The Best Natural Wonders to Visit in March

Planning a trip for March? These 166 wonders are at or near their best this month — the season when conditions, wildlife, light, or access line up. It’s distilled from each place’s real best-time notes, and because the atlas rebuilds daily, this stays current. Open any place for the honest detail on timing and access.

Aldabra Atoll

Outer Islands, Seychelles

One of the world's largest raised coral atolls and among the least disturbed places on Earth — home to some 100,000 giant tortoises, far more than the Galápagos.

Island Africa

Annapurna Sanctuary

Gandaki, north-central Nepal

A high glacial amphitheatre ringed by a wall of 7,000- and 8,000-metre Himalayan giants — the beating heart of one of the world's great treks, reached through rhododendron forest and terraced hills.

Mountain South Asia

Antarctic Peninsula

Antarctic Peninsula

The most accessible edge of the frozen continent — a realm of blue icebergs, glacier-hung mountains, and vast penguin colonies, where wildlife thrives amid staggering polar scenery.

Polar & ice Antarctica & the Poles

Banaue & the Ifugao Rice Terraces

Ifugao, Cordillera, Philippines

Two thousand years of hand-built rice terraces climbing the Cordillera mountainsides — a living landscape of stone-and-mud paddies, fed by an intricate forest-and-irrigation system, often called the 'Eighth Wonder of the World'.

Living terraces Southeast Asia

Chocolate Hills

Bohol, Central Visayas, Philippines

More than 1,200 near-symmetrical grass-covered mounds spread across the interior of Bohol, turning chocolate-brown each dry season — a karst landscape unlike anywhere else on Earth.

Rock formation Southeast Asia

El Nido & the Bacuit Archipelago

El Nido, Palawan, Philippines

A bay scattered with dozens of jagged limestone islands, hidden lagoons reached through narrow rock gaps, white beaches, and clear turquoise water — one of the most spectacular karst seascapes in the world.

Karst landscape Southeast Asia

Grand Canyon

Arizona, United States

One of the most staggering landscapes on Earth — a mile-deep, 446-kilometre-long chasm where the Colorado River has laid bare nearly two billion years of the planet's history in bands of coloured rock.

Canyon North America

Gunung Mulu

Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia

A Bornean rainforest hiding some of the world's greatest caves — including the largest cave chamber on Earth — plus razor-sharp limestone pinnacles rising from the jungle canopy.

Cave Southeast Asia

Hạ Long Bay

Gulf of Tonkin, northeastern Vietnam

A jade-green sea studded with nearly 2,000 limestone karst islands and pillars rising sheer from the water — caves, hidden lagoons, and floating villages in one of the world's most beautiful seascapes.

Karst landscape Southeast Asia

Iguazú Falls

Paraná, Brazil / Misiones, Argentina border

A thundering wall of water on the Brazil–Argentina border — hundreds of individual falls spread across nearly three kilometres of jungle, culminating in the vast horseshoe chasm of the Devil's Throat.

Waterfall Latin America

Kaziranga

Assam, India

A vast floodplain of tall grass and marsh on the Brahmaputra — home to two-thirds of the world's great one-horned rhinos, plus tigers, elephants, and wild buffalo in astonishing numbers.

Wetland South Asia

Lake Baikal

Siberia, Russia

The deepest and oldest lake on Earth — a vast Siberian sea holding a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh water, its waters so clear you can see 40 metres down, and freezing each winter into sheets of turquoise ice.

Lake East Asia

Marble Caves

General Carrera Lake, Aysén, Chile

Swirling caverns of polished marble at the water's edge of a remote Patagonian lake — their blue-and-white walls glowing turquoise with the reflected light of the glacier-fed water.

Cave Latin America

Mayon Volcano

Albay, Bicol Region, Philippines

The Philippines' most active volcano and, by many accounts, the most perfectly symmetrical cone on Earth — a 2,463-metre stratovolcano that dominates the Bicol skyline and, as of mid-2026, is in active eruption.

Volcano Southeast Asia

Milford Sound

Fiordland National Park, South Island, New Zealand

New Zealand's most famous fjord — sheer cliffs and the pyramid of Mitre Peak rising straight from dark water, laced with waterfalls fed by some of the highest rainfall on Earth, in the heart of Fiordland.

Fjord Oceania

Mount Everest

Mahalangur Himal, Nepal / Tibet (China) border

The highest point on Earth — 8,849 metres above sea level, where the Himalaya's collision-built peaks reach into the 'death zone', drawing climbers and trekkers to the roof of the world.

Mountain South Asia

Ningaloo Reef

Coral Coast, Western Australia

One of the world's largest fringing reefs — a coral wonderland that hugs the shore of Western Australia, where you can wade off the beach to snorkel with turtles, manta rays, and the giant whale shark.

Coral reef Oceania

Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng

Quảng Bình Province, Vietnam

An ancient limestone landscape riddled with the world's greatest cave systems — including Sơn Đoòng, the largest cave passage on Earth, big enough to hold its own jungle, river, and clouds.

Cave Southeast Asia

Puerto Princesa Subterranean River

Puerto Princesa, Palawan, Philippines

One of the world's longest navigable underground rivers, winding 8.2 km through a vast limestone cave system beneath a karst mountain range before emptying directly into the West Philippine Sea.

Cave Southeast Asia

Raja Ampat

West Papua, Indonesia

An archipelago of jungle-clad karst islands scattered across turquoise seas — the most biodiverse marine environment on Earth, at the very heart of the Coral Triangle.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

Rotorua Geothermal Field

Bay of Plenty, North Island, New Zealand

A landscape that steams, bubbles, and erupts — geysers, boiling mud pools, and mineral terraces in impossible colours, at the heart of Māori cultural life.

