The UNESCO Sites of Exceptional Natural Beauty in North America
9 places in 5 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in North America are Yellowstone National Park (United States), Gros Morne National Park (Canada) and Ilulissat Icefjord (Greenland). The list covers 9 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in 5 countries. The United States has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Criterion (vii) is the one UNESCO criterion out of ten that is about beauty itself: superlative natural phenomena and landscapes of exceptional aesthetic value. North America answers it with scale and contrast, from the volcanic hotspot under Wyoming to the Greenland ice sheet, from granite valleys cut by glaciers to the warm Caribbean reef.
Yellowstone, established in 1872 as the first national park anywhere, holds more than half of the world's active geysers, Old Faithful among them, and the rainbow-ringed Grand Prismatic Spring. The Grand Canyon shows nearly two billion years of rock in walls about a mile deep, cut by the Colorado River. In Yosemite the granite of El Capitan and Half Dome rises over a glacial valley full of waterfalls. Jedediah Smith Redwoods, part of Redwood National and State Parks, protects old-growth coast redwoods, the tallest trees on Earth.
Farther north, Gros Morne in Newfoundland exposes the Tablelands, a slab of the Earth's mantle pushed to the surface, next to fjords carved by ice. Ilulissat Icefjord in Greenland is fed by Sermeq Kujalleq, one of the fastest glaciers in the world, which fills the fjord with icebergs. In the Caribbean, the Belize Barrier Reef runs along the coast with the Great Blue Hole, a round marine sinkhole about 300 metres across, and on Saint Lucia the twin volcanic spires of the Pitons rise straight from the sea.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yellowstone National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 2 | Gros Morne National Park | National park | Canada | ✓ |
| 3 | Ilulissat Icefjord | Fjord | Greenland | ✓ |
| 4 | Grand Canyon National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 5 | Great Blue Hole | Blue hole | Belize | ✓ |
| 6 | Yosemite National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 7 | Belize Barrier Reef | Coral reef | Belize | ✓ |
| 8 | Pitons | Mountain | Saint Lucia | ✓ |
| 9 | Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park | Forest | United States |
01 Yellowstone National Park
United States44.600° N 110.500° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- biosphere reserve
James St. John from Newark, Ohio · CC BY 2.0 That it needed protecting at all says something about what's underneath it. Yellowstone sits on top of one of the largest active volcanic systems on Earth, and the geothermal features scattered across the park — geysers, hot springs, mudpots, fumaroles — aren't a curiosity on the side, they're most of the reason the place exists as a park in the first place: it holds well over half of all the geysers on the planet. Old Faithful gets the crowds, but the more revealing feature is Grand Prismatic Spring, whose rainbow rings of colour come from heat-loving bacteria living in water too hot and too mineral-rich for almost anything else to survive in.
Did you know? About 96 per cent of the park lies in Wyoming, three per cent in Montana and one per cent in Idaho.
02 Gros Morne National Park
Canada49.689° N 57.738° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Canadian-Nature-Visions from Pixabay The Tablelands, between Trout River and Woody Point, are the most startling sight. They are made of peridotite, a rock from the Earth's mantle so poor in nutrients and so rich in toxic metals that almost nothing grows on it. The result, in the middle of green Newfoundland, is a bare, rust-brown plateau that looks like a desert; underneath the weathered crust, the rock is dark green.
Did you know? Western Brook Pond reaches a depth of about 165 metres, with an average depth of over 70 metres.
03 Ilulissat Icefjord
Greenland69.150° N 49.550° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by SarahNic from Pixabay UNESCO inscribed the fjord in 2004, and the protected area covers more than 400,000 hectares, much of it ice. The Greenlandic name of the fjord is Kangia. For the visitor, the experience is simple and overwhelming: towers of ice several storeys high, sculpted into arches and caves, drifting almost silently past, their colour changing from pure white at noon to gold and pink under the low summer and midnight sun.
Did you know? The ice carried through the fjord can be up to about 250,000 years old, making it a valuable archive of past climate.
04 Grand Canyon National Park
United States36.055° N 112.122° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Filio from Pixabay Protection came slowly. Benjamin Harrison introduced the first bill for a national park here in 1882 and failed three times; as president he made the area a forest reserve in 1893. Theodore Roosevelt, who visited in 1903 and urged Americans to leave the canyon as it was, declared a national monument in 1908. Only on 26 February 1919 did Woodrow Wilson sign the act creating the national park, the fifteenth in the country. In 1975 it was enlarged to take in Marble Canyon and a second monument to the west, and its status helped defeat proposals to dam the river inside its boundaries.
Did you know? Within the layers lies the Great Unconformity, a gap where about 500 million years of rock record is simply missing.
