Natural wonders of Africa

The wonders of Africa in the atlas so far. This region grows as the atlas expands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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, 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

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 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 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

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