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- Entry № 001
Skara Brae
Skara Brae is a 5,000-year-old Neolithic village on Orkney's Bay of Skaill, buried in sand for millennia and exposed by a storm in 1850.
- Entry № 002
The Wadden Sea
The Wadden Sea, spanning the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, is the largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mud flats on Earth.
- Entry № 003
Aogashima
Aogashima is Japan's least populated village: around 170 people living inside an active double caldera 350 km south of Tokyo.
- Entry № 004
Gros Morne Tablelands
The Tablelands in Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland, are a slab of the Earth's mantle pushed to the surface around 470 million years ago.
- Entry № 005
Chiloé
On Chile's Chiloe archipelago, boat builders constructed wooden churches without iron nails, using ship-framing joints.
- Entry № 006
The Drake Passage
The Drake Passage is the 800-kilometre strait between Cape Horn and Antarctica where the world's largest ocean current runs unobstructed by any land.
- Entry № 007
South Georgia
South Georgia holds king penguin colonies numbering in the hundreds of thousands at Salisbury Plain, and Ernest Shackleton's grave at the abandoned whaling station of Grytviken, where visito
- Entry № 008
Port Lockroy
Port Lockroy on Goudier Island, Antarctica, is the world's most southerly public post office.
- Entry № 009
Fakarava
Fakarava in French Polynesia's Tuamotu Archipelago is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve whose southern pass holds one of the densest aggregations of grey reef sharks recorded anywhere — hundr
- Entry № 010
The Marquesas
The Marquesas Islands, inscribed by UNESCO in 2024 as Te Henua Enata, are vertical volcanic islands in French Polynesia with almost no protecting reef, monumental stone tiki, a distinct lang
- Entry № 011
The Aletsch Glacier
The Aletsch Glacier in Valais, Switzerland runs about 22.6 kilometres, the longest in the Alps.
- Entry № 012
Sequoia National Park
Sequoia National Park, established 25 September 1890, protects the General Sherman Tree — about 52,500 cubic feet of wood, the largest known living tree by volume — and a species
- Entry № 013
Cueva de las Manos
Cueva de las Manos in Santa Cruz, Argentina holds hundreds of stencilled hands on a canyon wall, made by blowing pigment through bone tubes.
- Entry № 014
Perito Moreno Glacier
Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina periodically advances across Lago Argentino, damming one arm until the water rises as much as 30 metres and bursts through.
- Entry № 015
Acadia National Park
Acadia in Maine was assembled from land bought and donated by private citizens rather than carved from federal territory.
- Entry № 016
Škocjan Caves
The Škocjan Caves in Slovenia hold one of the world's largest known underground river canyons, carved by the sinking Reka River.
- Entry № 017
Torres del Paine
Torres del Paine in Chilean Patagonia centres on a granite laccolith emplaced 12.59–12.50 million years ago and sliced open by glaciers.
- Entry № 018
Península Valdés
At Punta Norte on Argentina's Península Valdés, orcas deliberately strand themselves on the beach to take sea lion pups — a hunting technique documented in only one other place on Eart
- Entry № 019
Isle Royale
Isle Royale in Lake Superior hosts the world's longest continuous predator-prey study: wolves and moose counted every year since 1958.
- Entry № 020
The Dry Tortugas
Fort Jefferson in Dry Tortugas National Park is the largest brick masonry structure in the Americas — over 16 million bricks on a tiny Florida island, begun 1846, never finished, never
- Entry № 021
Katmai & Brooks Falls
At Brooks Falls in Alaska's Katmai National Park, brown bears stand at the lip of a waterfall catching leaping sockeye salmon.
- Entry № 022
Fernandina
Fernandina is the youngest Galapagos island and one of the most pristine island ecosystems on Earth: no introduced species, an active volcano, the largest marine iguana colonies — and
- Entry № 023
Kaikōura
At Kaikoura, New Zealand, a submarine canyon plunging over 1,200 metres begins almost at the shoreline, bringing year-round sperm whales within sight of snow-capped mountains.
