The Most Spectacular Sea Stacks in the World
23 places in 16 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular sea stacks in the world are The Twelve Apostles (Australia), Hvítserkur (Iceland) and Risin og Kellingin (Faroe Islands). The list covers 23 sea stacks in 16 countries. Australia has the most, with 3. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A sea stack is a piece of coastline the sea has not finished with: a column of rock left standing offshore after waves have cut through the headland it once belonged to. What makes one spectacular is its silhouette, a lone pillar, a needle, a shape that looks like an animal or a figure, and the drama of its setting, with surf breaking at its base and seabirds on its ledges. Many have legends attached, because they look so much like something that was once alive.
Risin og Kellingin off the Faroe Islands are the giant and the witch of local legend, turned to stone at dawn. The Twelve Apostles rise from the Southern Ocean along Australia's Great Ocean Road, and Reynisdrangar, basalt columns near Vík in Iceland, are told to be trolls caught by daylight. In Britain, the Old Man of Hoy stands tall above Orkney's cliffs, while the white chalk of Old Harry Rocks and the Needles marks the south coast. In Thailand, Ko Tapu rises from the waters of Phang Nga Bay.
The stacks here were chosen for how they look and arranged in order of beauty. Every one has its own text, a photograph with its author named and a point on the map, and the collection can also be explored country by country.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Twelve Apostles | Stack | Australia | |
| 2 | Hvítserkur | Stack | Iceland | |
| 3 | Risin og Kellingin | Stack | Faroe Islands | |
| 4 | Haystack Rock | Stack | United States | |
| 5 | The Needles | Stack | United Kingdom | |
| 6 | Reynisdrangar | Stack | Iceland | |
| 7 | Old Man of Hoy | Stack | United Kingdom | |
| 8 | Old Harry Rocks | Stack | United Kingdom | |
| 9 | Ball's Pyramid | Stack | Australia | ✓ |
| 10 | Petra tou Romiou | Stack | Cyprus | |
| 11 | Nugget Point | Stack | New Zealand | |
| 12 | Kicker Rock (León Dormido) | Stack | Ecuador | |
| 13 | Percé Rock | Stack | Canada | |
| 14 | Diamond Rock | Stack | Martinique | |
| 15 | Drangarnir | Stack | Faroe Islands | |
| 16 | Dún Briste | Stack | Ireland | |
| 17 | Langhammars | Stack | Sweden | |
| 18 | Hole-in-the-Wall, Eastern Cape | Natural arch | South Africa | |
| 19 | Ko Tapu (James Bond Island) | Stack | Thailand | |
| 20 | Totem Pole, Tasmania | Stack | Australia | |
| 21 | Aiguilles de Port-Coton, Belle-Île | Stack | France | |
| 22 | Aiguille d'Étretat | Stack | France | |
| 23 | Hashigui-iwa | Stack | Japan |
01 The Twelve Apostles
Australia38.641° S 143.049° E
Leonard Koh · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Twelve Apostles are a scatter of limestone stacks standing in the surf of the Southern Ocean off the coast of Port Campbell National Park, in south-western Victoria. Rising up to about 50 metres, they are cut from soft limestone laid down on the sea floor in the Middle to Late Miocene, roughly 15 to 5 million years ago, and their horizontal bands of cream, buff and ochre record those layers of sediment. Behind them the mainland ends in cliffs of the same stone, and the whole coast is being slowly dismantled by the swell.
Did you know? Five drowned stacks about 10 metres tall stand on the seabed some 6 km offshore, relics of a coastline flooded as seas rose after the last ice age.
02 Hvítserkur
Iceland65.606° N 20.635° W
Image by susnpics from Pixabay 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.
