The UNESCO Sites of Exceptional Natural Beauty in the World

77 places in 44 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Victoria Falls

   Zambia · 2 km from Victoria Falls17.925° S 25.858° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The Zambezi reaches Victoria Falls as a broad, lazy river threaded with wooded islands, then drops in one sheer step into a crack in the basalt plateau. The curtain is about 1,708 metres wide and up to 108 metres deep at the centre. By combined width and height, that makes it the largest single sheet of falling water on Earth. The Lozi name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, is usually translated as "the smoke that thunders". The name is literal: at high water the spray column climbs several hundred metres and can be seen from tens of kilometres away. The river here is the border, with Zambia on the north and east bank and Zimbabwe on the south.

   Did you know? The falls split the river's fish: about 84 species live in the Zambezi above them but only 39 below, so the drop works as a natural barrier.

   More about Victoria Falls →

2. 02 Yellowstone National Park

   United States44.600° N 110.500° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty
   • biosphere reserve

   

   On 1 March 1872, Ulysses S. Grant signed a piece of legislation that had no real precedent anywhere in the world: setting aside more than two million acres of Wyoming and Montana territory not for a king, a church, or a private estate, but simply to be left alone. Yellowstone wasn't just America's first national park — it was the first national park, period, the model every other country's park system has copied since.

   Did you know? Two-thirds of all the world's geysers are in Yellowstone, and at least 1,283 have erupted there, with around 465 active in a typical year.

   More about Yellowstone National Park →

3. 03 Lake Baikal

   Russia53.303° N 108.005° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Baikal holds roughly a fifth of all the unfrozen fresh water on Earth's surface — more than all five of North America's Great Lakes combined — despite a surface area that's a fraction of theirs, because the lake plunges to a maximum depth of about 1,642 metres, deeper than almost any point on the ocean floor within a thousand kilometres of shore. It's also old in a way lakes almost never get to be: most lakes on the planet are geologically short-lived, filling with sediment within tens of thousands of years, but Baikal sits in an active continental rift that keeps deepening it faster than it can silt up, and it's been open water for an estimated 25 million years.

   Did you know? About 330 rivers flow into Baikal, yet only one, the Angara, flows out of it.

   More about Lake Baikal →

4. 04 Ngorongoro Conservation Area

   Tanzania · 8 km from Ngorongoro3.210° S 35.460° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Ngorongoro Crater is the centrepiece of this protected area in northern Tanzania. It is a volcanic caldera about 610 metres deep with a floor of roughly 260 square kilometres, formed two to three million years ago when a large volcano collapsed on itself. It is often described as the world's largest intact, unflooded caldera. The crater floor lies at about 1,800 metres. Streams from the forested rim feed a seasonal soda lake, Makat or Magadi, along with the Lerai fever-tree forest and the swamp around Ngoitokitok Spring. The Maasai name is said to imitate the sound of a cowbell.

   Did you know? Before it collapsed, the Ngorongoro volcano may have stood between 4,500 and 5,800 metres high, rivalling Kilimanjaro.

   More about Ngorongoro Conservation Area →

5. 05 Serengeti National Park

   Tanzania2.400° S 34.600° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The Serengeti is the stage for the largest animal migration on land: roughly 1.5 million wildebeest, a quarter of a million zebra and hundreds of thousands of Thomson's gazelle moving in a yearly circuit between northern Tanzania and Kenya's Maasai Mara. The park itself covers nearly 15,000 square kilometres and was created in 1940; its boundaries were fixed in 1951, and in 1959 the eastern highlands were split off as the Ngorongoro Conservation Area so that the Maasai, excluded from the park, could keep grazing there. Bernhard and Michael Grzimek's book and film Serengeti Shall Not Die made it famous the same year, and UNESCO listed it in 1981.

   Did you know? The migration follows a circuit of roughly 800 km, and around 250,000 wildebeest and 30,000 zebras die along the way each year from predators, drowning, thirst and disease.

