The Best Natural Wonders to Visit in May

Planning a trip for May? These 200 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

Arches National Park

Utah, USA

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.

Rock formation North America

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

Benagil Sea Cave

Benagil, Algarve, southern Portugal

A domed sea cave on the Algarve coast whose vaulted limestone roof is pierced by a great circular skylight — an 'oculus' that pours a column of sunlight onto a hidden beach reachable only from the water.

Cave Europe

Białowieża Forest

Poland–Belarus border

The last great primeval lowland forest of Europe — a surviving fragment of the woodland that once covered the continent, and the home of the wild European bison.

Forest Europe

Bora Bora

Society Islands, French Polynesia

The archetypal South Pacific paradise — a jagged volcanic peak ringed by a luminous turquoise lagoon and a protective coral reef, encircled by palm-fringed islets of white sand.

Island Oceania

Bryce Canyon

Utah, United States

Not really a canyon at all, but a series of vast natural amphitheatres filled with thousands of glowing orange rock spires called hoodoos — the largest concentration of these strange pinnacles on Earth.

Rock formation North America

Bungle Bungle Range

Purnululu, Kimberley, Western Australia

Hundreds of orange-and-black striped sandstone domes rising from the Kimberley outback — a beehive landscape unknown to the wider world until the 1980s.

Rock formation Oceania

Cappadocia

Central Anatolia, Turkey

A dreamlike landscape of 'fairy chimneys' — tapering cones and pinnacles of soft volcanic rock carved by erosion, honeycombed with ancient cave homes and churches, and famous for its dawn balloon flights.

Rock formation Middle East

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

Eisriesenwelt

Werfen, Salzburg, Austria

The largest ice cave on Earth — 42 kilometres of limestone passage in an Alpine cliff, its entrance chambers filled with towering formations of natural ice.

Cave Europe

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

Faroe Islands

North Atlantic (between Iceland and Norway)

A cluster of green, wind-scoured islands rising in sheer sea cliffs from the wild North Atlantic — grass-roofed villages, cascading waterfalls, and a lake that seems to hang above the ocean.

Island Europe

Geirangerfjord

Sunnmøre, Western Norway

One of the world's most celebrated fjords — a deep, narrow arm of the sea winding between sheer 1,000-metre cliffs laced with waterfalls like the Seven Sisters, with abandoned farms clinging to impossible ledges.

Fjord Europe

Giant Forest Sequoias

California, USA

Groves of giant sequoias — the largest living things on Earth by volume — including General Sherman, a single tree containing more wood than almost any other organism alive.

Forest North America

Giant's Causeway

County Antrim, Northern Ireland

Around 40,000 interlocking basalt columns, mostly perfect hexagons, stepping down into the North Atlantic — one of the most remarkable geometric formations in nature.

Rock formation Europe

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

Huangshan

Anhui Province, China

The 'Yellow Mountains' — a range of granite peaks and wind-sculpted pines that rise from seas of cloud, the landscape that inspired centuries of Chinese painting and poetry.

Mountain East 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

Isle of Skye

Inner Hebrides, Scotland

A wild Hebridean island of jagged black peaks, mist-wrapped pinnacles, and sea cliffs — the most dramatic scenery in Scotland, stitched with waterfalls, lochs, and ancient rock.

Island Europe

Jeju Island

Jeju Province, South Korea

A volcanic island crowned by South Korea's highest peak, riddled with the world's finest lava-tube caves and edged by a sunrise crater rising straight from the sea.

Volcano East Asia

Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon

Vatnajökull National Park, Southeast Iceland

A glacial lagoon where huge icebergs calved from the Vatnajökull ice cap drift in still, deep water before floating out to sea — and wash up as glittering shards on the black-sand 'Diamond Beach'.

Glacier Europe

Kawah Ijen

East Java, Indonesia

A volcano famous for two rare sights: electric-blue flames that flicker across its crater in the dark as sulphurous gas ignites, and the world's largest highly acidic crater lake — a vast turquoise pool with the acidity of battery acid.