Hot spring Oceania

Rub' al Khali

Southern Arabian Peninsula

The Empty Quarter — the largest continuous sand desert on Earth, a sea of dunes up to 250 metres tall rolling across an area larger than France.

Desert & dunes Middle East

Salar de Uyuni

Altiplano, southwestern Bolivia

The largest salt flat on Earth — a blinding-white expanse of over 10,000 square kilometres high on the Bolivian Altiplano that becomes, after rain, the world's biggest natural mirror, reflecting the sky so perfectly that the horizon disappears.

Desert & dunes Latin America

Serengeti

Northern Tanzania

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.

Savanna & plains Africa

Simien Mountains

Amhara, northern Ethiopia

A dramatic highland escarpment of jagged pinnacles and mile-deep gorges — the 'Roof of Africa' — home to gelada monkeys, walia ibex, and Ethiopian wolves found nowhere else.

Mountain Africa

South Georgia

South Georgia, South Atlantic

A remote, mountainous sub-Antarctic island where glaciers meet the sea and beaches heave with hundreds of thousands of king penguins and elephant seals — one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on Earth.

Polar & ice Antarctica & the Poles

The Galápagos Islands

Pacific Ocean, ~1,000 km west of Ecuador

A remote volcanic archipelago where evolution is on open display — giant tortoises, marine iguanas, and fearless wildlife found nowhere else, the living laboratory that shaped Darwin's theory of natural selection.

Island Latin America

The Great Blue Hole

Lighthouse Reef, off Belize

A perfect deep-blue circle in the turquoise Caribbean — a giant marine sinkhole over 300 metres across and 120 metres deep, ringed by coral reef and famed as one of the world's great dive sites.

Marine sanctuary North America

The Sahara (Erg Chebbi)

Merzouga / Erg Chebbi, southeastern Morocco

The largest hot desert on Earth, met at its most iconic in Morocco's Erg Chebbi — a sea of towering, rippling dunes that glow gold and rose at dawn and dusk beneath some of the clearest, darkest skies anywhere.

Desert & dunes Africa

The Yucatán Cenotes

Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico

Thousands of natural sinkholes opening into a hidden world of crystal-clear groundwater and flooded caves beneath the Yucatán — the peninsula's only natural fresh water and among the most beautiful swimming holes on Earth.

Cave North America

Torres del Paine

Magallanes, Chilean Patagonia

The signature landscape of Chilean Patagonia — three sheer granite towers rising above windswept steppe, glacial lakes, and hanging glaciers, roamed by guanacos, condors, and pumas.

Mountain Latin America

Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park

Sulu Sea, off Palawan, Philippines

A pristine, remote atoll system in the middle of the Sulu Sea — nearly 100,000 hectares of coral reef, sheer walls, and open ocean that rank among the healthiest marine ecosystems on the planet.

Coral reef Southeast Asia

Vatnajökull Ice Caves

Southeast Iceland

Glowing blue caves melted into the heart of Europe's largest ice cap — crystalline chambers of glacier ice, formed anew each winter beneath a vast frozen dome that hides fire below.

Glacier Europe

Victoria Falls

Zambezi River, Zimbabwe / Zambia border

Known locally as Mosi-oa-Tunya, 'the smoke that thunders' — the Zambezi River drops over a 1.7-kilometre-wide precipice to form the largest single sheet of falling water on Earth, wrapped in a self-made rainforest of spray.

Waterfall Africa

Abisko

Swedish Lapland, above the Arctic Circle, Sweden

A national park in the far north of Swedish Lapland famous for some of the clearest skies on Earth — and, beneath them, one of the world's finest windows onto the northern lights.

Mountain Europe

Acatenango

Sacatepéquez and Chimaltenango Departments, near Antigua, Guatemala

A 3,976-metre stratovolcano climbed almost entirely for the view of a different volcano — from its upper slopes you camp level with Fuego, one of the most active vents in Central America, and watch it erupt through the night.

Volcano Latin America

Al Wahbah Crater

Harrat Kishb, Makkah Province, western Saudi Arabia

A two-kilometre hole in the Arabian desert with a floor of white salt crystals — long assumed to be a meteorite crater, and in fact the scar of a steam explosion from below.

Volcano Middle East

Aliwagwag Falls

Cateel, Davao Oriental, Mindanao

A towering 'stairway' waterfall in eastern Mindanao where the Cateel River tumbles down a long series of cascades — often described as a natural staircase of dozens of tiers dropping through rainforest.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

Aoraki / Mount Cook

Canterbury, South Island, New Zealand

New Zealand's highest peak — a snow-and-ice pyramid rising above glacier-fed turquoise lakes and the country's longest glacier, in the heart of the Southern Alps' greatest concentration of high mountains.

Mountain Oceania

Apo Island Marine Sanctuary

Dauin, Negros Oriental, Philippines

A small volcanic island off Negros ringed by one of the world's most celebrated community-run marine sanctuaries — famous for resident green sea turtles grazing over coral just off the beach.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

Apo Reef Natural Park

Occidental Mindoro, Philippines

The largest contiguous coral reef in the Philippines and the second-largest in the world — an isolated 34-square-kilometre atoll of coral, lagoon, and mangrove in the Mindoro Strait, teeming with sharks, turtles, and rays.

Coral reef Southeast Asia

Arenal Volcano

Alajuela, northern Costa Rica

A near-perfectly conical volcano rising above the rainforests of northern Costa Rica — for decades one of the world's most active, now resting, surrounded by hot springs, waterfalls, and abundant wildlife.