- Entry № 024
Lord Howe Island
Lord Howe Island caps visitors at about 400 at a time, holds the world's southernmost true coral reef, and faces Ball's Pyramid — the tallest sea stack on Earth, where a stick insect t
- Entry № 025
The Bay of Fundy
The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides on Earth — a record 16.3 metres at Burntcoat Head, with roughly 160 billion tonnes of water moving in and out twice daily.
- Entry № 026
Nahanni
In Canada's Nahanni National Park Reserve, the South Nahanni River pours 96 metres over Virginia Falls — Nailicho, 'big water falling' in Dene — twice Niagara's height, in a road
- Entry № 027
The Osa Peninsula
Corcovado National Park on Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula protects the largest Pacific lowland rainforest in Central America.
- Entry № 028
Coober Pedy
In Coober Pedy, South Australia's opal capital, around half the residents live underground in dugouts that stay cool year-round.
- Entry № 029
Pico
Pico in the Azores holds Portugal's highest mountain (2,351 m) and a UNESCO World Heritage vineyard landscape of black lava-stone corrals where Verdelho vines grow in rock.
- Entry № 030
Mykines
Mykines, the westernmost Faroe island, hosts one of the largest puffin colonies in the Faroes and the islands' only gannet colony, with a footbridge over a sea gorge to the Mykinesholmur lig
- Entry № 031
Sedona
Sedona, Arizona sits among red sandstone formations coloured by iron oxide — the rocks are literally rusting.
- Entry № 032
The Iberá Wetlands
Argentina's Ibera Wetlands, among South America's largest freshwater wetlands, are the site of a landmark rewilding: jaguars returned in 2021 after 70 years, with giant otters, macaws, antea
- Entry № 033
Sossusvlei & Deadvlei
Deadvlei is a white clay pan in Namibia's Namib-Naukluft National Park where camel thorn trees that died roughly six to seven centuries ago still stand, too dry to decompose, beneath dunes a
- Entry № 034
Hang Sơn Đoòng
Hang Son Doong in Vietnam's Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park is the world's largest cave: about 9 km long, 38.5 million cubic metres, with passages 200 m tall.
- Entry № 035
Living Root Bridges
In Meghalaya, India - the wettest inhabited region on Earth - the Khasi and Jaintia peoples grow bridges from the living roots of Ficus elastica trees.
- Entry № 036
Song-Köl
Song-Kol is an alpine lake at 3,016 m in Kyrgyzstan's Naryn Region - 29 km long, the country's largest freshwater lake, a Ramsar wetland since 2011.
- Entry № 037
Zhangjiajie & Wulingyuan
Wulingyuan in China's Hunan Province holds more than 3,000 quartzite sandstone pillars, many over 200 metres tall - a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992 and the landscape that inspired Av
- Entry № 038
Þingvellir
Þingvellir is a rift valley in southwest Iceland where the Alþingi, Iceland's general assembly, was founded in 930 and met until 1798.
