The Most Remarkable Rock Formations in the World

107 places in 49 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Uluru

   Australia25.345° S 131.036° E

   

   Uluru rises 348 metres from the flat red sand of central Australia, about 9.4 km around its base. That makes it one of the most recognisable landforms on the continent. Geologists call it an inselberg: an isolated remnant that outlasted the rock around it because it has almost no joints or bedding partings for erosion to exploit. Its strata are tilted almost vertical, and much of the formation continues underground. The rock is arkose, a coarse sandstone rich in feldspar, laid down as an alluvial fan about 550 million years ago. It is grey inside, and the surface looks red because iron minerals in the outer layer have rusted. That coating is what glows at sunrise and sunset. During rare heavy rain, short-lived waterfalls pour down its flanks.

   Did you know? The rock's sandstone layers stand almost on end, dipping at about 85 degrees, and at least 2.4 km of their thickness is exposed at the surface.

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2. 02 El Capitan

   United States37.734° N 119.637° W

   

   El Capitan is the granite wall that greets you at the western end of Yosemite Valley: a single, almost unjointed monolith rising roughly 900 metres from the valley floor to its rounded top. Its name comes from the Mariposa Battalion, who entered the valley in 1851 and rendered a local Miwok name for the cliff as "the captain"; another Miwok tradition connects the rock with an inchworm that rescued two bear cubs stranded on its summit. The rock is mostly pale, coarse El Capitan granite about 100 million years old, crossed by dark diorite veins that form the shape climbers call the North America Wall.

   Did you know? Despite its towering face, El Capitan's summit has only about 3 metres of topographic prominence, because it is attached to higher ground behind.

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3. 03 Trolltunga

   Norway60.133° N 6.754° E

   

   Trolltunga, "the troll's tongue", is a slab of ancient bedrock that juts horizontally from a mountainside in Ullensvang municipality in western Norway, about 1,100 m above sea level and some 700 m above the lake Ringedalsvatnet. The rock is gneiss of Precambrian age; its shape was cut during the last glaciation, when water froze in the cracks at the edge of the ice, prised off large angular blocks and left this ledge standing free over the void. Across the valley lie the plateaus and snowfields of the Hardanger mountains, with glimpses of the Folgefonna glacier on clear days.

   Did you know? Visitor numbers soared from about 1,000 in 2010 to some 20,000 in 2012 and close to 100,000 in 2016.

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4. 04 Meteora

   Μετέωρα

   Greece39.712° N 21.627° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Monastic life came here before any monastery did. From around the 11th century, hermits climbed into natural fissures and caves high in these sandstone pillars using removable rope ladders — inaccessibility itself was the point, a way of withdrawing from the world that the rock simply handed them. It took until the 14th century for that scattered hermit life to organize into something institutional, when the monk Athanasios arrived from Mount Athos and founded the Great Meteoron on the tallest of the pillars.

   Did you know? The pillars are not volcanic but sandstone and conglomerate, laid down in a river delta and later uplifted and split by faults some 60 million years ago.

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5. 05 Giant's Causeway

   United Kingdom55.241° N 6.512° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Some 40,000 basalt columns step down from the cliff foot into the sea on the north coast of County Antrim, most of them six-sided, some with as few as four or as many as eight sides, the tallest about 12 metres high. They formed around 50 to 60 million years ago, when very fluid lava poured through fissures in the chalk and pooled in thick sheets. As each sheet cooled slowly it contracted and cracked, the way drying mud does, and the cracks ran downward to split the rock into near-regular prisms; horizontal fractures then divided the columns into stacked segments, often with a concave top and a convex base. The regularity looks engineered, which is exactly what made the place famous.

   Did you know? The causeway was announced to the scientific world in 1693, when Sir Richard Bulkeley presented a paper on it to the Royal Society in London.

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6. 06 Sassi di Matera

   Italy40.667° N 16.608° E

   

   Matera's Sassi are two whole quarters of a town carved into and built out of the soft stone of a ravine. On the slopes of the Gravina, the gorge that cuts into the Murgia plateau, the Sasso Barisano and the Sasso Caveoso spread out on either side of the Civita, a rocky spur crowned by the Romanesque cathedral. Seen from above, the two hollows look like funnels of pale honey-coloured houses stepping down one on top of another, so that a lane is often the roof of the dwelling below. In Carlo Levi's account of his exile in the region, their shape is compared to the way schoolchildren imagine Dante's Inferno; today the same view is one of the most extraordinary townscapes in Europe.