   More about Serengeti National Park →

6. 06 Ha Long Bay

   Vietnam · 12.4 km from Hạ Long20.900° N 107.200° E

   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Nearly two thousand limestone islets rise straight out of the green water of Ha Long Bay, in Vietnam's far north-east, spread over some 1,550 square kilometres of the Gulf of Tonkin. Most are uninhabited and many are little more than sheer-sided pillars capped with jungle, their bases undercut by the sea into overhangs and notches. Seen from a boat, they overlap in receding ranks that grow paler with every layer of haze, which is exactly the effect that has made the bay one of the most painted and photographed seascapes in Asia.

   Did you know? Ti Top Island was renamed in 1962 after the Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, who visited it with Ho Chi Minh; a statue of Titov was added in 2015.

   More about Ha Long Bay →

7. 07 Great Barrier Reef

   Australia · 37.6 km from Port Douglas16.400° S 145.800° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   At around 344,400 square kilometers and roughly 2,300 km long, the Great Barrier Reef isn't one reef so much as some 3,000 individual reefs and hundreds of islands strung together — a footprint about the size of Italy or Japan, and by most measures the largest living structure ever built by living organisms, coral included. It's living habitat for well over a thousand fish species, hundreds of types of hard and soft coral, and dozens of species of whales, dolphins, and sea turtles moving through it at different times of year.

   Did you know? On 11 June 1770 James Cook's ship Endeavour ran aground on the reef, and repairing her took about seven weeks.

   More about Great Barrier Reef →

8. 08 Aletsch Glacier

   Aletschgletscher

   Switzerland46.442° N 8.077° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   The Great Aletsch Glacier is the largest glacier in the Alps: about 23 km long, covering some 80 square kilometres, and holding around 15 cubic kilometres of ice. It is born at Konkordiaplatz, a wide basin high in the Bernese Alps where four ice streams meet, fed from the flanks of the Jungfrau, the Mönch, the Fiescherhorn and the Aletschhorn. Here the ice is more than 900 metres thick. From Konkordiaplatz the glacier flows south-east at around 180 metres a year, then bends in a long curve towards the Rhône valley, before ending far below the tree line in the gorge of the Massa river.

   Did you know? In 1678 the villagers of Fiesch and Fieschertal vowed to pray against the advancing glacier; in 2010 the Vatican approved changing the prayer to ask for its survival.

   More about Aletsch Glacier →

9. 09 Lake Ohrid

   North Macedonia · 15.5 km from Pogradec41.033° N 20.717° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Lake Ohrid is old in a way few lakes are. Most bodies of water fill with sediment and disappear within tens of thousands of years; Ohrid sits in a tectonic rift in the mountains between North Macedonia and Albania that began opening some millions of years ago, and its oldest sediments may date back three to five million years. It survives because it is deep — up to 288 m, the deepest lake in the Balkans — because the ground beneath it is still sinking, and because much of its water arrives not by muddy rivers but through underground karst channels from Lake Prespa, 10 km away and some 150 m higher, emerging as springs along the eastern shore and beneath the surface.

   Did you know? In 2010 NASA gave Lake Ohrid's name to one of the lakes on Saturn's moon Titan.

   More about Lake Ohrid →

10. 10 Kakadu National Park

    Australia13.005° S 132.520° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Kakadu, in the Top End of Australia's Northern Territory, is the country's largest national park after one desert reserve: about 19,800 square kilometres, roughly the size of Wales, running from tidal rivers on the coast to the sheer sandstone wall of the Arnhem Land escarpment. Most of the land belongs to its Aboriginal traditional owners, who manage it jointly with Parks Australia; their ancestors have lived here for tens of thousands of years, and archaeological sites in the region are among the oldest in Australia. UNESCO listed Kakadu in stages between 1981 and 1992 for both its natural and its cultural values.

    More about Kakadu National Park →

11. 11 Tassili n'Ajjer

    Algeria25.667° N 9.000° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Tassili n'Ajjer — "plateau of rivers" in Berber — is a sandstone upland of more than 72,000 square kilometres in south-eastern Algeria, near the borders with Libya and Niger, and it holds one of the densest concentrations of prehistoric rock art on Earth. Some 15,000 paintings and engravings have been recorded in its shelters and gorges. UNESCO listed it in 1982 for both its art and its geology, and it is also a national park and biosphere reserve.

    Did you know? Optically stimulated luminescence dating suggests most of the plateau's rock art was made in the ninth and tenth millennia before the present.

