Natural wonders of Latin America

Every wonder in the atlas that sits in Latin America, across 16 countries. This region grows as the atlas expands.

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

Aconcagua

Aconcagua Provincial Park, Mendoza Province, Argentina

The highest mountain in the Americas and the loftiest peak outside Asia — a colossal Andean massif of rock, snow and thin air near Mendoza, and the most accessible of the world's Seven Summits.

Mountain Latin America

Angel Falls

Canaima National Park, Venezuela

The tallest waterfall on Earth — a ribbon of water that plunges 979 metres from the rim of a flat-topped tepui, so high it dissolves into mist long before it reaches the ground.

Waterfall Latin America

Caño Cristales

Serranía de la Macarena, Meta, Colombia

The 'river of five colours' — a crystalline Colombian stream that erupts each season into brilliant reds, pinks, yellows, greens, and blues as a rare aquatic plant blooms across its bed of ancient rock.

River Latin America

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

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

Chimborazo

Chimborazo Province, Ecuador, near Riobamba

Ecuador's highest mountain — an ice-capped volcano whose summit, thanks to the equatorial bulge, is the farthest point on Earth's surface from the planet's centre.

Volcano Latin America

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

Cocos Island

Pacific Ocean, 550 km off Costa Rica

A rainforest island alone in the Pacific, ringed by waters where hammerhead sharks school in their hundreds — often called the finest big-animal dive site on Earth.

Marine sanctuary 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

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

Cotopaxi

Cotopaxi Province, Ecuador

A near-perfect glacier-capped cone rising almost 5,900 metres from the Andean highlands — one of the world's highest active volcanoes, and among the most symmetrical anywhere.

Volcano Latin America

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

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

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

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

Laguna Colorada

Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna National Reserve, Sur Lípez, Potosí Department, southwestern Bolivia

A shallow salt lake on the Bolivian Altiplano at 4,278 m whose water runs brick-red with algae and sediment, streaked with white borax islands and dotted with thousands of flamingos.

Lake Latin America

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 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

Lençóis Maranhenses

Maranhão, Brazil

A vast field of white dunes that fills each rainy season with thousands of crystal-clear turquoise lagoons — a desert that becomes, improbably, dotted with lakes.

Desert & dunes Latin America

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

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

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

Médanos de Coro

Médanos Isthmus, beside the city of Coro, Falcón state, Venezuela

A sea of wind-sculpted sand dunes up to 40 metres high on the isthmus north of Coro — Venezuela's desert, constantly reshaped by the wind, a short drive from a colonial city.

Desert & dunes Latin America

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 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 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

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

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

Península Valdés

Chubut, Patagonia, Argentina

A windswept Patagonian peninsula and its sheltered gulfs — one of the world's premier marine-wildlife havens, where southern right whales calve close to shore and orcas hunt seals on the beach.

Marine sanctuary Latin America

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

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

Quilotoa

Cotopaxi Province, Ecuadorian Andes

A green crater lake inside a 3 km-wide volcanic caldera high in the Ecuadorian Andes — reached by walking down from the rim.

Lake 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

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

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

Tatacoa Desert

Huila, Colombia

A labyrinth of eroded red and grey badlands in Colombia's Huila department — not a true desert but a dry tropical forest sculpted into ochre canyons and ashen gullies, and one of the country's finest places to watch the stars.

Desert & dunes Latin America

Tayrona National Park

Magdalena, Caribbean coast, Colombia

Where the jungled foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta tumble straight into the Caribbean — a coast of golden coves, giant granite boulders and rainforest, still lived in and cultivated by the Indigenous peoples who hold it.

Beach & coast Latin America

The Amazon Rainforest

Amazon Basin, Brazil (and neighbouring countries)

The largest tropical rainforest on Earth — a continent-spanning sea of green threaded by the mighty Amazon River, holding a staggering share of the planet's species and helping regulate the world's climate.

Forest Latin America

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 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 Pantanal

Mato Grosso & Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil

The world's largest tropical wetland — a vast seasonal floodplain that is the best place on Earth to see jaguars in the wild, teeming with caimans, capybaras, and millions of birds.

Wetland Latin 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