Volcano North America

Balabac Islands

Balabac, southern Palawan

A remote cluster of islands off Palawan's southern tip, ringed by blindingly white and faintly pink sandbars, clear shallow lagoons, and some of the last dugong (sea cow) habitat in the country.

Beach & coast Southeast Asia

Bale Mountains

Bale Zone, Oromia Region, southeastern Ethiopia

The largest stretch of Afroalpine habitat anywhere on Earth — a treeless plateau above 4,000 metres holding more than half the world's Ethiopian wolves, with cloud forest falling away down its southern side.

Mountain Africa

Balicasag Island

Panglao, Bohol, Central Visayas

A tiny coral island off Bohol ringed by a protected marine sanctuary famous for its dramatic reef wall, resident sea turtles, and swirling schools of jackfish — one of the country's premier diving and snorkelling sites.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

Bardenas Reales

Navarre, northern Spain

A semi-desert of pale clay badlands in northern Spain — wind- and water-carved ravines, flat-topped mesas, and lone earth pillars that look transplanted from the American West.

Desert & dunes Europe

Batanes

Batanes, northernmost Philippines

The country's northernmost islands — rolling emerald hills that meet the sea in dramatic cliffs, stone villages built to withstand typhoons, and a windswept beauty utterly unlike the tropical lowlands.

Island Southeast Asia

Belize Barrier Reef

Caribbean coast of Belize

The largest barrier reef in the northern hemisphere — some 300 kilometres of coral running the length of Belize, with three of the Atlantic's four true atolls behind it and the Great Blue Hole at its centre.

Coral reef North America

Biri Rock Formations

Biri Island, Northern Samar, Eastern Visayas

Massive sandstone rock formations on a remote island where the Pacific Ocean meets the ferocious San Bernardino Strait — sculpted over millennia into cliffs, arches, and tidal pools battered by giant waves.

Rock formation Southeast Asia

Blue Mountains

New South Wales, Australia

A sandstone plateau slashed by vast eucalypt-filled valleys that shimmer blue with oil haze — home to towering cliffs, waterfalls, and a tree thought extinct for 90 million years.

Forest Oceania

Bulusan Volcano & Lake

Sorsogon, Bicol, Philippines

An active, rainforest-cloaked stratovolcano at the southern tip of Luzon, cradling a still crater-foot lake — the green, misty heart of Bulusan Volcano Natural Park.

Volcano Southeast Asia

Callao Cave

Peñablanca, Cagayan, Northern Luzon

A vast limestone cave of seven great chambers lit by natural skylights — and the site where the ancient human species Homo luzonensis was discovered, deep in the karst of the Cagayan Valley.

Cave Southeast Asia

Camiguin & White Island

Camiguin, Northern Mindanao

A small volcanic island 'born of fire and water' — home to more volcanoes per square kilometre than anywhere in the country, ringed by hot and cold springs, waterfalls, and the bare white sandbar of White Island offshore.

Island Southeast Asia

Caramoan Islands

Caramoan, Camarines Sur, Bicol, Philippines

A remote Bicol peninsula where jagged limestone islets, hidden lagoons, and pocket white-sand beaches crowd a warm, reef-fringed sea — an El Nido–like seascape on the Pacific side of Luzon.

Island Southeast Asia

Chitwan National Park

Terai lowlands, southern Nepal

Nepal's first national park — a lush lowland jungle of sal forest, tall grassland, and rivers that shelters greater one-horned rhinos, Bengal tigers, and gharial crocodiles.

Forest South Asia

Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary

Stann Creek District, south-central Belize, eastern Maya Mountains

Tropical forest on the eastern slopes of the Maya Mountains, set aside as the world's first protected area for the jaguar — with waterfall pools and Victoria Peak above.

Forest Latin America

Cocora Valley

Quindío, Coffee Region, Colombia

A green Andean valley where the tallest palm trees on Earth — Colombia's slender wax palms — soar up to 60 metres above misty cloud-forest hills, an almost dreamlike landscape in the heart of coffee country.

Forest Latin America

Coiba

Gulf of Chiriquí, Veraguas Province, Pacific Panama

The largest island in Central America, cut off from the mainland when sea levels rose — and left almost untouched for eighty-five years because it was a penal colony nobody would go near.

Island Latin America

Copper Canyon

Sierra Tarahumara, Chihuahua, Mexico

A network of six great canyons in the Sierra Tarahumara of northern Mexico — deeper in places than the Grand Canyon — traversed by one of the world's most spectacular railways.

Canyon North America

Cradle Mountain

Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park, Central Highlands, northwest Tasmania, Australia

Tasmania's emblem: the jagged dolerite crown of Cradle Mountain rising above glacier-carved Dove Lake, in the heart of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, with wombats on the moors and golden fagus in autumn.

Mountain Oceania

Dana Biosphere Reserve

Tafilah Governorate, along the Great Rift Valley, Jordan

Jordan's largest nature reserve — a sweep of mountain ridges and sandstone canyons tumbling from a 1,500-metre plateau down to the desert of Wadi Araba, spanning several bioclimatic zones in a single dramatic descent.

Canyon Middle East

Death Valley

California / Nevada, United States

The hottest, driest, and lowest place in North America — a vast desert of salt flats, sculpted dunes, and painted badlands that, against all odds, bursts into wildflowers after rare rains.

Desert & dunes North America

Doñana

Andalusia, southwestern Spain

The marshes at the mouth of the Guadalquivir — one of Europe's most important wetlands, a staging post for millions of migrating birds, the stronghold of the Iberian lynx, and a place now visibly running short of water.

