Every wonder in the atlas

Abisko

Swedish Lapland, above the Arctic Circle, Sweden

A national park in the far north of Swedish Lapland famous for some of the clearest skies on Earth — and, beneath them, one of the world's finest windows onto the northern lights.

Mountain Europe

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

Akagera National Park

Eastern Province, Rwanda

Rwanda's savanna park on the Tanzanian border — a landscape of papyrus swamp, lakes and rolling grassland that lost almost everything, then had lions and rhinos brought back and became the country's only Big Five park.

Savanna & plains Africa

Al Wahbah Crater

Harrat Kishb, Makkah Province, western Saudi Arabia

A two-kilometre hole in the Arabian desert with a floor of white salt crystals — long assumed to be a meteorite crater, and in fact the scar of a steam explosion from below.

Volcano Middle East

Ala Archa National Park

Kyrgyz Ala-Too range, about 35 km south of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

A glacier-filled alpine valley in the Tian Shan just 35 km from Bishkek, rising from 1,500 m to the 4,895 m summit of Semenov-Tian-Shansky Peak.

Mountain Central Asia

Aldabra Atoll

Outer Islands, Seychelles

One of the world's largest raised coral atolls and among the least disturbed places on Earth — home to some 100,000 giant tortoises, far more than the Galápagos.

Island Africa

Aletsch Glacier

Valais, Switzerland

The largest glacier in the Alps — a 20-kilometre river of ice up to 900 metres thick, curving between 4,000-metre peaks in a vast frozen highway.

Glacier Europe

Aliwagwag Falls

Cateel, Davao Oriental, Mindanao

A towering 'stairway' waterfall in eastern Mindanao where the Cateel River tumbles down a long series of cascades — often described as a natural staircase of dozens of tiers dropping through rainforest.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

Amboseli National Park

Kajiado County, southern Kenya, on the Tanzanian border

The land of giants beneath Kilimanjaro — a dry-lake savanna in southern Kenya where great herds of free-ranging elephants cross golden plains with Africa's highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro, rising snow-capped just beyond the border.

Savanna & plains Africa

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

Annapurna Sanctuary

Gandaki, north-central Nepal

A high glacial amphitheatre ringed by a wall of 7,000- and 8,000-metre Himalayan giants — the beating heart of one of the world's great treks, reached through rhododendron forest and terraced hills.

Mountain South Asia

Antarctic Peninsula

Antarctic Peninsula

The most accessible edge of the frozen continent — a realm of blue icebergs, glacier-hung mountains, and vast penguin colonies, where wildlife thrives amid staggering polar scenery.

Polar & ice Antarctica & the Poles

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

Aoraki / Mount Cook

Canterbury, South Island, New Zealand

New Zealand's highest peak — a snow-and-ice pyramid rising above glacier-fed turquoise lakes and the country's longest glacier, in the heart of the Southern Alps' greatest concentration of high mountains.

Mountain Oceania

Apo Island Marine Sanctuary

Dauin, Negros Oriental, Philippines

A small volcanic island off Negros ringed by one of the world's most celebrated community-run marine sanctuaries — famous for resident green sea turtles grazing over coral just off the beach.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

Apo Reef Natural Park

Occidental Mindoro, Philippines

The largest contiguous coral reef in the Philippines and the second-largest in the world — an isolated 34-square-kilometre atoll of coral, lagoon, and mangrove in the Mindoro Strait, teeming with sharks, turtles, and rays.

Coral reef Southeast Asia

Arches National Park

Utah, USA

The greatest concentration of natural stone arches on Earth — more than 2,000 sandstone spans, fins, and balanced rocks glowing red above the high desert of Utah.

Rock formation North America

Arenal Volcano

Alajuela, northern Costa Rica

A near-perfectly conical volcano rising above the rainforests of northern Costa Rica — for decades one of the world's most active, now resting, surrounded by hot springs, waterfalls, and abundant wildlife.

Volcano North America

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

Badab-e Surt

Mazandaran Province, northern Iran

A hillside staircase of terraced mineral pools in northern Iran, stained deep orange and red by iron-rich spring water and built up over thousands of years into stepped basins of travertine.

Hot spring Middle East

Balabac Islands

Balabac, southern Palawan

A remote cluster of islands off Palawan's southern tip, ringed by blindingly white and faintly pink sandbars, clear shallow lagoons, and some of the last dugong (sea cow) habitat in the country.

Beach & coast Southeast Asia

Bale Mountains

Bale Zone, Oromia Region, southeastern Ethiopia

The largest stretch of Afroalpine habitat anywhere on Earth — a treeless plateau above 4,000 metres holding more than half the world's Ethiopian wolves, with cloud forest falling away down its southern side.

Mountain Africa

Balicasag Island

Panglao, Bohol, Central Visayas

A tiny coral island off Bohol ringed by a protected marine sanctuary famous for its dramatic reef wall, resident sea turtles, and swirling schools of jackfish — one of the country's premier diving and snorkelling sites.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

Banaue & the Ifugao Rice Terraces

Ifugao, Cordillera, Philippines

Two thousand years of hand-built rice terraces climbing the Cordillera mountainsides — a living landscape of stone-and-mud paddies, fed by an intricate forest-and-irrigation system, often called the 'Eighth Wonder of the World'.

Living terraces Southeast Asia

Banff & Moraine Lake

Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada

The turquoise glacial lakes of the Canadian Rockies — Moraine Lake beneath the Valley of the Ten Peaks and nearby Lake Louise — where glacier-ground rock flour turns the water an electric blue-green beneath snow-capped mountains.

Lake North America

Bardenas Reales

Navarre, northern Spain

A semi-desert of pale clay badlands in northern Spain — wind- and water-carved ravines, flat-topped mesas, and lone earth pillars that look transplanted from the American West.

Desert & dunes Europe

Batanes

Batanes, northernmost Philippines

The country's northernmost islands — rolling emerald hills that meet the sea in dramatic cliffs, stone villages built to withstand typhoons, and a windswept beauty utterly unlike the tropical lowlands.

Island Southeast Asia

Bay of Fundy

New Brunswick & Nova Scotia, Canada

Home to the highest tides on Earth — up to 16 metres of water rising and falling twice a day, laying bare a seabed you can walk across beneath towering flowerpot rocks.

Beach & coast North America

Belize Barrier Reef

Caribbean coast of Belize

The largest barrier reef in the northern hemisphere — some 300 kilometres of coral running the length of Belize, with three of the Atlantic's four true atolls behind it and the Great Blue Hole at its centre.

Coral reef North America

Benagil Sea Cave

Benagil, Algarve, southern Portugal

A domed sea cave on the Algarve coast whose vaulted limestone roof is pierced by a great circular skylight — an 'oculus' that pours a column of sunlight onto a hidden beach reachable only from the water.

Cave Europe

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

Bieszczady Mountains

Subcarpathia, south-east Poland

Poland's wild south-eastern corner — rolling forested ridges of the Eastern Carpathians crowned by open, treeless mountain meadows called połoniny, where wolves, lynx, bison and brown bears still roam.

Mountain Europe

Biri Rock Formations

Biri Island, Northern Samar, Eastern Visayas

Massive sandstone rock formations on a remote island where the Pacific Ocean meets the ferocious San Bernardino Strait — sculpted over millennia into cliffs, arches, and tidal pools battered by giant waves.

Rock formation Southeast Asia

Blue Cave of Biševo

Biševo island, off Vis, Dalmatia, Croatia

A sea cave on the tiny island of Biševo that fills with an unearthly blue light around midday, when sunlight enters through a submerged opening and glows up through the water onto the cavern's walls.

Cave 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

Blue Nile Falls

Amhara, northern Ethiopia

'The Great Smoke' — a broad curtain of water thundering off the Ethiopian plateau near the source of the Blue Nile, throwing up mist and rainbows in the rainy season.

Waterfall Africa

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

Bora Bora

Society Islands, French Polynesia

The archetypal South Pacific paradise — a jagged volcanic peak ringed by a luminous turquoise lagoon and a protective coral reef, encircled by palm-fringed islets of white sand.

Island Oceania

Brandberg Mountain

Damaraland, Erongo Region, Northwest Namibia

Namibia's highest mountain — a huge granite dome standing alone above the desert, its 'Fire Mountain' name earned from the glow of sunset on its flanks, and home to the famous 'White Lady' among thousands of ancient rock paintings.

Mountain Africa

Bryce Canyon

Utah, United States

Not really a canyon at all, but a series of vast natural amphitheatres filled with thousands of glowing orange rock spires called hoodoos — the largest concentration of these strange pinnacles on Earth.

Rock formation North America

Bulusan Volcano & Lake

Sorsogon, Bicol, Philippines

An active, rainforest-cloaked stratovolcano at the southern tip of Luzon, cradling a still crater-foot lake — the green, misty heart of Bulusan Volcano Natural Park.

Volcano Southeast Asia

Bungle Bungle Range

Purnululu, Kimberley, Western Australia

Hundreds of orange-and-black striped sandstone domes rising from the Kimberley outback — a beehive landscape unknown to the wider world until the 1980s.

Rock formation 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

Callao Cave

Peñablanca, Cagayan, Northern Luzon

A vast limestone cave of seven great chambers lit by natural skylights — and the site where the ancient human species Homo luzonensis was discovered, deep in the karst of the Cagayan Valley.

Cave Southeast Asia

Camiguin & White Island

Camiguin, Northern Mindanao

A small volcanic island 'born of fire and water' — home to more volcanoes per square kilometre than anywhere in the country, ringed by hot and cold springs, waterfalls, and the bare white sandbar of White Island offshore.

Island Southeast Asia

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

Cape of Good Hope

Cape Peninsula, Western Cape, South Africa

The wild, storied headland at the tip of the Cape Peninsula — soaring sea cliffs, wind-blasted fynbos and crashing surf where two ocean currents meet, long mistaken for the southern tip of Africa.

Beach & coast Africa

Cappadocia

Central Anatolia, Turkey

A dreamlike landscape of 'fairy chimneys' — tapering cones and pinnacles of soft volcanic rock carved by erosion, honeycombed with ancient cave homes and churches, and famous for its dawn balloon flights.

Rock formation Middle East

Caramoan Islands

Caramoan, Camarines Sur, Bicol, Philippines

A remote Bicol peninsula where jagged limestone islets, hidden lagoons, and pocket white-sand beaches crowd a warm, reef-fringed sea — an El Nido–like seascape on the Pacific side of Luzon.

Island Southeast Asia

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

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

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

Chobe National Park

Northern Botswana, beside Kasane and the Chobe River

Botswana's great elephant park — floodplains, marsh and woodland along the Chobe River, where some of the largest elephant herds on Earth gather in the dry season.