   Did you know? Pasolini filmed The Gospel According to St. Matthew here in 1964, and Mel Gibson shot The Passion of the Christ in the Sassi in 2004.

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7. 07 Devils Tower

   United States44.590° N 104.715° W

   

   Devils Tower rises out of the rolling pine and prairie country of north-eastern Wyoming like a giant fluted stump: a flat-topped column of grey rock about 265 metres high from its base, with its summit at 1,558 metres above sea level and nearly 390 metres above the Belle Fourche River that loops beneath it. Its sides are made of hundreds of long polygonal columns, most of them six-sided but some four, five or seven, up to six metres across, fitted together like a bundle of pencils. At the foot lies a skirt of broken columns that have fallen over the millennia.

   Did you know? The name comes from Colonel Richard Dodge's 1875 expedition, whose interpreter reportedly rendered a Native name as Bad God's Tower.

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8. 08 Richat Structure

   Mauritania21.124° N 11.402° W

   

   From orbit the Richat Structure looks like a target painted on the Sahara: a set of concentric rings some 40 kilometres across, laid out on the Adrar plateau of Mauritania with a precision that seems too perfect to be natural. Known in Hassaniya Arabic as Guelb er Richât and nicknamed the Eye of Africa, it has fascinated geologists since it was first described in the 1930s and 1940s. On the ground the rings are much harder to read. What you walk across are low quartzite ridges, the cuestas, rising above broad sandy depressions, one after another, each ridge a hard layer of rock that has resisted the wind while the softer beds between them wore away.

   Did you know? Gemini IV astronauts Ed White and James McDivitt photographed the Richat Structure from orbit in 1965, bringing the formation worldwide attention.

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9. 09 Spitzkoppe

   Namibia21.826° S 15.195° E

   

   Spitzkoppe rises out of the gravel plains of the Namib like a ship's prow, a cluster of bald granite domes and spires whose highest point stands at about 1,728 metres — some 670 metres above the flat desert around it. The granite is more than 120 million years old, and the massif is a classic inselberg, an "island mountain" standing alone on an empty horizon. Its sharp profile earned it the nickname "the Matterhorn of Namibia", and the comparison makes sense the first time you see it standing out against a white sky at noon.

   Did you know? Photographs of the landscape around Spitzkoppe served as backdrops for the 'Dawn of Man' opening of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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10. 10 Three Sisters (Blue Mountains)

    Three Sisters

    Australia · 3.2 km from Katoomba33.736° S 150.314° E

    

    Three sandstone pillars stand on the edge of the Jamison Valley at Katoomba, stepping down one after another from the cliff into a sea of eucalyptus forest. The Three Sisters — named Meehni, Wimlah and Gunnedoo, rising to 922, 918 and 906 metres — are the best-known sight of the Blue Mountains. More than 600,000 people a year come to look at them.

    Did you know? Early colonial visitors called the headland Tri Saxa Point, Latin for three stones; it was renamed Echo Point in 1890.

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11. 11 Roque Nublo

    Spain · 23 km from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria27.971° N 15.613° W

    

    Roque Nublo is the finger of rock that anchors the skyline of Gran Canaria: an 80-metre monolith standing on a summit plateau at about 1,813 metres, near the geographic centre of the island and among its highest points. From the coast it reads as a single thumb raised above the ridges; up close it becomes a rough, many-layered tower whose surface is studded with embedded stones and pale ash.

    Did you know? Geologists call one whole phase of Gran Canaria's volcanic history the Roque Nublo cycle, after the rock it left behind.

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12. 12 Calanche de Piana

    Calanques de Piana

    France42.325° N 8.629° E

    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    On the west coast of Corsica, between the village of Piana and the little port of Porto, the mountains come down to the sea as a maze of red granite needles, towers and overhangs. The Corsicans call them calanche; French guidebooks borrowed the word as "calanques", although they have nothing in common with the limestone inlets near Marseille. Here the rock is the colour of embers, it rises in jagged crests to about 700 metres, and it drops in cliffs to the deep blue Gulf of Porto. A single narrow road threads through it, clinging to the walls, squeezing through notches and crossing ravines on bridges and retaining walls.