03 Risin og Kellingin
Faroe Islands · 35.8 km from Tórshavn62.323° N 7.104° W
Sanshiro KUBOTA from London, UK · CC BY 2.0 Off the northern tip of Eysturoy, where the sound between Eysturoy and Streymoy opens to the North Atlantic, two dark sea stacks rise straight out of the swell: Risin og Kellingin, the Giant and the Witch. The Giant, about 71 metres high, stands further out; the Witch, a little lower at 68 to 69 metres, is the sharper spire closer to the cliffs, and she stands on two legs, with daylight showing through the gap between them. On a calm day a clear channel of water runs between the pair. Seen from the shore with the headland of Eiðiskollur behind them, they are one of the most recognisable silhouettes of the Faroe Islands, and they appeared on a Faroese stamp in 1996.
Did you know? Both stacks are basalt pillars, standing about two kilometres north of Eiði beneath sea cliffs that rise to around 350 metres.
04 Haystack Rock
United States · 35.4 km from Astoria45.884° N 123.968° W
Image by danielamorescalchi from Pixabay Haystack Rock rises 235 feet (about 72 metres) straight from the sand of Cannon Beach, a dark monolith of basalt on the Oregon coast, with three smaller spires, the Needles, standing just to the south. At low tide the sea draws back and it is possible to walk to its base, where the rock is ringed by tide pools full of sea stars, anemones, crabs, chitons and sea slugs. At high tide it is an island again, and on grey days, with fog blowing through, it can look like the prow of an enormous ship.
Did you know? In July 2023 a cougar was documented climbing Haystack Rock for the first time, apparently crossing the sand at low tide.
05 The Needles
United Kingdom · 29.6 km from Southampton50.663° N 1.589° W
Image by JStephenArts from Pixabay 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.
06 Reynisdrangar
Iceland63.400° N 19.032° W
Jakub Fryš · CC BY-SA 4.0 Reynisdrangar are a cluster of dark basalt sea stacks standing off the southern tip of Reynisfjall, the steep headland just west of Vík í Mýrdal on Iceland's south coast. The tallest rises some 66 metres straight out of the Atlantic, and the group stands in the surf like a line of jagged spires, often wreathed in spray and circling seabirds. The cliffs of Reynisfjall above them are home to puffins, guillemots and fulmars, and seals are sometimes seen offshore.
Did you know? The individual stacks have names: Landdrangur is the largest, alongside Langhamar (also called Langsamur), Skessudrangur and the small Steðji.
07 Old Man of Hoy
United Kingdom · 29.2 km from Kirkwall58.886° N 3.432° W
Stephen Temple from Cape Town, South Africa · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Old Man of Hoy is a 137 m tower of red sandstone standing alone off the west coast of Hoy in Orkney, one of the tallest sea stacks in Britain. It rises from a plinth of dark basalt, separated from the cliffs by a gap about 60 m wide, with sheer, ledged sides and a summit only a few metres across. The rock is layered — soft, pebbly sandstone alternating with harder flagstone — which gives the stack its stepped, slabby look and explains why it is wearing away so fast.
Did you know? In 2013 Red Széll, with only about five per cent of his sight, became the first blind person to climb the stack.
08 Old Harry Rocks
United Kingdom · 9.9 km from Bournemouth50.642° N 1.924° W
Image by diego_torres from Pixabay At Handfast Point, where the chalk downs of Purbeck end abruptly in the sea, a line of white stacks stands off the cliff: Old Harry Rocks. They mark the eastern end of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site, and on clear days you can see across the water to the Needles on the Isle of Wight, which are part of the same chalk band. Only a few thousand years ago the two were joined by a ridge of chalk; the sea broke through, leaving Purbeck and the Isle of Wight as two ends of a vanished bridge.
Did you know? Old Harry Rocks form the eastern end of the Jurassic Coast, a 95-mile World Heritage shoreline whose rocks record some 185 million years of Earth history.