Savanna & plains Africa

Chocolate Hills

Bohol, Central Visayas, Philippines

More than 1,200 near-symmetrical grass-covered mounds spread across the interior of Bohol, turning chocolate-brown each dry season — a karst landscape unlike anywhere else on Earth.

Rock formation Southeast Asia

Churchill

Churchill, Manitoba, western Hudson Bay, Canada

The stretch of sub-Arctic coast where roughly 900 polar bears gather each autumn, waiting on the tundra for Hudson Bay to freeze — and where thousands of beluga whales fill the river estuary through the short northern summer.

Polar & ice North America

Cliffs of Moher

County Clare, western Ireland

A wall of sheer sea cliffs rising up to 214 metres straight from the wild Atlantic on Ireland's west coast — layered in ancient rock, alive with seabirds, and often wreathed in Atlantic mist and spray.

Rock formation Europe

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

Columbia Icefield

Alberta & British Columbia, Canada

The largest icefield in the Rocky Mountains — a vast frozen plateau feeding glaciers that flow toward three different oceans, reached along one of the world's great mountain highways.

Glacier North 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

Connemara National Park

County Galway, Ireland

A compact wilderness on Ireland's rugged west coast — bog, heath and quartzite mountains of the Twelve Bens, where Connemara ponies graze and boardwalk trails climb Diamond Hill for sweeping Atlantic views.

Mountain Europe

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

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

Crater Lake

Oregon, USA

The deepest lake in the United States — a caldera of astonishing, luminous blue, formed when a great volcano collapsed and filled with nothing but rain and snow.

Lake North America

Creux du Van

Jura Mountains, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

A vast natural rock amphitheatre in the Swiss Jura — a horseshoe of sheer 150-metre limestone cliffs curving nearly a kilometre and a half around a green forested hollow.

Rock formation Europe

Dachstein

Salzkammergut, Upper Austria / Styria / Salzburg, Austria

A great limestone massif crowning the Salzkammergut, where the Northern Alps' easternmost glaciers cling below the 2,995-metre Hoher Dachstein, and giant ice caves honeycomb the pale rock above the lakes of the Salzkammergut.

Mountain Europe

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

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

Danakil Depression

Afar Region, northeastern Ethiopia

One of the hottest, lowest, and most alien places on Earth — a searing volcanic desert of neon-yellow sulphur springs, salt flats, and a permanent lava lake, where three tectonic plates are tearing the land apart.

Volcano Africa

Death Valley

California / Nevada, United States

The hottest, driest, and lowest place in North America — a vast desert of salt flats, sculpted dunes, and painted badlands that, against all odds, bursts into wildflowers after rare rains.

Desert & dunes North America

Denali

Alaska, USA

The highest peak in North America — a 6,190-metre wall of rock and ice towering over the Alaskan wilderness, so tall its base-to-summit rise is among the greatest of any mountain on Earth.

Mountain North America

Dettifoss

Jökulsárgljúfur, Vatnajökull National Park, Northeast Iceland

Often called the most powerful waterfall in Europe — a grey glacial river hurling itself 44 metres into a black canyon, 100 metres wide and so loud the ground shakes and spray drifts for hundreds of metres.

Waterfall Europe

Doñana

Andalusia, southwestern Spain

The marshes at the mouth of the Guadalquivir — one of Europe's most important wetlands, a staging post for millions of migrating birds, the stronghold of the Iberian lynx, and a place now visibly running short of water.

Wetland Europe

Donsol Whale Shark Sanctuary

Donsol, Sorsogon, Bicol Region

A quiet Bicol town whose plankton-rich bay draws seasonal gatherings of whale sharks — the world's largest fish — met on a strictly regulated, community-run, swim-alongside basis that pioneered ethical encounters in the Philippines.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

Doubtful Sound

Fiordland National Park, South Island, New Zealand

Fiordland's deep, silent wilderness fjord — larger, wilder, and far quieter than neighbouring Milford Sound, reached only by boat across Lake Manapouri and a mountain pass, its three dark arms walled by rainforest cliffs and roamed by dolphins, seals, and penguins.

Fjord Oceania

Dune du Pilat

Arcachon Bay, Gironde, southwestern France

The tallest sand dune in Europe — a vast wave of pale sand over 100 metres high, poised between a great pine forest and the Atlantic on France's southwest coast.

Desert & dunes Europe

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

Eisriesenwelt

Werfen, Salzburg, Austria

The largest ice cave on Earth — 42 kilometres of limestone passage in an Alpine cliff, its entrance chambers filled with towering formations of natural ice.

Cave Europe

El Nido & the Bacuit Archipelago

El Nido, Palawan, Philippines

A bay scattered with dozens of jagged limestone islands, hidden lagoons reached through narrow rock gaps, white beaches, and clear turquoise water — one of the most spectacular karst seascapes in the world.

Karst landscape Southeast Asia

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

Ennedi Massif

Ennedi, northeastern Chad

A sandstone labyrinth in the heart of the Sahara — natural arches, towers, and canyons hiding permanent water where desert crocodiles survive, thousands of kilometres from any river.

Rock formation Africa

Epupa Falls

Kunene Region (Kaokoland), Namibia–Angola border

A wide scatter of waterfalls where the Kunene River breaks over rock on the remote Angolan border — braided channels tumbling among baobabs and palms in one of the least-visited corners of Namibia, and Himba homeland.

Waterfall Africa

Erawan Falls

Kanchanaburi Province, western Thailand

A seven-tiered waterfall tumbling through jungle into a chain of emerald-green pools, each one held back by natural travertine dams that the stream builds as it flows.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

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

Etosha Pan

Northern Namibia

A vast white salt pan the size of a small country, so large it is visible from space — ringed by waterholes where elephants, rhinos, and lions gather in the dry season.

Savanna & plains Africa

Étretat Cliffs

Étretat, Seine-Maritime, Normandy, France

White chalk cliffs on the Normandy coast carved into three natural arches and a lone needle of rock — the seascape Monet painted again and again.

Rock formation Europe

Făgăraș Mountains & the Transfăgărășan

Southern Carpathians, central Romania

Romania's highest mountains — a wall of glacier-carved peaks and cirque lakes in the Carpathians — crossed by the Transfăgărășan, one of the world's most spectacular alpine roads.

Mountain Europe

Faroe Islands

North Atlantic (between Iceland and Norway)

A cluster of green, wind-scoured islands rising in sheer sea cliffs from the wild North Atlantic — grass-roofed villages, cascading waterfalls, and a lake that seems to hang above the ocean.

Island Europe

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

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

Franz Josef Glacier

Westland Tai Poutini National Park, South Island, New Zealand

A steep river of blue ice that pours from the Southern Alps almost into rainforest — one of only a handful of glaciers on Earth that descend so close to temperate forest and the sea, and one of the fastest-moving, tumbling from high snowfields to a valley of ferns.

Glacier Oceania

Geirangerfjord

Sunnmøre, Western Norway

One of the world's most celebrated fjords — a deep, narrow arm of the sea winding between sheer 1,000-metre cliffs laced with waterfalls like the Seven Sisters, with abandoned farms clinging to impossible ledges.

Fjord Europe

Geysir & Strokkur

Haukadalur geothermal field, Southwest Iceland

The geothermal valley that gave the world the word 'geyser' — where the reliable Strokkur spout blasts boiling water 15–20 metres skyward every few minutes amid steaming vents and mineral pools.

Geyser 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

Giant's Causeway

County Antrim, Northern Ireland

Around 40,000 interlocking basalt columns, mostly perfect hexagons, stepping down into the North Atlantic — one of the most remarkable geometric formations in nature.

Rock formation Europe

Glacier National Park

Montana, USA

The 'Crown of the Continent' — a wilderness of knife-edged peaks, hanging valleys, turquoise glacial lakes, and alpine meadows in the northern Rockies, crossed by one of the world's great mountain roads.

Mountain North America

Glen Coe

Lochaber, Scottish Highlands, Scotland, United Kingdom

Scotland's most dramatic glen — a deep, glacier-scoured valley walled by brooding peaks and knife-edge ridges, as famous for its beauty as for the 1692 massacre that darkens its name.

Mountain Europe

Golden Mountains of Altai

Altai Republic, southern Siberia

Where Siberia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and China meet — glaciated peaks above turquoise rivers and steppe, holding the most complete sequence of vegetation zones in the region.

Mountain Central Asia

Gotland & the Raukar

Baltic Sea, southeastern Sweden

Sweden's largest island, rimmed by raukar — weathered limestone sea stacks that stand along the shore like a gallery of stone figures carved by the Baltic.

Rock formation Europe

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

Grand Teton

Wyoming, USA

A wall of jagged granite peaks erupting straight from a flat valley floor with no foothills — the most abruptly dramatic mountain front in North America, mirrored in glacial lakes.

Mountain North America

Great Barrier Reef

Queensland coast, Australia

The largest living structure on Earth — a 2,300-kilometre system of nearly 3,000 individual reefs and hundreds of islands off Queensland, so vast it can be seen from space, and among the most biodiverse places in the ocean.

Coral reef Oceania

Great Santa Cruz Island

Zamboanga City, Zamboanga Peninsula, Mindanao

One of the few pink-sand beaches in the world — a protected island off Zamboanga City whose blush-coloured shore comes from crushed red organ-pipe coral, backed by a mangrove lagoon.

Beach & coast Southeast Asia

Gros Morne

Newfoundland, Canada

A dramatic Newfoundland wilderness of landlocked fjords and bare orange mountains — where a slice of the Earth's mantle lies exposed at the surface, helping prove the theory of plate tectonics.

Mountain North America

Guilin & the Li River Karst

Guangxi, southern China

The landscape of Chinese scroll paintings brought to life — thousands of rounded limestone peaks rising from green plains and the winding Li River, mirrored in still water beneath drifting mist.

Karst landscape East Asia

Gullfoss

Hvítá river, Southwest Iceland

Iceland's most famous waterfall — the glacial Hvítá river plunges in two dramatic stepped tiers into a rugged canyon, throwing up spray that catches the sun in near-constant rainbows.

Waterfall Europe

Gunung Mulu

Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia

A Bornean rainforest hiding some of the world's greatest caves — including the largest cave chamber on Earth — plus razor-sharp limestone pinnacles rising from the jungle canopy.

Cave Southeast Asia

Hạ Long Bay

Gulf of Tonkin, northeastern Vietnam

A jade-green sea studded with nearly 2,000 limestone karst islands and pillars rising sheer from the water — caves, hidden lagoons, and floating villages in one of the world's most beautiful seascapes.