Wetland Europe

Donsol Whale Shark Sanctuary

Donsol, Sorsogon, Bicol Region

A quiet Bicol town whose plankton-rich bay draws seasonal gatherings of whale sharks — the world's largest fish — met on a strictly regulated, community-run, swim-alongside basis that pioneered ethical encounters in the Philippines.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

Doubtful Sound

Fiordland National Park, South Island, New Zealand

Fiordland's deep, silent wilderness fjord — larger, wilder, and far quieter than neighbouring Milford Sound, reached only by boat across Lake Manapouri and a mountain pass, its three dark arms walled by rainforest cliffs and roamed by dolphins, seals, and penguins.

Fjord Oceania

Finnish Lapland

Northern Finland, above the Arctic Circle

A vast Arctic wilderness of snow-blanketed forest, frozen lakes, and open fell — where the northern lights dance through the long polar nights and the summer sun never sets.

Forest Europe

Franz Josef Glacier

Westland Tai Poutini National Park, South Island, New Zealand

A steep river of blue ice that pours from the Southern Alps almost into rainforest — one of only a handful of glaciers on Earth that descend so close to temperate forest and the sea, and one of the fastest-moving, tumbling from high snowfields to a valley of ferns.

Glacier Oceania

Great Santa Cruz Island

Zamboanga City, Zamboanga Peninsula, Mindanao

One of the few pink-sand beaches in the world — a protected island off Zamboanga City whose blush-coloured shore comes from crushed red organ-pipe coral, backed by a mangrove lagoon.

Beach & coast Southeast Asia

Hierve el Agua

San Lorenzo Albarradas, Oaxaca, Mexico

A pair of 'petrified waterfalls' in the mountains of Oaxaca — cliffs coated white by mineral springs — above natural infinity pools that hang over a vast valley.

Hot spring North America

Hinatuan Enchanted River

Hinatuan, Surigao del Sur, Mindanao, Philippines

A short, astonishingly deep spring-fed river of sapphire and jade water that surfaces from an underground karst system and flows straight to the sea — its clarity and colour the product of limestone, depth and the way water scatters light.

River Southeast Asia

Hormuz Island

Strait of Hormuz, Persian Gulf, southern Iran

A small 'rainbow island' in the Strait of Hormuz where salt-dome geology paints the hills and beaches in red, ochre, and a spectrum of mineral colours — including sand you can taste.

Island Middle East

Horseshoe Bend

Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, near Page, Arizona, USA

A perfect 270-degree meander of the Colorado River, seen from a sandstone rim about 1,000 ft (305 m) above the water — one of the most photographed views in the American Southwest.

Canyon North America

Horton Plains & World's End

Central Highlands, Sri Lanka

A high, misty plateau of montane grassland and cloud forest in Sri Lanka's highlands, ending abruptly at World's End — a sheer escarpment that drops nearly 900 metres to the plains.

Mountain South Asia

Hundred Islands

Alaminos, Pangasinan, Philippines

A scatter of 124 small, mushroom-shaped limestone islands in the Lingayen Gulf — ancient coral reef, uplifted and undercut by the sea into rounded green-capped islets you can hop between by boat.

Island Southeast Asia

Jebel Shams

Al Hajar Mountains, northern Oman

Oman's highest mountain, whose sheer rim plunges into the vast Wadi Ghul — the 'Grand Canyon of Arabia' — a mile-deep gorge of banded rock and vertiginous cliffs.

Mountain Middle East

Jigokudani & the Snow Monkeys

Yamanouchi, Nagano Prefecture, Japan

A steaming hot-spring valley in the mountains of Nagano — 'Hell Valley' — where wild Japanese macaques, the famous snow monkeys, come down through the winter forest to bathe in a natural thermal pool, the only place on Earth where monkeys soak in an onsen in the wild.

Hot spring East Asia

Joshua Tree National Park

Southern California, USA, between Twentynine Palms and Interstate 10, about 140 miles east of Los Angeles

Where two deserts meet: shaggy Joshua trees and piles of rounded monzogranite boulders spread across nearly 800,000 acres of southern California, with dark night skies and a long drop into the lower Colorado Desert.

Desert & dunes North America

Kaieteur Falls

Kaieteur National Park, Potaro-Siparuni, central Guyana

A single 226-metre drop of the Potaro River into rainforest gorge — roughly five times the height of Niagara, carrying enough water to make it one of the most powerful waterfalls on Earth, and with almost nothing built around it.

Waterfall Latin America

Kalanggaman Island

Palompon, Leyte, Eastern Visayas

A slender, uninhabited coral island in the Camotes Sea famous for its long, curving white sandbar that trails off both ends into clear turquoise shallows — a near-perfect desert island.

Island Southeast Asia

Kawasan Falls

Badian, Cebu, Central Visayas, Philippines

A tiered waterfall in southern Cebu whose pools glow an almost unreal turquoise — the colour a gift of the limestone the spring-fed river runs through on its way to the sea.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

Kayangan Lake, Coron

Coron Island, Palawan, Philippines

Often called the cleanest lake in the Philippines — a jewel-clear brackish lake cradled by limestone cliffs on Coron Island, reached by a short climb over a saddle with one of the country's most photographed viewpoints.

Lake Southeast Asia

Kinabatangan River

Sabah, Malaysian Borneo

Sabah's great wildlife river — the second longest in Malaysia, whose forested floodplain is among the best places on Earth to see wild orangutans, proboscis monkeys and pygmy elephants from a boat.

River Southeast Asia

Koh Rong

Gulf of Thailand, off Sihanoukville, Cambodia

A jungle-cloaked island off Cambodia's coast ringed by long white-sand beaches and clear turquoise water — and famous for seas that glow blue with bioluminescent plankton at night.

