Best of · North America
The 16 Most Beautiful Places in North America
16 places · every one real, mapped, and worth the trip
North America is a continent of superlatives — the deepest canyons, the tallest trees, geysers and glaciers, painted deserts and Arctic ice — much of it protected inside the world's first and finest national parks and reachable on a long, scenic drive.
This is our editors' pick of the most beautiful natural places across the continent, from Greenland's icebergs to the Yucatán's cenotes. It isn't a ranked countdown, but every entry is a real, mapped place with an honest guide to reaching it and the season it looks its best.
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Banff & Moraine Lake Turquoise water
Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada
A glacier-fed lake of almost electric blue beneath the jagged Valley of the Ten Peaks — the most photographed view in the Canadian Rockies.
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Churchill The polar bear coast
Churchill, Manitoba, western Hudson Bay, Canada
The Hudson Bay shore where roughly 900 polar bears gather each autumn, waiting on the tundra for the sea ice to form.
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Grand Canyon The great chasm
Arizona, United States
A mile-deep, 446-kilometre gorge in Arizona that lays two billion years of Earth's history bare in bands of rose, ochre, and slate.
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Yosemite Valley
Sierra Nevada, California, United States
Sheer granite walls, waterfalls, and giant sequoias in a glacier-carved valley that helped launch the idea of the national park itself.
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Denali
Alaska, USA
The highest peak in North America, rising in a single vast sweep above the Alaskan tundra and its wildlife-rich wilderness.
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Yellowstone
Wyoming / Montana / Idaho, United States
A supervolcano's caldera of geysers, hot springs, and rainbow-rimmed pools, home to bison, wolves, and grizzlies across its high plateau.
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Antelope Canyon
Navajo Nation, near Page, Arizona, United States
A slot canyon on Navajo land where shafts of light pour between sculpted, wave-like sandstone walls glowing orange and violet.
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Crater Lake
Oregon, USA
The deepest lake in the United States, an astonishingly blue circle of water filling the caldera of a collapsed Oregon volcano.
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Monument Valley
Arizona–Utah border, Navajo Nation
Red sandstone buttes and mesas rising from the desert floor on the Navajo Nation — the archetypal landscape of the American West.
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Bryce Canyon
Utah, United States
A vast natural amphitheatre filled with thousands of orange rock spires, or hoodoos, glowing at sunrise across the Utah plateau.
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Zion Canyon
Utah, United States
Towering sandstone cliffs above a green river valley, cut by narrow slot canyons you can wade through the heart of.
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Ilulissat Icefjord
Ilulissat, western Greenland
A UNESCO fjord in Greenland choked with colossal icebergs calved from one of the fastest-moving glaciers on Earth.
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The Yucatán Cenotes
Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico
Flooded limestone sinkholes across the Yucatán, their clear water lit by shafts of light through jungle roots and cave ceilings.
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The Great Blue Hole
Lighthouse Reef, off Belize
A perfect dark-blue circle of deep water in a Belizean reef, a collapsed cave system ringed by turquoise shallows.
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Redwood Forests
Northern California, USA
Groves of the tallest living things on Earth in coastal California, ancient redwoods rising in cathedral silence through the fog.
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Niagara Falls
Ontario, Canada / New York, United States
Not the tallest but among the most powerful falls on Earth, a thundering horseshoe of water on the US–Canada border.
North America spans Arctic to tropics, so timing matters: the western parks are at their best in late spring and autumn, Greenland and Alaska in the long summer light, and the Yucatán and Belize in the dry winter months. Each guide notes the window that suits it.
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