- Entry № 039
Dominica
Dominica is a mountainous volcanic island in the eastern Caribbean whose interior is protected as Morne Trois Pitons National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 1997, and whose
- Entry № 040
Svalbard
Svalbard is a Norwegian Arctic archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, governed under the 1920 Svalbard Treaty, which now has 46 parties and lets their citizens live and work
- Entry № 041
Paro Taktsang
Paro Taktsang, the Tiger's Nest, is a Vajrayana Buddhist monastery complex built in 1692 on a cliff about 900 metres above Bhutan's Paro valley, at roughly 3,120 metres above sea level, arou
- Entry № 042
Cappadocia & Derinkuyu
Cappadocia is a region of central Anatolia in Türkiye where volcanic tuff from the Erciyes and Hasan eruptions has eroded into pinnacles known as fairy chimneys, and where people carved
- Entry № 043
Lofoten
Lofoten is a Norwegian archipelago in Nordland, north of the Arctic Circle, whose settlement, wealth and architecture were built on the Lofotfisket — the winter cod fishery that has ru
- Entry № 044
Plitvice Lakes
Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia is a chain of sixteen terraced lakes separated by tufa barriers that are built, not eroded — deposited by living mosses, algae and bacteria and
- Entry № 045
Meteora
Meteora in Thessaly, Greece, is a cluster of conglomerate pinnacles up to about 200 metres high, formed from a Gilbert-type river delta deposited in the Mesohellenic Trough in the Oligocene
- Entry № 046
Raja Ampat
Raja Ampat in Southwest Papua, Indonesia, holds the highest recorded reef biodiversity on the planet: around 553 hard coral species, about 75 per cent of the world's known total, and over 1,
- Entry № 047
The Flaming Cliffs
The Flaming Cliffs (Bayanzag) are a red sandstone escarpment in Mongolia's South Gobi, part of the Late Cretaceous Djadokhta Formation, where a 1923 American Museum of Natural History expedi
- Entry № 048
Taroko Gorge
Taroko Gorge is a marble canyon in eastern Taiwan cut by the Liwu River over several million years.
- Entry № 049
The cenotes of the Yucatán
The cenotes of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula are natural sinkholes exposing the region's underground aquifer.
- Entry № 050
The Okavango Delta
The Okavango Delta is a UNESCO World Heritage inland delta in northwestern Botswana whose annual flood, sourced from Angola's highlands, arrives and peaks during Botswana's dry winter.
- Entry № 051
Cirque de Mafate
A collapsed volcanic cirque on Réunion enclosed by ramparts of up to about 1,000 metres, holding nine or ten hamlets and around 800 residents, reachable only on foot or by helicopter.
- Entry № 052
The Makgadikgadi Pans
A complex of salt pans in north-eastern Botswana lying on the bed of the prehistoric Lake Makgadikgadi, among the largest salt flats on Earth, crossed each wet season by a zebra migration.
- Entry № 053
Etosha
A national park in northern Namibia built around the Etosha Pan, the salt floor of a lake abandoned when its river was diverted, where dry-season game concentrates at a small number of waterholes.
- Entry № 054
Chã das Caldeiras
A village of several hundred people farming inside the caldera of the active volcano Pico do Fogo in Cabo Verde, at about 1,700 metres, ringed by an escarpment roughly a thousand metres high.
- Entry № 055
Vallée de Mai
A palm forest on Praslin in the Seychelles holding the coco de mer, Lodoicea maldivica, which produces the largest seed of any plant and grows naturally on only two islands.
- Entry № 056
SG̱ang Gwaay
A nineteenth-century Haida village site on SG̱ang Gwaay (Anthony Island), within Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, National Marine Conservation Area Reserve and Haida Heritage Site, British Columbia, Canada. Inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1981 under criterion (iii).
- Entry № 057
Mammoth Cave
A limestone cave system beneath south-central Kentucky, United States, and the longest known cave system in the world, protected as Mammoth Cave National Park since 1941 and inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1981.
- Entry № 058
The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks
A group of eight monumental earthwork complexes built by Hopewell-culture peoples in the Ohio River valley between about 100 BC and AD 500, in Ross, Licking and Union Counties, Ohio, United States. Inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site on 19 September 2023.
- Entry № 059
Wood Buffalo National Park
A national park straddling northern Alberta and the southern Northwest Territories, Canada, established in 1922 to protect wood bison and inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1983. It is the largest national park in Canada and the world’s largest dark sky preserve.
- Entry № 060
Great Sand Dunes
A national park and preserve in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado, United States, containing the tallest sand dunes in North America, an International Dark Sky Park, established as a national monument in 1932 and a national park in 2004.