Karst landscape Southeast Asia

Hell's Gate

Naivasha, Great Rift Valley, Kenya

A dramatic Rift Valley gorge of red cliffs, rock towers, and steaming geothermal vents — one of the few African parks you can explore on foot or by bike among the wildlife.

Rock formation Africa

Hierve el Agua

San Lorenzo Albarradas, Oaxaca, Mexico

A pair of 'petrified waterfalls' in the mountains of Oaxaca — cliffs coated white by mineral springs — above natural infinity pools that hang over a vast valley.

Hot spring North 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

Hormuz Island

Strait of Hormuz, Persian Gulf, southern Iran

A small 'rainbow island' in the Strait of Hormuz where salt-dome geology paints the hills and beaches in red, ochre, and a spectrum of mineral colours — including sand you can taste.

Island Middle East

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

Horton Plains & World's End

Central Highlands, Sri Lanka

A high, misty plateau of montane grassland and cloud forest in Sri Lanka's highlands, ending abruptly at World's End — a sheer escarpment that drops nearly 900 metres to the plains.

Mountain South Asia

Hpa-An Karst

Kayin State, southeastern Myanmar

A landscape of sheer limestone karst mountains rising straight from emerald rice paddies in southeastern Myanmar, riddled with vast caves full of Buddha images and roosting bats.

Karst landscape Southeast Asia

Huanglong

Sichuan Province, China

A valley paved with thousands of terraced travertine pools in gold, turquoise, and blue — a three-kilometre cascade of mineral basins climbing toward snow peaks.

Living terraces East Asia

Huangshan

Anhui Province, China

The 'Yellow Mountains' — a range of granite peaks and wind-sculpted pines that rise from seas of cloud, the landscape that inspired centuries of Chinese painting and poetry.

Mountain East Asia

Hundred Islands

Alaminos, Pangasinan, Philippines

A scatter of 124 small, mushroom-shaped limestone islands in the Lingayen Gulf — ancient coral reef, uplifted and undercut by the sea into rounded green-capped islets you can hop between by boat.

Island Southeast Asia

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

Ilulissat Icefjord

Ilulissat, western Greenland

A fjord choked with colossal icebergs calved from one of the fastest, most productive glaciers on Earth — a roaring, ever-changing cathedral of ice on Greenland's Arctic coast.

Glacier North America

Inle Lake

Shan State, Myanmar

A vast, shallow highland lake in the Shan hills where fishermen row standing on one leg, whole villages stand on stilts, and gardens float on the water itself.

Lake Southeast Asia

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

Isle of Skye

Inner Hebrides, Scotland

A wild Hebridean island of jagged black peaks, mist-wrapped pinnacles, and sea cliffs — the most dramatic scenery in Scotland, stitched with waterfalls, lochs, and ancient rock.

Island Europe

Issyk-Kul

Issyk-Kul Region, Tian Shan, Kyrgyzstan

A vast, slightly saline mountain lake ringed by the snow peaks of the Tian Shan — the world's second-largest alpine lake, 182 kilometres long, and warm enough that it never freezes despite sitting at 1,607 metres.

Lake Central Asia

Jasmund Chalk Cliffs

Jasmund National Park, Rügen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany

Germany's largest chalk cliffs, dropping white into the Baltic on the island of Rügen — topped by the last great beech forest on this coast, and eroding fast enough that the shoreline is measurably different within a lifetime.

Beach & coast Europe

Jatiluwih Rice Terraces

Tabanan Regency, Bali, Indonesia

Bali's largest surviving expanse of traditional rice terraces, spread over some 600 hectares beneath Mount Batukaru and irrigated by subak — a thousand-year-old system in which farmers themselves allocate every litre of water down the slope.

Living terraces Southeast Asia

Jebel Shams

Al Hajar Mountains, northern Oman

Oman's highest mountain, whose sheer rim plunges into the vast Wadi Ghul — the 'Grand Canyon of Arabia' — a mile-deep gorge of banded rock and vertiginous cliffs.

Mountain Middle East

Jeju Island

Jeju Province, South Korea

A volcanic island crowned by South Korea's highest peak, riddled with the world's finest lava-tube caves and edged by a sunrise crater rising straight from the sea.

Volcano East Asia

Jeti-Ögüz Rocks

Jeti-Ögüz District, Issyk-Kul Region, near Karakol, Kyrgyzstan

Sheer cliffs of red conglomerate rising from spruce-covered hills near Lake Issyk-Kul — Kyrgyzstan's 'Seven Bulls'.

Rock formation Central Asia

Jigokudani & the Snow Monkeys

Yamanouchi, Nagano Prefecture, Japan

A steaming hot-spring valley in the mountains of Nagano — 'Hell Valley' — where wild Japanese macaques, the famous snow monkeys, come down through the winter forest to bathe in a natural thermal pool, the only place on Earth where monkeys soak in an onsen in the wild.

Hot spring East Asia

Jiuzhaigou

Sichuan Province, China

A valley of impossibly blue and turquoise lakes, terraced waterfalls, and travertine pools stepping down from snow peaks on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

Lake East Asia

Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon

Vatnajökull National Park, Southeast Iceland

A glacial lagoon where huge icebergs calved from the Vatnajökull ice cap drift in still, deep water before floating out to sea — and wash up as glittering shards on the black-sand 'Diamond Beach'.

Glacier Europe

Jostedalsbreen

Vestland, Western Norway

The largest glacier on mainland Europe — a high plateau ice cap that sends blue-tongued arms like Nigardsbreen and Briksdalsbreen spilling down into green valleys and turquoise meltwater lakes.

Glacier Europe

Jungfrau

Bernese Alps, Switzerland

One of the great peaks of the Bernese Alps at 4,158 metres — reached, uniquely, by a cog railway tunnelled through the mountain to the Jungfraujoch, the 'Top of Europe', overlooking the head of the Aletsch Glacier.

Mountain Europe

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

Kakadu

Northern Territory, Australia

Australia's largest national park — a vast monsoonal landscape of floodplains, waterfalls, and stone country, alive with crocodiles and millions of birds, and holding some of the world's oldest rock art.

Wetland Oceania

Kalanggaman Island

Palompon, Leyte, Eastern Visayas

A slender, uninhabited coral island in the Camotes Sea famous for its long, curving white sandbar that trails off both ends into clear turquoise shallows — a near-perfect desert island.

Island Southeast Asia

Kamchatka Volcanoes

Kamchatka Peninsula, Russian Far East

A remote peninsula bristling with snow-capped volcanoes, geysers, and hot springs — one of the most volcanically active places on Earth, roamed by some of the world's largest brown bears.

Volcano East Asia

Karakoram & Baltoro Glacier

Gilgit-Baltistan, northern Pakistan

The greatest concentration of high peaks on Earth — a 62-kilometre river of ice leading to K2 and a ring of granite towers, in the most extreme mountain terrain anywhere.

Glacier South Asia

Kawah Ijen

East Java, Indonesia

A volcano famous for two rare sights: electric-blue flames that flicker across its crater in the dark as sulphurous gas ignites, and the world's largest highly acidic crater lake — a vast turquoise pool with the acidity of battery acid.

Volcano Southeast Asia

Kawasan Falls

Badian, Cebu, Central Visayas, Philippines

A tiered waterfall in southern Cebu whose pools glow an almost unreal turquoise — the colour a gift of the limestone the spring-fed river runs through on its way to the sea.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

Kayangan Lake, Coron

Coron Island, Palawan, Philippines

Often called the cleanest lake in the Philippines — a jewel-clear brackish lake cradled by limestone cliffs on Coron Island, reached by a short climb over a saddle with one of the country's most photographed viewpoints.

Lake Southeast Asia

Kaziranga

Assam, India

A vast floodplain of tall grass and marsh on the Brahmaputra — home to two-thirds of the world's great one-horned rhinos, plus tigers, elephants, and wild buffalo in astonishing numbers.

Wetland South Asia

Kebnekaise

Kiruna Municipality, Norrbotten, Swedish Lapland

Sweden's highest mountain, whose summit changed places because the old one is made of ice — the glacier-capped south peak has melted below the bare rock of the north peak, and researchers measure the difference every summer.

Mountain Europe

Kelimutu

Flores, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia

A volcano on the island of Flores crowned by three crater lakes that change colour independently and unpredictably — turquoise, green, black, brown, or red — each tied in local belief to the resting place of departed souls.

Lake Southeast Asia

Kenai Fjords National Park

Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, United States

A coast of glacier-carved fjords on the Gulf of Alaska, where tidewater glaciers spilling from the vast Harding Icefield calve straight into the sea among humpback whales, orcas, sea otters, and cliffs of nesting seabirds.

Fjord North America

Kerala Backwaters

Kerala, southwestern India

A 900-kilometre network of lagoons, lakes and canals running parallel to the Arabian Sea behind a chain of barrier islands — brackish, palm-fringed, and worked by rice barges converted into houseboats.

Wetland South Asia

Kīlauea

Island of Hawaiʻi, United States

One of the most active volcanoes on Earth — a shield volcano on Hawaiʻi whose lava has repeatedly reshaped the island, sometimes glowing in a lava lake and, at times, spilling in rivers of fire to the sea.

Volcano North America

Killarney National Park

County Kerry, Ireland

Ireland's first national park — a storied landscape of lakes, ancient oak woods and mountains around Killarney, home to the country's only wild red deer herd and its largest surviving native forest.

Lake Europe

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

Kirkjufell

Grundarfjörður, Snæfellsnes Peninsula, West Iceland

A steep, symmetrical 463-metre peak rising alone from the sea on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula — often called the most photographed mountain in Iceland, most famously with the small tiered waterfall Kirkjufellsfoss in the foreground.

Mountain Europe

Koh Rong

Gulf of Thailand, off Sihanoukville, Cambodia

A jungle-cloaked island off Cambodia's coast ringed by long white-sand beaches and clear turquoise water — and famous for seas that glow blue with bioluminescent plankton at night.

Island Southeast Asia

Komodo National Park

Lesser Sunda Islands, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia

A cluster of rugged islands that shelter the Komodo dragon — the largest lizard on Earth — above water, and some of the world's richest coral reefs below, including a beach tinted pink by red coral.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

Kong Lor Cave

Khammouane Province, central Laos

A river cave that tunnels for over seven kilometres straight through a limestone mountain — navigated by longtail boat through pitch darkness, from one green valley to another.

Cave Southeast Asia

Königssee

Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, Germany

A deep, emerald, fjord-like lake hemmed by sheer alpine cliffs in Berchtesgaden National Park — so clean that only silent electric boats are allowed to cross it.

