Natural Wonders of Canada: The 7 Most Beautiful Places to Visit

Canada is a country defined by ice and rock. Glaciers past and present shaped much of its landscape — grinding out the U-shaped valleys and rock-flour lakes of the Canadian Rockies, whose turquoise waters sit beneath jagged, snow-capped peaks in a UNESCO-listed cluster of parks. Further east, the outflow of the Great Lakes crashes over Niagara. Immense boreal forest, tundra, and coastline stretch beyond, home to bears, wolves, and vast wild spaces. Below are the 7 natural wonders of Canada in the atlas — the most beautiful places to build a trip around, each with what makes it remarkable, when to go, and how to reach it. Best overall time: Summer to early autumn (roughly June–October) for the mountain parks, when roads open and lakes thaw to reveal their colour; winter brings snow sports and frozen spectacle.

Banff & Moraine Lake

Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada

The turquoise glacial lakes of the Canadian Rockies — Moraine Lake beneath the Valley of the Ten Peaks and nearby Lake Louise — where glacier-ground rock flour turns the water an electric blue-green beneath snow-capped mountains.

Lake North America

Bay of Fundy

New Brunswick & Nova Scotia, Canada

Home to the highest tides on Earth — up to 16 metres of water rising and falling twice a day, laying bare a seabed you can walk across beneath towering flowerpot rocks.

Beach & coast North America

Churchill

Churchill, Manitoba, western Hudson Bay, Canada

The stretch of sub-Arctic coast where roughly 900 polar bears gather each autumn, waiting on the tundra for Hudson Bay to freeze — and where thousands of beluga whales fill the river estuary through the short northern summer.

Polar & ice North America

Columbia Icefield

Alberta & British Columbia, Canada

The largest icefield in the Rocky Mountains — a vast frozen plateau feeding glaciers that flow toward three different oceans, reached along one of the world's great mountain highways.

Glacier North America

Gros Morne

Newfoundland, Canada

A dramatic Newfoundland wilderness of landlocked fjords and bare orange mountains — where a slice of the Earth's mantle lies exposed at the surface, helping prove the theory of plate tectonics.

Mountain North America

Nahanni & Virginia Falls

Northwest Territories, Canada

A remote subarctic wilderness of deep river canyons, hot springs, and Virginia Falls — a thundering cataract twice the height of Niagara — reachable only by float plane or canoe deep in Canada's north.

Waterfall North America

Niagara Falls

Ontario, Canada / New York, United States

Not the tallest falls, but among the most powerful on Earth — three waterfalls on the Niagara River between the Great Lakes, where a colossal volume of water plunges over a cliff in a permanent roar of mist.

Waterfall North America