- Entry № 061
Hamelin Pool
Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve, a hypersaline embayment in Shark Bay, Western Australia, holding one of the world’s two well-developed populations of living marine stromatolites. Part of the Shark Bay World Heritage Area, inscribed by UNESCO in 1991.
- Entry № 062
Purnululu
Purnululu National Park, 239,723 hectares in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia, containing the Bungle Bungle Range of banded sandstone cone karst. Declared a national park in 1987 and inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2003 under natural criteria (vii) and (viii).
- Entry № 063
Tongariro
Tongariro National Park, in the central North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, containing the volcanoes Tongariro, Ngāuruhoe and Ruapehu. New Zealand’s first national park, established 1894, and inscribed by UNESCO under natural criteria in 1990 and extended in 1993 as the first cultural landscape on the World Heritage List.
- Entry № 064
Rakiura
Stewart Island / Rakiura, the third largest and southernmost inhabited island of New Zealand, lying 30 km south of the South Island across Foveaux Strait. About 85 per cent of the island is protected as Rakiura National Park, established in 2002, and the island was designated an International Dark Sky Sanctuary in 2019.
- Entry № 065
Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre
Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre, an endorheic salt lake in the arid interior of South Australia, containing the lowest natural point on the Australian continent at about 15 metres below sea level. Protected as Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre National Park and co-managed with the Arabana people.
- Entry № 066
The Florida Keys
The Florida Keys, an archipelago of roughly 1,700 islands extending south-west from the southern tip of the Florida peninsula, United States, linked by the 113-mile Overseas Highway and bordered by the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States.
- Entry № 067
St John
Virgin Islands National Park on the island of St John, United States Virgin Islands, covering roughly sixty per cent of the island together with adjacent submerged lands. Established in 1956 following a land donation by Laurance S. Rockefeller.
- Entry № 068
Upper Svaneti
Upper Svaneti, a region of the Greater Caucasus in northwestern Georgia in the upper Enguri valley, containing medieval tower-house villages including Mestia and the Ushguli community. Inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1996.
- Entry № 069
The haenyeo of Jeju
The culture of the Jeju haenyeo, women breath-hold divers of Jeju Island, Republic of Korea, inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016.
- Entry № 070
Scoresby Sund
Scoresby Sund (Kangertittivaq), the largest fjord system in the world, on the east coast of Greenland, and Ittoqqortoormiit, the only inhabited settlement within it, founded in 1925 and bordering the Northeast Greenland National Park.
- Entry № 071
The Saloum Delta
The Saloum Delta, a mangrove delta at the mouth of the Saloum River in western Senegal, inscribed by UNESCO in 2011 as a cultural landscape for its 218 shell mounds, 28 of them bearing burial tumuli, and lying partly within Saloum Delta National Park, established in 1976.
- Entry № 072
Príncipe
Príncipe, the smaller of the two main islands of São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea, about 142 square kilometres, designated in its entirety a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2012, and the site at Roça Sundy of Arthur Eddington’s observations of the total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919.
- Entry № 073
Gunung Mulu
Gunung Mulu National Park in Miri Division, Sarawak, Malaysia, on the island of Borneo: 52,864 hectares of rainforest and karst around the sandstone peak of Gunung Mulu, with at least 295 kilometres of explored caves including the Sarawak Chamber, Deer Cave and the Clearwater Cave system. Inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2000; there is no road access.
- Entry № 074
Nan Madol
Nan Madol, the ceremonial and political centre of the Saudeleur dynasty, built on artificial islets of columnar basalt and coral fill on the reef off Temwen Island, Madolenihmw, Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia. Inscribed by UNESCO in 2016 as Nan Madol: Ceremonial Centre of Eastern Micronesia, and placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger the same year.