Lake Europe

Kornati Islands

Šibenik-Knin / Zadar County, Adriatic Sea, Croatia

A stark, sun-bleached archipelago of some 89 islands, islets, and reefs — the densest island cluster in the Adriatic — whose seaward cliffs, the dramatic 'crowns', drop straight into deep blue water.

Island Europe

Kravica Falls

Trebižat River, near Ljubuški, Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina

A 25-metre curtain of water spread across an amphitheatre of moss and living rock in the karst of Herzegovina — a waterfall that is still building itself out of the river it carries.

Waterfall Europe

Krimml Waterfalls

High Tauern National Park, Salzburg, Austria

Austria's highest waterfall and the tallest in Europe — the Krimmler Ache river thrown 380 metres down the mountainside in three great tiers, roaring through pine forest in the High Tauern National Park.

Waterfall Europe

Krka National Park

Šibenik-Knin County, Dalmatia, Croatia

A Dalmatian river that builds its own waterfalls — the Krka lays down travertine barriers of living rock as it flows, culminating in Skradinski Buk, a broad staircase of cascades tumbling over seventeen natural steps.

Waterfall Europe

Kruger National Park

Mpumalanga & Limpopo, South Africa

One of Africa's greatest and most accessible game reserves — a vast bushveld wilderness the size of a small country, home to the Big Five and an extraordinary abundance of wildlife.

Savanna & plains Africa

Kuang Si Falls

Luang Prabang Province, northern Laos

A three-tiered jungle waterfall near Luang Prabang that spills over pale travertine into a staircase of impossibly turquoise pools, cool and clear enough to swim in.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

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 Assal

Afar Triangle, western Djibouti

The lowest point on land in Africa — a lake 155 metres below sea level with no outlet, so saline that the salt has crystallised into a plain sixty metres deep along its western shore.

Lake Africa

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 Baikal

Siberia, Russia

The deepest and oldest lake on Earth — a vast Siberian sea holding a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh water, its waters so clear you can see 40 metres down, and freezing each winter into sheets of turquoise ice.

Lake East Asia

Lake Bled

Upper Carniola, Slovenia

A serene glacial lake with a tiny church-topped island at its heart, cupped beneath a clifftop castle and the peaks of the Julian Alps — one of the most picture-perfect scenes in Europe.

Lake Europe

Lake Como

Lombardy, northern Italy

A deep, inverted-Y-shaped glacial lake beneath the southern Alps, ringed by steep wooded mountains, cliff-clinging villages, and centuries of grand lakeside villas.

Lake Europe

Lake Kivu

Rwanda–DR Congo border (Western Rwanda)

A deep, calm African Great Lake cradled in the rift between Rwanda and the Congo — ringed by terraced green hills and holding one of the world's most unusual reserves of dissolved gas.

Lake Africa

Lake Louise

Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada

A glacier-fed lake of improbable turquoise beneath the Victoria Glacier, high in Banff National Park — the postcard of the Canadian Rockies.

Lake North America

Lake Lucerne

Central Switzerland (cantons of Lucerne, Nidwalden, Obwalden, Schwyz, Uri)

A many-armed alpine lake at the heart of Switzerland — 114 square kilometres of deep blue-green water winding between the peaks of Rigi, Pilatus, and the Uri Alps, ringed by lakeside towns and the meadow where the Swiss Confederation was born.

Lake Europe

Lake Malawi

Malawi, Mozambique & Tanzania

A vast Rift Valley lake holding more fish species than any other lake on Earth — hundreds of brilliantly coloured cichlids found nowhere else, in water clear as glass.

Lake Africa

Lake Mývatn

Northeast Iceland, near Akureyri

A shallow, volcanic lake ringed by craters, lava fields and steaming ground — one of Europe's richest waterfowl habitats, alive with ducks in summer and framed by pseudocraters, twisted lava pillars and geothermal steam.

Lake Europe

Lake Nakuru

Great Rift Valley, central Kenya

A shallow soda lake in Kenya's Rift Valley, famous for shimmering pink shorelines of flamingos and as a stronghold sanctuary for both black and white rhinos.

Lake Africa

Lake Natron

Arusha Region, northern Tanzania

A caustic soda lake that burns blood-red with salt-loving microbes — lethal to most life, yet the single most important breeding ground on Earth for lesser flamingos.

Lake Africa

Lake Ohrid

Southwestern North Macedonia, on the border with Albania

One of the oldest lakes in the world — deep, clear water on the North Macedonia–Albania border, home to more than 200 species found nowhere else.

Lake Europe

Lake Sebu & the Seven Falls

South Cotabato, Mindanao, Philippines

A serene highland lake wreathed in morning mist, feeding a chain of seven waterfalls through the mountains — the ancestral home of the T'boli people and one of Mindanao's most soulful landscapes.

Lake Southeast Asia

Lake Tekapo (Takapō)

Mackenzie Basin, Canterbury, South Island, New Zealand

A glacier-fed turquoise lake in the Mackenzie Basin, at the heart of the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve — milky blue water by day and some of the clearest night skies on Earth.

Lake Oceania

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

Landmannalaugar

Southern Highlands, Iceland

Rhyolite mountains streaked in red, pink, green, and gold above black lava fields and steaming hot springs — the most colourful landscape in Iceland's remote interior highlands.

Mountain Europe

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

Lauterbrunnen Valley

Bernese Oberland, Switzerland

A glacier-carved Alpine valley walled by sheer cliffs down which seventy-two waterfalls pour — including the free-falling Staubbach and the thundering Trümmelbach inside the mountain.

Waterfall Europe

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

Lofoten Islands

Nordland, Arctic Norway

A chain of dramatic Arctic islands where jagged granite peaks rise straight from the sea above white beaches and red fishing villages — improbably mild for its latitude, and lit by the midnight sun and the northern lights.

Island Europe

Longji Rice Terraces

Longsheng County, Guangxi, China

The Dragon's Backbone — centuries-old rice terraces climbing whole mountainsides in coils and ribbons above the villages of the Zhuang and Yao people, near Guilin in southern China, flooded to mirror the sky in spring and turning gold at harvest.

Living terraces East Asia

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

Lut Desert

Kerman & Sistan provinces, southeastern Iran

One of the hottest and most surreal deserts on Earth — a sea of wind-carved ridges called kaluts that stretch to the horizon, where satellites have recorded record land-surface temperatures.

Desert & dunes Middle East

Ma'in Hot Springs

Between Madaba and the Dead Sea, Madaba Governorate, Jordan

A cluster of geothermal waterfalls tumbling down a desert canyon near the Dead Sea — hot, mineral-rich water heated deep underground and prized for its healing warmth since Roman times.

Hot spring Middle East

Makgadikgadi Pans

Northeastern Botswana, between Nata and Maun

Some of the largest salt pans on Earth — the dried floor of an ancient lake in the Kalahari, a blinding white plain that floods in the rains and draws zebra, wildebeest and flamingos.

Desert & dunes Africa

Mammoth Cave

Kentucky, USA

The longest cave system known on Earth — over 685 kilometres of mapped passages winding beneath the Kentucky hills, with new miles still being discovered.

Cave North 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

Maria Cristina Falls

Iligan, Lanao del Norte, Mindanao

A powerful twin waterfall on the Agus River — nearly 100 metres of thundering white water that both dazzles visitors and drives a hydroelectric plant powering much of Mindanao.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

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

Masai Mara

Narok County, southwestern Kenya

Rolling grassland where the Great Migration crosses the Mara River — over a million wildebeest running the gauntlet of crocodiles and Africa's densest big-cat population.

Savanna & plains Africa

Masungi Georeserve

Baras, Rizal, Philippines

A dramatic limestone karst landscape barely 90 minutes from Manila, reborn as a conservation project — jagged rock formations, rope courses, and hanging viewpoints woven through a rainforest being restored tree by tree.

Karst landscape Southeast Asia

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

Mavrovo National Park

Northwestern North Macedonia, between Gostivar, Debar and Kičevo, on the borders with Albania and Kosovo

North Macedonia's largest national park: a high country of beech and fir forest, the 25-km Radika gorge, a mountain reservoir lake with a half-drowned church, and Korab, the highest peak in the country at 2,764 m.

Mountain Europe

Mayon Volcano

Albay, Bicol Region, Philippines

The Philippines' most active volcano and, by many accounts, the most perfectly symmetrical cone on Earth — a 2,463-metre stratovolcano that dominates the Bicol skyline and, as of mid-2026, is in active eruption.

Volcano Southeast Asia

McMurdo Dry Valleys

Victoria Land, Antarctica

The largest ice-free area in Antarctica — around 4,500 square kilometres of bare rock and gravel where no significant snow or rain has fallen for close to two million years, and the closest thing on Earth to the surface of Mars.

Polar & ice Antarctica & the Poles

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

Mekong Delta

Southwestern Vietnam

Some 40,000 square kilometres of river-built farmland where the Mekong finally reaches the sea — Vietnam's rice bowl, threaded by canals, and now sinking faster than the sea is rising.

Wetland Southeast Asia

Melissani Cave

Karavomylos, Kefalonia, Ionian Islands, Greece

An underground lake on the Ionian island of Kefalonia, roofed by a collapsed cavern that lets a shaft of midday sun ignite the brackish water in an unearthly electric blue.

Cave Europe

Meteora

Thessaly, central Greece

A cluster of colossal, sheer rock pillars soaring from the plains of Thessaly — a surreal geological forest of stone towers, several capped by centuries-old monasteries built where the cliffs seem to touch the sky.

Rock formation Europe

Milford Sound

Fiordland National Park, South Island, New Zealand

New Zealand's most famous fjord — sheer cliffs and the pyramid of Mitre Peak rising straight from dark water, laced with waterfalls fed by some of the highest rainfall on Earth, in the heart of Fiordland.

Fjord Oceania

Moalboal Sardine Run

Moalboal, Cebu, Central Visayas, Philippines

A vast resident school of sardines swirls in the shallows off Panagsama Beach on Cebu's west coast — a living silver tornado you can reach by swimming a few strokes from shore.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

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

Mont Blanc

French Alps (France–Italy border)

The highest peak in the Alps and western Europe — a great dome of snow and ice above Chamonix, ringed by glaciers, granite spires, and the birthplace of mountaineering.

Mountain Europe

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

Monument Valley

Arizona–Utah border, Navajo Nation

Colossal red sandstone buttes standing alone on a desert plain — the defining landscape of the American West, on Navajo land where the mesas rise up to 300 metres from the flats.

Rock formation North 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

Morskie Oko

Tatra National Park, Lesser Poland, Poland

The largest and most beloved lake of the Polish Tatras — a clear alpine tarn cradled beneath the sheer Mięguszowieckie peaks, its name, the 'Eye of the Sea', matched by water clear enough to see many metres down.

