The UNESCO Sites of Exceptional Natural Beauty in Europe
14 places in 9 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in Europe are Aletsch Glacier (Switzerland), Lake Ohrid (North Macedonia) and Meteora (Greece). The list covers 14 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in 9 countries. Spain has the most, with 3. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Among the ten World Heritage criteria, criterion (vii) is the only one that names natural beauty outright; the others speak of geology, ecology, biodiversity or human history. Europe has few untouched wildernesses, so its beautiful places tend to be compact and sharply drawn: a fjord carved by ice ages, a basalt coast, a glacier, a cascade of lakes, shaped by glaciation and karst and set close to centuries of human life.
The Aletsch Glacier, the longest in the Alps, flows from the Jungfrau region in a broad curve striped with dark moraines. Lake Ohrid is among the oldest lakes in Europe, its clear water fed largely by springs. At Meteora monasteries such as Varlaam sit on top of sandstone and conglomerate pillars above the plain of Thessaly. The Giant's Causeway on the Antrim coast is made of some forty thousand interlocking basalt columns left by ancient lava flows.
Norway's Nærøyfjord, a narrow arm of the Sognefjord, runs between walls that rise well over a thousand metres. Plitvice in Croatia is a staircase of sixteen lakes divided by travertine barriers that keep growing. In Corsica the red granite of the Calanche de Piana and the Scandola reserve drops straight into the sea, while the Škocjan Caves in Slovenia hide one of the largest underground canyons known, cut by the Reka river. St Kilda, an Atlantic archipelago abandoned in 1930, holds some of the highest sea cliffs in Britain.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aletsch Glacier | Glacier | Switzerland | ✓ |
| 2 | Lake Ohrid | Lake | North Macedonia | ✓ |
| 3 | Meteora | Rock formation | Greece | ✓ |
| 4 | Giant's Causeway | Rock formation | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 5 | Nærøyfjord | Fjord | Norway | ✓ |
| 6 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 7 | Calanche de Piana | Rock formation | France | |
| 8 | Škocjan Caves | Show cave | Slovenia | ✓ |
| 9 | St Kilda | Nature reserve | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 10 | Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 11 | Teide National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 12 | Garajonay National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 13 | Scandola Nature Reserve | Nature reserve | France | ✓ |
| 14 | Varlaam monastery | Monastery | Greece | ✓ |
01 Aletsch Glacier
Aletschgletscher
Switzerland46.442° N 8.077° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Christian David · CC BY-SA 4.0 The glacier's signature is its dark medial moraines, two stripes of rock debris that run down the middle of the ice for almost its entire length, traces of the tributary glaciers that merged upstream. Seen from the ridge above, the white river of ice with its dark lines, framed by peaks of four thousand metres, is one of the great sights of the Alps. The glacier is also a record of climate: it was far larger during the last ice age, when only the summits of the Bettmerhorn and Eggishorn rose above it, and it is shrinking now, having lost more than three kilometres of length since 1870.
Did you know? Since 1862 locals have walked an annual procession of about five hours to the Ernerwald chapel on 31 July to renew that vow.
02 Lake Ohrid
North Macedonia · 15.5 km from Pogradec41.033° N 20.717° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0 That filtered water gives Ohrid its astonishing clarity: on a calm day you can see down some twenty metres. It also sustains one of the most remarkable freshwater ecosystems in the world. Like Baikal and Tanganyika, Ohrid has evolved its own species at every level of the food chain, from algae and sponges to snails, crustaceans and two endemic trout; around 200 species live nowhere else, and almost four-fifths of its molluscs are unique to the lake.
Did you know? Water entering Lake Ohrid stays on average about 70 years before it evaporates or leaves through the Black Drin.
03 Meteora
Μετέωρα
Greece39.712° N 21.627° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by shogun from Pixabay 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.
04 Giant's Causeway
United Kingdom55.241° N 6.512° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Lindy Buckley from Nanjing, China · CC BY 2.0 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.
05 Nærøyfjord
Norway60.944° N 6.931° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by jogi031 from Pixabay The landscape is a textbook of glaciation. Ice sheets during the Quaternary cut a deep, narrow trough into ancient crystalline bedrock, and when they melted the sea flooded in. Waterfalls pour from hanging valleys hundreds of metres up, especially after snowmelt, and bare rock faces show the polish of the ice. In 2005 UNESCO inscribed the Nærøyfjord together with the Geirangerfjord as the West Norwegian Fjords, one of the best examples of fjord landscape on Earth. The protected area also takes in an old farming landscape, worked for centuries on the few patches of usable ground between the cliffs.
Did you know? The shallow sill at Bakka was built up by a glacial end moraine and debris from rockfalls.
06 Plitvice Lakes National Park
Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera
Croatia44.880° N 15.616° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Hobbyfotography from Pixabay That means the landscape people photograph is never finished; it's mid-construction, permanently. The famous shifts in the water's colour — turquoise, green, grey, depending on mineral content, sunlight angle and the season — come from exactly the same chemistry that's building the barriers, which is part of why the colour looks different every time someone visits rather than being some kind of seasonal trick.
Did you know? Its Veliki slap, the Great Waterfall, plunges 78 metres.
07 Calanche de Piana
Calanques de Piana
France42.325° N 8.629° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by jackmac34 from Pixabay 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.
