The Most Spectacular Cliffs in the World

44 places in 24 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Cape of Good Hope

   South Africa34.358° S 18.472° E

   

   At the end of the Cape Peninsula, a ridge of Table Mountain sandstone drops into the Atlantic in a jumble of dark rock and surf. The Cape of Good Hope is not, despite its fame, the southernmost point of Africa – that is Cape Agulhas, some 150 km to the east-southeast – but for ships following the west coast of the continent south from the equator it is the point where the course finally begins to turn east. That made it the symbolic gateway between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and for centuries sailors have called it simply "the Cape". Cape Point, with its higher cliffs, rises a little over two kilometres to the east-southeast.

   Did you know? Herodotus doubted Phoenician sailors who claimed to have rounded Africa around 600 BC with the sun on their right, the very detail that now makes their voyage plausible.

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2. 02 Loreley

   Germany · 25.2 km from Koblenz50.139° N 7.729° E

   

   Above a tight bend of the Rhine near Sankt Goarshausen, a slate cliff rises 132 metres almost straight out of the water. The Lorelei marks the narrowest and deepest point of the river's navigable course between Basel and Rotterdam: here the Rhine squeezes to about 160 metres across and was once up to 25 metres deep, winding between reefs and shallows. For centuries this was among the most dangerous passages on the river, recorded as a place of wrecks from the tenth century on; some of the rocks were blasted away in the 1930s, and traffic through the gorge is still regulated by signal stations. The rock stands in the heart of the Upper Middle Rhine Valley, a cultural landscape of castles, vineyards and river towns inscribed by UNESCO in 2002, and the view from its summit takes in the river loop and Katz Castle on the slope above Sankt Goarshausen.

   Did you know? Before the dangerous reefs were blasted, skippers rang a bell three times as they approached the rock to call their crews to prayer.

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3. 03 White Cliffs of Dover

   United Kingdom · 4 km from Dover51.135° N 1.357° E

   

   The White Cliffs of Dover stand on both sides of the port of Dover for about 13 km, a wall of chalk up to 110 metres high facing the narrowest part of the Channel. On a clear day France is visible 32 km away, and from France the cliffs are visible in turn. They are made of the skeletons of coccoliths, microscopic algae that settled on the floor of a warm Cretaceous sea between about 100 and 66 million years ago, compacted into soft white rock. Dark bands of flint, formed from the silica of sponges and plankton, run across the face in horizontal lines. The same chalk continues on the far side as the cliffs of Normandy's Alabaster Coast; the two shores were joined until floods from a great ice-dammed lake broke through the land bridge hundreds of thousands of years ago.

   Did you know? Over the past 150 years the cliffs have retreated by roughly 22 to 32 cm a year, several times faster than the 2 to 6 cm estimated for earlier millennia.

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4. 04 Seven Sisters Cliffs, Sussex

   Seven Sisters

   United Kingdom · 24.5 km from Brighton50.760° N 0.160° E

   

   The Seven Sisters are a run of white chalk cliffs on the Sussex coast between Seaford and Eastbourne, where the rolling South Downs meet the English Channel and are simply sliced off by the sea. Seen from the side, the cliff top rises and falls in a series of rounded crests separated by dry valleys, so that the coast looks like a row of sheets hung out on a line. The name promises seven, but count the summits from west to east and there are eight: Haven Brow, the highest at about 77 metres, then Short Brow, Rough Brow, Brass Point, Flagstaff Point, Flat Hill, Baily's Hill and Went Hill Brow.

   Did you know? In 1926 developers planned a new town on the cliff tops, and conservationists, Rudyard Kipling among them, had one month to raise £17,000 to buy the land instead.

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5. 05 Cirque de Gavarnie

   France42.695° N 0.009° W

   

   At the head of a quiet Pyrenean valley the mountains stop being slopes and become architecture. The Cirque de Gavarnie is a glacial amphitheatre carved into the limestone of the French–Spanish frontier: roughly 800 metres across at its floor, about three kilometres wide along the rim, and walled by cliffs that climb close to 1,500 metres above the visitor standing at their base. The walls rise in three great tiers, each separated by a ledge, so the whole face reads like the stepped seating of an arena turned inside out. Victor Hugo, who knew the place, called it at once a mountain and a rampart, and the comparison with a colosseum built by nature has followed it ever since.

   Did you know? In Gascon the cirque is called the ola de Gavarnia; the name Gavarnie is thought to come from gave, the local word for a mountain torrent.