- Entry № 075
Deception Island
Deception Island, a horseshoe-shaped island in the South Shetland Islands off the Antarctic Peninsula, formed by the flooded caldera of an active volcano, with an inner bay, Port Foster, entered through the channel of Neptune’s Bellows. Managed under the Antarctic Treaty as Antarctic Specially Managed Area No. 4, it contains the whaling and research station remains at Whalers Bay, Historic Site and Monument No. 71.
- Entry № 076
Victoria Falls
Victoria Falls (Mosi-oa-Tunya), the waterfall on the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe, 1,708 metres wide and up to 108 metres high, with a zigzag series of gorges below it that mark its earlier positions. Listed by UNESCO under both names.
- Entry № 077
Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu, a fifteenth-century Inca royal estate on a ridge above the Urubamba River in the Peruvian Andes, about 80 kilometres northwest of Cusco. A Peruvian Historic Sanctuary since 1981 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1983.
- Entry № 078
Salar de Uyuni
Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world, about 10,582 square kilometres at 3,656 metres in Potosí Department, Bolivia: the dried bed of prehistoric lakes, so level that space agencies use it to calibrate satellite instruments, and a mirror after rain.
- Entry № 079
The Nazca Lines
The Nazca Lines, geoglyphs made between about 500 BC and AD 500 in the stony desert of southern Peru, including more than 70 animal figures and lines totalling over 1,300 kilometres. Inscribed by UNESCO in 1994.
- Entry № 080
The Great Blue Hole
The Great Blue Hole, a circular marine sinkhole about 318 metres across and 124 metres deep on Lighthouse Reef, off Belize. Stalactites in its submerged caves show it was a dry cave during the ice ages. Part of the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996.
- Entry № 081
The Giant’s Causeway
About 40,000 basalt columns on the County Antrim coast. In the late eighteenth century they were at the centre of the argument over whether basalt formed in water or from volcanoes, much of it conducted through engravings of Susanna Drury's paintings. The same pattern grows in drying cornflour.
- Entry № 082
Venice
Left alone, the Venetian lagoon would have silted into marsh. From the early 1500s the Republic of Venice dug new beds to carry the Brenta, the Piave and the Sile around it, and the water that protects the city is partly a construction. Now the MOSE barrier holds back the sea.
- Entry № 083
Neuschwanstein
Ludwig II of Bavaria built Neuschwanstein as a private retreat from public life, from designs first drawn by a theatre painter. No outsider was allowed in during his lifetime. On 1 August 1886, seven weeks after his death, it opened to the public, and more than 1.3 million now come each year.
- Entry № 084
The Alhambra
The Nasrid palaces of the Alhambra in Granada are covered in poems carved into plaster, and many of them speak in the first person, as the room. The Fountain of the Lions carries verses by Ibn Zamrak describing the fountain itself. A famous claim about its tiles, that they hold all 17 symmetry groups, is disputed by mathematicians.
- Entry № 085
Malta
Across Malta, paired grooves are cut into the bare limestone like the tracks of a rail yard. At Misraħ Għar il-Kbir so many cross that an archaeologist nicknamed it Clapham Junction; at Birżebbuġa they run into the sea. Their age and makers are still argued over.
- Entry № 086
The Great Barrier Reef
The world's largest reef system has died five times in 30,000 years, stranded as the sea fell and drowned as it rose, and survived each time by moving. The reef you swim over is less than 10,000 years old.
- Entry № 087
Milford Sound / Piopiotahi
So much rain falls here that fresh water floats on the sea like a lid, and deep-sea black coral grows within a diver's reach. The boats pass right over it.
- Entry № 088
The Twelve Apostles
Named for tourists, never twelve, and now seven: the stacks were carved in the last few thousand years, and the only extra Apostles anyone has found stand drowned offshore.
- Entry № 089
Aoraki / Mount Cook
Measured at 3,764 metres for a century, New Zealand's highest mountain lost ten metres in a night in 1991 and thirty more since. To Ngai Tahu it is an ancestor, not a summit.