Island Southeast Asia

Kong Lor Cave

Khammouane Province, central Laos

A river cave that tunnels for over seven kilometres straight through a limestone mountain — navigated by longtail boat through pitch darkness, from one green valley to another.

Cave Southeast Asia

Kuang Si Falls

Luang Prabang Province, northern Laos

A three-tiered jungle waterfall near Luang Prabang that spills over pale travertine into a staircase of impossibly turquoise pools, cool and clear enough to swim in.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

Lake Atitlán

Sololá, southwestern Guatemala highlands

A deep blue volcanic lake cradled in a highland caldera and ringed by three perfect volcanic cones and Maya villages — long called one of the most beautiful lakes on Earth.

Lake Latin America

Lake Sebu & the Seven Falls

South Cotabato, Mindanao, Philippines

A serene highland lake wreathed in morning mist, feeding a chain of seven waterfalls through the mountains — the ancestral home of the T'boli people and one of Mindanao's most soulful landscapes.

Lake Southeast Asia

Lake Tekapo (Takapō)

Mackenzie Basin, Canterbury, South Island, New Zealand

A glacier-fed turquoise lake in the Mackenzie Basin, at the heart of the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve — milky blue water by day and some of the clearest night skies on Earth.

Lake Oceania

Lord Howe Island

Tasman Sea, about 570 km east of Port Macquarie, New South Wales, Australia

A crescent of volcanic island in the Tasman Sea, 11 km long, with the 875 m Mount Gower above a lagoon sheltered by the world's most southerly coral reef. A World Heritage Site since 1982, it takes only 400 visitors at a time.

Island Oceania

Los Haitises

Samaná Bay, Hato Mayor, Monte Plata and Samaná provinces, Dominican Republic

A limestone plateau eaten into hundreds of conical hills of almost identical height — and where it meets Samaná Bay, the hilltops continue offshore as forested islets standing in the water.

Karst landscape Latin America

Los Roques Archipelago

Caribbean Sea, about 128 km north of La Guaira, Venezuela

A Caribbean national park of some 350 islands, cays and sandbanks around a shallow turquoise lagoon, ringed by two barrier reefs and some 1,500 km² of coral reef, protected as a national park since 1972.

Coral reef Latin America

Lut Desert

Kerman & Sistan provinces, southeastern Iran

One of the hottest and most surreal deserts on Earth — a sea of wind-carved ridges called kaluts that stretch to the horizon, where satellites have recorded record land-surface temperatures.

Desert & dunes Middle East

Ma'in Hot Springs

Between Madaba and the Dead Sea, Madaba Governorate, Jordan

A cluster of geothermal waterfalls tumbling down a desert canyon near the Dead Sea — hot, mineral-rich water heated deep underground and prized for its healing warmth since Roman times.

Hot spring Middle East

Makgadikgadi Pans

Northeastern Botswana, between Nata and Maun

Some of the largest salt pans on Earth — the dried floor of an ancient lake in the Kalahari, a blinding white plain that floods in the rains and draws zebra, wildebeest and flamingos.

Desert & dunes Africa

Maria Cristina Falls

Iligan, Lanao del Norte, Mindanao

A powerful twin waterfall on the Agus River — nearly 100 metres of thundering white water that both dazzles visitors and drives a hydroelectric plant powering much of Mindanao.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

Masungi Georeserve

Baras, Rizal, Philippines

A dramatic limestone karst landscape barely 90 minutes from Manila, reborn as a conservation project — jagged rock formations, rope courses, and hanging viewpoints woven through a rainforest being restored tree by tree.

Karst landscape Southeast Asia

Mekong Delta

Southwestern Vietnam

Some 40,000 square kilometres of river-built farmland where the Mekong finally reaches the sea — Vietnam's rice bowl, threaded by canals, and now sinking faster than the sea is rising.

Wetland Southeast Asia

Moalboal Sardine Run

Moalboal, Cebu, Central Visayas, Philippines

A vast resident school of sardines swirls in the shallows off Panagsama Beach on Cebu's west coast — a living silver tornado you can reach by swimming a few strokes from shore.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

Monarch Butterfly Reserve

Michoacán / State of Mexico, central Mexico

High-altitude fir forests where hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies gather each winter after migrating up to 4,000 kilometres — one of the most astonishing wildlife spectacles on the planet.

Forest North America

Monteverde Cloud Forest

Puntarenas / Alajuela, Cordillera de Tilarán, Costa Rica

A misty mountaintop cloud forest dripping with life — where clouds snag on the ridge and feed a green world of orchids, epiphytes, and rare wildlife, from the resplendent quetzal to hundreds of bird species.

Forest North America

Mount Apo

Davao del Sur / Cotabato, Mindanao, Philippines

The highest mountain in the Philippines at 2,954 metres — a potentially active volcano whose slopes hold sulfur vents, a summit boulder field, crater lakes, and one of the country's most important refuges for the Philippine eagle.

Mountain Southeast Asia

Mount Fitz Roy

Los Glaciares National Park, Santa Cruz, Argentina

A sheer granite spire on the Argentina–Chile border towering above El Chaltén in Los Glaciares National Park — one of the most dramatic and technically feared peaks on Earth, wreathed in the cloud the first peoples read as smoke.

Mountain Latin America

Mount Guiting-Guiting

Sibuyan Island, Romblon, MIMAROPA

A jagged, saw-toothed peak crowning Sibuyan — an island so ecologically intact it's called the 'Galápagos of Asia' — offering one of the most technical and rewarding climbs in the Philippines.