Volcano Southeast Asia

Kīlauea

Island of Hawaiʻi, United States

One of the most active volcanoes on Earth — a shield volcano on Hawaiʻi whose lava has repeatedly reshaped the island, sometimes glowing in a lava lake and, at times, spilling in rivers of fire to the sea.

Volcano North America

Krka National Park

Šibenik-Knin County, Dalmatia, Croatia

A Dalmatian river that builds its own waterfalls — the Krka lays down travertine barriers of living rock as it flows, culminating in Skradinski Buk, a broad staircase of cascades tumbling over seventeen natural steps.

Waterfall Europe

Kruger National Park

Mpumalanga & Limpopo, South Africa

One of Africa's greatest and most accessible game reserves — a vast bushveld wilderness the size of a small country, home to the Big Five and an extraordinary abundance of wildlife.

Savanna & plains Africa

Manú National Park

Madre de Dios & Cusco, southeastern Peru

One of the most biodiverse places on Earth — a park descending from Andean cloud forest to lowland Amazon, with more bird species than any other protected area in the world.

Forest 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

Monument Valley

Arizona–Utah border, Navajo Nation

Colossal red sandstone buttes standing alone on a desert plain — the defining landscape of the American West, on Navajo land where the mesas rise up to 300 metres from the flats.

Rock formation North America

Mount Bromo

East Java, Indonesia

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.

Volcano Southeast Asia

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

Mount Yasur

Tanna Island, Vanuatu

One of the world's most accessible active volcanoes — a crater that has erupted almost continuously for centuries, flinging glowing lava bombs into the night sky just metres from its rim.

Volcano Oceania

Mù Cang Chải Terraces

Yên Bái Province, northern Vietnam

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.

Living terraces Southeast 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

Ölüdeniz

Fethiye, Muğla Province, southwest Turkey

A sheltered turquoise lagoon sealed off from the open Aegean by a slender sand spit, backed by the pine-clad wall of Babadağ — one of the world's premier paragliding launches — and the cliff-ringed cove of Butterfly Valley nearby.

Beach & coast Middle East

Pangong Tso

Ladakh, India

A vast high-altitude lake on the Tibetan Plateau whose waters shift through unearthly blues and greens beneath the bare, colossal mountains of Ladakh at over 4,300 metres.

Lake South Asia

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

Plitvice Lakes

Lika, central Croatia

A staircase of sixteen turquoise lakes tumbling one into the next over natural travertine dams and countless waterfalls, threaded by boardwalks through lush forest — Croatia's oldest and most beloved national park.

Lake Europe

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

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

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

Skeleton Coast

Northwestern Namibia

Where the world's oldest desert meets the cold Atlantic — a fog-shrouded shore of shipwrecks, immense dunes, and seal colonies, kept alive by mist rolling off the frigid Benguela Current.

Beach & coast Africa

Sossusvlei & Deadvlei

Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia

The soaring red dunes of the ancient Namib — among the tallest on Earth — surrounding the surreal white clay pan of Deadvlei, where 900-year-old blackened trees stand skeletal against orange sand and blue sky.

Desert & dunes Africa

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

Tsingy de Bemaraha

Melaky, western Madagascar

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.

Karst landscape Africa

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

Uluru

Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, Northern Territory, Australia

A colossal sandstone monolith rising abruptly from the flat red heart of Australia — glowing through fiery reds and oranges at sunrise and sunset, and a place of the deepest cultural significance to its Aboriginal custodians.

Rock formation Oceania

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

Yellowstone

Wyoming / Montana / Idaho, United States

The world's first national park, sitting atop a giant volcanic hotspot — home to half the planet's geysers, rainbow-rimmed hot springs like Grand Prismatic, and vast wildlife-rich valleys of bison, wolves, and bears.

Geyser North America

Zhangjiajie (Wulingyuan)

Hunan Province, China

A forest of thousands of towering quartzite-sandstone pillars rising hundreds of metres from misty subtropical forest — an ethereal landscape of floating peaks that helped inspire the world of Avatar.

Rock formation East Asia

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

Antelope Canyon

Navajo Nation, near Page, Arizona, United States

A slot canyon of flowing, sculpted sandstone walls glowing orange, purple, and gold — carved by flash floods into curving corridors where, at midday, shafts of sunlight spear down like beams of light.

