The UNESCO Sites of Exceptional Natural Beauty in Africa
12 places in 10 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in Africa are Victoria Falls (Zambia), Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Tanzania) and Serengeti National Park (Tanzania). The list covers 12 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in 10 countries. The Seychelles has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Of the ten World Heritage criteria, criterion (vii) alone is about natural beauty and superlative natural phenomena, rather than science or history. In Africa the phenomenon is often alive: the movement of great herds, the seasonal flood of a delta, flamingos massing on a soda lake. Ancient rock, the Great Rift Valley and the Sahara add landscapes found nowhere else.
Victoria Falls drops the full width of the Zambezi, about 1.7 kilometres, into a narrow gorge, raising spray seen from far away. In Tanzania the Ngorongoro crater shelters lions, rhinos and elephants on the floor of a collapsed volcano, and the Serengeti plains carry the annual migration of wildebeest and zebra. Lake Nakuru, part of the Kenya Lake System in the Rift Valley, is known for its flamingos. The Okavango in Botswana is an inland delta that never reaches the sea, filling with floodwater in the dry season.
The north and the islands are just as varied. Tassili n'Ajjer in the Algerian Sahara pairs a sandstone "forest" of eroded rock with thousands of prehistoric paintings. The Simien Mountains in Ethiopia fall away in sheer escarpments where gelada baboons graze. Madagascar's Tsingy de Bemaraha is a maze of razor-sharp limestone needles. Aldabra in the Seychelles is a raised coral atoll home to giant tortoises, while the Vallée de Mai on Praslin protects the coco de mer palm. The Lakes of Ounianga in Chad are fed by groundwater in the middle of the desert.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Victoria Falls | Waterfall | Zambia | ✓ |
| 2 | Ngorongoro Conservation Area | Protected area | Tanzania | ✓ |
| 3 | Serengeti National Park | National park | Tanzania | ✓ |
| 4 | Tassili n'Ajjer | Archaeological site | Algeria | ✓ |
| 5 | Lake Nakuru | Lake | Kenya | ✓ |
| 6 | Okavango Delta | Protected area | Botswana | |
| 7 | Simien Mountains National Park | National park | Ethiopia | ✓ |
| 8 | Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve | Nature reserve | Madagascar | ✓ |
| 9 | Aldabra | Coral reef | Seychelles | ✓ |
| 10 | Bandiagara Escarpment | Protected area | Mali | ✓ |
| 11 | Vallée de Mai | Nature reserve | Seychelles | ✓ |
| 12 | Lakes of Ounianga | Oasis | Chad |
01 Victoria Falls
Zambia · 2 km from Victoria Falls17.925° S 25.858° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Jürgen_Bierlein from Pixabay What makes the falls unusual is the geometry. The river does not tumble down a valley. It falls into a transverse chasm, the First Gorge, and leaves through a single gap roughly 110 metres wide. From there it zigzags through a chain of gorges that mark older positions of the falls, each cut back along a line of weakness in the lava. Livingstone Island and Cataract Island sit on the lip and split the flow into named sections: the Devil's Cataract, the Main Falls, Rainbow Falls and the Eastern Cataract. Below the exit, a steep path on the Zambian side leads down to the Boiling Pot, a whirlpool basin where the river turns hard into the Second Gorge.
Did you know? The zigzag gorges below the falls record eight earlier positions of the waterfall, each abandoned as the river cut back along a new line of weakness in the basalt.
02 Ngorongoro Conservation Area
Tanzania · 8 km from Ngorongoro3.210° S 35.460° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
James Wagner · CC BY-SA 4.0 About 25,000 large animals live on the crater floor, mostly grazers: buffalo, wildebeest, zebra, eland and gazelles. Lions live here at one of the highest densities known. The crater's black rhino population fell from over a hundred in the 1960s to 13 in 1993, and protection programmes had brought it back to about 55 by 2018. Some familiar savannah species are missing, including giraffe, impala and topi. The crater acts as a natural enclosure, and its lions are notably inbred because few outside males manage to join the population.
Did you know? Laetoli, inside the conservation area, preserves a trail of about 70 footprints left by upright-walking hominins some 3.6 million years ago.
