The Most Remarkable Rock Formations in Europe

34 places in 15 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Trolltunga

   Norway60.133° N 6.754° E

   

   For most of its history this was a place for a few hundred determined walkers a year: fewer than 800 people made the trip before 2010. Social media changed that. By 2016 an estimated 80,000 people were hiking out to stand on the tongue, and it became one of the most photographed natural sites in Norway. There is deliberately no railing at the edge. One fatal fall, in 2015, is recorded, but the real danger lies in the hike itself: rescue teams have been called out dozens of times in a season, mostly for walkers who underestimated the distance, got lost in fog or ran out of strength on the way back.

   Did you know? In 2017 the hike to Trolltunga was mapped for Google Street View with a camera carried in a backpack.

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2. 02 Meteora

   Μετέωρα

   Greece39.712° N 21.627° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Everything that followed had to be hauled up by hand: stone, timber, food, and eventually the monks themselves, using nets, hand-cranked winches and retractable ladders. Some of the two dozen monasteries built here took two or three generations of monks to complete — men who started the work and died long before it was finished, without ever seeing the result from the top.

   Did you know? In nearby Theopetra Cave a stone wall built about 23,000 years ago, probably against Ice Age winds, is among the oldest known human-made structures.

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3. 03 Giant's Causeway

   United Kingdom55.241° N 6.512° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Local tradition, of course, has a different explanation. In the best-known version, the giant Fionn mac Cumhaill built the causeway across the North Channel to fight the Scottish giant Benandonner, then took fright at his rival's size; his wife dressed Fionn as a baby, and Benandonner, imagining the size of the father of such an infant, fled home and tore up the road behind him. The same basalt surfaces again at Fingal's Cave on the Scottish island of Staffa, which may have fed the story. Many of the rock features along the shore carry names from it, such as the Giant's Boot, the Organ, the Chimney Stacks and the Camel's Hump.

   Did you know? Its rocks appear on the cover of Led Zeppelin's 1973 album Houses of the Holy, where two child models were multiplied into eleven figures.

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4. 04 Sassi di Matera

   Italy40.667° N 16.608° E

   

   The settlement is one of the oldest continuously used places in Italy. People sheltered in the caves of the gorge in prehistory, Neolithic villages stood on the plateau, and over the centuries the caves were enlarged, closed with built façades and joined by lanes, stairways and channels. The whole quarter worked as a system for gathering rain: water ran along carved gutters into cisterns, some houses had several, and the families of a vicinato shared a courtyard, a well and an oven. Renaissance and Baroque fronts open onto rooms that began as rock-cut cisterns, and beneath the main square lies the Palombaro Lungo, a vast underground reservoir.

   Did you know? The Sassi became the Amazon city of Themyscira in Wonder Woman (2017), and James Bond's Aston Martin tore through them in No Time to Die.

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5. 05 Roque Nublo

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

   

   That texture tells how it was made. The rock is what erosion has left of a pyroclastic flow – a scalding avalanche of blocks and welded ash thrown out by an explosive stratovolcano between roughly 4.5 and 3.4 million years ago. Softer material around it has washed away over the ages, leaving the hardened core standing alone, with smaller companions nearby: the slender Roque del Fraile, "the Friar", and the rounded formation called La Rana, "the Frog". Long before hikers arrived, the island's pre-Hispanic inhabitants treated the rock as a place of worship.

   Did you know? The stratovolcano whose eruptions produced the rock may have stood around 3,000 metres high, far above anything on the island today.

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6. 06 Calanche de Piana

   Calanques de Piana

   France42.325° N 8.629° E

   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The calanche belong to the crystalline western half of Corsica, built of plutonic rock that cooled deep underground. Exposed at the surface, the granite has been worked on by wind, salt spray, rain and changes of temperature, which hollow it into cavities known as tafoni, open arches and isolated pinnacles. The result reads like a gallery of figures, and people have been naming them for a long time: a castle, a pair of lovers, a dog's head, a bishop. When Guy de Maupassant crossed the calanche at dusk in 1880, he wrote of pink granite giants twisted by time into monks, a seated bishop, a crouching lion and a horned devil's head, and ranked the place among the wonders of the world.

   Did you know? Reusch recorded that Corsicans called such cavities tafoni when small and grotte when large, borrowing the islanders' own vocabulary.