Canyon North America

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

Avenue of the Baobabs

Menabe, western Madagascar

A dirt road lined with towering, ancient baobab trees — vast smooth trunks rising like columns, some close to a thousand years old, glowing at sunset in one of Africa's most iconic scenes.

Forest Africa

Badab-e Surt

Mazandaran Province, northern Iran

A hillside staircase of terraced mineral pools in northern Iran, stained deep orange and red by iron-rich spring water and built up over thousands of years into stepped basins of travertine.

Hot spring Middle East

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

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 Cave of Biševo

Biševo island, off Vis, Dalmatia, Croatia

A sea cave on the tiny island of Biševo that fills with an unearthly blue light around midday, when sunlight enters through a submerged opening and glows up through the water onto the cavern's walls.

Cave Europe

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

Blyde River Canyon

Mpumalanga, South Africa

One of the world's largest canyons and the greatest of its green, forested kind — a subtropical gorge of red-rock buttresses, plunging cliffs and swirling rock pools along Mpumalanga's Panorama Route.

Canyon Africa

Brandberg Mountain

Damaraland, Erongo Region, Northwest Namibia

Namibia's highest mountain — a huge granite dome standing alone above the desert, its 'Fire Mountain' name earned from the glow of sunset on its flanks, and home to the famous 'White Lady' among thousands of ancient rock paintings.

Mountain Africa

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

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

Chapada Diamantina

Bahia, northeastern Brazil

A highland wilderness of table mountains, deep canyons, and waterfalls in the Brazilian interior — with caves holding pools so clear the light turns them electric blue.

Canyon Latin America

Charyn Canyon

Almaty Region, Kazakhstan

A dramatic red-rock canyon on the steppes of Central Asia, its most famous stretch — the Valley of Castles — a maze of towering sculpted spires often likened to a smaller Grand Canyon.

Canyon Central Asia

Cliffs of Moher

County Clare, western Ireland

A wall of sheer sea cliffs rising up to 214 metres straight from the wild Atlantic on Ireland's west coast — layered in ancient rock, alive with seabirds, and often wreathed in Atlantic mist and spray.

Rock formation Europe

Colca Canyon

Arequipa Region, southern Peru

One of the deepest canyons on Earth — more than twice the depth of the Grand Canyon — carved by the Colca River through the Peruvian Andes, and among the surest places in the world to watch giant Andean condors soar.

Canyon Latin America

Connemara National Park

County Galway, Ireland

A compact wilderness on Ireland's rugged west coast — bog, heath and quartzite mountains of the Twelve Bens, where Connemara ponies graze and boardwalk trails climb Diamond Hill for sweeping Atlantic views.

Mountain Europe

Creux du Van

Jura Mountains, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

A vast natural rock amphitheatre in the Swiss Jura — a horseshoe of sheer 150-metre limestone cliffs curving nearly a kilometre and a half around a green forested hollow.

Rock formation Europe

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

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

Dune du Pilat

Arcachon Bay, Gironde, southwestern France

The tallest sand dune in Europe — a vast wave of pale sand over 100 metres high, poised between a great pine forest and the Atlantic on France's southwest coast.

Desert & dunes Europe

El Tatio Geysers

Andes near San Pedro de Atacama, Antofagasta Region, northern Chile

The world's highest major geyser field — more than eighty geysers steaming at 4,300 metres in the high Andes above the Atacama, where columns of hot vapour rise against the dawn cold and the surrounding volcanic peaks.

Geyser Latin America

Epupa Falls

Kunene Region (Kaokoland), Namibia–Angola border

A wide scatter of waterfalls where the Kunene River breaks over rock on the remote Angolan border — braided channels tumbling among baobabs and palms in one of the least-visited corners of Namibia, and Himba homeland.

Waterfall Africa

Esteros del Iberá

Corrientes Province, northeastern Argentina

One of the largest freshwater wetlands on Earth — a vast mosaic of marsh, lagoon and floating island in northeast Argentina, and the stage for South America's most ambitious rewilding, which has returned the jaguar to the region after 70 years.