Lake Europe

Mount Apo

Davao del Sur / Cotabato, Mindanao, Philippines

The highest mountain in the Philippines at 2,954 metres — a potentially active volcano whose slopes hold sulfur vents, a summit boulder field, crater lakes, and one of the country's most important refuges for the Philippine eagle.

Mountain Southeast Asia

Mount Ararat

Iğdır Province, Eastern Anatolia, Turkey

Turkey's highest peak — a snow-capped dormant volcano of two joined cones rising in near-perfect isolation above the plains of the Armenian highlands, its ice cap visible a hundred kilometres away.

Volcano Middle East

Mount Bromo

East Java, Indonesia

A smoking volcanic cone rising from a vast 'Sea of Sand' inside an ancient caldera — one of Earth's most dramatic sunrise views, ringed by the peaks of the Tengger massif in East Java.

Volcano Southeast Asia

Mount Damavand

Alborz range, Mazandaran Province, northern Iran

The highest peak in Iran and in the whole Middle East — a near-symmetrical stratovolcano above the Alborz range, with sulphur fumaroles still venting at the summit crater and hot springs on its flanks.

Volcano Middle East

Mount Elbrus

Kabardino-Balkaria, Caucasus, Russia

The highest peak in Europe — a twin-coned dormant volcano wrapped in 22 glaciers, rising 5,642 metres above the Caucasus range.

Volcano Europe

Mount Etna

Sicily, Southern Italy

Europe's largest and most active volcano — a snow-capped, constantly rumbling giant looming over eastern Sicily, whose frequent eruptions have built astonishingly fertile slopes of vineyards and orchards.

Volcano Europe

Mount Everest

Mahalangur Himal, Nepal / Tibet (China) border

The highest point on Earth — 8,849 metres above sea level, where the Himalaya's collision-built peaks reach into the 'death zone', drawing climbers and trekkers to the roof of the world.

Mountain South Asia

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 Fuji

Honshū, Japan

Japan's highest peak — an almost perfectly symmetrical, snow-capped stratovolcano rising to 3,776 metres, standing alone above the plains and visible on a clear day from central Tokyo, a hundred kilometres away.

Volcano East Asia

Mount Guiting-Guiting

Sibuyan Island, Romblon, MIMAROPA

A jagged, saw-toothed peak crowning Sibuyan — an island so ecologically intact it's called the 'Galápagos of Asia' — offering one of the most technical and rewarding climbs in the Philippines.

Mountain Southeast Asia

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

Mount Kanlaon

Negros Island, Central Visayas / Negros Island Region

The highest peak in the central Philippines and one of the country's most active volcanoes — a forested stratovolcano crowning Negros, ringed by a national park rich in endemic wildlife.

Volcano Southeast Asia

Mount Kazbek & Gergeti

Kazbegi, Greater Caucasus, Georgia

A glacier-clad 5,000-metre volcano in the Greater Caucasus, above which a lone medieval church stands on a green ridge — one of the most iconic mountain scenes in the Caucasus.

Mountain Europe

Mount Kenya

Central Kenya

Africa's second-highest peak — the eroded core of an ancient volcano, crowned with glaciers on the equator and ringed by bizarre giant plants found nowhere else.

Mountain Africa

Mount Kilimanjaro

Northern Tanzania

The highest mountain in Africa and the tallest free-standing mountain on Earth — a snow-capped volcanic giant rising alone from the savanna to 5,895 metres, climbable without technical gear yet crowned with vanishing equatorial glaciers.

Mountain Africa

Mount Kinabalu

Sabah, Borneo, Malaysia

The highest peak in Southeast Asia's island world — a granite giant on Borneo, ringed by one of the richest concentrations of plant life on Earth, from giant Rafflesia flowers to carnivorous pitcher plants.

Mountain Southeast Asia

Mount Olympus

Between Thessaly and Macedonia, near Litochoro, Greece

The highest mountain in Greece — a limestone massif of more than fifty peaks that climbs almost 2,900 metres within twenty kilometres of the Aegean shore, cut by deep gorges and protected as the country's first national park.

Mountain Europe

Mount Pinatubo Crater Lake

Zambales / Tarlac / Pampanga, Luzon, Philippines

The volcano behind the second-largest eruption of the 20th century now cradles a serene turquoise crater lake — reached by a 4x4 ride across ash-grey lahar canyons and a short hike to the rim.

Volcano Southeast Asia

Mount Popa & Taung Kalat

Mandalay Region, central Myanmar

An extinct volcano rising green from the dry central plains of Myanmar, beside a sheer volcanic plug crowned by a golden monastery reached by 777 steps.

Volcano Southeast Asia

Mount Pulag

Benguet, Cordillera, Philippines

Luzon's highest peak at 2,922 metres, famous for its dawn 'sea of clouds' — a rolling white ocean seen from a summit of dwarf bamboo grassland high in the Cordillera.

Mountain Southeast Asia

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

Mount Teide

Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain

Spain's highest peak and the third-largest volcano on Earth measured from its base — a 3,715-metre cone rising from a vast caldera of frozen lava, often floating above a sea of cloud.

Volcano Europe

Mount Ushba

Upper Svaneti, Greater Caucasus, Georgia

The twin-horned peak that dominates Georgian Svaneti — 4,710 metres of granite and hanging ice known as the Matterhorn of the Caucasus, and widely held to be the hardest serious climb in the range.

Mountain Europe

Mount Yasur

Tanna Island, Vanuatu

One of the world's most accessible active volcanoes — a crater that has erupted almost continuously for centuries, flinging glowing lava bombs into the night sky just metres from its rim.

Volcano Oceania

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

Mù Cang Chải Terraces

Yên Bái Province, northern Vietnam

Mountainsides sculpted into thousands of curving rice terraces by the Hmong people — a living landscape that turns mirror-silver in planting season and molten gold at harvest.

Living terraces Southeast Asia

Murchison Falls

Murchison Falls National Park, northwestern Uganda

The Nile forced through a gap in the rock about 7 m wide before plunging some 43 m — the centrepiece of Uganda's largest national park.

Waterfall Africa

Nærøyfjord

Aurland, Vestland, Western Norway

The narrowest fjord in the world open to cruising — a slender, UNESCO-listed arm of the great Sognefjord, squeezed to barely 250 metres between cliffs that climb well over a kilometre straight from the water.

Fjord Europe

Nahanni & Virginia Falls

Northwest Territories, Canada

A remote subarctic wilderness of deep river canyons, hot springs, and Virginia Falls — a thundering cataract twice the height of Niagara — reachable only by float plane or canoe deep in Canada's north.

Waterfall North America

Ngorongoro Crater

Ngorongoro Highlands, Northern Tanzania

The world's largest intact volcanic caldera — a 20-kilometre-wide, 600-metre-deep collapsed crater that has become a natural amphitheatre teeming with one of the densest concentrations of large wildlife on Earth.

Volcano Africa

Niagara Falls

Ontario, Canada / New York, United States

Not the tallest falls, but among the most powerful on Earth — three waterfalls on the Niagara River between the Great Lakes, where a colossal volume of water plunges over a cliff in a permanent roar of mist.

Waterfall North America

Ningaloo Reef

Coral Coast, Western Australia

One of the world's largest fringing reefs — a coral wonderland that hugs the shore of Western Australia, where you can wade off the beach to snorkel with turtles, manta rays, and the giant whale shark.

Coral reef Oceania

Nxai Pan & Baines' Baobabs

Nxai Pan National Park, northeastern Botswana, north of the Maun–Nata road

A fossil lake bed in the Kalahari, grassland that fills with game in the rains — and Baines' Baobabs, a cluster of ancient trees standing on the edge of a salt pan.

Savanna & plains Africa

Nyiragongo

Virunga, eastern DR Congo

A volcano cradling one of the world's largest and most active lava lakes — a churning pool of molten rock that glows red against the night sky over the Virunga mountains.

Volcano Africa

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

Oeschinen Lake

Kandersteg, Bernese Oberland, Switzerland

A turquoise mountain lake cupped beneath the snow-streaked Blüemlisalp peaks — part of the UNESCO Jungfrau-Aletsch World Heritage area, reached by gondola and a short walk high above Kandersteg.

Lake Europe

Okavango Delta

Northern Botswana

A river that never reaches the sea — the Okavango spills into the Kalahari to form a vast, ever-shifting inland delta of channels, islands, and lagoons that draws Africa's great wildlife into the heart of a desert.

Wetland Africa

Ol Doinyo Lengai

Gregory Rift, near Lake Natron, Northern Tanzania

The 'Mountain of God' — a near-perfect ash cone in the Rift Valley and the only active volcano on Earth known to erupt natrocarbonatite, a strange, cool, runny lava that flows black and dries chalky white.

Volcano Africa

Ölüdeniz

Fethiye, Muğla Province, southwest Turkey

A sheltered turquoise lagoon sealed off from the open Aegean by a slender sand spit, backed by the pine-clad wall of Babadağ — one of the world's premier paragliding launches — and the cliff-ringed cove of Butterfly Valley nearby.

Beach & coast Middle East

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

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

Ouzoud Falls

Tanaghmeilt, near Azilal, Middle Atlas, Morocco

North Africa's tallest waterfall — a 110-metre triple cascade tumbling over red cliffs into a green river gorge in the Middle Atlas, wreathed in rainbows, olive groves and wild Barbary macaques.

Waterfall Africa

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

Pagsanjan Falls

Pagsanjan / Cavinti, Laguna, Southern Luzon

One of Luzon's most famous waterfalls, reached by a thrilling paddled canoe journey up a gorge of jungle cliffs and rapids — where skilled boatmen 'shoot the rapids' back downstream.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

Palau's Rock Islands

Rock Islands Southern Lagoon, Palau, Micronesia

Hundreds of emerald mushroom-shaped limestone islands scattered across a turquoise lagoon — a marine wonderland of hidden lakes, world-class reefs, and a lake full of harmless golden jellyfish.

Marine sanctuary Oceania

Palaui Island

Santa Ana, Cagayan, Northern Luzon

A wild, protected island off the northeastern tip of Luzon — rolling green headlands, empty beaches, and a Spanish-era lighthouse on the dramatic Cape Engaño cliffs above the meeting of two seas.

Island Southeast Asia

Pamukkale

Denizli Province, southwestern Turkey

The 'Cotton Castle' — a dazzling white hillside of terraced travertine pools formed by mineral-rich hot springs, where warm turquoise water spills over blindingly white stone terraces.