Mountain Southeast Asia

Mount Hamiguitan Range

Davao Oriental, Mindanao

A UNESCO World Heritage wildlife sanctuary famous for its eerie 'pygmy forest' of century-old bonsai-sized trees growing on mineral-rich soil — a hotspot of endemic species, from pitcher plants to the Philippine eagle.

Forest Southeast Asia

Mount Kanlaon

Negros Island, Central Visayas / Negros Island Region

Active volcano on Negros, at PHIVOLCS Alert Level 2 as of 18 October 2026 after a moderately explosive eruption on 10 October. Entry into the 4 km Permanent Danger Zone around the summit is prohibited, so there are no summit climbs.

Volcano Southeast Asia

Mount Kilimanjaro

Northern Tanzania

The highest mountain in Africa and the tallest free-standing mountain on Earth — a snow-capped volcanic giant rising alone from the savanna to 5,895 metres, climbable without technical gear yet crowned with vanishing equatorial glaciers.

Mountain Africa

Mount Kinabalu

Sabah, Borneo, Malaysia

The highest peak in Southeast Asia's island world — a granite giant on Borneo, ringed by one of the richest concentrations of plant life on Earth, from giant Rafflesia flowers to carnivorous pitcher plants.

Mountain Southeast Asia

Mount Pinatubo Crater Lake

Zambales / Tarlac / Pampanga, Luzon, Philippines

The volcano behind the second-largest eruption of the 20th century now cradles a serene turquoise crater lake — reached by a 4x4 ride across ash-grey lahar canyons and a short hike to the rim.

Volcano Southeast Asia

Mount Roraima

Canaima National Park, Venezuela

A vast, cloud-wrapped table mountain rising in sheer 400-metre cliffs above the jungle — a 'lost world' plateau of black rock, endemic plants, and waterfalls spilling into the void.

Mountain Latin America

Mountain Pine Ridge

Cayo District, western Belize

A highland of Caribbean pine on a granite massif in western Belize, cut by rivers that tumble over waterfalls and through the vast entrance of Rio Frio Cave.

Forest Latin America

Nxai Pan & Baines' Baobabs

Nxai Pan National Park, northeastern Botswana, north of the Maun–Nata road

A fossil lake bed in the Kalahari, grassland that fills with game in the rains — and Baines' Baobabs, a cluster of ancient trees standing on the edge of a salt pan.

Savanna & plains Africa

Ometepe

Lake Nicaragua, Rivas Department, southwestern Nicaragua

Two volcanoes standing in a freshwater lake and joined at the base into a single hourglass island — one still erupting, the other carrying a crater lake and cloud forest.

Volcano Latin America

Ouzoud Falls

Tanaghmeilt, near Azilal, Middle Atlas, Morocco

North Africa's tallest waterfall — a 110-metre triple cascade tumbling over red cliffs into a green river gorge in the Middle Atlas, wreathed in rainbows, olive groves and wild Barbary macaques.

Waterfall Africa

Pacaya

Escuintla, near Antigua, southern Guatemala

One of Central America's most active volcanoes, an accessible cone near Antigua where hikers walk over old lava fields toward the glow of a restless summit.

Volcano Latin America

Pagsanjan Falls

Pagsanjan / Cavinti, Laguna, Southern Luzon

One of Luzon's most famous waterfalls, reached by a thrilling paddled canoe journey up a gorge of jungle cliffs and rapids — where skilled boatmen 'shoot the rapids' back downstream.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

Palau's Rock Islands

Rock Islands Southern Lagoon, Palau, Micronesia

Hundreds of emerald mushroom-shaped limestone islands scattered across a turquoise lagoon — a marine wonderland of hidden lakes, world-class reefs, and a lake full of harmless golden jellyfish.

Marine sanctuary Oceania

Palaui Island

Santa Ana, Cagayan, Northern Luzon

A wild, protected island off the northeastern tip of Luzon — rolling green headlands, empty beaches, and a Spanish-era lighthouse on the dramatic Cape Engaño cliffs above the meeting of two seas.

Island Southeast Asia

Perito Moreno Glacier

Los Glaciares National Park, Santa Cruz, Argentina

A vast, active glacier in Argentine Patagonia whose towering blue ice face calves thunderously into a lake — one of the few large glaciers on Earth that has stayed roughly in balance rather than sharply retreating.

Glacier Latin America

Phang Nga Bay

Andaman Sea, southern Thailand

A calm emerald bay between Phuket and Krabi studded with sheer limestone karst islands, sea caves, and hidden tidal lagoons reached by paddling through the rock.

Karst landscape Southeast Asia

Phewa Lake

Pokhara, central Nepal

Nepal's second-largest lake, about 4 km² of open water on the edge of Pokhara, a short flight or a 6–8 hour drive from Kathmandu. Rent a rowing boat from Lakeside to see Machapuchare and the Annapurna range reflected in the lake. October–November and March–April have the clearest skies.

Lake South Asia

Phnom Kulen

Siem Reap Province, Cambodia

A forested sandstone plateau northeast of Angkor where a wide waterfall pours into jungle pools, and the riverbed upstream is carved with a thousand ancient sculptures beneath the flowing water.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

Railay

Krabi Province, southern Thailand

A tiny peninsula of white-sand beaches walled off from the mainland by towering limestone cliffs — reachable only by boat, and one of the world's great rock-climbing spots.

Beach & coast Southeast Asia

Río Celeste

Tenorio Volcano National Park, Guanacaste, Costa Rica

A river in the Costa Rican rainforest that turns an improbable sky blue at the exact point two clear streams meet — a colour produced by light scattering off suspended particles, not by any dissolved pigment.

River North America

Sagada

Sagada, Mountain Province, Cordillera, Philippines

A cool, pine-clad limestone highland in the heart of the Cordillera, where caves riddle the karst, waterfalls drop into rice terraces, and dawn breaks over a sea of clouds at Kiltepan.