    Did you know? The word tafoni, now used by geologists worldwide for honeycomb hollows in rock, first appeared in print in 1882 in a geological note on Corsica by Norwegian geologist Hans Reusch.

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13. 13 Chocolate Hills

    Philippines9.917° N 124.167° E

    

    The Chocolate Hills are one of the strangest landscapes in Southeast Asia: well over a thousand rounded, almost identical grassy mounds spread across the interior of Bohol island, like a field of giant haycocks or upturned bowls. Estimates of their number run from 1,268 to 1,776, scattered over more than 50 square kilometres. Most are 30 to 50 metres high, the tallest about 120 metres, and between them lie flat valley floors. In the dry season the grass that covers them turns brown, and the hills take on the colour that gave them their name.

    Did you know? The hills appear on the provincial flag and seal of Bohol as an emblem of the island's natural wonders.

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14. 14 Quiraing

    United Kingdom57.641° N 6.267° W

    

    At the northern end of Skye, the long Trotternish ridge breaks apart into one of the strangest landscapes in Britain. The Quiraing — in Gaelic Cuith-Raing — lies on the eastern face of Meall na Suiramach, the ridge's northernmost summit, where cliffs, towers and grassy hollows tumble in disorder towards the sea. Victorian visitors were already struck by it; the poet Alexander Smith called it a nightmare of nature, and on a day of racing cloud, with light sliding over the pinnacles and the sea shining beyond, the description still feels apt.

    Did you know? The slide covers about 8.5 square kilometres and runs 2.2 kilometres from the cliff crest all the way down to the coast.

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15. 15 Adršpach-Teplice Rocks

    Czech Republic50.611° N 16.115° E

    

    The Adršpach-Teplice Rocks in north-eastern Bohemia are the largest rock city in Central Europe: a labyrinth of sandstone towers, walls and gorges formed when a continuous plateau of sandstone, laid down in a Cretaceous sea, was split by tectonic movement and then carved by water, frost and wind. The result is two separate rock cities, Adršpach and Teplice, divided by the deep, seven-kilometre canyon called Wolf's Gorge. Some of the towers rise to around 90 metres.

    Did you know? In 1824 a forest fire smouldered among the rocks for several weeks and destroyed the entire forest around the rock city.

    More about Adršpach-Teplice Rocks →

16. 16 Cave of the Crystals

    Cueva de los cristales

    Mexico · 38.7 km from Delicias27.851° N 105.496° W

    

    Some 300 metres below the mining town of Naica in Chihuahua, miners cutting a new tunnel for the silver, zinc and lead workings of Industrias Peñoles broke into a chamber in April 2000 that turned out to hold some of the largest natural crystals ever recorded. The horseshoe-shaped cavity in limestone, roughly 109 metres long, is crossed by translucent beams of selenite, a form of gypsum; the biggest measures about 11.4 metres and is estimated to weigh around 12 tonnes. A smaller chamber higher up in the same mine, the Cave of Swords at about 120 metres depth, had been found as early as 1910, but its crystals reach only about a metre.

    Did you know? Measured in the laboratory, the giant crystals grow by less than half a nanometre a year, the slowest crystal growth rate ever directly measured.

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17. 17 Moeraki Boulders / Kaihinaki

    New Zealand · 29.4 km from Oamaru45.345° S 170.826° E

    

    On Koekohe Beach, on the Otago coast of New Zealand's South Island, a scattering of grey stone spheres lies at the edge of the surf as if a game of giant marbles had been abandoned. Some sit alone, some in clusters; some are half buried in the sand, others have split open to show a hollow, crystal-lined heart. They are the Moeraki Boulders, officially Moeraki Boulders / Kaihinaki, and on a still morning, with the sea washing around them and the low sun picking out the net-like pattern of veins on their skins, they are one of the most quietly surreal sights in the country.

    Did you know? The concretions grew close to the ancient sea floor while between 10 and 50 metres of marine mud slowly piled up above them.