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6. 06 Møns Klint

   Denmark54.964° N 12.552° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Møns Klint is a wall of white chalk cliffs along the eastern shore of the island of Møn, rising out of the Baltic in a line some six to seven kilometres long. The highest point, Dronningestolen, reaches about 128 metres, and in places the cliff face drops a sheer hundred metres or more to a narrow beach of flint and chalk. Above the edge grows a beech forest whose leaves take on an unusually pale, fresh green from the chalky soil, so that from the cliff top the view is of white chalk framed by green woods and open sea.

   Did you know? The individual coccoliths that make up the chalk measure only about 2 to 25 micrometres across, invisible to the naked eye.

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7. 07 Cliffs of Moher

   Ireland52.936° N 9.471° W

   

   The Cliffs of Moher are a 14 km wall of dark rock along the Atlantic coast of County Clare, at the south-western edge of the Burren. At their southern end, at Hag's Head, they rise 120 m above the sea; eight kilometres north, just beyond O'Brien's Tower, they reach 214 m before falling away again towards Doolin. The rock is a layer cake of shale and sandstone laid down more than 300 million years ago at the mouth of a great river delta, and the individual beds, some a few centimetres thick and some several metres, stand out as horizontal stripes along the whole face. The rock preserves fossil worm trails, burrows and ripple marks from that ancient seabed.

   Did you know? The cliffs played the Cliffs of Insanity in the 1987 film The Princess Bride.

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8. 08 Preikestolen

   Norway · 29.2 km from Stavanger58.987° N 6.187° E

   

   Preikestolen, the Pulpit Rock, is a block of granite with a nearly flat top about 25 by 25 metres that ends in a vertical drop of 604 metres to the Lysefjord. The shape is the work of the last Ice Age: roughly 10,000 years ago, when the edge of the glacier stood here, meltwater froze in the rock's joints and split off angular blocks that the ice then carried away, leaving the square-cut platform. A deep fissure runs along the plateau behind the edge; geologists who have studied it have concluded that the block is not in danger of falling in any foreseeable time. There are no railings, by design: the authorities have decided against fencing, and serious accidents remain very rare.

   Did you know? The cliff face rising from the Lysefjord was climbed for the first time only in June 2016, by the Norwegians Øyvind Salvesen and Jon Egil Auestad.

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9. 09 Beinisvørð

   Faroe Islands61.426° N 6.767° W

   

   Beinisvørð is the great triangular headland on the south-west coast of Suðuroy, the southernmost of the Faroe Islands. On the land side it rises as a steep green slope; on the ocean side it simply ends, in a vertical wall of dark basalt that drops about 469 metres into the North Atlantic. It is the highest sea cliff on Suðuroy and among the highest in the archipelago, and its sharp profile is visible from much of the island, from the villages of Lopra, Nes and Vágur, and on clear days from the deck of the ferry approaching from Tórshavn.

   Did you know? Beinisvørð is the second-highest sea cliff in the Faroe Islands; only Enniberg on Viðoy is taller.

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10. 10 Pointe du Raz

    France48.040° N 4.741° W

    

    At the far western end of Cap Sizun, the granite of Brittany narrows into a jagged blade of rock that runs out into the Atlantic. The Pointe du Raz rises about 72 metres above the sea and drops away in broken cliffs and scree towards the water, where waves break constantly over the reefs. Its Breton name is Beg ar Raz. Beyond the tip, a line of rocks and islets leads out towards the low island of Sein, and the whole scene is dominated by wind, spray and the restless current of the strait.

    Did you know? About a million people a year now come to the headland, double the roughly 500,000 counted in 1990.

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11. 11 Tōjinbō

    Japan · 20.4 km from Fukui36.238° N 136.125° E

    

    Tōjinbō is a kilometre of coast on the Sea of Japan where the land ends in giant stone pillars. The cliffs, about 30 metres high on average, are made of pyroxene andesite that cooled 12 to 13 million years ago, in the Miocene, and cracked as it cooled into tightly packed five- and six-sided columns. Winter storms from the sea have prised them apart into towers, gullies and deep chasms, so that the cliff face looks like a bundle of organ pipes lashed by the waves. Up close, the rock shows crystals of plagioclase, augite and enstatite. In 1935 the site was designated both a Natural Monument and a Place of Scenic Beauty of Japan.

    Did you know? Columnar andesite on this scale is said to occur in only three places in the world, which is why the cliffs are prized by geologists.