- Entry № 090
The Blue Mountains
Not mountains but a sandstone plateau cut into gorges, blue because of its eucalypts and World Heritage-listed for them. One canyon hid a tree known only from fossils until 1994.
- Entry № 091
The Grand Canyon
Nearly two billion years of rock, and a hole cut through it that geologists still date three ways: 70 million years for part of it, 5 to 6 million for the whole, or a lake that spilled.
- Entry № 092
Yellowstone
The colours around Yellowstone's hot springs are living microbes. From one small pool off the boardwalks came the bacterium whose enzyme made copying DNA practical.
- Entry № 093
Niagara Falls
A treaty sets how much water goes over Niagara Falls: twice as much by day in the tourist season as at night. The rest goes through tunnels to power stations, and in 1969 the American Falls was turned off.
- Entry № 094
Banff
Canada's national parks began with a quarrel over a hot spring in 1885. The spring is now closed to bathers, because it is the main home of a snail found nowhere else.
- Entry № 095
Churchill
Polar bears gather at Churchill each autumn to wait for Hudson Bay to freeze. The ones that come into town can be held by the province until the ice forms, then let go onto it.
- Entry № 096
Angkor Wat
The famous building is one temple. Lidar flown in 2012 showed the forest around it hides a planned city of embankments, ponds and roads, and the temple was built into the grid.
- Entry № 097
Mount Fuji
The summit of Japan's national symbol is shrine land: the state took it after the Meiji Restoration, the Supreme Court ruled for the shrine in 1974, and it was handed back in 2004. The prefectural border across the top was never drawn.
- Entry № 098
The South Pole
The pole stays put; the ice on top of it moves about ten metres a year. So every New Year's Day the station's people mark the pole again, with a marker made by hand over the winter.
- Entry № 099
The Avenue of the Baobabs
The giant baobabs along the road north of Morondava did not grow as an avenue. They are what remains of a forest cleared for farming, and the land around them is poor ground for young trees.
- Entry № 100
Ilulissat Icefjord
The glacier behind Ilulissat's icebergs slowed and thickened from 2016 as the sea cooled, then sped up again from 2018 before the warm water came back. Its biggest icebergs still queue on a ridge at the fjord's mouth.
- Entry № 101
Vatican City
The smallest country in the world meets Italy along a white stone line across St Peter's Square. By the 1929 treaty the square is the Vatican's, and on an ordinary day Italian police keep order in it.
- Entry № 102
Santiago de Compostela
A pilgrimage made since the ninth century, waymarked since 1984 by a parish priest's yellow arrows and proved with a book of stamps, ending at a granite cathedral in Galicia.
- Entry № 103
Ephesus
One of the great ports of the Roman world, left inland by its own river. Ephesus moved more than once to follow a coastline that silt kept pushing west.
- Entry № 104
Ronda
A town on both lips of a gorge, joined by a bridge 98 metres high that was built of stone cut from the bottom of the gorge itself. It is called the New Bridge, and it was finished in 1793.
- Entry № 105
Patmos
In 1088 a Byzantine emperor granted a small Aegean island to a monk. He built a monastery with battlements above the harbour, and a white town grew up around its walls.
- Entry № 106
Iguazú Falls
Argentina's park counts 275 falls; other accounts give 150 to 300, because the number depends on the river. The same river wrecked the walkway to the Devil's Throat in 2023, and it was taken apart again in 2026 before an expected flood.
- Entry № 107
Kruger National Park
South Africa's first national park turned 100 in 2026. It is named for President Paul Kruger, and historians have argued since 1994 about how much he had to do with it.
- Entry № 108
Ha Long Bay
A limestone tower landscape that the sea has flooded: UNESCO calls it the most extensive marine-invaded tower karst on Earth. Every island carries a notch the tide has dissolved at its foot.