Karst landscape Southeast Asia

Semuc Champey

Alta Verapaz, central Guatemala

A 300-metre natural limestone bridge deep in the Guatemalan jungle, carrying a staircase of turquoise pools on its surface while a whole river thunders through the rock beneath.

River Latin America

Siargao & Sugba Lagoon

Surigao del Norte, Mindanao, Philippines

A tear-drop island of surf, palm forest, and mangrove — home to the famous Cloud 9 reef break, the glassy Sugba Lagoon, tidal rock pools, and one of the largest mangrove reserves in the country.

Island Southeast Asia

Sigiriya

Central Province, Sri Lanka

A sheer 200-metre column of ancient volcanic rock rising abruptly from the green plains of central Sri Lanka — a natural monolith crowned by the ruins of a 5th-century sky palace.

Rock formation South Asia

Similan Islands

Mu Ko Similan National Park, Phang Nga Province, Andaman Sea, Thailand

An eleven-island granite archipelago in the Andaman Sea whose west sides are stacked with room-sized boulders underwater — widely rated the best diving in Thailand, and closed for five months a year to let the reef recover.

Coral reef Southeast Asia

Sinharaja Forest Reserve

Sabaragamuwa & Southern Provinces, Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka's last great stretch of primary lowland rainforest — a dense, dripping, biodiversity hotspot where more than half the island's endemic trees, birds, and mammals are found.

Forest South Asia

Siquijor

Siquijor, Central Visayas, Philippines

A small island of clear-water coves, waterfalls spilling into turquoise pools, and coral sanctuaries just off the sand — all fed by rain that sinks straight through its raised-coral bedrock and resurfaces inland as cold blue springs.

Island Southeast Asia

Siwa Oasis

Western Desert, near the Libyan border, Egypt

A remote desert oasis of palm groves, freshwater springs, and turquoise salt lakes in Egypt's far west — an ancient island of green ringed by the dunes of the Great Sand Sea.

Lake Africa

Socotra

Socotra Archipelago, Arabian Sea, Yemen

An isolated Indian Ocean island of such strange, ancient life that it's been called the 'Galápagos of the Indian Ocean' — home to umbrella-shaped dragon's blood trees and hundreds of plants found nowhere else on Earth.

Island Middle East

Sohoton Cove & Jellyfish Sanctuary

Bucas Grande, Surigao del Norte, Mindanao, Philippines

A hidden lagoon system on Bucas Grande Island, entered through a sea cave passable only at low tide, sheltering stingless jellyfish, karst-walled coves, and cliffs you can leap from into deep clear water.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

Sơn Đoòng Cave

Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park, Quảng Bình Province, Vietnam

The largest known cave passage on Earth — a river-cut cavern in central Vietnam so vast that two collapsed skylights have let a jungle grow inside it.

Cave Southeast Asia

Taal Volcano & Lake

Batangas, Calabarzon, Philippines

A volcano within a lake within a volcano — one of the world's smallest and most active volcanoes, sitting on an island inside a crater lake that fills a far larger ancient caldera, just south of Manila.

Volcano Southeast Asia

Table Mountain

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

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.

Mountain Africa

Taman Negara

Pahang, Terengganu and Kelantan, Peninsular Malaysia

One of the oldest tropical rainforests on Earth — more than 130 million years unbroken — sprawling across the heart of Peninsular Malaysia, with a treetop canopy walkway, jungle rivers and the peninsula's highest mountain.

Forest Southeast Asia

Taroko Gorge

Taroko National Park, Hualien County, eastern Taiwan

A gorge cut through solid marble on Taiwan's east coast — walls rising as much as a kilometre above the Liwu River, in one of only a handful of river canyons anywhere carved entirely through marble.

Canyon East Asia

Tassili n'Ajjer

Illizi and Djanet, southeastern Algeria, at the Libyan and Nigerien borders

A sandstone plateau the size of Ireland, eroded into forests of freestanding rock towers and nearly three hundred natural arches — and carrying, in its layers, the record of an ice sheet that once covered the Sahara.

Rock formation Africa

The Asir Mountains

Asir Province, southwestern Saudi Arabia

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.

Mountain Middle East

The Atacama Desert

Northern Chile

The driest nonpolar desert on Earth — a surreal high-altitude landscape of salt flats, sculpted dunes, geyser fields, and flamingo-dotted lagoons, under some of the clearest night skies anywhere.

Desert & dunes Latin America

The Boiling Lake

Morne Trois Pitons National Park, Dominica

A flooded fumarole in the Dominican interior whose centre boils continuously — the second-largest hot lake on Earth, reached only by a six-hour walk across a valley of steam vents.

Hot spring Latin America

The Cardamom Mountains

Koh Kong, Pursat and Kampong Speu Provinces, southwestern Cambodia

One of the largest tracts of rainforest left in mainland Southeast Asia, almost unpopulated across its interior — and a range wet enough on one side and dry enough on the other to hold two different forests at once.

Forest Southeast Asia

The Dead Sea

Jordan Rift Valley, Jordan / Israel / West Bank

The lowest point on the surface of the Earth — a hypersaline lake so dense with salt and minerals that swimmers float effortlessly, cradled in the desert far below sea level.

Lake Middle East

The Edge of the World

Jebel Fihrayn, near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

A dramatic cliff-edge of the Tuwaiq escarpment near Riyadh, where an ancient seabed drops away hundreds of metres to a vast plain that stretches unbroken to the horizon.