    More about Moeraki Boulders / Kaihinaki →

18. 18 Hvítserkur

    Iceland65.606° N 20.635° W

    

    Hvítserkur is a 15-metre basalt sea stack standing in the shallows off the eastern shore of the Vatnsnes peninsula in north-west Iceland. Seen from the shore it looks uncannily like a beast bending to drink — two arches pierce its base, so that it seems to stand on legs with its head lowered to the water, and people have compared it to a dragon or a rhinoceros. The name means "white shirt", after the pale coat of droppings that nesting seabirds, gulls and fulmars among them, leave on its seaward face in summer, while the back of the rock remains dark basalt.

    Did you know? Although the stack stands about 15 metres tall and nearly as wide, it is only one to two metres thick, an eroded volcanic dyke left standing on its edge.

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19. 19 Landscape Arch

    United States · 24.6 km from Moab38.791° N 109.607° W

    

    Landscape Arch is a ribbon of sandstone so thin that it seems impossible it is still standing. It spans the air in the Devils Garden area at the northern end of Arches National Park, and it is one of the longest natural arches on Earth: a 2004 survey measured the opening at about 88 metres, with the arch rising some 24 metres above the ground. The Natural Arch and Bridge Society ranks it fifth in the world, behind four arches in China, and just ahead of Kolob Arch in Zion. The National Park Service gives its span as 306 feet — about 93 metres — which shows how hard such a slender form is to measure.

    Did you know? On 5 June 1995 visitors heard a boom like a dynamite blast as a slab about 13 metres long broke from the arch's thinnest section.

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20. 20 Es Pontàs

    Spain39.326° N 3.145° E

    

    Es Pontàs — "the big bridge" in Catalan — is a limestone sea arch on the south-east coast of Mallorca, standing free in the water a short way off the cliffs between Cala Santanyí and Cala Llombards. About twenty metres high, it looks like a doorway left standing after the rest of the house has fallen into the sea: a thick slab of pale rock resting on two legs, with open water on both sides and the Mediterranean shining through the gap. It is what remains of a stretch of coastline that the waves have gradually hollowed out, the same process that carved the deep, narrow calas all along this part of the island.

    Did you know? Chris Sharma needed almost 50 attempts, each failure ending with a long fall into the sea, before completing Es Pontàs on 26 September 2006.

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21. 21 Dasht-e Lut

    Iran30.264° N 59.241° E

    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Dasht-e Lut — in Persian, roughly "the bare plain" — fills a vast basin in south-eastern Iran, about 480 km long and 320 km wide, enclosed by mountains on every side. It is one of the driest and hottest places on Earth: satellite instruments have measured ground temperatures here above 70 °C, the highest land-surface readings recorded anywhere. Yet what makes the Lut extraordinary is not its emptiness but its shapes. Few deserts show so clearly, on such a scale, what wind alone can do to a landscape, and that is why UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage site in 2016.

    Did you know? In 2016 the Lut became the first natural site in Iran to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

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22. 22 Shiprock

    United States36.688° N 108.836° W

    

    Shiprock rises almost 1,600 feet (about 480 m) straight out of the flat high desert of northwestern New Mexico, a jagged dark tower alone on the plain. Its summit stands at 7,177 feet (2,188 m) above sea level. Long, low walls of black rock run away from it across the plain like the spines of a buried creature — the formation's famous dikes.

    Did you know? The shattered volcanic breccia that makes up much of Shiprock formed inside a diatreme, an explosive volcanic pipe.

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23. 23 Faraglioni of Capri

    Faraglioni di Capri

    Italy · 33.3 km from Naples40.542° N 14.253° E

    

    The Faraglioni are three limestone stacks rising straight out of the sea off the south-eastern tip of Capri, and they have been the emblem of the island for as long as painters have come here. Each has its own name. Stella, the one still joined to the island, is about 109 metres high. Faraglione di Mezzo, 82 metres, is pierced at sea level by a natural tunnel large enough for a small boat. The outermost, Scopolo or Faraglione di Fuori, rises to about 106 metres.

    Did you know? The word faraglione is thought to come from the Greek pharos, lighthouse, while the name Scopolo means a promontory over the sea.

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24. 24 The Needles

    United Kingdom · 29.6 km from Southampton50.663° N 1.589° W

    

    Three white blades of chalk run out from the western tip of the Isle of Wight into the open Channel, each about 30 metres high, with a red-and-white lighthouse standing at the very end of the line. The Needles are the last visible stretch of a chalk ridge that once continued unbroken towards the Dorset coast; the sea has worked along it for thousands of years and left only these sharp, separated stacks.