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7. 07 Quiraing

   United Kingdom57.641° N 6.267° W

   

   The scenery is the work of a giant landslip. Thick sheets of basalt lava were laid down over the peninsula on top of much weaker Jurassic mudstones, sandstones and limestones. Under that weight the soft layers gave way, and enormous blocks of lava broke off the escarpment and slid eastwards, tilting as they went. The Quiraing is the largest landslide of its kind known in Britain, about two kilometres wide, and it took its present shape after the last ice age. It has not entirely finished moving: parts of the slip still settle a little, and the narrow road over the ridge needs regular repair.

   Did you know? Roughly 300 metres of basalt lava pressing down on about 200 metres of weaker sediments drove the collapse, according to classic geological mapping.

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8. 08 Adršpach-Teplice Rocks

   Czech Republic50.611° N 16.115° E

   

   In the Adršpach rocks the paths run through narrow clefts between pillars, past a waterfall and two small lakes. The formations have names that go back centuries: the Mayor and his Wife, the Lovers, the Sugar Loaf, Rübezahl's Organ. The Teplice rocks are more austere, with sheer walls along the Skalní potok stream, the ridge of the Čáp at 786 metres, and a rocky maze of plateaus and passages. Three medieval rock castles, Střmen, Adršpach and Skály, stand in the area in ruins.

   Did you know? For centuries local people entered the maze of towers only when they needed a hiding place from danger.

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9. 09 Hvítserkur

   Iceland65.606° N 20.635° W

   

   Local tradition holds that Hvítserkur is a troll who set out to destroy the monastery at Þingeyrar across the bay and was caught by the rising sun and turned to stone. The story has a curious modern sequel: in the middle of the 20th century, worried that the sea would bring the "troll" down, local farmers shored up its base with concrete, so that the troll still stands.

   Did you know? A magnitude-7 earthquake shook the Skagafjörður area of north Iceland in 1963, and the stack is thought to have survived it only thanks to the concrete poured around its base.

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10. 10 Es Pontàs

    Spain39.326° N 3.145° E

    

    The best way to enjoy it is from the cliff-top viewpoint above, the Mirador d'Es Pontàs, where the arch is framed against the open sea. It is especially beautiful early and late in the day, when low sunlight turns the limestone gold and the water beneath shifts from turquoise to deep blue. From the land it can only be looked at; reaching the arch itself means coming by water, swimming or by boat.

    Did you know? The crux is a leap of about seven feet between holds, made some 35 feet above the water with nothing but the sea to catch a miss.

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11. 11 Faraglioni of Capri

    Faraglioni di Capri

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

    

    Scopolo has a small secret: it is the only home of a blue variety of the Italian wall lizard, Podarcis siculus coeruleus, found on this rock and nowhere else. Painters were drawn to them early: Josef Rebell and Albert Bierstadt both painted the stacks. They also appear in Italian cinema, from the comedy The Emperor of Capri (1949) onwards.

    Did you know? The tunnel through Faraglione di Mezzo runs about 58 metres through the rock and averages around 13 metres in height.

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12. 12 The Needles

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

    

    Their shape owes much to the earth movements of the Alpine mountain-building period, which folded the chalk beds here until they stood almost on end. That near-vertical layering is why the stacks break away as thin, upright slabs rather than rounded lumps. There used to be a fourth: a slender pillar, said to have been around 120 feet tall and known as Lot's Wife, which fell during a storm in 1764. It was that lost spire, not the blunter survivors, that gave the group its name, from the Old English word for a needle.

    Did you know? Rocket engines tested on the cliffs of High Down powered Black Arrow, which in 1971 launched the Prospero satellite into orbit.

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13. 13 Madara Rider

    Мадарски конник

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

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The carving is dated to the very end of the 7th or the early 8th century, the time of Khan Tervel, shortly after the Bulgars settled the region in 680–681. Around the image are inscriptions in medieval Greek. The oldest describes Tervel's dealings with the Byzantine emperor Justinian II, and later ones refer to the khans Krum and Omurtag. Who the rider is remains debated. Early scholars saw him as a version of the Thracian horseman, a Balkan deity; most now link the iconography, including the stirrup and the halo, to Bulgar steppe tradition, while the lion and the rightward movement echo older Thracian art. Candidates include the Bulgar deity Tangra and Tervel himself.

