Rivers

Moving water that carves and feeds whole landscapes.

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

Hinatuan Enchanted River

Hinatuan, Surigao del Sur, Mindanao, Philippines

A short, astonishingly deep spring-fed river of sapphire and jade water that surfaces from an underground karst system and flows straight to the sea — its clarity and colour the product of limestone, depth and the way water scatters light.

River Southeast Asia

Kinabatangan River

Sabah, Malaysian Borneo

Sabah's great wildlife river — the second longest in Malaysia, whose forested floodplain is among the best places on Earth to see wild orangutans, proboscis monkeys and pygmy elephants from a boat.

River Southeast Asia

Río Celeste

Tenorio Volcano National Park, Guanacaste, Costa Rica

A river in the Costa Rican rainforest that turns an improbable sky blue at the exact point two clear streams meet — a colour produced by light scattering off suspended particles, not by any dissolved pigment.

River North 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

Si Phan Don & the Khone Falls

Khong District, Champasak Province, southern Laos

Where the Mekong spreads fourteen kilometres wide and breaks into thousands of islands — and then falls over the widest waterfall on Earth, the barrier that stopped the river ever becoming a highway to China.

River Southeast Asia

The Li River

Guilin to Yangshuo, Guangxi, Southern China

China's most famous river scene — a clear green waterway winding 83 kilometres from Guilin to Yangshuo through a forest of karst peaks, past bamboo groves, fishermen on rafts, and the misty limestone hills painted on the 20-yuan note.

River East Asia

The Three Gorges

Chongqing & Hubei, China

A 200-kilometre procession of sheer limestone gorges where the Yangtze — Asia's greatest river — cuts between cliffs rising a thousand metres, long celebrated in Chinese poetry and painting.

River East Asia

The Verzasca River

Verzasca Valley, Ticino, Southern Switzerland

One of the clearest rivers in Europe — an emerald-green mountain stream tumbling through the Verzasca Valley in Italian-speaking Ticino, past smooth sculpted granite and the double-arched stone bridge of Lavertezzo.

River Europe

The Vjosa

Southern Albania, from the Greek border to the Adriatic north of Vlorë

One of the last large rivers in Europe still allowed to behave like a river — braiding across its own gravel, moving its channels year to year, and undammed for 192 kilometres to the Adriatic.

River Europe