you know? According to legend, a wise old man dug into the earth to release the water, and a golden deer then came to live beneath a rock at the falls.

    More about Kuang Si Falls →

24. 24 Blood Falls

    77.722° S 162.273° E

    

    In one of the coldest and driest places on Earth, a glacier appears to bleed. At the snout of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica, a rust-red stain spills down the white ice face and spreads across the frozen surface of West Lake Bonney. Blood Falls is not a waterfall in the usual sense but an outflow of extremely salty water that seeps out from beneath the glacier, leaving a vivid red deposit against the pale ice and the bare brown rock of the valley.

    Did you know? The red was long blamed on red algae; iron oxide was later shown to be the real cause of the colour.

    More about Blood Falls →

25. 25 Dynjandi

    Iceland · 39.1 km from Ísafjörður65.733° N 23.199° W

    

    Dynjandi does not fall so much as spread. The Dynjandisá river tips over the rim of the high moorland above Arnarfjörður and fans out across a stepped rock face, roughly 30 metres wide at the top and about twice that at the foot, so that the whole cataract takes the shape of a bridal veil or a broad trapezoid of white lace. The drop is around 100 metres in all, and the name means something like "the thundering one" — a fair description of the sound that fills the valley long before the main fall comes into view. It is the largest waterfall in the Westfjords, and an older name, Fjallfoss, is still sometimes used.

    Did you know? Behind one of the lower falls, Göngufoss, a passage lets walkers step right behind the curtain of water.

    More about Dynjandi →

26. 26 McWay Falls

    United States36.159° N 121.672° W

    

    McWay Falls is small by the standards of this collection — a single ribbon of about 80 feet — but its setting is hard to match anywhere on the Pacific coast. McWay Creek leaps from a coastal cliff straight onto a small sandy cove in Big Sur, and at high tide the water falls directly into the ocean. Waterfalls that end in the sea are rare; one that does so into a crescent of pale sand ringed by turquoise water and rock is rarer still.

    Did you know? McWay Falls is one of only two tidefalls in California, waterfalls that pour directly into the ocean; the other is Alamere Falls in Marin County.

    More about McWay Falls →

27. 27 Kaieteur Falls

    Guyana5.178° N 59.482° W

    

    Kaieteur drops 226 metres in a single sheer plunge off a sandstone plateau — nearly five times the height of Niagara — and combines that height with enough water volume to be ranked among the most powerful waterfalls on Earth, a combination very few falls this tall can match. There's no development crowding the rim: no fences at most viewpoints, no roads within reach, and no crowds, because the only practical way in is a light aircraft or a multi-day trek through Guyana's interior.

    Did you know? At dusk thousands of swifts dive straight through the spray to roost on the cliff hidden behind the falling water.

    More about Kaieteur Falls →

28. 28 Cascata delle Marmore

    Italy42.551° N 12.715° E

    

    The Marmore Falls near Terni in Umbria drop 165 metres in three great leaps from the lip of the Rieti plateau into the gorge of the Nera, the highest man-made waterfall in Europe. They are also man-made. In 271 BC the Roman consul Manius Curius Dentatus had a channel cut to drain the marshes of the Velino valley around Rieti, sending the river over the cliff at Marmore instead. The solution created a long quarrel: every flood of the Velino now threatened Terni downstream, and in 54 BC Cicero argued the case of the people of Rieti before a Roman commission.

    Did you know? The tallest of the three drops plunges more than 80 metres, about half the waterfall's full height.

    More about Cascata delle Marmore →

29. 29 Tugela Falls

    South Africa28.752° S 28.894° E

    

    The single leap most people mean when they talk about Tugela is 411 metres — taller than most entire waterfalls anywhere else — and it's only the top tier of a five-stage cascade off the Amphitheatre, the sheer wall of the northern Drakensberg, that adds up to somewhere between 947 and 983 metres depending on whose survey you trust. By most reckonings that makes it the second-tallest waterfall on the planet, behind only Venezuela's Angel Falls, and there's an ongoing argument among waterfall surveyors that measurement uncertainty on Angel Falls could put Tugela in first place instead.

    Did you know? The falls drop off the Amphitheatre, a rock wall more than 5 kilometres long whose cliffs rise about 1,200 metres along almost its whole length.

    More about Tugela Falls →

30. 30 Dettifoss

    Iceland65.822° N 16.388° W

    

    Dettifoss is less a waterfall than a collapse of the landscape. The Jökulsá á Fjöllum, a glacial river born under Vatnajökull, arrives across a bare plateau of grey gravel and lava and drops 44 metres over a lip about 100 metres wide into the head of the Jökulsárgljúfur canyon. The water is not white but milky, laden with ground rock from the ice, and with an average flow of close to 200 cubic metres a second it throws up a column of spray that can be seen long before the falls themselves, and felt as a trembling underfoot at the edge. By volume it is counted among the most powerful waterfalls in Europe.

    Did you know? The name joins the Icelandic detta, meaning to fall or collapse, with foss, waterfall.

    More about Dettifoss →