    Did you know? It is regarded as the only early medieval rock relief of its kind in Europe.

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14. 14 Katskhi Pillar

    Georgia42.288° N 43.216° E

    

    The summit is uneven and measures roughly 150 square metres. On it are the little hall church of St Maximus the Confessor, a burial crypt, three hermit cells, a wine cellar where diggers found eight large qvevri jars, and a protective wall. A cave room with two small windows is cut into the vertical face about 10 metres below the top, and at the foot of the pillar a cross carved in relief recalls early medieval crosses known elsewhere in Georgia. Locals have long called the rock the Pillar of Life and venerated it as a symbol of the True Cross; one tradition held that an iron chain once linked its top to the dome of the Katskhi church about 1.5 km away.

    Did you know? After the 1944 climb, an architect in the party took the ruins for two 5th- or 6th-century stylite churches; excavations in 2006 re-dated them to the 9th–10th centuries.

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15. 15 Dimmuborgir

    Iceland65.590° N 16.899° W

    

    The landscape is the remains of a lava lake. A little over two thousand years ago a large eruption along the Þrengslaborgir and Lúdentsborgir crater row to the east sent lava flooding into this hollow, where it pooled over marshy, waterlogged ground. Steam from the boiling wetland forced its way up through the molten rock, and around each vent the lava chilled into a pipe or column, some as thin as a drainpipe and others several metres across. When the still-liquid lava eventually drained away towards the Mývatn basin, the roof of the lake collapsed, leaving the hardened pillars and chambers standing below the level of the surrounding lava surface.

    Did you know? The eruption that created the site happened about 2,300 years ago, filling a circular lava lake roughly 2 km across.

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16. 16 Lange Anna

    Germany54.188° N 7.869° E

    

    Lange Anna was once part of the mainland of Heligoland, connected by a natural rock arch that collapsed on 16 May 1860, leaving the column standing alone. The sea keeps working on it: in 1976 a smaller neighbour, the Kleine Anna, broke away, and the weakest layer lies about 16 metres up. To protect the island, a long sea wall was built along the west coast between 1903 and 1927, and in 1979 the foot of the stack was reinforced. It has been protected as a natural monument since 1969. The origin of its name is uncertain; it seems to date from around 1900.

    Did you know? Islanders traditionally called it Nathuurnstak, roughly the "north horn surf pillar", and over time it was also known as the Monk, the Nun, the Stallion and the Sentry.

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17. 17 Ciudad Encantada

    Spain40.206° N 2.007° W

    

    The limestone dates back about 90 million years, to the Cretaceous, when this part of the Iberian Peninsula lay on the floor of the Tethys Sea and calm waters accumulated thick deposits of calcium carbonate from dissolved minerals and the skeletons of marine animals. At the end of the Cretaceous, the uplift associated with the Alpine orogeny raised the old seabed above water. Rainwater charged with carbon dioxide then seeped into the permeable rock, dissolving it and opening galleries inside.

    Did you know? Although protected since 1929, the Enchanted City stands on privately owned land.

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18. 18 Kuklica Stone Dolls

    Камени Кукли

    North Macedonia42.124° N 22.050° E

    

    The pillars are earth pyramids, carved by rain and runoff out of the volcanic ground of the Kratovo area. Soft tuff at the base wears away quickly, while harder caps of andesite and ignimbrite — rocks around thirty million years old — shield the material beneath them, so that each pillar is a column protected by its own stone hat. Erosion is still at work: villagers say that new figures emerge every few years as the slope retreats, while older ones lose their caps and slowly melt back into the hillside.

    Did you know? Of only four comparable fields of earth pyramids known in the Balkans, three lie in North Macedonia.

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19. 19 Old Man of Storr

    United Kingdom57.507° N 6.175° W

    

    The whole scene is the product of one of the largest landslips in Britain. The Trotternish ridge is made of thick layers of basalt lava laid down around sixty million years ago on top of much weaker Jurassic sedimentary rocks. As the soft rocks beneath gave way, huge blocks of the lava plateau broke off and slid downhill, tilting as they went, and weathering has since whittled the stranded blocks into pinnacles. The Old Man is one such fragment, left standing on its own. The Storr is also the place where the mineral gyrolite was first described, one of several unusual minerals found in the cavities of Skye's lavas.

