A country-by-country field guide to Earth’s most extraordinary places — what makes each one
marvelous, why it’s worth the trip, what to know before you go, and the wild riches and local
food of the land around it. Factual, appreciative, and made to spark a little awe.
These picks rotate with the calendar: places that are great to visit right now, or whose best
season is about to open — refreshed automatically every day. See the full
best time to visit, month by month →
Šibenik-Knin / Zadar County, Adriatic Sea, Croatia
A stark, sun-bleached archipelago of some 89 islands, islets, and reefs — the densest island cluster in the Adriatic — whose seaward cliffs, the dramatic 'crowns', drop straight into deep blue water.
Mountainsides sculpted into thousands of curving rice terraces by the Hmong people — a living landscape that turns mirror-silver in planting season and molten gold at harvest.
One of Iceland's biggest and best-loved waterfalls — a 60-metre curtain about 25 metres wide on the Skógá river, dropping over what was once a sea cliff and throwing up so much spray that a rainbow hangs in front of it on almost any sunny day.
A smoking volcanic cone rising from a vast 'Sea of Sand' inside an ancient caldera — one of Earth's most dramatic sunrise views, ringed by the peaks of the Tengger massif in East Java.
One of Europe's longest gorges — a 16-kilometre cleft dropping from the White Mountains of Crete to the Libyan Sea, narrowing at the famous Iron Gates to a corridor just a few metres wide beneath 500-metre walls.
The largest tropical rainforest on Earth — a continent-spanning sea of green threaded by the mighty Amazon River, holding a staggering share of the planet's species and helping regulate the world's climate.
A green, misty mountain range in Saudi Arabia's southwest — terraced highlands and juniper forests, cooled by monsoon cloud, that overturn every expectation of the desert kingdom.
Europe's largest field of shifting sand dunes — a wandering desert on Poland's Baltic coast, where wind-driven dunes rise dozens of metres and creep inland, burying forest as they go, between the sea and Lake Łebsko.
In a few places, you can stand where the planet is literally tearing apart — the slow birth of new oceans, written in lava lakes, salt flats, and sinking seas.
A river that runs crimson, a salt flat that mirrors the sky, a mountain striped like a rainbow — the most colourful landscapes on Earth, and the science behind their hues.