    Did you know? During Storm Eunice on 18 February 2022, a gust of 122 mph was provisionally recorded at the Needles, the strongest wind gust ever measured in England.

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25. 25 Madara Rider

    Мадарски конник

    Bulgaria · 15.4 km from Shumen43.277° N 27.119° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    On a sheer cliff face above the village of Madara in north-eastern Bulgaria, a horseman rides to the right, spearing a lion that lies beneath his horse's hooves while a dog runs behind him. The relief is almost life-size and is carved about 23 m above the ground into a near-vertical rock wall roughly 100 m high. Centuries of weather have worn away much of the detail, and the rider's halo, his clothing and a bird in front of his face are now hard to make out. It was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1979.

    Did you know? The relief itself is about 2.6 metres high and 3.1 metres wide at the base.

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26. 26 Katskhi Pillar

    Georgia42.288° N 43.216° E

    

    In a quiet valley of Imereti, in western Georgia, a single column of limestone about 40 metres high rises straight out of the forest, and on its narrow summit stands a small stone church with a cluster of cells. The Katskhi Pillar is a natural monolith, but what makes it unforgettable is the way people have used it: for centuries it was a retreat for hermits who chose to live between earth and sky, and the sight of a building perched on top of a sheer rock, reached only by a thin ladder, looks almost unreal.

    Did you know? The restored church on the summit is tiny, about 4.5 by 3.5 metres, with a burial crypt of roughly 2 by 1 metres beneath it.

    More about Katskhi Pillar →

27. 27 Dimmuborgir

    Iceland65.590° N 16.899° W

    

    Dimmuborgir looks less like a lava field than a ruined city: a sunken maze of black towers, arches, hollow chambers and leaning pillars on the eastern side of Lake Mývatn in north Iceland. The Icelandic name joins dimmu, "dark", and borgir, "castles" or "fortresses", and walking among the formations it is easy to see why the first people to name them reached for the language of walls and citadels.

    Did you know? Lava formations like those of Dimmuborgir are known nowhere else on land outside the Mývatn area; the closest parallel lies on the ocean floor off Mexico.

    More about Dimmuborgir →

28. 28 Lange Anna

    Germany54.188° N 7.869° E

    

    Lange Anna, "Tall Anna", is a sea stack of red sandstone at the north-western tip of Heligoland in the North Sea. The stack is 47 metres high and weighs about 25,000 tonnes, standing on a base of only about 180 square metres. It is made of red Buntsandstein, the same rock as the island's cliffs, and the layered colours of its sediments are clearly visible on its face.

    Did you know? In 1934 the Nazi authorities tried to rename the stack "Nathurn", after its old name in the island's own Heligolandic Frisian dialect.

    More about Lange Anna →

29. 29 The Wave

    United States36.996° N 112.006° W

    

    In the Coyote Buttes of northern Arizona, on the border with Utah, the Navajo Sandstone has been eroded into a pair of intersecting troughs whose walls are banded in red, orange, pink and cream. The stripes curve and swirl around the walls like frozen surf, and walking through them feels like stepping into a sculpture. The Wave is one of the most photographed rock formations in the American Southwest, and one of the hardest to reach.

    Did you know? The Navajo Sandstone of the Wave was laid down as desert dunes about 200 to 195 million years ago, in the Early Jurassic.

    More about The Wave →

30. 30 Pancake Rocks

    New Zealand42.117° S 171.327° E

    

    On the wild West Coast of New Zealand's South Island, the headland of Dolomite Point looks as if it were built from stacks of giant grey pancakes. Layer upon layer of thin limestone slabs, separated by narrow grooves, rise in towers and walls above the surf, and in between them the Tasman Sea has hollowed out chasms, surge pools and caverns. When a big swell rolls in at high tide, water is forced up through vertical shafts in the rock and bursts from the blowholes in roaring plumes of spray; the Putai Blowhole at the centre of the site is the most dramatic of them.

    Did you know? The coastal hills between Punakaiki and Barrytown hold the only known breeding colonies of the Westland petrel anywhere on Earth.

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