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12. 12 Malham Cove

    United Kingdom54.071° N 2.159° W

    

    A kilometre north of the village of Malham, the green floor of the valley ends abruptly at a curved wall of pale limestone some 80 metres high and more than 300 metres across. Malham Cove is the dry lip of a waterfall: at the close of the last Ice Age, more than 12,000 years ago, meltwater from the retreating glaciers poured over this edge in a vast cataract, and because the water cut hardest at the centre of the lip, the cliff was worn back into its amphitheatre shape. When the cove was described in 1779 by the antiquary Thomas West, he likened it to the weathered wall of an enormous castle.

    Did you know? When water poured over the lip on 6 December 2015, the 80-metre drop briefly counted as England's highest single-drop waterfall above ground.

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13. 13 Königsstuhl (Rügen)

    Königsstuhl

    Germany54.573° N 13.662° E

    

    The Königsstuhl, the "King's Chair", is the best-known of the chalk cliffs of Jasmund on the island of Rügen, a white crag rising 118 metres above the Baltic on the stretch of coast called the Stubbenkammer. From its small top the view falls almost straight down to the shingle and the pale turquoise water, and along the coast in both directions the cliffs continue in a broken white wall, crowned with the green of beech forest. The contrast of white rock, blue sea and fresh green leaves is the classic image of Rügen, and Caspar David Friedrich, the great painter of German Romanticism, came to these cliffs and drew on them for his work.

    Did you know? The granite steps up to the Königsstuhl's summit plateau, only about 200 square metres in area, cover what is believed to be a Bronze Age burial mound.

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14. 14 Acantilados de Los Gigantes

    Spain28.297° N 16.856° W

    

    Along the western coast of Tenerife, dark basalt walls drop straight into the Atlantic from heights of roughly 300 to more than 600 metres. The Acantilados de Los Gigantes, the Cliffs of the Giants, are the product of the sea eating into old volcanic rock, at the seaward edge of the Teno massif. The Guanches, the island's indigenous people, are said to have called them the Wall of Hell, and the name fits the way the rock shuts off the interior: only a handful of steep ravines, such as Barranco Seco, Juan López and Carrizales, cut through to the sea.

    Did you know? The cliffs are cut into the Teno massif, one of the oldest parts of Tenerife, an ancient shield volcano built roughly six million years ago.

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15. 15 Troll Wall

    Norway62.482° N 7.729° E

    

    The Troll Wall, Trollveggen in Norwegian, is the sheer north face of the Trolltindene massif in Romsdalen, in the county of Møre og Romsdal, and it is the tallest vertical rock face in Europe: about 1,100 m from the valley floor to its highest point. Near the top the summit ridge overhangs the base by roughly 50 m. The rock is gneiss, broken into enormous corners, overhanging roofs and crack systems and crowned by a row of spires and pinnacles, and it is notoriously loose; a series of large rockfalls in September 1998 changed the face and destroyed several classic routes.

    Did you know? Carl Boenish, a pioneer of modern BASE jumping, was killed jumping from the wall in 1984, one of eight BASE jumpers to die here.

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16. 16 Trango Towers

    Pakistan35.757° N 76.201° E

    

    The Trango Towers are a row of granite blades on a ridge above the Baltoro Glacier in the Karakoram, and for anyone walking towards K2 they are the first sight that seems to belong to another scale of mountain. The ridge runs north-west to south-east between the Trango and Dunge glaciers. At its heart stands Great Trango Tower, a massif with three summits, the main one at 6,286 metres; its east face drops about 1,340 metres of near-vertical and overhanging rock, among the tallest cliffs anywhere. Just north-west rises Trango Tower, better known as Nameless Tower, a smooth, almost symmetrical spike that lifts roughly a kilometre clear of the ridgeline, with the slimmer Trango Monk beside it and the Trango Pulpit and Trango Castle stepping down to the south.

    Did you know? The route Eternal Flame on Nameless Tower takes its name from a song by the Bangles, picked by its German first ascensionists in 1989.

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17. 17 Creux du Van

    Switzerland · 16.4 km from Neuchâtel46.937° N 6.728° E

    

    The Creux du Van is a vast natural amphitheatre carved into the crest of the Jura mountains: a horseshoe of pale limestone cliffs, about 160 metres high and around four kilometres long in total, enclosing a bowl more than a kilometre wide. From the rim the ground simply stops, and the view drops into the wooded hollow and runs on across the Swiss Plateau towards the Alps.

    Did you know? The name is usually traced to a Franco-Provençal dialect word for rock, so it means roughly a hollow ringed by rock rather than a hollow of the wind.