Hot spring Middle East

Pangong Tso

Ladakh, India

A vast high-altitude lake on the Tibetan Plateau whose waters shift through unearthly blues and greens beneath the bare, colossal mountains of Ladakh at over 4,300 metres.

Lake South Asia

Pasterze Glacier

Hohe Tauern, Carinthia, Austria

Austria's longest glacier, curling beneath the country's highest peak, the Grossglockner — a great river of ice reached by the famous alpine road, and a stark, moving record of a warming climate.

Glacier Europe

Pelister National Park

Baba Mountain, above Bitola, southwestern North Macedonia

North Macedonia's oldest national park, on Baba Mountain above Bitola: forests of the rare Macedonian pine, high granite ridges, and two glacial lakes known as Pelister's Eyes just below the 2,601-m summit.

Mountain Europe

Peneda-Gerês National Park

Northern Portugal, on the Spanish border

Portugal's only national park — a wild expanse of 300-million-year-old granite mountains, oak forest, peat bog, and plunging rivers in the far north, home to Iberian wolves, wild ponies, and roaming long-horned cattle.

Mountain Europe

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

Peyto Lake

Bow Summit, Icefields Parkway, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada

A glacier-fed lake of startling turquoise in a forested valley below Bow Summit, the highest point on the Icefields Parkway — one of the most photographed views in the Canadian Rockies.

Lake North America

Phang Nga Bay

Andaman Sea, southern Thailand

A calm emerald bay between Phuket and Krabi studded with sheer limestone karst islands, sea caves, and hidden tidal lagoons reached by paddling through the rock.

Karst landscape Southeast Asia

Phewa Lake

Pokhara, central Nepal

A serene lake at Pokhara that mirrors the snow peaks of the Annapurna range — including the sharp fishtail summit of Machapuchare — with a small temple island at its heart.

Lake South Asia

Phnom Kulen

Siem Reap Province, Cambodia

A forested sandstone plateau northeast of Angkor where a wide waterfall pours into jungle pools, and the riverbed upstream is carved with a thousand ancient sculptures beneath the flowing water.

Waterfall Southeast Asia

Phobjikha Valley

Wangdue Phodrang District, central Bhutan

A broad glacial valley at 3,000 metres holding Bhutan's best-known marshland — where a few hundred black-necked cranes winter each year, and where the country buried its power lines underground rather than risk them flying into the wires.

Wetland South Asia

Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng

Quảng Bình Province, Vietnam

An ancient limestone landscape riddled with the world's greatest cave systems — including Sơn Đoòng, the largest cave passage on Earth, big enough to hold its own jungle, river, and clouds.

Cave Southeast Asia

Picos de Europa

Asturias, Cantabria & León, northern Spain

A compact range of sheer limestone peaks rising to 2,600 metres barely 20 kilometres from the Atlantic — glacier-carved gorges, karst towers, and Spain's first national park.

Mountain Europe

Plitvice Lakes

Lika, central Croatia

A staircase of sixteen turquoise lakes tumbling one into the next over natural travertine dams and countless waterfalls, threaded by boardwalks through lush forest — Croatia's oldest and most beloved national park.

Lake Europe

Preikestolen

Rogaland, southwestern Norway

A sheer, flat-topped cliff jutting 604 metres straight above the Lysefjord — 'Pulpit Rock,' one of the most spectacular and vertiginous natural viewpoints in the world.

Rock formation Europe

Prometheus Cave

Imereti, near Kutaisi, western Georgia

A vast karst cave near Kutaisi, its huge chambers hung with stalactites and curtains of stone, explored on lit walkways and, in part, by boat along an underground river.

Cave Europe

Puerto Princesa Subterranean River

Puerto Princesa, Palawan, Philippines

One of the world's longest navigable underground rivers, winding 8.2 km through a vast limestone cave system beneath a karst mountain range before emptying directly into the West Philippine Sea.

Cave Southeast Asia

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

Queen Elizabeth National Park

Western Uganda, between Lake George and Lake Edward

Savanna, crater lakes and forested gorges below the Rwenzori Mountains — home to the tree-climbing lions of Ishasha and Kyambura Gorge, a sunken forest in the plains.

Savanna & plains Africa

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

Railay

Krabi Province, southern Thailand

A tiny peninsula of white-sand beaches walled off from the mainland by towering limestone cliffs — reachable only by boat, and one of the world's great rock-climbing spots.

Beach & coast Southeast Asia

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

Raja Ampat

West Papua, Indonesia

An archipelago of jungle-clad karst islands scattered across turquoise seas — the most biodiverse marine environment on Earth, at the very heart of the Coral Triangle.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

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

Ras Muhammad

Southern Sinai, Egypt

At the very tip of the Sinai Peninsula, a marine national park where sheer coral walls plunge into the Red Sea — one of the world's great diving and snorkelling destinations.

Marine sanctuary 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

Retezat National Park

Retezat Mountains, Hunedoara County, Southern Carpathians, Romania

Romania's first national park, declared in 1935 — sixty peaks above 2,300 metres, around eighty glacial lakes scattered between them, and some of the last untouched old-growth forest in Europe.

Mountain Europe

Reynisfjara

Near Vík í Mýrdal, South Iceland

Iceland's famous black-sand beach — jet-black volcanic sand under a cliff of stacked basalt columns, with offshore sea stacks and a powerful, genuinely dangerous surf rolling straight in off the North Atlantic.

Beach & coast Europe

Rhine Falls

Near Schaffhausen, Northern Switzerland

The largest waterfall in Europe by volume — 150 metres of the Rhine thundering over a 23-metre ledge around a rock pinnacle you can climb, in a green gorge below a hilltop castle.

Waterfall Europe

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

Rotorua Geothermal Field

Bay of Plenty, North Island, New Zealand

A landscape that steams, bubbles, and erupts — geysers, boiling mud pools, and mineral terraces in impossible colours, at the heart of Māori cultural life.

Hot spring Oceania

Rub' al Khali

Southern Arabian Peninsula

The Empty Quarter — the largest continuous sand desert on Earth, a sea of dunes up to 250 metres tall rolling across an area larger than France.

Desert & dunes Middle East

Rwenzori Mountains

Uganda–DR Congo border

The 'Mountains of the Moon' — Africa's highest range not born of volcanism, carrying equatorial glaciers above a surreal bog world of giant heathers and lobelias.

Mountain Africa

Sagada

Sagada, Mountain Province, Cordillera, Philippines

A cool, pine-clad limestone highland in the heart of the Cordillera, where caves riddle the karst, waterfalls drop into rice terraces, and dawn breaks over a sea of clouds at Kiltepan.

Karst landscape Southeast Asia

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

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

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

Santorini Caldera

Cyclades, Aegean Sea, Greece

A flooded volcanic crater ringed by 300-metre cliffs of banded ash and lava — the drowned remains of one of the largest eruptions in human history.

Volcano Europe

Saxon Switzerland

Saxony, eastern Germany

A labyrinth of free-standing sandstone towers, table mountains, and deep ravines above a bend in the River Elbe near Dresden — the birthplace of free climbing.

Rock formation Europe

Scărișoara Ice Cave

Apuseni Mountains, western Romania

A cave in Romania's Apuseni Mountains that holds one of the largest underground glaciers in the world — a block of ancient ice thousands of years old, deep beneath the forest.

Cave Europe

Seljalandsfoss

Seljaland, South Iceland

The waterfall you can walk behind — a slender 60-metre ribbon on the Seljalandsá river, fed by the Eyjafjallajökull ice cap, dropping over a former sea cliff into a mossy amphitheatre with a footpath that loops right around behind the falling water.

Waterfall Europe

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

Seoraksan

Taebaek Mountains, Gangwon Province, South Korea, inland from Sokcho

South Korea's most dramatic mountains: about thirty granite peaks rising to Daecheongbong at 1,708 m, with the sheer dome of Ulsanbawi, deep forested valleys, and some of the country's most celebrated autumn colour.

Mountain East Asia

Serengeti

Northern Tanzania

The archetypal African plain — endless golden grassland that hosts the greatest land-mammal migration on Earth, as over a million wildebeest and hundreds of thousands of zebra move in a vast annual circle.

Savanna & plains Africa

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

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

Siargao & Sugba Lagoon

Surigao del Norte, Mindanao, Philippines

A tear-drop island of surf, palm forest, and mangrove — home to the famous Cloud 9 reef break, the glassy Sugba Lagoon, tidal rock pools, and one of the largest mangrove reserves in the country.

Island Southeast Asia

Sigiriya

Central Province, Sri Lanka

A sheer 200-metre column of ancient volcanic rock rising abruptly from the green plains of central Sri Lanka — a natural monolith crowned by the ruins of a 5th-century sky palace.

Rock formation South Asia

Simien Mountains

Amhara, northern Ethiopia

A dramatic highland escarpment of jagged pinnacles and mile-deep gorges — the 'Roof of Africa' — home to gelada monkeys, walia ibex, and Ethiopian wolves found nowhere else.

Mountain Africa

Similan Islands

Mu Ko Similan National Park, Phang Nga Province, Andaman Sea, Thailand

An eleven-island granite archipelago in the Andaman Sea whose west sides are stacked with room-sized boulders underwater — widely rated the best diving in Thailand, and closed for five months a year to let the reef recover.

Coral reef Southeast 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

Sipadan Island

Celebes Sea, off Sabah, Malaysian Borneo

Malaysia's only oceanic island — a coral pinnacle rising 600 metres from the floor of the Celebes Sea off Borneo, ringed by walls of reef alive with turtles, barracuda tornadoes and reef sharks.

Coral reef Southeast Asia

Siquijor

Siquijor, Central Visayas, Philippines

A small island of clear-water coves, waterfalls spilling into turquoise pools, and coral sanctuaries just off the sand — all fed by rain that sinks straight through its raised-coral bedrock and resurfaces inland as cold blue springs.

Island Southeast Asia

Siwa Oasis

Western Desert, near the Libyan border, Egypt

A remote desert oasis of palm groves, freshwater springs, and turquoise salt lakes in Egypt's far west — an ancient island of green ringed by the dunes of the Great Sand Sea.

Lake Africa

Skeleton Coast

Northwestern Namibia

Where the world's oldest desert meets the cold Atlantic — a fog-shrouded shore of shipwrecks, immense dunes, and seal colonies, kept alive by mist rolling off the frigid Benguela Current.

Beach & coast Africa

Skógafoss

Skógar, South Iceland

One of Iceland's biggest and best-loved waterfalls — a 60-metre curtain about 25 metres wide on the Skógá river, dropping over what was once a sea cliff and throwing up so much spray that a rainbow hangs in front of it on almost any sunny day.