Wetland Latin America

Fish River Canyon

ǁKaras, southern Namibia

Africa's largest canyon — a 160-kilometre gash up to 550 metres deep and 27 kilometres wide, where a river winds in vast loops through some of the oldest rock on the continent.

Canyon Africa

Geysir & Strokkur

Haukadalur geothermal field, Southwest Iceland

The geothermal valley that gave the world the word 'geyser' — where the reliable Strokkur spout blasts boiling water 15–20 metres skyward every few minutes amid steaming vents and mineral pools.

Geyser Europe

Glen Coe

Lochaber, Scottish Highlands, Scotland, United Kingdom

Scotland's most dramatic glen — a deep, glacier-scoured valley walled by brooding peaks and knife-edge ridges, as famous for its beauty as for the 1692 massacre that darkens its name.

Mountain Europe

Gotland & the Raukar

Baltic Sea, southeastern Sweden

Sweden's largest island, rimmed by raukar — weathered limestone sea stacks that stand along the shore like a gallery of stone figures carved by the Baltic.

Rock formation Europe

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

Guilin & the Li River Karst

Guangxi, southern China

The landscape of Chinese scroll paintings brought to life — thousands of rounded limestone peaks rising from green plains and the winding Li River, mirrored in still water beneath drifting mist.

Karst landscape East Asia

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

Huanglong

Sichuan Province, China

A valley paved with thousands of terraced travertine pools in gold, turquoise, and blue — a three-kilometre cascade of mineral basins climbing toward snow peaks.

Living terraces East 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

Jasmund Chalk Cliffs

Jasmund National Park, Rügen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany

Germany's largest chalk cliffs, dropping white into the Baltic on the island of Rügen — topped by the last great beech forest on this coast, and eroding fast enough that the shoreline is measurably different within a lifetime.

Beach & coast Europe

Jatiluwih Rice Terraces

Tabanan Regency, Bali, Indonesia

Bali's largest surviving expanse of traditional rice terraces, spread over some 600 hectares beneath Mount Batukaru and irrigated by subak — a thousand-year-old system in which farmers themselves allocate every litre of water down the slope.

Living terraces Southeast Asia

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

Kakadu

Northern Territory, Australia

Australia's largest national park — a vast monsoonal landscape of floodplains, waterfalls, and stone country, alive with crocodiles and millions of birds, and holding some of the world's oldest rock art.

Wetland Oceania

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

Kelimutu

Flores, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia

A volcano on the island of Flores crowned by three crater lakes that change colour independently and unpredictably — turquoise, green, black, brown, or red — each tied in local belief to the resting place of departed souls.

Lake Southeast Asia

Kenai Fjords National Park

Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, United States

A coast of glacier-carved fjords on the Gulf of Alaska, where tidewater glaciers spilling from the vast Harding Icefield calve straight into the sea among humpback whales, orcas, sea otters, and cliffs of nesting seabirds.

Fjord North America

Killarney National Park

County Kerry, Ireland

Ireland's first national park — a storied landscape of lakes, ancient oak woods and mountains around Killarney, home to the country's only wild red deer herd and its largest surviving native forest.

Lake Europe

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

Komodo National Park

Lesser Sunda Islands, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia

A cluster of rugged islands that shelter the Komodo dragon — the largest lizard on Earth — above water, and some of the world's richest coral reefs below, including a beach tinted pink by red coral.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

Königssee

Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, Germany

A deep, emerald, fjord-like lake hemmed by sheer alpine cliffs in Berchtesgaden National Park — so clean that only silent electric boats are allowed to cross it.

Lake Europe

Kornati Islands

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.

Island Europe

Kravica Falls

Trebižat River, near Ljubuški, Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina

A 25-metre curtain of water spread across an amphitheatre of moss and living rock in the karst of Herzegovina — a waterfall that is still building itself out of the river it carries.

Waterfall Europe

Lake Bled

Upper Carniola, Slovenia

A serene glacial lake with a tiny church-topped island at its heart, cupped beneath a clifftop castle and the peaks of the Julian Alps — one of the most picture-perfect scenes in Europe.

