The Most Remarkable Rock Formations in Africa
11 places in 10 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable rock formations in Africa are Richat Structure (Mauritania), Spitzkoppe (Namibia) and Pico Cão Grande (São Tomé and Príncipe). The list covers 11 rock formations in 10 countries. Mauritania has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Africa holds some of the oldest exposed rock on Earth, and much of it has been left bare by deserts, savannas and long ages of weathering. Ancient granite rises from the plains as isolated domes and inselbergs, volcanic necks stand up where softer cones have washed away, and wind-driven sand in the Sahara and the Namib has sculpted sandstone into towers, needles and arches. Few continents show their geology so openly, with so little soil or forest to hide it.
The Richat Structure in the Mauritanian Sahara is a set of concentric rings about 40 kilometres across, so large that it is best understood from orbit; it is an eroded geological dome rather than an impact crater. Not far away, Ben Amera is one of the largest monoliths in the world, a granite mass beside the iron-ore railway across the desert. In Namibia the granite peaks of Spitzkoppe rise abruptly from the gravel plains, while on São Tomé the volcanic plug of Pico Cão Grande shoots more than 300 metres above the surrounding rainforest like a needle.
Other formations are shaped by colour or by water. The Seven Coloured Earths of Chamarel in Mauritius are dunes of weathered volcanic soil in bands of red, violet and ochre. On South Africa's Wild Coast, Hole-in-the-Wall is a detached cliff pierced by an arch through which waves roar. The Red Tsingy of northern Madagascar are eroded pinnacles of laterite, Rhumsiki in Cameroon is a volcanic spire over the Mandara Mountains, and the Hand of Fatima in Mali raises its sandstone fingers above the Sahel.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Richat Structure | Rock formation | Mauritania | |
| 2 | Spitzkoppe | Rock formation | Namibia | |
| 3 | Pico Cão Grande | Rock formation | São Tomé and Príncipe | |
| 4 | Ben Amera | Rock formation | Mauritania | |
| 5 | Seven Coloured Earths | Rock formation | Mauritius | |
| 6 | Rhumsiki | Rock formation | Cameroon | |
| 7 | Hole-in-the-Wall, Eastern Cape | Natural arch | South Africa | |
| 8 | Red Tsingy | Rock formation | Madagascar | |
| 9 | Black Rocks of Pungo Andongo | Rock formation | Angola | |
| 10 | Hand of Fatima | Rock formation | Mali | |
| 11 | Sindou peaks | Rock formation | Burkina Faso |
01 Richat Structure
Mauritania21.124° N 11.402° W
DHQ · CC BY-SA 4.0 For decades the obvious explanation was a meteorite impact, and Théodore Monod's 1952 expedition listed it alongside three genuine craters in the region. Closer study found none of the signs of shock that an impact leaves, and a mineral once reported as the shock indicator coesite turned out in 1969 to be barite. The accepted picture today is quite different: a large body of alkaline magma pushed up from below during the Cretaceous, around 100 million years ago, arching the overlying sediments into a dome.
Did you know? French geographers who first described it in the 1930s called it the Richât Crater or the Richât buttonhole.
02 Spitzkoppe
Namibia21.826° S 15.195° E
Image by LionMountain from Pixabay The real spectacle comes at the edges of the day. In low light the rock turns from grey-ochre to deep orange and then almost red, and the weathered granite reveals its texture: rounded boulders balanced on one another, smooth slabs scoured by wind, hollows and overhangs where rainwater collects after a rare storm. A natural rock arch on the lower slopes frames the main peak and is the classic place to stand at sunrise or sunset. Beside the main summit sits Little Spitzkoppe at about 1,557 metres, and the Pontok Mountains trail away from the group in a ridge of rounded domes, so the massif reads as a whole small range rather than a single peak.
Did you know? The granite began as magma that cooled underground without reaching the surface; the massif emerged as the softer rock around it slowly eroded away.
03 Pico Cão Grande
São Tomé and Príncipe · 30.3 km from São Tomé0.118° N 6.566° E
Helena Van Eykeren from Gent, Belgium · CC BY 2.0 The needle is a volcanic plug. It formed when magma cooled and hardened inside the vent of a volcano belonging to the Cameroon Line, the chain of volcanoes that runs from mainland Cameroon out into the Gulf of Guinea. The rock, mostly phonolite, solidified around three and a half million years ago in the Pliocene; the softer volcanic material around it has since been stripped away by erosion, leaving the hard core standing alone. The peak lies within Obô Natural Park, which protects much of the island's interior forest, in the Caué District in the far south of the island.
Did you know? Phonolite is the same rare rock that forms Devils Tower in Wyoming, another famous volcanic monolith rising from its surroundings.
04 Ben Amera
Mauritania21.233° N 13.667° W
Les3corbiers · CC BY-SA 3.0 Geologically the rock is an inselberg: a resistant mass of granite that has survived while the land around it was worn down. Its smooth slabs are crossed by darker dykes of basalt and by veins of quartzite, and those long, clean faces now carry climbing routes of various grades with nearly 500 metres of vertical gain. Ben Amera is not alone. 5 km to the north-west stands a smaller companion, Ben Aïcha, and a third dome, Ben Haddad, lies a similar distance to the north-east.
Did you know? Some rankings place Ben Amera third among the world's monoliths, behind Australia's Uluru and Mount Augustus.