Rock formation Middle East

The Everglades

Florida, United States

A vast, slow-moving 'river of grass' at the tip of Florida — a shallow, sawgrass-covered wetland the size of a small country, and the only place on Earth where alligators and crocodiles live side by side.

Wetland North America

The Farasan Islands

Red Sea, off Jazan, southwestern Saudi Arabia

A low, coral-fringed archipelago in the southern Red Sea — turquoise shallows, mangroves, and reefs that shelter dugongs, nesting seabirds, and a gazelle found nowhere else.

Island Middle East

The Maldives Atolls

Indian Ocean, southwest of Sri Lanka

A double chain of coral atolls scattered across the Indian Ocean — nearly 1,200 low-lying islands ringed by turquoise lagoons and vibrant reefs, and the lowest-lying nation on Earth.

Island South Asia

The Myeik Archipelago

Tanintharyi Region, far southern Myanmar, Andaman Sea

Around eight hundred islands scattered down Myanmar's southern coast — limestone and granite under unbroken rainforest, barely inhabited, and closed to outsiders until 1997.

Island Southeast Asia

The Pitons

Soufrière, Saint Lucia, Caribbean

Two dramatic volcanic spires rising straight from the Caribbean Sea — the twin cones of Gros Piton and Petit Piton, cloaked in rainforest, that have become the emblem of Saint Lucia.

Mountain North America

The Sundarbans

Ganges–Brahmaputra Delta, Bangladesh (and India)

The largest mangrove forest on Earth — a vast, tidal labyrinth of channels and salt-tolerant trees at the mouth of the Ganges, and the last stronghold of the swimming Bengal tiger.

Wetland South Asia

The Twelve Apostles

Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia

A row of towering limestone sea stacks rising from the Southern Ocean along Victoria's Great Ocean Road — sculpted from crumbling coastal cliffs by the relentless waves, and constantly, visibly changing.

Rock formation Oceania

The Wahiba Sands

Ash Sharqiyah, eastern Oman

A sea of red-gold dunes rolling for well over a hundred kilometres across eastern Oman — classic Arabian desert, home to the Bedouin and their camels.

Desert & dunes Middle East

The White Desert

Farafra, Western Desert, Egypt

A dreamlike stretch of Egypt's Western Desert where wind has carved a vanished chalk seabed into ghostly white boulders shaped like mushrooms, icebergs, and sculptures.

Desert & dunes Africa

Tinuy-an Falls

Bislig, Surigao del Sur, Mindanao, Philippines

A broad, multi-tiered curtain of water often called the 'Niagara of the Philippines' — up to 95 metres wide, spilling in white sheets through the rainforest of eastern Mindanao, frequently crowned by a midday rainbow.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

Todra Gorge

Near Tinghir, Drâa-Tafilalet, High Atlas, Morocco

A soaring slot canyon in Morocco's High Atlas — sheer red limestone walls closing to a corridor barely ten metres wide above a spring-fed river and a lush palm oasis, and a world-class rock-climbing venue.

Canyon Africa

Tongariro National Park

Central Plateau, North Island, New Zealand

New Zealand's oldest national park — a volcanic heartland of steaming craters, brilliant emerald lakes, and lava fields, crossed by one of the world's finest day hikes, and gifted to the nation by Māori in 1887 to keep it intact.

Volcano Oceania

Vang Vieng

Vientiane Province, central Laos

A dramatic landscape of sheer limestone karst peaks rising above the Nam Song river and green rice fields, riddled with caves and blue lagoons, in the hills north of Vientiane.

Karst landscape Southeast Asia

Viñales Valley

Sierra de los Órganos, Pinar del Río Province, western Cuba

Round-topped limestone towers standing up to 300 metres out of flat red tobacco fields in western Cuba — the same tower-karst process that built Ha Long Bay, on an island, and still farmed by hand.

Karst landscape North America

Wadi Al-Hitan

Faiyum Governorate, Western Desert, Egypt

A stretch of Egyptian desert holding the best fossil record anywhere of whales learning to leave the land — hundreds of skeletons of archaic whales, some still with hind legs, lying where a shallow sea left them.

Desert & dunes Middle East

Wadi Rum

Southern Jordan

The 'Valley of the Moon' — a vast desert of red and gold sand studded with towering sandstone and granite mountains, sculpted by wind into arches, canyons, and sheer cliffs beneath enormous skies.

Desert & dunes Middle East

Wadi Shab

Ash Sharqiyah coast, northeastern Oman

A palm-fringed canyon on Oman's coast where a hike between sheer cliffs leads to a chain of turquoise pools — and a hidden waterfall tucked inside a cave chamber.

Canyon Middle East

White Sands

Tularosa Basin, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA

The largest gypsum dunefield on Earth — 710 km² of brilliant white dunes in New Mexico's Tularosa Basin, protected in White Sands National Park and surrounded by a missile range.

Desert & dunes North America

Yakushima

Kagoshima, southern Japan

A mossy, rain-soaked island of ancient cedar forest — home to yakusugi trees thousands of years old, whose primeval green world helped inspire the landscapes of Studio Ghibli.

Forest East Asia

Yala National Park

Southern and Uva Provinces, southeastern Sri Lanka

Dry-zone scrub, lagoons and granite outcrops on Sri Lanka's southeast coast — thought to hold the highest density of leopards per square kilometre anywhere, in a park that partly closes each year when the water runs out.

Savanna & plains South Asia

Yuanyang Rice Terraces

Yuanyang County, Honghe, Yunnan, China

Thousands of hand-cut paddy terraces falling three thousand steps down the Ailao Mountains in southern Yunnan — flooded through the winter months into a vast staircase of mirrors that turns pink and gold at sunrise.

Living terraces East Asia