03 Serengeti National Park
Tanzania2.400° S 34.600° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Giles Laurent · CC BY-SA 4.0 Where you see the herds depends on the month. Around half a million calves are born on the short-grass plains of the south, largely inside Ngorongoro's borders, between January and March. As the dry season sets in the herds turn north and west, passing through the Western Corridor in April and May, where they must cross the Grumeti River. To reach the Maasai Mara they must also ford the Mara River, where some 3,000 crocodiles lie in wait and far more animals drown in the crush than are taken by the reptiles. When the dry season ends in late October, the herds start back south.
Did you know? The name is usually traced to a Maasai word meaning 'endless plains', although that word has not been found in dictionaries of the Maasai language.
04 Tassili n'Ajjer
Algeria25.667° N 9.000° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Djaren-Sefar from Pixabay The landscape alone would justify the journey. Erosion has carved the sandstone into "rock forests" of pillars and slots, varnished by the desert from black to dull red, with close to 300 natural arches in the south-east and deep canyons holding permanent pools in the north. On the higher ground survive relict Saharan cypresses — among the longest-lived trees known — and the rare Saharan myrtle, remnants of a wetter past. An isolated population of West African crocodiles survived here into the twentieth century.
Did you know? A painted sleeping antelope from the Tin-Taghirt site appears on Algeria's 1,000-dinar banknote.
05 Lake Nakuru
Kenya · 9.7 km from Nakuru0.367° S 36.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Nick115 from Pixabay That chemistry has changed, and it's worth knowing before setting expectations for a visit. Since around 2013, and especially from 2020 onward, Lake Nakuru's water level has risen dramatically — its surface area roughly doubled over a decade — diluting the alkaline water that the algae need to bloom. Less algae means less food, and in recent years the famous flocks have largely relocated to other Rift Valley soda lakes, particularly Lake Bogoria and Lake Natron across the border in Tanzania, leaving Nakuru with only a fraction of the flamingo numbers that made it famous.
Did you know? Scientists have estimated that Nakuru's flamingos once ate about 250,000 kg of algae per hectare of lake surface each year.
06 Okavango Delta
Botswana19.400° S 22.900° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by LionMountain from Pixabay The delta's rhythm runs against the local seasons. Rain falls on the Angolan highlands in the southern summer, and the flood then takes months to crawl down the river and seep across the flat fan of the delta, so the water peaks between June and August, in the heart of Botswana's dry winter. At that moment the delta can be three times its permanent size, and animals from the surrounding dry country converge on it. The whole system sits in a shallow tectonic trough, and fault lines shape where the water goes: Chief's Island, the largest island in the delta, is a block uplifted along a fault, more than 70 km long.
Did you know? Because the Okavango carries almost no mud, plants act as the glue that traps the river's sand, building up channel banks and new islands.
07 Simien Mountains National Park
Ethiopia13.183° N 38.067° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Ondřej Žváček · CC BY 2.5 Vegetation climbs in bands with the altitude: montane forest of juniper, African redwood (Hagenia) and wild olive; then an ericaceous belt of giant heath hung with lichen; and above 3,700 metres, Afroalpine moorland dotted with the tall rosettes and flower spikes of giant lobelia. An unpaved road crosses the park eastward from Debark through villages to the Buahit Pass at about 4,430 metres, then turns south to Mekane Berhan.
Did you know? Male geladas carry a bright red, hourglass-shaped patch of bare skin on the chest, which earned them the nickname "bleeding-heart monkey".
08 Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve
Madagascar18.667° S 44.751° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Rod Waddington · CC BY-SA 2.0 The reserve was created in 1927 as a strict nature reserve and was inscribed by UNESCO in 1990. In 1997 its southern part was reclassified as the Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park, opening it to visitors, while the northern part remains a strict reserve closed to tourism. The isolation of each pinnacle, ledge and canyon floor has produced exceptional endemism, with species confined to tiny pockets of the massif. Lemurs include Decken's sifaka, a bamboo lemur and the aye-aye. There are also tiny Brookesia chameleons, rare birds such as the white-throated rail, and some 650 plant species. The park's two showpieces are the Great Tsingy and the Little Tsingy, both limestone forests of this kind.