Lake Europe

Lake Como

Lombardy, northern Italy

A deep, inverted-Y-shaped glacial lake beneath the southern Alps, ringed by steep wooded mountains, cliff-clinging villages, and centuries of grand lakeside villas.

Lake Europe

Lake Lucerne

Central Switzerland (cantons of Lucerne, Nidwalden, Obwalden, Schwyz, Uri)

A many-armed alpine lake at the heart of Switzerland — 114 square kilometres of deep blue-green water winding between the peaks of Rigi, Pilatus, and the Uri Alps, ringed by lakeside towns and the meadow where the Swiss Confederation was born.

Lake Europe

Lake Malawi

Malawi, Mozambique & Tanzania

A vast Rift Valley lake holding more fish species than any other lake on Earth — hundreds of brilliantly coloured cichlids found nowhere else, in water clear as glass.

Lake Africa

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 Titicaca

Peru–Bolivia border, Andes

The highest large navigable lake on Earth — a vast, luminous inland sea at 3,812 metres in the Andes, ringed by snow peaks and dotted with floating reed islands.

Lake Latin America

Laurisilva of Madeira

Madeira, Portugal (North Atlantic)

The world's largest surviving laurel forest — a mist-fed, moss-draped relic of the woodland that once cloaked southern Europe, blanketing the mountainous heart of Madeira and threaded by the island's famous levada water channels.

Forest Europe

Lauterbrunnen Valley

Bernese Oberland, Switzerland

A glacier-carved Alpine valley walled by sheer cliffs down which seventy-two waterfalls pour — including the free-falling Staubbach and the thundering Trümmelbach inside the mountain.

Waterfall Europe

Longji Rice Terraces

Longsheng County, Guangxi, China

The Dragon's Backbone — centuries-old rice terraces climbing whole mountainsides in coils and ribbons above the villages of the Zhuang and Yao people, near Guilin in southern China, flooded to mirror the sky in spring and turning gold at harvest.

Living terraces East Asia

Mammoth Cave

Kentucky, USA

The longest cave system known on Earth — over 685 kilometres of mapped passages winding beneath the Kentucky hills, with new miles still being discovered.

Cave North America

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

Martvili Canyon

Samegrelo, western Georgia

A narrow limestone canyon in western Georgia where a turquoise river winds between sheer mossy walls, past small waterfalls — once the private bathing place of Georgian nobles.

Canyon Europe

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

Melissani Cave

Karavomylos, Kefalonia, Ionian Islands, Greece

An underground lake on the Ionian island of Kefalonia, roofed by a collapsed cavern that lets a shaft of midday sun ignite the brackish water in an unearthly electric blue.

Cave Europe

Meteora

Thessaly, central Greece

A cluster of colossal, sheer rock pillars soaring from the plains of Thessaly — a surreal geological forest of stone towers, several capped by centuries-old monasteries built where the cliffs seem to touch the sky.

Rock formation Europe

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

Moray

Maras district, Sacred Valley, Cusco Region, Peru

A set of vast concentric terraces sunk into the Andean plateau above the Sacred Valley — engineered bowls in which the temperature drops measurably from the top ring to the floor, giving Inca farmers a whole ladder of climates in one field.

Living terraces Latin 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 Etna

Sicily, Southern Italy

Europe's largest and most active volcano — a snow-capped, constantly rumbling giant looming over eastern Sicily, whose frequent eruptions have built astonishingly fertile slopes of vineyards and orchards.

Volcano Europe

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

The highest peak in the central Philippines and one of the country's most active volcanoes — a forested stratovolcano crowning Negros, ringed by a national park rich in endemic wildlife.

Volcano Southeast Asia

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 Teide

Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain

Spain's highest peak and the third-largest volcano on Earth measured from its base — a 3,715-metre cone rising from a vast caldera of frozen lava, often floating above a sea of cloud.

Volcano Europe

Nærøyfjord

Aurland, Vestland, Western Norway

The narrowest fjord in the world open to cruising — a slender, UNESCO-listed arm of the great Sognefjord, squeezed to barely 250 metres between cliffs that climb well over a kilometre straight from the water.