    More about Tassili n'Ajjer →

12. 12 Lake Nakuru

    Kenya · 9.7 km from Nakuru0.367° S 36.083° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    For most of the twentieth century, Lake Nakuru was described by ornithologists in almost hyperbolic terms — one famous account called the sight of its flamingo flocks "the greatest bird spectacle on Earth," with counts at times estimated well over a million birds packed onto a single shallow lake. That reputation was built on genuine chemistry: Nakuru is a soda lake, alkaline enough that it grows dense blooms of blue-green algae, and lesser flamingos filter that algae out of the water in numbers few other places on the planet can match.

    Did you know? About 10,000 years ago Nakuru, Elementaita and Bogoria formed a single deep freshwater lake, which later dried into three separate alkaline remnants.

    More about Lake Nakuru →

13. 13 Tiger Leaping Gorge

    People's Republic of China27.230° N 100.140° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The Jinsha River — the upper Yangtze, before it earns that name downstream — has cut a 15-kilometer gorge between the Yulong and Haba snow-capped ranges so deep that the drop from the highest peaks to the river below runs to nearly 3,800 meters, making it one of the deepest canyons on the planet, whatever the exact ranking on any given list.

    Did you know? The river squeezes between Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, 5,596 m high, and Haba Snow Mountain, 5,396 m, under cliffs rising some 2,000 m.

    More about Tiger Leaping Gorge →

14. 14 Valley of Flowers National Park

    India30.730° N 79.618° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty
    • biosphere reserve

    

    For a few weeks each summer, a high hanging valley in the Garhwal Himalaya turns into a sweep of alpine flowers. The Valley of Flowers lies at around 3,350 to 3,650 metres in the upper basin of the Pushpawati river in Uttarakhand, about eight kilometres long and two wide, below peaks that rise to Gauri Parbat at 6,719 metres. It is snowbound for most of the year and opens to visitors only in the warm season, roughly June to October.

    Did you know? A 1997 survey by the Wildlife Institute of India found five plant species in the valley that were new to science.

    More about Valley of Flowers National Park →

15. 15 Gros Morne National Park

    Canada49.689° N 57.738° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Gros Morne National Park on the west coast of Newfoundland is one of the few places on Earth where you can walk on the planet's mantle. Its UNESCO listing in 1987 recognised a textbook of plate tectonics laid bare: slabs of ancient ocean floor and deep mantle rock pushed up onto the edge of the continent when an ocean closed hundreds of millions of years ago. Around them lie fjords, sea cliffs, bogs and the flat-topped Long Range Mountains, remnants of a range formed more than a billion years ago. The park covers about 1,805 square kilometres and takes its name from its second-highest peak, Gros Morne, at 806 metres.

    Did you know? Pissing Mare Falls plunges about 343 metres into Western Brook Pond, with an unbroken drop of some 250 metres, and is considered the highest waterfall in eastern North America.

    More about Gros Morne National Park →

16. 16 Huanglong

    People's Republic of China32.741° N 103.831° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Huanglong, the Yellow Dragon, is a high valley in the Minshan range of northern Sichuan where mineral-rich water has built one of the finest travertine landscapes on Earth. Snowmelt and springs saturated with calcium carbonate run down the valley floor and deposit it as they flow, forming a golden, scaly ribbon of rimmed terraces, pools and frozen-looking cascades. Seen from above, the 3.6-kilometre band of travertine really does look like a yellow dragon winding down through the forest, and the name has stuck for centuries.

    Did you know? The Five-Colour Pools at the head of the valley number 693 separate basins, the largest single group in Huanglong.

    More about Huanglong →

17. 17 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.

    More about Meteora →

18. 18 Wulingyuan

    People's Republic of China29.346° N 110.467° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Wulingyuan is a forest of stone. More than 3,000 pillars and peaks of quartz sandstone rise from the valleys of north-western Hunan, many of them over 200 metres tall. Between them run gorges, streams, pools and waterfalls. The landscape is so improbable that it looks invented; UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1992.

    Did you know? In January 2010 one of the pillars, the Southern Sky Column, was officially renamed Avatar Hallelujah Mountain after the film's floating mountains.

