The Best Natural Wonders to Visit in October

Planning a trip for October? These 106 wonders are at or near their best this month — the season when conditions, wildlife, light, or access line up. It’s distilled from each place’s real best-time notes, and because the atlas rebuilds daily, this stays current. Open any place for the honest detail on timing and access.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 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

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

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

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

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

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 earth and heaven blur.

Desert & dunes Latin America

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

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

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, called by the Bushmen 'the land God made in anger'.

Beach & coast Africa

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

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 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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 geology, not legend.

River 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

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

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

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

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 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 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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 storybook forest of German legend.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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