Fjord Europe

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

Okavango Delta

Northern Botswana

A river that never reaches the sea — the Okavango spills into the Kalahari to form a vast, ever-shifting inland delta of channels, islands, and lagoons that draws Africa's great wildlife into the heart of a desert.

Wetland Africa

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

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

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

Pamukkale

Denizli Province, southwestern Turkey

The 'Cotton Castle' — a dazzling white hillside of terraced travertine pools formed by mineral-rich hot springs, where warm turquoise water spills over blindingly white stone terraces.

Hot spring Middle East

Peneda-Gerês National Park

Northern Portugal, on the Spanish border

Portugal's only national park — a wild expanse of 300-million-year-old granite mountains, oak forest, peat bog, and plunging rivers in the far north, home to Iberian wolves, wild ponies, and roaming long-horned cattle.

Mountain Europe

Preikestolen

Rogaland, southwestern Norway

A sheer, flat-topped cliff jutting 604 metres straight above the Lysefjord — 'Pulpit Rock,' one of the most spectacular and vertiginous natural viewpoints in the world.

Rock formation Europe

Prometheus Cave

Imereti, near Kutaisi, western Georgia

A vast karst cave near Kutaisi, its huge chambers hung with stalactites and curtains of stone, explored on lit walkways and, in part, by boat along an underground river.

Cave Europe

Quebrada de Humahuaca

Jujuy Province, northwestern Argentina

A long, arid mountain valley in Argentina's far northwest, walled by hillsides banded in reds, ochres, greens and purples — a UNESCO-listed cultural landscape carved by the Rio Grande and travelled for ten thousand years.

Rock formation Latin America

Rainbow Mountain (Vinicunca)

Cusco Region, Peruvian Andes

A high Andean ridge striped in bands of red, gold, green, and turquoise — mineral-stained sediments laid bare at over 5,000 metres, one of the most colourful mountains on Earth.

Mountain Latin America

Ras Muhammad

Southern Sinai, Egypt

At the very tip of the Sinai Peninsula, a marine national park where sheer coral walls plunge into the Red Sea — one of the world's great diving and snorkelling destinations.

Marine sanctuary Africa

Redwood Forests

Northern California, USA

Cathedral groves of coast redwoods — the tallest living things on Earth — rising over 100 metres in cool, fog-fed forests along the northern California coast.

Forest North America

Reynisfjara

Near Vík í Mýrdal, South Iceland

Iceland's famous black-sand beach — jet-black volcanic sand under a cliff of stacked basalt columns, with offshore sea stacks and a powerful, genuinely dangerous surf rolling straight in off the North Atlantic.

Beach & coast Europe

Rhine Falls

Near Schaffhausen, Northern Switzerland

The largest waterfall in Europe by volume — 150 metres of the Rhine thundering over a 23-metre ledge around a rock pinnacle you can climb, in a green gorge below a hilltop castle.

Waterfall Europe

Saklıkent Gorge

Muğla Province, near Fethiye, southwest Turkey

A hidden slot canyon of the Taurus Mountains — a chasm up to 300 m deep and around 18 km long, so narrow in places you can touch both walls, cut by the icy Esen River behind the beaches of the Turquoise Coast.

Canyon Middle East

Samaria Gorge

White Mountains, Chania, Crete, Greece

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.

Canyon Europe

Santorini Caldera

Cyclades, Aegean Sea, Greece

A flooded volcanic crater ringed by 300-metre cliffs of banded ash and lava — the drowned remains of one of the largest eruptions in human history.

Volcano Europe

Saxon Switzerland

Saxony, eastern Germany

A labyrinth of free-standing sandstone towers, table mountains, and deep ravines above a bend in the River Elbe near Dresden — the birthplace of free climbing.

Rock formation Europe

Scărișoara Ice Cave

Apuseni Mountains, western Romania

A cave in Romania's Apuseni Mountains that holds one of the largest underground glaciers in the world — a block of ancient ice thousands of years old, deep beneath the forest.

Cave Europe

Seljalandsfoss

Seljaland, South Iceland

The waterfall you can walk behind — a slender 60-metre ribbon on the Seljalandsá river, fed by the Eyjafjallajökull ice cap, dropping over a former sea cliff into a mossy amphitheatre with a footpath that loops right around behind the falling water.