    Did you know? The Storr is part of the Trotternish landslip, the longest landslip feature in Great Britain.

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20. 20 Dyrhólaey

    Iceland63.404° N 19.117° W

    

    The view from the top is one of the finest on the south coast. To the east lie the long beach of Reynisfjara and the basalt sea stacks of Reynisdrangar standing in the surf; to the north, the ice cap of Mýrdalsjökull; to the west, the coast runs away towards Selfoss, depending on the weather. Below, the Atlantic breaks against the arch and the cliff faces. In summer the ledges are crowded with nesting seabirds, including many Atlantic puffins, which sit at the cliff edge within easy sight.

    Did you know? The 1993 flight through the arch was made by pilot Arngrímur Jóhannsson in a small Citabria aerobatic plane, which passed through the opening three times.

    More about Dyrhólaey →

21. 21 Petrified forest of Lesbos

    Απολιθωμένο δάσος της Λέσβου

    Greece39.204° N 25.874° E

    

    The forest was buried during the early Miocene, when a series of volcanic eruptions covered this part of the island in lava flows and thick layers of ash. Over time the buried wood was mineralised and turned to stone. The vegetation they record was subtropical, very different from today's Mediterranean scrub: laurels, beeches and conifers are among the plant groups identified. Around 150 fossil logs have been exposed in the main concentration, which lies in the triangle formed by the villages of Sigri, Eresos and Antissa, while isolated fossils occur as far away as Molyvos, Polichnitos and Plomari.

    Did you know? The tallest standing trunk, an ancestral form of the sequoia, rises 7.02 metres and is considered the tallest standing fossil tree in Europe.

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22. 22 Arco Naturale

    Italy · 32.5 km from Naples40.549° N 14.256° E

    

    What makes the arch so arresting is its frame. Looking through the opening, the eye travels over rugged ridges and plunging cliffs to the blue water of the gulf and the distant coast of the mainland, with the little Li Galli islands floating offshore. Its curve is unusually round for a natural formation, and long, pale stalactites, formed by water seeping through the limestone, still cling to the underside of the vault.

    Did you know? It is the surviving section of the roof of a large cave that collapsed through landslides and erosion.

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23. 23 Mallos de Riglos

    Spain42.351° N 0.724° W

    

    The rock tells the story of the Pyrenees themselves. As the range was pushed up during the Alpine orogeny, rivers carried huge quantities of boulders, gravel and sand southwards towards the old Ebro basin and dumped them in vast alluvial fans. Cemented by carbonate, these Miocene deposits hardened into conglomerate, which was later uplifted, fractured and attacked by running water. Erosion widened the cracks into deep gullies and chimneys and left the solid blocks standing apart as separate towers.

    Did you know? The Firé, formerly known as the Mallo de las Diez, ends in five separate summit points, one named Buzón after a summit register box left by early climbers.

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24. 24 Aiguilles de Bavella

    France41.811° N 9.218° E

    

    The heart of the massif is a row of seven towers known as the tours d'Asinau, from Punta di l'Acellu (1,588 m) to Punta Alta, the highest needle at 1,855 m; nearby summits reach 1,899 m, and Monte Incudine, the highest peak of the area, stands at 2,134 m. Two kinds of granite make up the range: a coarse, pale stone that weathers easily, and a fine-grained, potassium-rich pink granite that cooled quickly and is much harder. Weathering has hollowed the rock into tafoni — cavities of every size that give whole cliffs the look of petrified sponge — and in places has bored straight through it, as at Punta Tafunata, the pierced mountain, at 1,312 m.

    Did you know? Of the seven Asinau towers, traditionally numbered one to seven from south to north, only Punta di a Vacca can be reached by an ordinary hiker.

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25. 25 Dún Briste

    Dun Briste

    Ireland54.328° N 9.348° W

    

    That bridge is traditionally said to have failed in a violent storm in 1393, when the people living on the promontory had to be brought across the new chasm on ropes. Local legend tells the story differently: Saint Patrick, having founded a church on the headland, was defied by the pagan chieftain Crom Dubh, and struck the ground with his staff so that the chieftain's fort was split away from the mainland. The ruins of an early church and a statue of the saint still stand on the headland. When researchers were landed on top of the stack by helicopter in 1980, they found the remains of stone buildings and of walls for sheep, confirming that the summit had once been lived on.