09 Ball's Pyramid
Australia31.754° S 159.252° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
PotMart186 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ball's Pyramid is the eroded core of a volcano standing alone in the Tasman Sea, a blade of dark basalt that rises 572 metres straight out of the water yet is only about 300 metres wide at its base. Seen side-on from a boat it looks almost impossibly thin, a jagged spire with a notched crest and sheer grey flanks streaked white by seabirds; seen end-on it becomes a steep pyramid. It is regarded as the tallest volcanic stack in the world, the remnant of a shield volcano that formed some 6.4 million years ago and has since been planed away by the ocean until only the hardest plug remains.
Did you know? Although only about 300 metres wide, the pyramid is some 1,100 metres long, which is why it looks so different side-on and end-on.
10 Petra tou Romiou
Πέτρα του Ρωμιού
Cyprus · 21.4 km from Paphos34.664° N 32.627° E
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay A pale limestone stack rises out of the surf a short way off a pebble beach on the south-west coast of Cyprus, with a scatter of smaller rocks around it and the swell breaking white against all of them. It is a modest landform by size, but few rocks in the Mediterranean carry this much story. Petra tou Romiou is better known as Aphrodite's Rock: by long tradition, this is where the goddess of love came ashore from the sea foam.
Did you know? The white stone of the rock is recrystallised reef limestone that grew around ancient volcanic islands, and fossils in the area date these rocks to roughly 210 million years ago.
11 Nugget Point
New Zealand46.447° S 169.814° E
Noel Jhinku, aka Njhinku · CC BY 2.5 At the northern edge of the Catlins, a narrow ridge of land runs out into the Pacific and ends in a white lighthouse on a cliff top, with a scatter of dark rock stacks trailing into the sea beyond it. These islets are the "nuggets" that give the headland its English name; in Māori it is Tokatā. Seen from the end of the track, where the ground falls away on both sides, the stacks line up one behind another into the swell, a view that changes with every shift of light and weather off the open sea.
Did you know? The nuggets are Triassic volcanic sandstone and siltstone whose layers, laid down flat, have been tilted until they stand almost vertical.
12 Kicker Rock (León Dormido)
Roca León Dormido
Ecuador · 16.3 km from Puerto Baquerizo Moreno0.777° S 89.519° W
Xxchangwoo0120xx · CC BY-SA 3.0 León Dormido — "sleeping lion" — is a pair of sheer rock walls rising straight out of the Pacific off the coast of San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos. English-speaking sailors called it Kicker Rock, because seen from one side the silhouette resembles a boot; from the other, the long, low profile does look like a lion, or a sea lion, lying asleep on the water. The cliffs rise some 140–150 metres above the sea, pale, streaked and vertical, and they stand miles from any other land, which makes them one of the most arresting sights in the archipelago.
Did you know? Charles Darwin already used the English name in 1844, describing Kicker Rock in his geology of the Beagle voyage as about 400 feet high and made of compact tuff.
13 Percé Rock
Perce Rock
Canada48.524° N 64.199° W
Image by nightelves from Pixabay Seen from the shore at Percé, the rock looks less like a piece of geology than a vessel: a long, sheer-sided slab of limestone lying in the Gulf of St. Lawrence with its bow to the sea, often compared to a ship under sail. It is about 433 metres long, 90 metres wide and 88 metres high at its tallest point, and at its seaward end the waves have bored straight through it, leaving an arch roughly 15 metres high. Samuel de Champlain gave it the name Percé, "pierced", in the early 1600s, and the name has stuck to the rock, the bay and the village that grew up facing it.
Did you know? The rock is a single block estimated at about 5 million tonnes; at its current rate of erosion it would vanish in some 16,000 years.
14 Diamond Rock
Rocher du Diamant
Martinique · 19 km from Fort-de-France14.443° N 61.039° W
Apmarles · CC BY 3.0 Diamond Rock is a sheer, 175-metre block of basalt rising straight out of the Caribbean off the south-west coast of Martinique, so steep-sided that from the shore it looks like a cut gem set on the water. It is a volcanic plug, the hardened core of a vent left behind by the intense volcanic activity that shaped this part of the Lesser Antilles about a million years ago, and it covers just over five hectares. The rock lies about two kilometres from Pointe du Diamant, south of the long beach of Grande Anse du Diamant, at the northern end of the Saint Lucia Channel.