    More about Wulingyuan →

19. 19 Okavango Delta

    Botswana19.400° S 22.900° E

    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The Okavango is a river that never reaches the sea. Rising in the highlands of Angola, it flows south-east into Botswana and then simply spreads out and disappears into the sands of the Kalahari, forming a vast inland delta of channels, lagoons, reed beds and islands. Its extent swings between roughly 6,000 and 15,000 square kilometres through the year, and almost all of the water that arrives – well over 95 per cent – ends up evaporating or being drawn up by plants rather than flowing onwards. When UNESCO inscribed it in 2014, it became the thousandth site on the World Heritage List.

    Did you know? Across some 15,000 square kilometres the surface of the delta varies in height by less than 2 metres.

    More about Okavango Delta →

20. 20 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.

    More about Giant's Causeway →

21. 21 Canaima National Park

    Parque Nacional Canaima

    Venezuela5.319° N 61.795° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Canaima National Park covers about 30,000 square kilometres of south-eastern Venezuela, stretching to the borders with Brazil and Guyana and taking in most of the Gran Sabana. It is one of the largest national parks in the world, roughly the size of Belgium. Around two-thirds of it is taken up by tepuis — flat-topped mountains of ancient sandstone with sheer cliff walls, rising abruptly from the savanna and forest like islands. Their rock is among the oldest on Earth, laid down on granite nearly three billion years old, dating from a time when South America and Africa were still joined.

    Did you know? Angel Falls takes its name from American pilot Jimmie Angel, who flew over it in 1933 and crash-landed his plane on top of Auyán-tepui in 1937.

    More about Canaima National Park →

22. 22 Nærøyfjord

    Norway60.944° N 6.931° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The Nærøyfjord is the narrowest and one of the most dramatic arms of Norway's Sognefjord system: about 17 km long, down to roughly 250 metres wide at its tightest point, and walled by mountains that rise to around 1,760 metres. South of the hamlet of Bakka the fjord narrows to less than 500 metres of water, while the summits on either side are only about three kilometres apart, so the cliffs seem to lean over the boats. It branches off the Aurlandsfjord in Aurland municipality and ends at the village of Gudvangen, where the Nærøydalselvi river comes down from its valley.

    Did you know? For a fjord walled by peaks over 1,700 metres, the water is strikingly shallow: about 75 metres at most, and only around 11 metres at Bakka.

    More about Nærøyfjord →

23. 23 Plitvice Lakes National Park

    Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera

    Croatia44.880° N 15.616° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The barriers that create Plitvice's sixteen terraced lakes are, in a very real sense, alive — or at least built by living things. As water flows over limestone, it releases dissolved carbon dioxide, which shifts the water's chemistry so that calcium carbonate starts crystallising out of solution. Left alone, that process would just leave mineral crusts. What actually happens here is that mosses, algae and cyanobacteria growing on every submerged surface trap those crystals and keep building on them, layer by layer, into travertine barriers that dam the river's flow and stack the lakes into their famous cascading terraces.

    Did you know? Plitvice was among the very first natural sites on the World Heritage List, inscribed in 1979 and extended in 2000.

    More about Plitvice Lakes National Park →

24. 24 Seongsan Ilchulbong

    South Korea · 39.5 km from Jeju33.458° N 126.942° E

    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Seongsan Ilchulbong, "Sunrise Peak", rises from the eastern tip of Jeju Island like a crown set at the edge of the sea. It is a tuff cone, built around 6,700 years ago when magma met seawater on a shallow seabed and blew apart in violent steam-driven explosions of the kind named after Iceland's Surtsey. The ash and fragments piled into a near-perfect ring, and the sea has since cut its outer walls into steep ribbed cliffs, so that from a distance the peak resembles a fortress with jagged ramparts. It stands 182 metres high, and its bowl-shaped crater, about 600 metres across, is carpeted with grass and silvery reeds rather than water.

    Did you know? The cone was once a separate island; sand and gravel worn from its own flanks built up a narrow tombolo that now ties it to Jeju.