    Did you know? The 1980 landing on 30 July put people on the stack for the first time in centuries; the team camped overnight on the summit.

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26. 26 Vratna Gates

    Прерасти у кањону Вратне

    Serbia · 39.2 km from Drobeta-Turnu Severin44.383° N 22.337° E

    

    The first two arches stand directly over the stream. The Little Prerast is 34 metres high, with an opening 22 metres wide and a span of rock about 15 metres long and 10 metres thick. The Big Prerast is lower, at 26 metres, but far more massive: its arch runs 45 metres long and is around 30 metres thick, spanning an opening 23 metres wide. The third, the Dry Prerast, is 20 metres high and 34 metres long, with a 15-metre opening; it owes its name to the fact that in summer the river sinks into the ground before reaching it and reappears further on. All three are cut into late Jurassic limestone.

    Did you know? The Dry Prerast lies almost 3 km upstream of the other two arches, near a point where the river drops about 50 metres.

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27. 27 Marvelous Bridges

    Чудните мостове

    Bulgaria · 39.9 km from Plovdiv41.819° N 24.581° E

    

    The formation is the work of water. The Erkyupriya, once a much larger river than the stream seen today, worked its way along fissures in the marble and hollowed out a cave; eventually the roof of the cave collapsed, leaving only the sections that now stand as bridges. About 200 metres downstream is the smaller bridge, 60 metres long and some 50 metres high, with an arch rising to about 30 metres. Further on, a third small opening marks the point where the river sinks underground; cavers have followed its course for around three kilometres to a flooded passage.

    Did you know? According to local legend, shepherds fed a dragon a donkey loaded with burning tinder, and the maddened beast tore open the gorge as it fled underground.

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28. 28 Pulpí Geode

    Geoda de Pulpí

    Spain · 34.1 km from Lorca37.382° N 1.702° W

    

    The geode was found in December 1999 by members of the Grupo Mineralogista de Madrid, a group of mineral collectors led by Javier García-Guinea, who were exploring the abandoned workings of the Pilar de Jaravía mine, also known as Mina Rica. The mine had been dug for silver and lead in the Sierra del Aguilón, a low range about 3 km from the sea, within the municipality of Pulpí. The cavity is funnel-shaped, narrowing into an L-shaped section, and its crystals are remarkable for their size and clarity.

    Did you know? It is the only geode of its kind open to the public, admitted from 5 August 2019, almost twenty years after its discovery.

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29. 29 Les Orgues d’Ille-sur-Têt

    Orgues d'Ille-sur-Têt

    France · 22.5 km from Perpignan42.688° N 2.626° E

    

    The formations are textbook fairy chimneys, created by differential erosion. Their story begins in the Pliocene: after the Messinian salinity crisis, when the Mediterranean was cut off from the Atlantic and its level dropped dramatically, rivers carved deep canyons into the Roussillon plain. 3 million years ago, the Têt valley became a marine inlet, and rivers filled it with delta deposits of clay and sand. The rocks exposed today are about four million years old. During the first cold phases of the Quaternary, a sheet of coarse stony debris spread over them, and it is this rubbly cap that has kept the soft layers beneath from washing away.

    Did you know? When these sediments were laid down in the Pliocene, the Roussillon was roamed by the elephant-like Anancus, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses and sabre-toothed cats.

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30. 30 Aiguilles de Port-Coton, Belle-Île

    Aiguilles de Port-Coton

    France47.306° N 3.240° W

    

    The rocks owe their fame to Claude Monet. He arrived in Le Palais, the island's main town, on 12 September 1886, intending to stay a fortnight, and left only on 25 November. In letters to Alice Hoschedé he called this coast sinister, diabolical and magnificent, and he painted the same group of needles six times from one viewpoint, under clear midday light, mist, broken cloud and the warm sun of late afternoon, with the sea shifting from calm to storm. The series, The Pyramids of Port-Coton, is now divided among the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, the museum in Caracas and other collections.

    Did you know? Constant changes of cloud, wind and rain pushed Monet to paint the same motifs again and again, an early step towards his later series of haystacks and cathedrals.

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