The 29 Most Spectacular Canyons in the World

A canyon is a cross-section of deep time — millions of years of rock laid bare by a river's patient cutting. These are the canyons and gorges of the atlas, from mile-deep painted chasms to slot canyons barely wide enough to walk and gorges you wade through the middle of. Desert canyons bake in summer and glow at dawn and dusk; slot canyons and wadeable gorges can turn lethal in flash floods — each guide notes the best window and what it takes to visit.

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

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

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

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

Chicamocha Canyon

Santander, Colombia

One of the world's great canyons — a vast, arid gorge carved by the Chicamocha River through the eastern Andes of Santander, plunging up to two kilometres deep and crossed by a spectacular cable car.

Canyon Latin America

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

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

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

Durmitor & the Tara Canyon

Durmitor National Park, northern Montenegro

A glaciated limestone massif in northern Montenegro with more than forty peaks above 2,000 metres, cut on its eastern flank by the Tara — at up to 1,300 metres, the deepest river canyon in Europe.

Canyon Europe

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

Fjaðrárgljúfur

Near Kirkjubæjarklaustur, South Iceland

A serpentine canyon on Iceland's south coast, roughly two kilometres long and up to about 100 metres deep, its dark palagonite walls draped in green moss with the Fjaðrá river winding along the bottom — one of the country's most photographed gorges.

Canyon Europe

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

Isalo National Park

Ihorombe Region, southwestern Madagascar, near Ranohira

A sandstone massif carved into canyons up to 200 m deep, plateaus and natural swimming pools in southwestern Madagascar — home to ring-tailed lemurs and plants found nowhere else.

Canyon Africa

Karijini National Park

Hamersley Range, Pilbara, Western Australia, about 1,400 km north of Perth

Western Australia's second-largest national park: more than 627,000 hectares of the Pilbara's Hamersley Range, where creeks plunge into 100-metre gorges cut through banded iron rock and hide waterfalls, ferny pools and narrow chasms.

Canyon Oceania

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

Matka Canyon

West of Skopje, North Macedonia, on the Treska River

A steep limestone canyon on the Treska River just outside Skopje, with a glassy reservoir lake, kayaking, climbing and Vrelo Cave, believed to be among the deepest in Europe.

Canyon 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

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

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

Tiger Leaping Gorge

Yunnan Province, China, about 60 km north of Lijiang

One of the deepest river gorges on Earth — the Jinsha (upper Yangtze) roaring through a 15 km slot between two snow mountains, with nearly 3,800 m from river to summit.

Canyon East 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

Torotoro National Park

Northern Potosí Department, Bolivia, about 140 km south of Cochabamba

A small national park of folded sedimentary rock in Bolivia's Andean valleys, with a 300-metre-deep canyon, a waterfall-filled gorge, one of the country's largest caves and thousands of dinosaur footprints left on Cretaceous shorelines.

Canyon Latin America

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

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 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

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