Waterfall Europe

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

Sipadan Island

Celebes Sea, off Sabah, Malaysian Borneo

Malaysia's only oceanic island — a coral pinnacle rising 600 metres from the floor of the Celebes Sea off Borneo, ringed by walls of reef alive with turtles, barracuda tornadoes and reef sharks.

Coral reef Southeast 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

Skógafoss

Skógar, South Iceland

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.

Waterfall Europe

Slovenský raj

Spiš-Gemer Karst, eastern Slovakia

A karst plateau split into pieces by gorges so narrow that the trails through them are climbed on ladders bolted beside the waterfalls — and most of them only work in one direction.

Canyon Europe

Słowiński Sand Dunes

Słowiński National Park, Pomerania, Poland

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.

Desert & dunes Europe

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

Spitzkoppe

Erongo Region, Western Namibia

The 'Matterhorn of Namibia' — a group of bald granite peaks rising abruptly from the flat Namib plains, glowing orange at dawn and dusk, hung with a natural rock arch and some of the darkest night skies on Earth.

Rock formation Africa

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

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 Azores

Azores archipelago, Atlantic Ocean

A remote archipelago of green volcanic islands rising from the mid-Atlantic — crater lakes, hot springs, hydrangea-lined roads, and some of the best whale watching on Earth.

Island Europe

The Black Forest

Baden-Württemberg, southwest Germany

A vast range of dark, fir-cloaked hills in southwest Germany, cut by waterfalls and mirror lakes and giving rise to the Danube — the largest forested upland in Germany.

Forest Europe

The Blue Grotto

Isle of Capri, Campania, Italy

A sea cave on the island of Capri where sunlight passing through an underwater opening fills the whole cavern with an unearthly, glowing electric-blue light.

Cave Europe

The Burren

County Clare, Ireland

A silver-grey moonscape of bare limestone pavement in County Clare — one of Europe's finest karst landscapes, where Arctic, alpine and Mediterranean wildflowers bloom together in the cracks of the naked rock.

Karst landscape Europe

The Calanques

Between Marseille and Cassis, Provence, France

A string of steep white-limestone inlets on the Mediterranean coast near Marseille — hidden turquoise coves walled by sun-bleached cliffs, reached on foot or by boat.

Beach & coast Europe

The Curonian Spit

Klaipėda County, western Lithuania, extending into Kaliningrad Oblast

A 98-kilometre ribbon of sand dune separating a lagoon from the Baltic — never more than a few kilometres wide, and standing only because two centuries of deliberate replanting stopped it burying itself.

Beach & coast Europe

The Danube Delta

Where the Danube meets the Black Sea, eastern Romania

Europe's largest and best-preserved river delta — a vast, watery maze of reeds, channels, and lakes where the Danube fans into the Black Sea, and one of the continent's greatest bird havens.

Wetland Europe

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 Drakensberg

KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (bordering Lesotho)

South Africa's great basalt rampart — a UNESCO World Heritage range of soaring escarpment walls, plunging waterfalls and the world's richest gallery of San rock art, rising along the border with Lesotho.

Mountain Africa

The Gobi Desert

Southern Mongolia (and northern China)

A vast cold desert of gravel plains, singing sand dunes, and flaming red cliffs — a land of extremes where dinosaur fossils weather out of the rock and Bactrian camels cross the steppe.

Desert & dunes East Asia

The Gobustan Mud Volcanoes

Gobustan District, southwest of Baku, Azerbaijan

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.

Volcano Europe

The Hardangerfjord

Hardanger, Vestland, Western Norway

Norway's second-longest fjord and its orchard country — 179 kilometres of deep blue water reaching inland from the coast past Trolltunga, the Vøringsfossen falls, and the Folgefonna glacier, its gentler slopes white with apple and cherry blossom each spring.

Fjord Europe

The High Atlas & Mount Toubkal

High Atlas, near Imlil and Marrakesh, Morocco

The rugged spine of Morocco — a snow-topped range of bare rock and Berber villages rising south of Marrakesh to Jbel Toubkal, at 4,167 m the highest peak in North Africa and the Arab world.