Did you know? The British first occupied the rock in late 1803 from HMS Centaur, and Hood formally entered it in the navy's books as a sloop of war on 7 February 1804.
15 Drangarnir
Faroe Islands · 31.5 km from Tórshavn62.075° N 7.414° W
Erik Christensen , Porkeri. · CC BY-SA 3.0 Drangarnir is a pair of sea stacks rising from the water off the west coast of Vágar in the Faroe Islands, framed on one side by the cliffs of Vágar and on the other by the jagged islet of Tindhólmur. The larger stack, Stóri Drangur, is pierced at its base by a great sea arch, so that the ocean swell runs straight through it; the smaller, Lítli Drangur, stands beside it like a broken tower. Together they reach about 70 metres in height, and with the saw-toothed ridge of Tindhólmur behind them they form one of the most recognisable seascapes of the North Atlantic.
Did you know? In Faroese the names are plain descriptions: Drangarnir means simply "the sea stacks", Stóri Drangur "the large stack" and Lítli Drangur "the small stack".
16 Dún Briste
Dun Briste
Ireland54.328° N 9.348° W
Bargode · CC BY-SA 4.0 Dún Briste, the "broken fort", is a sea stack standing about 200 metres off the tip of Downpatrick Head on the north coast of County Mayo. It rises some 45 metres from the Atlantic, is about 63 metres long and 23 metres wide, and its flanks show, with textbook clarity, the horizontal bands of the rock it is made of: layers of limestone, sandstone and shale laid down on a sea floor in the Carboniferous period, roughly 350 million years ago. Seen from the clifftop the strata of the stack line up exactly with those of the headland opposite, so the eye can reassemble the missing bridge of rock that once joined them.
Did you know? The blowhole beside the stack, Poll na Seantainne, is roughly 30 metres deep and connects to the sea through an underground channel.
17 Langhammars
Langhammars naturreservat
Sweden57.983° N 19.167° E
ArildV · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the north-west tip of Fårö, the island at the top of Gotland, the shore is guarded by a crowd of grey stone figures. These are rauks – free-standing limestone pillars carved by the sea – and at Langhammars they stand in groups on a beach of rounded shingle, some squat and broken, others tall and strangely human. Two of them are often likened to the profiles of a man and a woman.
Did you know? Until the 1990s Fårö and northern Gotland were off-limits to foreigners because of a military installation, enforced by large multilingual road signs.
18 Hole-in-the-Wall, Eastern Cape
South Africa32.041° S 29.109° E
Vincentvanoosten · CC0 On the Wild Coast of South Africa's Eastern Cape, a short way south of the village of Coffee Bay, a great slab of rock stands detached from the mainland just off the beach, and straight through its middle runs an opening big enough to sail a small boat through. This is Hole-in-the-Wall. The rock is a wall of layered sandstone and shale, its flat top green with grass, and the hole sits right where the Mpako River reaches the sea. Rather than surf alone, it is the river, pushing through the barrier for countless years, that is credited with wearing the passage open.
Did you know? Survivors of the Portuguese ship Santo Alberto, wrecked nearby in 1593, walked overland under Nuno Velho all the way to what is now Maputo.
19 Ko Tapu (James Bond Island)
Thailand · 19.8 km from Phang Nga8.275° N 98.501° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 3.0 Ko Ta Pu is a single spike of limestone standing in the shallow green water of Phang Nga Bay, off the west coast of southern Thailand. It is only about 20 metres tall, but its shape is what makes it unforgettable: roughly four metres across at the waterline and swelling to about eight near the top, it looks like a nail driven into the seabed — which is one reading of its Thai name, the other being "crab's eye". The tides have gnawed its foot into a narrow waist, so the whole column seems to balance on a point.