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18. 18 Nā Pali Coast

    Nā Pali Coast State Park

    United States · 36.3 km from Līhuʻe22.183° N 159.642° W

    

    On the north-west side of Kauaʻi the land ends in a wall of fluted green cliffs that rise as much as 4,000 feet straight out of the Pacific. Nā Pali means simply "the cliffs", and for about 16 miles, from Kēʻē Beach in the north to Polihale in the west, there is almost no other kind of coast: knife-edged ridges, hanging valleys and sheer amphitheatres separated by deep, narrow clefts that open onto small beaches. The state park protects 6,175 acres of this shoreline.

    Did you know? The natural arch at Honopū Valley stands about 90 feet tall, making it the tallest natural arch in Hawaii.

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19. 19 Scala dei Turchi

    Italy37.290° N 13.473° E

    

    The Scala dei Turchi is a cliff of pure white marl on the south coast of Sicily, at Realmonte just west of Porto Empedocle, and in strong sunlight it is almost too bright to look at. The rock has been sculpted by wind and waves into a series of broad, rounded ledges that descend toward the sea like a giant staircase, which is exactly what the name means: scala is a stair. Seen from the beaches on either side, the whole formation glows against the blue of the Mediterranean and the golden sand, and the line between white rock and blue water is as clean as a drawing.

    Did you know? The cliff's alternating pale bands record astronomical rhythms: shifts in Earth's orbit and axis altered Mediterranean climate, changing what settled on the seabed.

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20. 20 Glacier Point

    United States37.731° N 119.573° W

    

    Glacier Point stands on the south rim of Yosemite Valley at about 7,214 feet, roughly 3,200 feet straight above the floor of the valley near Curry Village. What makes it extraordinary is not height alone but alignment: from the railing the whole architecture of the upper valley opens at once. Half Dome rises directly across Tenaya Canyon, its sheared face turned toward you; to the right Liberty Cap stands above the paired steps of Vernal and Nevada Falls, and beyond them the granite swells toward Clouds Rest. Turn north and Yosemite Falls drops from the opposite wall, while the meadows and the thread of the Merced lie so far below that cars look like grains of rice.

    Did you know? The Firefall began by accident: hotel keeper James McCauley kicked his guests' campfire embers over the edge, and people watching from the valley paid his sons for repeat shows.

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21. 21 Flaming Cliffs

    Mongolia44.139° N 103.728° E

    

    In the low evening sun the sandstone walls of Bayanzag turn red and orange against the grey-green gravel plain of the Gobi, which is how the place earned its English name. The American palaeontologist Roy Chapman Andrews called them the Flaming Cliffs during his visits in the 1920s; Mongolians know the site as Bayanzag, "rich in saxaul", after the hardy desert shrub that grows nearby, or simply as Ulaan Ereg, the red cliffs. The escarpment lies in Ömnögovi Province in the south of Mongolia.

    Did you know? The first Velociraptor fossil known to science, a crushed but complete skull with a hand claw, was dug up here by Peter Kaisen on 11 August 1923.

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22. 22 Ponta da Piedade

    Portugal · 13.4 km from Portimão37.079° N 8.668° W

    

    Ponta da Piedade is a headland just south of Lagos, in the western Algarve, where the coast breaks up into a maze of golden cliffs, sea stacks, arches and grottoes. The rock is a soft sedimentary stone laid down on the sea floor during the Miocene, roughly 20 to 7 million years ago, when this whole area was still under water; fossils of large sharks' teeth, extinct fishes and corals have been found in it. Since the land rose, the Atlantic has been carving it, and the result is a coastline in which every cove and pinnacle seems to be undercut, pierced or about to topple.

    Did you know? Bronze Age objects have been found on the headland, and divers have located Roman remains offshore, including ruins, a column base and coins.

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23. 23 Hornelen

    Norway61.842° N 5.247° E

    

    Hornelen rises 860 metres from the edge of the sea on the coast of western Norway, a sheer wall of rock above the strait of Frøysjøen. The summit lies only about 500 metres horizontally from the water, so the mountain drops to the fjord in a single dramatic sweep, and it is often described as the highest sea cliff in Europe. From the strait below, its grey, layered face fills the sky; from the top, the view reaches over the islands and skerries of the outer coast and into the mouth of Nordfjord.

    Did you know? The sandstone of Hornelen belongs to the Hornelen Basin, which holds an estimated 25 km of stacked sedimentary layers, an extraordinary thickness for a basin of about 1,100 square kilometres.

