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 →
A vast 'forest of stone' — a labyrinth of razor-sharp limestone pinnacles rising in grey blades from the Madagascar wilderness, hiding canyons, caves, and creatures found nowhere else.
A grey lunar plain of cones that erupt cold — mud, brine and methane pushed up from kilometres below by gas pressure rather than heat, in the country that has more of them than anywhere on Earth.
The archetypal African plain — endless golden grassland that hosts the greatest land-mammal migration on Earth, as over a million wildebeest and hundreds of thousands of zebra move in a vast annual circle.
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.
A baobab-studded savanna famous for its elephants — in the dry season, when the Tarangire River is the only water for miles, one of the densest concentrations of game in northern Tanzania gathers along its banks.
Nine thousand square kilometres at the southern end of the East African Rift, built around a river that moves every year — and the place where the walking safari was invented.
The flat-topped sandstone massif that presides over Cape Town — a sheer-sided landmark often draped in a 'tablecloth' of cloud, and the heart of a plant kingdom so rich it is unique on Earth.
The greatest concentration of natural stone arches on Earth — more than 2,000 sandstone spans, fins, and balanced rocks glowing red above the high desert of Utah.
Rainforests, temperate rainforests, primeval woods, and cedar islands — the planet's major forests differ enormously, and each plays a distinct role worth understanding.
Hexagonal stone pavements, striped beehive domes, terraced pools stepping up a mountainside. Some landscapes look manufactured — and the physics behind them is even better than the myths.
Cut a population off from the world and, given time, evolution does something remarkable. A look at the isolated places that generate species found nowhere else.