Did you know? According to legend, a fisherman who kept netting a nail instead of fish cut it in two with his sword, and one half leapt into the sea as Ko Tapu.
20 Totem Pole, Tasmania
Totem Pole
Australia43.139° S 148.006° E
Ed Dunens · CC BY 2.0 The Totem Pole is a single shaft of dolerite about 65 metres tall and only a few metres across, rising straight out of the Southern Ocean beside the cliffs of Cape Hauy on Tasmania's Tasman Peninsula. It is a remarkably slender stack, and it looks almost impossibly fragile against the swell that breaks around its base. Next to it stands a second stack, the Candlestick.
Did you know? The first free ascent was made by Doug McConnell and Dean Rollins; the free route is graded 24 on the Australian scale and climbed in two pitches.
21 Aiguilles de Port-Coton, Belle-Île
Aiguilles de Port-Coton
France47.306° N 3.240° W
Rivière, Henri (1864-1951). Dessinateur · Public domain On the wild Atlantic coast of Belle-Île, the largest island off Brittany, a cluster of rock needles stands in the sea at the mouth of a narrow inlet called Port-Coton. Under a heavy swell the waves burst white against their bases, and the foam that hangs over the water like a veil of cotton is said to have given the place its name. The stacks extend the southern ridge of the cove, whose tiny beach of coarse sand cannot be reached from land.
Did you know? Monet painted no fewer than 39 works during his roughly ten-week stay on Belle-Île in 1886.
22 Aiguille d'Étretat
France · 23.4 km from Le Havre49.707° N 0.193° E
Image by baccus7 from Pixabay The Aiguille – the Needle – is a slender pyramid of white chalk standing alone in the sea just off the Falaise d'Aval at Étretat, some 55 metres high and framed from most viewpoints by the great arch of the Porte d'Aval beside it. The two belong to the same story. Chalk cliffs on this coast are cut back by the sea and, here, also by water moving through the rock: a cave becomes an arch, the arch collapses, and one leg is left standing as a stack. The Needle is the stage that comes after an arch; offshore of the opposite cliff, the Falaise d'Amont, low stumps of rock show the stage after that, when only the hardened base of a former stack survives. Few places lay out the whole life cycle of a sea arch so legibly in a single view.
Did you know? Astronomers measuring the Needle in 2012 put its height at 54.5 metres, far short of the eighty-plus metres claimed in Leblanc's novel.
23 Hashigui-iwa
Japan33.484° N 135.797° E
663highland · CC BY-SA 4.0 Hashigui-iwa is a line of rock pillars marching out to sea. Some forty spires and towers of pale stone, large and small, stand in single file for about 850 metres from the shore at Kushimoto, near the southern tip of the Kii Peninsula, towards the island of Kii-Ōshima. Their name means "bridge-pile rocks": seen along the coast, they look like the piers of a bridge whose deck was never laid.
Did you know? Some of the boulders strewn around the pillars are too large to have been moved even by the 1707 Hōei tsunami, pointing to still bigger prehistoric tsunamis on this coast.
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 is the most spectacular sea stack in the world?
- On our list, The Twelve Apostles (Australia) ranks first, followed by Hvítserkur (Iceland) and Risin og Kellingin (Faroe Islands).
- How are sea stacks formed?
- Waves attack weak points in a headland, carving caves that can meet and become an arch. When the top of the arch collapses, the seaward part is left standing as a stack, which the sea eventually wears down into a stump.
- What is the tallest sea stack in the world?
- Ball's Pyramid, the eroded remnant of a volcano near Lord Howe Island in Australia, is generally regarded as the tallest sea stack, rising about 560 metres from the ocean.
- Which country has the most sea stacks?
- In our collection, the most come from Australia (3), the United Kingdom (3) and the Faroe Islands (2).
- How many sea stacks are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 23 sea stacks in 16 countries. Australia has the most, with 3.