Mountain Africa

The High Coast

Gulf of Bothnia, northeastern Sweden

A rugged Baltic coast of forested hills, cliffs, and islands that is still visibly rising out of the sea — the site of the greatest land uplift measured anywhere on Earth.

Beach & coast Europe

The Jurassic Coast

Dorset and East Devon, South West England, United Kingdom

England's only natural World Heritage Site — a 95-mile coast where 185 million years of Earth history stand exposed in the cliffs, from red Triassic desert rocks to the sea-carved arch of Durdle Door.

Beach & coast Europe

The Lake District

Cumbria, North West England, United Kingdom

England's largest national park and a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape — a compact country of glacier-carved fells, ribbon lakes and stone-walled valleys that shaped English ideas of the picturesque.

Lake Europe

The Li River

Guilin to Yangshuo, Guangxi, Southern China

China's most famous river scene — a clear green waterway winding 83 kilometres from Guilin to Yangshuo through a forest of karst peaks, past bamboo groves, fishermen on rafts, and the misty limestone hills painted on the 20-yuan note.

River East Asia

The Sognefjord

Sogn, Vestland, Western Norway

The King of the Fjords — Norway's longest and deepest fjord, reaching more than 200 kilometres inland from the coast to the foot of the Jotunheimen mountains, its narrow arms lined with sheer cliffs, hanging waterfalls, and villages under snow peaks.

Fjord Europe

The Three Gorges

Chongqing & Hubei, China

A 200-kilometre procession of sheer limestone gorges where the Yangtze — Asia's greatest river — cuts between cliffs rising a thousand metres, long celebrated in Chinese poetry and painting.

River East Asia

The Vjosa

Southern Albania, from the Greek border to the Adriatic north of Vlorë

One of the last large rivers in Europe still allowed to behave like a river — braiding across its own gravel, moving its channels year to year, and undammed for 192 kilometres to the Adriatic.

River Europe

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

Verdon Gorge

Provence, southeastern France

Europe's most spectacular canyon — 25 kilometres of limestone walls plunging up to 700 metres to a river the colour of turquoise glass.

Canyon Europe

Vikos Gorge

Zagori, Pindus Mountains, Epirus, Greece

Listed by Guinness as the deepest gorge in the world relative to its width — a plunging limestone chasm in the Pindus Mountains of northern Greece, at the heart of the stone-village country of Zagori.

Canyon Europe

Wadden Sea

Netherlands, Germany & Denmark

The largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mud flats on Earth — a vast tidal wilderness that feeds 10 to 12 million migratory birds a year.

Wetland Europe

Wadi Mujib

Mujib Biosphere Reserve, east of the Dead Sea, Jordan

A sandstone river canyon plunging into the Dead Sea — the lowest nature reserve on Earth — where a warm perennial stream lets visitors wade, swim and scramble up a slot gorge between towering red walls.

Canyon 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

Whitehaven Beach

Whitsunday Island, Queensland, Australia

A seven-kilometre stretch of near-pure silica sand so white and fine it squeaks underfoot, curving along uninhabited Whitsunday Island, where at Hill Inlet the tide swirls the sand and shallows into shifting ribbons of white and turquoise.

Beach & coast Oceania

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

Yosemite Valley

Sierra Nevada, California, United States

A glacier-carved granite valley of sheer cliffs and thundering waterfalls in California's Sierra Nevada — home to the monoliths of El Capitan and Half Dome, and groves of giant sequoias, the largest trees on Earth.

Mountain North America

Yr Wyddfa & Eryri (Snowdonia)

Gwynedd, North Wales, United Kingdom

The rugged mountain heart of Wales — a national park of glacier-hewn peaks, glacial lakes and Welsh-speaking valleys crowned by Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon), the highest mountain in England and Wales.

Mountain Europe

Zion Canyon

Utah, United States

A soaring sandstone canyon in southern Utah where sheer 600-metre cliffs of cream, pink, and red rock rise above a green river valley — carved by the Virgin River and threaded by unforgettable trails.

Canyon North America