05 Great Blue Hole
Belize17.316° N 87.534° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
The TerraMar Project · CC BY 2.0 The hole is a drowned cave. During the ice ages, when sea levels stood far lower than today, this was dry limestone country, and rainwater dissolved a cavern system in the rock until its roof collapsed into a vertical shaft. Stalactites, which only form in air, still hang from ledges deep under water; dating them has shown phases of growth at several points during the last glaciations, the most recent around 15,000 years ago. As the ice melted and the sea rose, the cave flooded, leaving a sunken sinkhole in the middle of a reef.
Did you know? Some stalactites deep in the shaft hang about 5 degrees off vertical, all in the same direction, showing that the limestone plateau itself once tilted.
06 Yosemite National Park
United States37.742° N 119.537° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12019 from Pixabay On its north side stands El Capitan, a single face of granite about 3,000 feet from base to rim, which became the proving ground of modern big-wall climbing: The Nose was first climbed in 1958 over 47 days of fixed ropes, freed by Lynn Hill in 1993, and in 2017 Alex Honnold climbed the Freerider route alone and without a rope in under four hours. At the valley's head Half Dome rises some 4,800 feet above the floor, its sheared face turned to the west, and across from it Yosemite Falls drops about 2,425 feet in three linked stages — at its best in late spring, when snowmelt is heaviest.
Did you know? The name Yosemite comes from a Miwok word meaning they are killers, given to the valley's people by neighbours; the old grizzly-bear translation is a misconception.
07 Belize Barrier Reef
Belize · 29.9 km from Belize City17.262° N 88.053° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
SentinelHub · CC BY 2.0 What sets it apart is variety. Besides the barrier itself, the protected area takes in some 450 cayes — from mangrove islets to sandy islands like Caye Caulker and Ambergris Caye — and three offshore atolls: Turneffe, Glover's Reef and Lighthouse Reef. In the middle of Lighthouse Reef lies the Great Blue Hole, a near-perfect circle about 318 metres across and 124 metres deep, a drowned sinkhole that Jacques Cousteau brought to world attention when he took his ship Calypso there in 1971. From the air it is one of the most striking shapes in any ocean.
Did you know? In December 2010 Belize became the first country in the world to ban bottom trawling completely.
08 Pitons
Saint Lucia · 23.7 km from Castries13.807° N 61.070° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by mimi_s from Pixabay The protected area includes a geothermal field with sulphurous fumaroles and hot springs, a reminder that the volcanic system is still active beneath the surface. The mountains are covered in tropical moist forest that gives way to wetter forest higher up, with patches of dry forest and stunted elfin woodland on the summits. At least 148 plant species have been recorded on Gros Piton and 97 on Petit Piton and the ridge, including eight rare trees. Gros Piton supports around 27 bird species, five of them endemic, along with native bats, reptiles and amphibians. The area is designated an Important Bird Area.
Did you know? The volcanic system has been dormant for at least 20,000 years, yet a blast from deep underground shook the area in 1766.
09 Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park
United States · 8.7 km from Crescent City41.782° N 124.101° W
- UNESCO natural beauty
Chris Rycroft from Madison, Wisconsin, United States · CC BY 2.0 The Smith River, which runs through the park, is California's last major undammed river, and its clear green water is part of the beauty here. At the confluence of Mill Creek and the Smith lies Stout Memorial Grove, where an easy loop of under a kilometre winds among trees of enormous girth on a flat river terrace. Deeper in the park, the Grove of Titans, which holds some of the largest coast redwoods known, is reached by an elevated boardwalk opened in 2022.
Did you know? Its giants carry nicknames rather than official names, several borrowed from Tolkien, such as Aragorn, Beregond and the pair Eärendil and Elwing.
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 North America?
- On our list, Yellowstone National Park (United States) ranks first, followed by Gros Morne National Park (Canada) and Ilulissat Icefjord (Greenland).
- Which country has the most UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (4), Belize (2) and Canada (1).
- What is the Great Blue Hole?
- It is a circular marine sinkhole off the coast of Belize, about 300 metres across and over 120 metres deep, formed as a limestone cave system that flooded when sea levels rose after the last ice age. It is part of the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System.
- How old are the rocks of the Grand Canyon?
- The oldest rocks at the bottom of the canyon are close to two billion years old, while the youngest layers at the rim are around 270 million years old.
- What are the Tablelands in Gros Morne?
- They are a large block of the Earth's mantle rock, peridotite, thrust up during the closing of an ancient ocean. Its chemistry is so poor for plants that the area looks bare and rust-coloured.
- How many UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 9 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in 5 countries. The United States has the most, with 4.