Forests

Canopies and root-tangled floors humming with life.

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

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

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

Bwindi Impenetrable Forest

Southwestern Uganda

An ancient, mist-shrouded montane rainforest that shelters nearly half the world's remaining mountain gorillas — one of the planet's most moving wildlife encounters.

Forest Africa

Chitwan National Park

Terai lowlands, southern Nepal

Nepal's first national park — a lush lowland jungle of sal forest, tall grassland, and rivers that shelters greater one-horned rhinos, Bengal tigers, and gharial crocodiles.

Forest South Asia

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

Congo Basin Rainforest

Central Africa

The world's second-largest rainforest — an immense green heart of Africa that absorbs more carbon than it emits, home to bonobos, forest elephants, and okapi.

Forest Africa

Daintree Rainforest

Far North Queensland, Australia, north of Port Douglas

Australia's largest continuous block of tropical rainforest, often called the oldest on Earth, running down to the Coral Sea where the forest meets the Great Barrier Reef.

Forest Oceania

Finnish Lapland

Northern Finland, above the Arctic Circle

A vast Arctic wilderness of snow-blanketed forest, frozen lakes, and open fell — where the northern lights dance through the long polar nights and the summer sun never sets.

Forest 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

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

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

Monarch Butterfly Reserve

Michoacán / State of Mexico, central Mexico

High-altitude fir forests where hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies gather each winter after migrating up to 4,000 kilometres — one of the most astonishing wildlife spectacles on the planet.

Forest North America

Monteverde Cloud Forest

Puntarenas / Alajuela, Cordillera de Tilarán, Costa Rica

A misty mountaintop cloud forest dripping with life — where clouds snag on the ridge and feed a green world of orchids, epiphytes, and rare wildlife, from the resplendent quetzal to hundreds of bird species.

Forest North America

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

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

Nyungwe Forest

Southwestern Rwanda

One of Africa's largest and oldest montane rainforests — a chimpanzee stronghold with a treetop canopy walkway and Rwanda's first UNESCO World Heritage listing.

Forest Africa

Olympic National Park

Washington State, USA

Three wildernesses in one — moss-draped temperate rainforest, glaciated peaks, and a wild driftwood coast of sea stacks, all packed onto a single Pacific peninsula.

Forest North America

Ranomafana National Park

Southeastern Madagascar, near Ranomafana town

Misty montane rainforest on Madagascar's eastern escarpment, home to thirteen lemur species including the golden bamboo lemur — part of the Rainforests of the Atsinanana World Heritage Site.

Forest 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

Shiretoko

Hokkaido, northern Japan

A wild peninsula at the edge of Japan where drift ice arrives each winter — feeding an extraordinary food chain of brown bears, salmon, sea eagles, and whales.

Forest East Asia

Sinharaja Forest Reserve

Sabaragamuwa & Southern Provinces, Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka's last great stretch of primary lowland rainforest — a dense, dripping, biodiversity hotspot where more than half the island's endemic trees, birds, and mammals are found.

Forest South Asia

Taman Negara

Pahang, Terengganu and Kelantan, Peninsular Malaysia

One of the oldest tropical rainforests on Earth — more than 130 million years unbroken — sprawling across the heart of Peninsular Malaysia, with a treetop canopy walkway, jungle rivers and the peninsula's highest mountain.

Forest Southeast Asia

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 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 Cardamom Mountains

Koh Kong, Pursat and Kampong Speu Provinces, southwestern Cambodia

One of the largest tracts of rainforest left in mainland Southeast Asia, almost unpopulated across its interior — and a range wet enough on one side and dry enough on the other to hold two different forests at once.

Forest Southeast Asia

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