05 Seven Coloured Earths
Terres des Sept Couleurs
Mauritius · 20.3 km from Curepipe20.440° S 57.373° E
Image by bigfoot from Pixabay The colours come from the island's volcanic past. In the hot, humid climate the local basalt broke down completely into clay, and water leached away silica and most of the soluble minerals. What remained is a ferrallitic soil rich in iron and aluminium oxides: iron gives the red and dark anthracite tones, aluminium the bluish and purple ones. The intriguing part is that the different coloured grains tend to sort themselves into separate layers rather than blend, so even disturbed earth slowly regains its stripes – a behaviour that has not been fully explained.
Did you know? The striped ridges are known locally as Les Côtes de Melon, the melon slices, after their rounded, regularly furrowed shape.
06 Rhumsiki
Cameroon10.483° N 13.600° E
No machine-readable author provided. Amcaja assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain These spires are volcanic necks: the solidified cores of long-dormant volcanoes, left standing after erosion stripped away the cones that once surrounded them. Scattered among the fields below are the round stone houses of the Kapsiki people, topped with conical thatched roofs and spread across the village and the neighbouring valley — a form of dwelling typical of northern Cameroon. The Kapsiki are descended from the so-called Kirdi peoples who settled the area in the 18th century.
Did you know? According to tradition, the Kirdi ancestors of the villagers took refuge in these mountains in the 18th century, fleeing the advance of the Muslim Fulani.
07 Hole-in-the-Wall, Eastern Cape
South Africa32.041° S 29.109° E
Vincentvanoosten · CC0 The isiXhosa name, esiKhaleni, is usually translated as "the place of sound" or "place of thunder". In heavy swell the waves surge through the arch and boom against the rock, and the noise carries a long way along the shore. Local tradition explains the hole with a love story: a girl from a village on the cliffs fell for one of the sea people, her father forbade the match, and the sea people rammed the hole through the cliff with the head of an enormous fish to carry her away. The roaring in a storm, so the story goes, is the sea people still calling.
Did you know? When the Santo Alberto went down, 62 people drowned, while about 285 Portuguese sailors and enslaved people struggled ashore.
08 Red Tsingy
Tsingy Rouge
Madagascar12.639° S 49.497° E
Chirocca77 · CC BY-SA 4.0 They are the work of the Irodo River and of the rain. As the river cut down into the soft ground, the slopes above it began to collapse and wash away, and gullies widened into a small canyon. Columns were left standing where the ground resisted while everything around them was carried off, producing a crowd of fluted pinnacles and fins like fairy chimneys. Clearing of the forest in the region has sped the process up, and the formations are said to have been exposed only from the mid-twentieth century, after landslides opened the ground.
Did you know? The pinnacles are cut through stacked layers of laterite, sandstone, limestone and marl, which weathering stains ochre-red, white and pink.
09 Black Rocks of Pungo Andongo
Pedras Negras de Pungo Andongo
Angola9.662° S 15.584° E
Wbkincaid1 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Geologically, the rocks are sedimentary conglomerates: a solid mass of sandstone in which cobbles of many kinds are embedded, compacted under pressure millions of years ago and later lifted up. Erosion has since separated the uplifted mass into free-standing domes, towers and walls, which stand out against the flat savanna for miles around.
Did you know? Livingstone spent weeks here rewriting the maps, dispatches and journal he had lost when the mail ship Forerunner sank on its way to Britain.
10 Hand of Fatima
La Main de Fatima
Mali15.243° N 1.803° W
Timm Guenther ( Timm Busshaus ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 The formation is an inselberg of sandstone, one of the isolated rock islands that rise abruptly from the plains around the town of Hombori in the Mopti Region. Each of its "fingers" carries its own name: Kaga Pamari, Kaga Tondo, Wangel, Debridu and Suri Tondo. Its sheer faces have long attracted climbers, and the walls include a strongly overhanging cliff of roughly 450 metres. In December 2006 the Italian climbing club known as the Lecco Spiders put up a series of new routes on the towers, and the rock had earlier featured in an adventure documentary filmed in 1998.
Did you know? Measured from base to summit, the sandstone towers rise as much as about 600 metres above the surrounding plain.
11 Sindou peaks
Pics de Sindou
Burkina Faso10.657° N 5.152° W
Wegmann · CC BY-SA 3.0 The towers are what remains of a layered sandstone plateau that rain and running water have cut apart over a very long time, separating it into individual blocks and leaving horizontal banding visible on many of the walls. The resulting outline, part ruined fortress and part forest of stone needles, is unlike anything else in the region. The wide range of habitats among the rocks makes the area important for local biodiversity, and the peaks are protected as a nature reserve bearing their name.
Did you know? This sandstone belongs to the sedimentary cover of the vast Taoudeni Basin, which stretches north across Mali into Mauritania.
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 remarkable rock formations in Africa?
- On our list, Richat Structure (Mauritania) ranks first, followed by Spitzkoppe (Namibia) and Pico Cão Grande (São Tomé and Príncipe).
- Which country has the most rock formations in Africa?
- In our collection, the most come from Mauritania (2), Angola (1) and Burkina Faso (1).
- What is the Richat Structure?
- The Richat Structure, also called the Eye of the Sahara, is a deeply eroded geological dome in Mauritania about 40 kilometres across. Its concentric rings are layers of rock of differing hardness exposed by erosion; it was once thought to be an impact crater, but that idea has been abandoned.
- Why are the Seven Coloured Earths of Chamarel different colours?
- The sands formed from basaltic volcanic rock that weathered into clay rich in iron and aluminium oxides. Differences in mineral content give the bands their red, brown, violet and yellow tones.
- How tall is Pico Cão Grande?
- Pico Cão Grande on São Tomé is a volcanic plug whose summit stands at about 663 metres above sea level, rising more than 300 metres above the surrounding terrain.
- How many rock formations are on this list in Africa?
- The list covers 11 rock formations in 10 countries. Mauritania has the most, with 2.