Waterfall 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

Słowiński Sand Dunes

Słowiński National Park, Pomerania, Poland

Europe's largest field of shifting sand dunes — a wandering desert on Poland's Baltic coast, where wind-driven dunes rise dozens of metres and creep inland, burying forest as they go, between the sea and Lake Łebsko.

Desert & dunes Europe

Socotra

Socotra Archipelago, Arabian Sea, Yemen

An isolated Indian Ocean island of such strange, ancient life that it's been called the 'Galápagos of the Indian Ocean' — home to umbrella-shaped dragon's blood trees and hundreds of plants found nowhere else on Earth.

Island Middle East

Sohoton Cove & Jellyfish Sanctuary

Bucas Grande, Surigao del Norte, Mindanao, Philippines

A hidden lagoon system on Bucas Grande Island, entered through a sea cave passable only at low tide, sheltering stingless jellyfish, karst-walled coves, and cliffs you can leap from into deep clear water.

Marine sanctuary Southeast Asia

Sơn Đoòng Cave

Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park, Quảng Bình Province, Vietnam

The largest known cave passage on Earth — a river-cut cavern in central Vietnam so vast that two collapsed skylights have let a jungle grow inside it.

Cave Southeast Asia

Song-Köl

Naryn, central Kyrgyzstan

A vast alpine lake on a high Tian Shan plateau, ringed by summer pastures where nomadic herders raise their yurts — a serene, roadless world of grass, water, and sky at 3,000 metres.

Lake Central Asia

Sossusvlei & Deadvlei

Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia

The soaring red dunes of the ancient Namib — among the tallest on Earth — surrounding the surreal white clay pan of Deadvlei, where 900-year-old blackened trees stand skeletal against orange sand and blue sky.

Desert & dunes Africa

South Georgia

South Georgia, South Atlantic

A remote, mountainous sub-Antarctic island where glaciers meet the sea and beaches heave with hundreds of thousands of king penguins and elephant seals — one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on Earth.

Polar & ice Antarctica & the Poles

South Luangwa National Park

Luangwa Valley, Eastern Province, Zambia

Nine thousand square kilometres at the southern end of the East African Rift, built around a river that moves every year — and the place where the walking safari was invented.

Savanna & plains Africa

Spitzkoppe

Erongo Region, Western Namibia

The 'Matterhorn of Namibia' — a group of bald granite peaks rising abruptly from the flat Namib plains, glowing orange at dawn and dusk, hung with a natural rock arch and some of the darkest night skies on Earth.

Rock formation Africa

Svalbard

Svalbard archipelago, Arctic Ocean

A High Arctic archipelago of glaciers, jagged peaks, and frozen fjords roughly midway between Norway and the North Pole — the realm of the polar bear, under months of midnight sun and polar night.

Polar & ice Europe

Svartifoss

Skaftafell, Vatnajökull National Park, South Iceland

The 'Black Falls' — a slender 20-metre waterfall in Skaftafell framed by a wall of dark, hexagonal basalt columns that hang like organ pipes above the plunge pool, one of the most distinctive waterfalls in Iceland.

Waterfall Europe

Taal Volcano & Lake

Batangas, Calabarzon, Philippines

A volcano within a lake within a volcano — one of the world's smallest and most active volcanoes, sitting on an island inside a crater lake that fills a far larger ancient caldera, just south of Manila.

Volcano Southeast Asia

Table Mountain

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

The flat-topped sandstone massif that presides over Cape Town — a sheer-sided landmark often draped in a 'tablecloth' of cloud, and the heart of a plant kingdom so rich it is unique on Earth.

Mountain Africa

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

Tarangire National Park

Manyara Region, Northern Tanzania

A baobab-studded savanna famous for its elephants — in the dry season, when the Tarangire River is the only water for miles, one of the densest concentrations of game in northern Tanzania gathers along its banks.

Savanna & plains Africa

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

Tassili n'Ajjer

Illizi and Djanet, southeastern Algeria, at the Libyan and Nigerien borders

A sandstone plateau the size of Ireland, eroded into forests of freestanding rock towers and nearly three hundred natural arches — and carrying, in its layers, the record of an ice sheet that once covered the Sahara.

Rock formation Africa

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

Tatra Mountains

Poland–Slovakia border

The highest range of the Carpathians — a compact alpine world of granite spires, glacial lakes, and deep valleys, home to bears, wolves, lynx, and the rare Tatra chamois.

Mountain Europe

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 Asir Mountains

Asir Province, southwestern Saudi Arabia

A green, misty mountain range in Saudi Arabia's southwest — terraced highlands and juniper forests, cooled by monsoon cloud, that overturn every expectation of the desert kingdom.

Mountain Middle East

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 Azores

Azores archipelago, Atlantic Ocean

A remote archipelago of green volcanic islands rising from the mid-Atlantic — crater lakes, hot springs, hydrangea-lined roads, and some of the best whale watching on Earth.

Island Europe

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 Blue Grotto

Isle of Capri, Campania, Italy

A sea cave on the island of Capri where sunlight passing through an underwater opening fills the whole cavern with an unearthly, glowing electric-blue light.

Cave Europe

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 Burren

County Clare, Ireland

A silver-grey moonscape of bare limestone pavement in County Clare — one of Europe's finest karst landscapes, where Arctic, alpine and Mediterranean wildflowers bloom together in the cracks of the naked rock.

Karst landscape Europe

The Calanques

Between Marseille and Cassis, Provence, France

A string of steep white-limestone inlets on the Mediterranean coast near Marseille — hidden turquoise coves walled by sun-bleached cliffs, reached on foot or by boat.

Beach & coast 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

The Curonian Spit

Klaipėda County, western Lithuania, extending into Kaliningrad Oblast

A 98-kilometre ribbon of sand dune separating a lagoon from the Baltic — never more than a few kilometres wide, and standing only because two centuries of deliberate replanting stopped it burying itself.

Beach & coast Europe

The Danube Delta

Where the Danube meets the Black Sea, eastern Romania

Europe's largest and best-preserved river delta — a vast, watery maze of reeds, channels, and lakes where the Danube fans into the Black Sea, and one of the continent's greatest bird havens.

Wetland Europe

The Dead Sea

Jordan Rift Valley, Jordan / Israel / West Bank

The lowest point on the surface of the Earth — a hypersaline lake so dense with salt and minerals that swimmers float effortlessly, cradled in the desert far below sea level.

Lake Middle East

The Dolomites

South Tyrol / Trentino / Veneto, Northern Italy

A range of pale limestone towers, sheer walls, and jagged spires in the Italian Alps that glow rose and gold at dawn and dusk — the famous 'enrosadira' — above green alpine meadows and turquoise lakes.

Mountain Europe

The Drakensberg

KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (bordering Lesotho)

South Africa's great basalt rampart — a UNESCO World Heritage range of soaring escarpment walls, plunging waterfalls and the world's richest gallery of San rock art, rising along the border with Lesotho.

Mountain Africa

The Edge of the World

Jebel Fihrayn, near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

A dramatic cliff-edge of the Tuwaiq escarpment near Riyadh, where an ancient seabed drops away hundreds of metres to a vast plain that stretches unbroken to the horizon.

Rock formation Middle East

The Everglades

Florida, United States

A vast, slow-moving 'river of grass' at the tip of Florida — a shallow, sawgrass-covered wetland the size of a small country, and the only place on Earth where alligators and crocodiles live side by side.

Wetland North America

The Fann Mountains

Sughd Province, western Tajikistan

About a hundred peaks in a compact block of the western Pamir-Alay, a dozen of them above 5,000 metres, with turquoise lakes dammed by landslides sitting under the walls.

Mountain Central Asia

The Farasan Islands

Red Sea, off Jazan, southwestern Saudi Arabia

A low, coral-fringed archipelago in the southern Red Sea — turquoise shallows, mangroves, and reefs that shelter dugongs, nesting seabirds, and a gazelle found nowhere else.

Island Middle East

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 Gobi Desert

Southern Mongolia (and northern China)

A vast cold desert of gravel plains, singing sand dunes, and flaming red cliffs — a land of extremes where dinosaur fossils weather out of the rock and Bactrian camels cross the steppe.

Desert & dunes East Asia

The Gobustan Mud Volcanoes

Gobustan District, southwest of Baku, Azerbaijan

A grey lunar plain of cones that erupt cold — mud, brine and methane pushed up from kilometres below by gas pressure rather than heat, in the country that has more of them than anywhere on Earth.

Volcano Europe

The Great Blue Hole

Lighthouse Reef, off Belize

A perfect deep-blue circle in the turquoise Caribbean — a giant marine sinkhole over 300 metres across and 120 metres deep, ringed by coral reef and famed as one of the world's great dive sites.

Marine sanctuary North America

The Hardangerfjord

Hardanger, Vestland, Western Norway

Norway's second-longest fjord and its orchard country — 179 kilometres of deep blue water reaching inland from the coast past Trolltunga, the Vøringsfossen falls, and the Folgefonna glacier, its gentler slopes white with apple and cherry blossom each spring.

Fjord Europe

The High Atlas & Mount Toubkal

High Atlas, near Imlil and Marrakesh, Morocco

The rugged spine of Morocco — a snow-topped range of bare rock and Berber villages rising south of Marrakesh to Jbel Toubkal, at 4,167 m the highest peak in North Africa and the Arab world.

Mountain Africa

The High Coast

Gulf of Bothnia, northeastern Sweden

A rugged Baltic coast of forested hills, cliffs, and islands that is still visibly rising out of the sea — the site of the greatest land uplift measured anywhere on Earth.

Beach & coast Europe

The Jurassic Coast

Dorset and East Devon, South West England, United Kingdom

England's only natural World Heritage Site — a 95-mile coast where 185 million years of Earth history stand exposed in the cliffs, from red Triassic desert rocks to the sea-carved arch of Durdle Door.

Beach & coast Europe

The Lake District

Cumbria, North West England, United Kingdom

England's largest national park and a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape — a compact country of glacier-carved fells, ribbon lakes and stone-walled valleys that shaped English ideas of the picturesque.

Lake Europe

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 Lysefjord

Rogaland, Southwestern Norway

A 42-kilometre fjord of sheer, luminous granite near Stavanger, walled by two of the world's most famous clifftops — Preikestolen, the flat Pulpit Rock 604 metres above the water, and Kjerag, whose face plunges nearly a kilometre straight down.

Fjord Europe

The Maldives Atolls

Indian Ocean, southwest of Sri Lanka

A double chain of coral atolls scattered across the Indian Ocean — nearly 1,200 low-lying islands ringed by turquoise lagoons and vibrant reefs, and the lowest-lying nation on Earth.