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24. 24 Slieve League

    Ireland54.638° N 8.681° W

    

    Slieve League, Sliabh Liag in Irish, is a mountain on the south-west coast of County Donegal whose seaward side falls to the Atlantic in some of the highest sea cliffs in Europe. The summit stands at 601 metres, and from the Bunglass viewpoint the cliff face below it rises over 600 metres from the water, streaked with reds, ochres and greens where the rock, heather and grass change. On a clear day the view runs across Donegal Bay to the Sligo mountains.

    Did you know? Despite their fame, these are only the second-highest sea cliffs in Ireland; the cliffs of Croaghaun on Achill Island are taller still.

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25. 25 Látrabjarg

    Iceland65.497° N 24.397° W

    

    Látrabjarg is the western edge of Iceland and, by most counts, of Europe: a wall of cliffs about 14 km long at the tip of the Westfjords, rising in places to around 440 metres straight out of the North Atlantic. At its western end the headland of Bjargtangar, with its small lighthouse, is the country's westernmost point. Every ledge, crack and grassy slope on its face is used by nesting birds, which is why it is counted among the largest seabird cliffs in Europe.

    Did you know? When the Dhoon rescue was re-enacted for a documentary a year later, another trawler, the Sargon, ran aground nearby, and its real rescue was filmed for the 1949 picture.

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26. 26 Cape Stolbchaty

    Russia44.024° N 145.676° E

    

    On the coast of Kunashir, the southernmost large island of the Kuril chain, a headland called Stolbchaty – "the columnar cape" – shows what happens when lava cools slowly and evenly. The cliffs are built from thousands of regular stone prisms, mostly four-, five- and six-sided, packed together like a bundle of pencils and reaching up to about 50 metres in height. Individual columns are up to half a metre across. The comparison everyone reaches for is the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, but Stolbchaty is a wall rather than a causeway: the columns rise as sheer cliffs straight from the surf, with no town in sight.

    Did you know? The cape lies on Kunashir's western shore, so its columns face the Sea of Okhotsk.

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27. 27 Waterpocket Fold

    United States38.022° N 111.121° W

    

    The Waterpocket Fold is a wrinkle in the Earth's crust nearly 160 kilometres long, running south-southeast across south-central Utah from the desert near Fruita to the Colorado River at Lake Powell. Geologists call it a monocline: a single step-like bend where the rock layers on the west side have been lifted more than 7,000 feet above the same layers on the east. It formed between 50 and 70 million years ago, when the Laramide orogeny, the mountain-building episode that raised the Rockies, reactivated an old fault buried far below, and the sandstones above it draped over the rising block like a tablecloth over a step.

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28. 28 Cabo Girão

    Portugal · 11.7 km from Funchal32.656° N 17.004° W

    

    Cabo Girão is a sheer sea cliff on the south coast of Madeira, one of the highest in Europe, dropping around 580 metres from the headland to the Atlantic. Like the rest of the island it is volcanic, built up in the Miocene. The name is usually explained as the "cape of the turn": tradition holds that João Gonçalves Zarco, exploring the coast in the early fifteenth century, turned back here and anchored in the bay that became Câmara de Lobos.

    Did you know? For centuries stone was quarried at the foot of the cliff and used in Funchal Cathedral, the Santa Clara convent and the São Lourenço Palace.

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29. 29 Vermilion Cliffs

    United States · 31.3 km from Kanab36.925° N 112.842° W

    

    The Vermilion Cliffs are one of the long, stepped escarpments that make the Colorado Plateau look like a staircase built for giants. In the Grand Staircase — the sequence of cliff bands rising northward from the Grand Canyon towards Bryce — they form the second step, a wall of red rock that runs westward from the Page area along the Arizona–Utah border. Their colour is the point: iron oxide stains the sandstone every shade from brick to rose, with streaks of bluish grey where manganese comes through, and at sunrise or sunset the whole face seems lit from within.

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30. 30 World's End, Horton Plains

    Sri Lanka · 36 km from Badulla6.783° N 80.793° E

    

    World's End is the place where the high grassland of Horton Plains simply stops. The plateau, lying at roughly 2,000 metres in Sri Lanka's central highlands, ends at its southern edge in a sheer escarpment that falls about 870 metres to the tea country and lowlands below. On a clear morning the view runs across ridges and valleys towards the south coast; later in the day it often disappears altogether, as cloud rises up the wall and leaves walkers staring into white. That rapid change is part of the experience — the mist usually wins by late morning, so the walk is traditionally started soon after dawn.

    Did you know? The plateau's old Sinhala name, Maha Eliya Thenna, means 'great open plain'; the British renamed it after Sir Robert Wilmot-Horton, governor of Ceylon from 1831 to 1837.

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