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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