Island South Asia

The Matterhorn

Zermatt, Valais — Swiss/Italian border

The most iconic peak in the Alps — a near-perfect rock pyramid rising in isolation above Zermatt, its four steep faces aligned almost to the compass points, mirrored in still alpine lakes.

Mountain Europe

The Myeik Archipelago

Tanintharyi Region, far southern Myanmar, Andaman Sea

Around eight hundred islands scattered down Myanmar's southern coast — limestone and granite under unbroken rainforest, barely inhabited, and closed to outsiders until 1997.

Island Southeast Asia

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

The Pitons

Soufrière, Saint Lucia, Caribbean

Two dramatic volcanic spires rising straight from the Caribbean Sea — the twin cones of Gros Piton and Petit Piton, cloaked in rainforest, that have become the emblem of Saint Lucia.

Mountain North America

The Sahara (Erg Chebbi)

Merzouga / Erg Chebbi, southeastern Morocco

The largest hot desert on Earth, met at its most iconic in Morocco's Erg Chebbi — a sea of towering, rippling dunes that glow gold and rose at dawn and dusk beneath some of the clearest, darkest skies anywhere.

Desert & dunes Africa

The Seven Rila Lakes

Rila National Park, Rila Mountains, southwestern Bulgaria

Seven glacial tarns arranged one above the other on a mountain staircase between 2,100 and 2,500 metres, each named for the shape the ice left it in — the Eye, the Kidney, the Tear, the Twin.

Lake Europe

The Sognefjord

Sogn, Vestland, Western Norway

The King of the Fjords — Norway's longest and deepest fjord, reaching more than 200 kilometres inland from the coast to the foot of the Jotunheimen mountains, its narrow arms lined with sheer cliffs, hanging waterfalls, and villages under snow peaks.

Fjord Europe

The Sundarbans

Ganges–Brahmaputra Delta, Bangladesh (and India)

The largest mangrove forest on Earth — a vast, tidal labyrinth of channels and salt-tolerant trees at the mouth of the Ganges, and the last stronghold of the swimming Bengal tiger.

Wetland South 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 Twelve Apostles

Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia

A row of towering limestone sea stacks rising from the Southern Ocean along Victoria's Great Ocean Road — sculpted from crumbling coastal cliffs by the relentless waves, and constantly, visibly changing.

Rock formation Oceania

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

The Wahiba Sands

Ash Sharqiyah, eastern Oman

A sea of red-gold dunes rolling for well over a hundred kilometres across eastern Oman — classic Arabian desert, home to the Bedouin and their camels.

Desert & dunes Middle East

The White Desert

Farafra, Western Desert, Egypt

A dreamlike stretch of Egypt's Western Desert where wind has carved a vanished chalk seabed into ghostly white boulders shaped like mushrooms, icebergs, and sculptures.

Desert & dunes Africa

The Yucatán Cenotes

Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico

Thousands of natural sinkholes opening into a hidden world of crystal-clear groundwater and flooded caves beneath the Yucatán — the peninsula's only natural fresh water and among the most beautiful swimming holes on Earth.

Cave North America

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

Tinuy-an Falls

Bislig, Surigao del Sur, Mindanao, Philippines

A broad, multi-tiered curtain of water often called the 'Niagara of the Philippines' — up to 95 metres wide, spilling in white sheets through the rainforest of eastern Mindanao, frequently crowned by a midday rainbow.

Waterfall Southeast 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

Tongariro National Park

Central Plateau, North Island, New Zealand

New Zealand's oldest national park — a volcanic heartland of steaming craters, brilliant emerald lakes, and lava fields, crossed by one of the world's finest day hikes, and gifted to the nation by Māori in 1887 to keep it intact.

Volcano Oceania

Tonlé Sap

Central Cambodia, near Siem Reap

Southeast Asia's largest freshwater lake — a vast, life-giving body of water that swells enormously each monsoon when its own river reverses course and flows backwards.

Lake Southeast Asia

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

Trolltunga

Vestland, western Norway

The 'Troll's Tongue' — a thin slab of rock jutting horizontally into empty air some 700 metres above a fjord lake, at the end of one of Norway's most demanding day hikes.

Rock formation Europe

Tsingy de Bemaraha

Melaky, western Madagascar

A vast 'forest of stone' — a labyrinth of razor-sharp limestone pinnacles rising in grey blades from the Madagascar wilderness, hiding canyons, caves, and creatures found nowhere else.

Karst landscape Africa

Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park

Sulu Sea, off Palawan, Philippines

A pristine, remote atoll system in the middle of the Sulu Sea — nearly 100,000 hectares of coral reef, sheer walls, and open ocean that rank among the healthiest marine ecosystems on the planet.

Coral reef Southeast Asia

Uluru

Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, Northern Territory, Australia

A colossal sandstone monolith rising abruptly from the flat red heart of Australia — glowing through fiery reds and oranges at sunrise and sunset, and a place of the deepest cultural significance to its Aboriginal custodians.

Rock formation Oceania

Valley of Flowers

Uttarakhand, India

A high Himalayan valley that erupts each monsoon into a carpet of alpine wildflowers — hundreds of species blooming beneath snow peaks and glaciers in one of the world's great floral spectacles.

Mountain South Asia

Vang Vieng

Vientiane Province, central Laos

A dramatic landscape of sheer limestone karst peaks rising above the Nam Song river and green rice fields, riddled with caves and blue lagoons, in the hills north of Vientiane.

Karst landscape Southeast Asia

Vatnajökull Ice Caves

Southeast Iceland

Glowing blue caves melted into the heart of Europe's largest ice cap — crystalline chambers of glacier ice, formed anew each winter beneath a vast frozen dome that hides fire below.

Glacier Europe

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

Victoria Falls

Zambezi River, Zimbabwe / Zambia border

Known locally as Mosi-oa-Tunya, 'the smoke that thunders' — the Zambezi River drops over a 1.7-kilometre-wide precipice to form the largest single sheet of falling water on Earth, wrapped in a self-made rainforest of spray.

Waterfall Africa

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

Viñales Valley

Sierra de los Órganos, Pinar del Río Province, western Cuba

Round-topped limestone towers standing up to 300 metres out of flat red tobacco fields in western Cuba — the same tower-karst process that built Ha Long Bay, on an island, and still farmed by hand.

Karst landscape North America

Volcanoes National Park

Northwestern Rwanda (Virunga Mountains)

A chain of forest-cloaked volcanoes on Rwanda's northern border, home to wild mountain gorillas and the setting for Dian Fossey's famous research — one of Africa's most moving wildlife encounters.

Volcano Africa

Vøringsfossen

Eidfjord, Vestland, Western Norway

Norway's most celebrated waterfall — a river flung off the edge of the Hardangervidda plateau, dropping around 180 metres into the raw rock gorge of Måbødalen, now ringed by a dramatic stepped bridge and clifftop viewpoints.

Waterfall Europe

Wadden Sea

Netherlands, Germany & Denmark

The largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mud flats on Earth — a vast tidal wilderness that feeds 10 to 12 million migratory birds a year.

Wetland Europe

Wadi Al-Hitan

Faiyum Governorate, Western Desert, Egypt

A stretch of Egyptian desert holding the best fossil record anywhere of whales learning to leave the land — hundreds of skeletons of archaic whales, some still with hind legs, lying where a shallow sea left them.

Desert & dunes Middle East

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 Rum

Southern Jordan

The 'Valley of the Moon' — a vast desert of red and gold sand studded with towering sandstone and granite mountains, sculpted by wind into arches, canyons, and sheer cliffs beneath enormous skies.

Desert & dunes 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

White Sands

Tularosa Basin, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA

The largest gypsum dunefield on Earth — 710 km² of brilliant white dunes in New Mexico's Tularosa Basin, protected in White Sands National Park and surrounded by a missile range.

Desert & dunes North America

Whitehaven Beach

Whitsunday Island, Queensland, Australia

A seven-kilometre stretch of near-pure silica sand so white and fine it squeaks underfoot, curving along uninhabited Whitsunday Island, where at Hill Inlet the tide swirls the sand and shallows into shifting ribbons of white and turquoise.

Beach & coast Oceania

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

Yala National Park

Southern and Uva Provinces, southeastern Sri Lanka

Dry-zone scrub, lagoons and granite outcrops on Sri Lanka's southeast coast — thought to hold the highest density of leopards per square kilometre anywhere, in a park that partly closes each year when the water runs out.

Savanna & plains South Asia

Yellowstone

Wyoming / Montana / Idaho, United States

The world's first national park, sitting atop a giant volcanic hotspot — home to half the planet's geysers, rainbow-rimmed hot springs like Grand Prismatic, and vast wildlife-rich valleys of bison, wolves, and bears.

Geyser North America

Yosemite Valley

Sierra Nevada, California, United States

A glacier-carved granite valley of sheer cliffs and thundering waterfalls in California's Sierra Nevada — home to the monoliths of El Capitan and Half Dome, and groves of giant sequoias, the largest trees on Earth.

Mountain North America

Yr Wyddfa & Eryri (Snowdonia)

Gwynedd, North Wales, United Kingdom

The rugged mountain heart of Wales — a national park of glacier-hewn peaks, glacial lakes and Welsh-speaking valleys crowned by Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon), the highest mountain in England and Wales.

Mountain Europe

Yuanyang Rice Terraces

Yuanyang County, Honghe, Yunnan, China

Thousands of hand-cut paddy terraces falling three thousand steps down the Ailao Mountains in southern Yunnan — flooded through the winter months into a vast staircase of mirrors that turns pink and gold at sunrise.

Living terraces East Asia

Zanzibar Archipelago

Indian Ocean, off the Tanzanian coast

Tanzania's Indian Ocean islands — coral-fringed shores of blinding white sand and turquoise shallows, spice plantations and mangroves, wrapped around the old trading port of Stone Town.

Island Africa

Zhangjiajie (Wulingyuan)

Hunan Province, China

A forest of thousands of towering quartzite-sandstone pillars rising hundreds of metres from misty subtropical forest — an ethereal landscape of floating peaks that helped inspire the world of Avatar.

Rock formation East Asia

Zhangye Danxia

Gansu Province, China

Hills painted in stripes of red, orange, gold, and green — a landscape of 'rainbow mountains' where millions of years of layered sediment have been folded and eroded into vivid bands of colour.

Rock formation East Asia

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

Þingvellir (Thingvellir)

Þingvellir National Park, Southwest Iceland

A rift valley where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are visibly pulling apart — a landscape of fissures, lava plains, and clear spring-fed water that is also the birthplace of Iceland's parliament.

Rock formation Europe