08 Škocjan Caves
Škocjanske jame
Slovenia · 15.3 km from Trieste45.665° N 13.995° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Julien Maury · Public domain The approach is part of the spectacle. Early in the Pleistocene the roof of the cave collapsed near the sinks, leaving two huge collapse dolines, Velika dolina up to 165 metres deep and Mala dolina about 120 metres deep, separated by a natural bridge of the original ceiling. The village of Škocjan, which gave the caves their name, sits on the rock between them. In the shaded depths of the dolines Alpine plants grow a short distance from Mediterranean species such as maidenhair fern, a rare pairing made possible by the cave's own microclimate. The canyon has also drawn people for a very long time.
Did you know? High under the cave ceiling a plaque marks how far the floodwater rose on 2 September 1965.
09 St Kilda
United Kingdom57.815° N 8.588° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Hugh Venables · CC BY-SA 2.0 People lived here for at least two thousand years, and probably far longer: pottery found in 2015 points to Neolithic settlers. The islanders lived on seabirds, taken by men who climbed the cliffs and stacks, on a few sheep and cattle, and on barley and potatoes grown in Village Bay. Adult men met each morning in the street to decide the day's work, a gathering outsiders called the St Kilda parliament. Everything was stored in cleits, dry-stone huts with turf roofs that let the wind through but kept out the rain; some 1,260 of them still stud Hirta, with about 170 more on the other islands. The curved street of cottages dates from a rebuilding in the 1830s.
Did you know? Islanders sent mail by casting messages adrift in floats, a method begun in 1877 when nine shipwrecked Austrian sailors were stranded on Hirta.
10 Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park
Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido
Spain42.672° N 0.056° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by vilanchelo from Pixabay Four valleys radiate from the massif, each with its own character. The Ordesa valley is the classic one — a U-shaped trough carved by glaciers, its sides layered like a cut cake, with a trail climbing past a string of waterfalls to the Circo de Soaso and the horsetail fall of the Cola de Caballo. Añisclo, Escuaín and Pineta are the others, each a deep cut into the massif, and together they show how differently ice and running water have worked the same rock. Above, chamois graze the ledges, marmots whistle in the meadows, and bearded vultures and golden eagles ride the updrafts.
Did you know? The last Pyrenean ibex, a female named Celia, was found dead on 6 January 2000, crushed by a falling tree.
11 Teide National Park
Parque Nacional del Teide
Spain28.276° N 16.643° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Barni1 from Pixabay Most visitors come for the landscape, which looks unlike anything else in Europe. Lava flows of different ages lie across the caldera floor in black, brown and rust; the plain of Ucanca stretches flat and pale beneath the peak; the eroded rock towers of the Roques de García stand like sculptures beside the road; the pumice fields of Minas de San José look lunar. The resemblance is not only poetic — the park's terrain is so close to that of Mars that ESA and NASA have tested instruments and rovers here. On a ridge east of the peak sit the telescopes of the Teide Observatory, where the sun shines nearly 3,500 hours a year.
12 Garajonay National Park
Parque nacional de Garajonay
Spain28.126° N 17.237° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by nike159 from Pixabay The forest changes character with its exposure. In the sheltered, north-facing valleys it is at its richest, a true subtropical rainforest with the tallest laurels; on the slopes it thins, and on the drier southern side it gives way to a lower forest of heather adapted to less humid air. Many of the plants and invertebrates are found nowhere outside Macaronesia, and the park is one of the best places to see the Canaries' two endemic pigeons, the laurel pigeon and Bolle's pigeon. A network of eighteen footpaths runs through it, and the visitor centre stands at Juego de Bolas near Agulo.
13 Scandola Nature Reserve
France42.357° N 8.567° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by jackmac34 from Pixabay The reserve was created in 1975 and was among the first in France to protect both land and sea together. It covers a little under 20 square kilometres, roughly half of it marine, with a strictly protected core at its north-western tip. Its value for scientists lies partly underwater: calcareous algae build pale ledges along the waterline, and deeper down coral formations and seagrass meadows shelter a wealth of fish and invertebrates. On land, the cliffs hold dozens of endemic plants and give nesting room to ospreys, shags, peregrine falcons and gulls. Scandola was once a last refuge in Corsica for the Mediterranean monk seal, which has since vanished from these waters.
Did you know? The reserve was created by decree on 9 December 1975, becoming the first in France to protect a stretch of land and sea together.
14 Varlaam monastery
Μονή Βαρλαάμ
Greece39.725° N 21.630° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by MichelleCoppiens from Pixabay The main church was completed in the 1540s, and its interior is the reason Varlaam is a highlight of any visit to Meteora. In 1548 the painter Frangos Katelanos of Thebes, one of the leading masters of post-Byzantine art, covered it with frescoes, including a vast Last Judgement; the narthex was painted in 1566 by two brothers, also from Thebes. The colour and detail have survived remarkably well.
Did you know? The hermit Varlaam reached the summit around 1350 and built a cell, three small chapels and a water cistern there.
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 Europe?
- On our list, Aletsch Glacier (Switzerland) ranks first, followed by Lake Ohrid (North Macedonia) and Meteora (Greece).
- Which country has the most UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Spain (3), France (2) and Greece (2).
- Why are the lakes at Plitvice so many colours?
- The water is rich in dissolved calcium carbonate, which settles as travertine and forms natural dams between the lakes. Minerals, algae and the angle of the light shift the colour from azure to green and grey.
- How was the Giant's Causeway formed?
- About 50 to 60 million years ago lava flows cooled and contracted, cracking into mostly hexagonal columns, much as drying mud cracks into polygons.
- What is the longest glacier in the Alps?
- The Great Aletsch Glacier in the Swiss canton of Valais, about 20 kilometres long, which flows south from the Jungfrau region.
- How many UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 14 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in 9 countries. Spain has the most, with 3.