    More about Seongsan Ilchulbong →

25. 25 Gunung Mulu National Park

    Malaysia4.043° N 114.813° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    In the interior of northern Sarawak, close to the border with Brunei, three mountains rise out of the Borneo rainforest and hide beneath them some of the largest caves on earth. Gunung Mulu National Park covers 52,864 hectares and was gazetted in 1974, opened to visitors in 1985 and inscribed as a natural World Heritage Site in 2000. Mount Mulu itself, 2,376 metres high, is sandstone; its neighbours Mount Api and Mount Benarat are limestone, and it is inside this band of limestone that rivers have carved nearly 300 km of explored cave passages, surveyed by a long series of British-led expeditions since the Royal Geographical Society's fifteen-month expedition of 1977–1978.

    Did you know? The Sarawak Chamber encloses roughly 12 million cubic metres of space beneath a roof that spans about 300 metres without any supporting pillar.

    More about Gunung Mulu National Park →

26. 26 Lençóis Maranhenses National Park

    Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses

    Brazil2.483° S 43.133° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Lençóis Maranhenses means "bedsheets of Maranhão" — the name comes straight from the shape of the dunes, whose parallel ridges look like a tangle of linens left out to dry. That image already hints at the park's real trick: this looks like a desert, but it isn't one. Rain falls here in real quantities, more than a metre a year, and between January and June it collects in the valleys between the dunes to form thousands of turquoise freshwater lagoons. By December most of them have evaporated or drained into the sand, and the cycle starts again.

    Did you know? The sand is carried to the coast by the Parnaíba and Preguiças rivers, then pushed back inland by the wind as far as 50 kilometres.

    More about Lençóis Maranhenses National Park →

27. 27 Fiordland National Park

    New Zealand45.386° S 167.347° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    Fiordland is New Zealand's largest national park by a wide margin, 1.2 million hectares of temperate rainforest and 14 fjords gouged out by glaciers that retreated long enough ago for forest to reclaim nearly every slope down to the waterline. Rudyard Kipling once called Milford Sound the eighth wonder of the world, and the sound alone gets roughly 6,000 to 8,000 millimetres of rain a year — several times London's annual total — spread across some 180 days.

    Did you know? The park covers about 12,600 square kilometres and makes up nearly half of the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Site in south-west New Zealand.

    More about Fiordland National Park →

28. 28 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.

    More about Calanche de Piana →

29. 29 Jiuzhaigou Valley

    People's Republic of China33.200° N 103.900° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The name means, roughly, "valley of nine villages," after the Tibetan settlements scattered through it — villages that predate its 1978 designation as a protected scenic reserve by centuries. The most-told explanation for its lakes has nothing to do with geology: a mountain god, in love with a goddess, gave her a mirror; she dropped it fleeing an attacking demon, and it shattered into over a hundred pieces that became the valley's lakes, each one a shard of that broken gift. It's a good story precisely because the real explanation is almost as strange. Most of Jiuzhaigou's lakes are barrier lakes — created when ancient earthquakes and landslides dumped enough rock and debris across the valley to dam sections of the river outright, backing up meltwater from the surrounding Minshan range into pool after pool rather than one continuous stream.

    Did you know? Long Lake, the highest, largest and deepest of the valley's lakes, stretches about 7.5 km and reaches a depth of around 103 metres.

    More about Jiuzhaigou Valley →

30. 30 Škocjan Caves

    Škocjanske jame

    Slovenia · 15.3 km from Trieste45.665° N 13.995° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    At Škocjan the Reka River, after some 55 km on the surface and a final four-kilometre gorge, runs up against a limestone wall and disappears underground. What it has carved beneath the Karst plateau is not a pretty grotto but one of the largest underground canyons known: the stretch called Šumeča jama, the Murmuring Cave, is about 3.5 km long, 10 to 60 metres wide and in places well over 100 metres high. Where the gorge widens it forms chambers, and the largest, Martel's Chamber, is 308 metres long, up to 123 metres wide and 146 metres high at the top of its vault, with a volume of about 2.2 million cubic metres. The river then flows on for 34 km out of sight and resurfaces at the springs of the Timavo near the Adriatic coast. The caves were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1986.

    Did you know? The underground path crosses the gorge on Cerkvenik Bridge, which hangs about 50 metres above the roaring Reka.

    More about Škocjan Caves →