Did you know? In 1990 the Tsingy became Madagascar's very first World Heritage Site, inscribed at a committee session held in Banff, Canada.
09 Aldabra
Seychelles9.416° S 46.416° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by veverkolog from Pixabay It is best known as the kingdom of the giant tortoise. Around 100,000 Aldabra giant tortoises live on the atoll, the largest population in the world, some weighing up to 350 kg. Their survival is a near miracle: in the 19th century ships carried them off by the hundred for food, and by 1900 they were close to extinction. A ban on killing them, imposed in 1891 by the concession-holder James Spurs, and later full legal protection allowed the population to recover. The atoll is also home to the world's largest land arthropod, the coconut crab, and to the white-throated rail, the last flightless bird of the Indian Ocean.
Did you know? In 1842 alone two ships carried off around 1,200 giant tortoises from Aldabra, a measure of how quickly the population was stripped.
10 Bandiagara Escarpment
Mali14.417° N 3.317° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
J. Drevet · CC BY-SA 3.0 The first people known to have lived on the cliff were the Tellem, who carved small chambers high in the rock face and buried their dead there, safe from the flash floods of the rainy season; these cave openings can still be seen dotting the cliff above the villages. The Dogon arrived around the fourteenth century, according to their own traditions near Kani-Na and Kani Bonzon at the southern end, and spread north along the escarpment, settling in defensible positions against the cliff wall.
Did you know? The Tellem burial caves have yielded textiles, baskets, pottery and carved wooden headrests, studied in depth by Dutch archaeologist Rogier Bedaux.
11 Vallée de Mai
Seychelles4.329° S 55.737° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
WL~commonswiki · CC BY-SA 3.0 Walking in, the first thing you notice is the light. Coco de mer palms rise to 25 or 30 metres and hold fan-shaped leaves up to 7 to 10 metres long, so the canopy filters the sun into a green and bronze gloom. The trees are either male or female; the males carry long catkins, and the females bear the heavy nuts; the largest on record weighed 42 kilograms. Around them grow the other endemics: the thief palm, the Seychelles stilt palm, millionaire's salad palm and two latanier palms, alongside pandanus screw pines and broadleaf trees. Praslin is granite, a fragment of old continental crust left behind when Gondwana broke apart, and the forest is a relic of that ancient isolation.
Did you know? When the giant seed sprouts, it pushes out a tube-like stalk that in the Vallée de Mai can reach up to 10 metres long.
12 Lakes of Ounianga
Lacs d'Ounianga
Chad18.983° N 20.667° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Jacques Taberlet · CC BY-SA 3.0 The lakes fall into two main groups, Ounianga Kebir and Ounianga Serir, with their colours depending on chemistry and the algae living in them, ranging from deep blue and green to reddish tones. At Ounianga Kebir the water is strongly saline. Its largest lake, Yoa, covers around 3.5 square kilometres and loses a column of water about six metres deep to evaporation each year; only algae and microorganisms survive in its brine, yet the aquifer keeps it full.
Did you know? Pollen in the Lake Yoa cores, studied by Stefan Kröpelin's team from the University of Cologne, shows the Sahara became desert gradually, through scrub and grassland phases.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in Africa?
- On our list, Victoria Falls (Zambia) ranks first, followed by Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Tanzania) and Serengeti National Park (Tanzania).
- Which country has the most UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in Africa?
- In our collection, the most come from the Seychelles (2), Tanzania (2) and Algeria (1).
- Why does the Okavango Delta flood in the dry season?
- Rain falling in the Angolan highlands takes months to travel down the Okavango River, so the flood reaches the delta in Botswana during the local dry winter.
- What is the coco de mer?
- A palm native to Praslin and Curieuse in the Seychelles that produces the largest seed of any plant, weighing up to about 25 kilograms. The Vallée de Mai is its best-known forest.
- What is the Ngorongoro Crater?
- It is a volcanic caldera about 20 kilometres across, formed when a large volcano collapsed some two to three million years ago. Its floor is home to a dense population of large mammals.
- How many UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty are on this list in Africa?
- The list covers 12 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in 10 countries. The Seychelles has the most, with 2.