- Entry № 109
Bora Bora
Visitors still land on an airstrip US forces built on a reef islet in 1943 for a wartime fuel base, then cross the lagoon by boat. For years it was French Polynesia's only international airport.
- Entry № 110
Ross Ice Shelf
The largest ice shelf on Earth, a floating slab about the size of France, ends in a cliff more than 600 km long. Ships sail south until they meet it, and the record for the farthest south keeps moving.
- Entry № 111
The Great Wall
Not one wall but thousands of sections, trenches and towers built over two thousand years, of whatever the ground offered. China's own survey of its Ming line counts hills and rivers as part of it.
- Entry № 112
Registan
Three tiled madrasas facing each other across Samarkand's central square. When a minaret of the oldest began to lean in 1918, the engineer of Moscow's radio tower set it straight in 1932.
- Entry № 113
Table Mountain
The only mountain with a constellation named after it, drawn in the 1750s by a French astronomer working below it. Its flat top was once the floor of a valley.
- Entry № 114
Fushimi Inari Taisha
The tunnels of vermilion gates on the Inari shrine's mountain are offerings, given since the Edo period for prayers made or answered. The giver's name is on the back of each.
- Entry № 115
Atacama Desert
The driest non-polar desert on Earth, whose soil near Yungay passed Viking-style tests for Mars in 2003, until another team grew microbes from it. In a wet year its southern end flowers.
- Entry № 116
Lençóis Maranhenses
White dunes on Brazil's north coast fill with freshwater lagoons every rainy season. The dunes move up to 25 metres a year, so the lagoons come back each year somewhere else.
- Entry № 117
Borobudur
Borobudur's first chapter, 160 carved panels on cause and effect, lies behind a later stone base. It was photographed once, in 1890–91, and covered again; one corner is open.
- Entry № 118
Kīlauea
After its summit collapsed in 2018, Kīlauea's crater filled with groundwater. The lake grew for seventeen months, until lava broke in one December night in 2020 and boiled it off in about ninety minutes.
- Entry № 119
Sigiriya
Visitors to Sri Lanka's Lion Rock scratched verses into its polished Mirror Wall between the 8th and 10th centuries. Hundreds survive, including one from a man who declined to write a poem.
- Entry № 120
McMurdo Dry Valleys
Antarctica's largest ice-free region, where a glacier leaks brine sealed underneath it for perhaps two million years. It comes out clear and turns red in the air.
- Entry № 121
South Luangwa
In Zambia's Luangwa Valley, visitors were first taken out on foot in the 1950s. The river loops into lagoons that have held some of the densest hippo numbers recorded.
- Entry № 122
Taputapuātea
On Raiatea, a marae at the centre of an old alliance of islands. UNESCO records that stones were carried from it to found marae of the same name elsewhere.
- Entry № 123
Jemaa el-Fnaa
The great square of Marrakesh is protected for what happens on it, not what stands round it. A writer's campaign to save it helped create UNESCO's list of oral heritage.
- Entry № 124
The Chocolate Hills
Rounded limestone mounds rise out of the rice fields of Bohol by the hundred and turn brown in the dry season. Three official counts give three different totals.
- Entry № 125
Hawa Mahal
A Jaipur landmark that is mostly a screen: five storeys of latticed windows over a bazaar street, built in 1799 so royal women could watch the city unseen.
- Entry № 126
Mount Bromo
An active volcano standing in a plain of grey volcanic sand inside an older crater in East Java. The sand sea has been a nature reserve since 1919, and the Tenggerese carry offerings to the crater every year.
- Entry № 127
Kuang Si Falls
A waterfall outside Luang Prabang that spills through a staircase of milky blue pools over pale stone the water laid down itself, with rescued moon bears and sun bears dozing beside the path.
- Entry № 128
The Meeting of the Waters
Below Manaus, the black Rio Negro and the pale, muddy Solimões run side by side in one channel for kilometres without mixing, and the river that leaves is the one Brazil calls the Amazon.
- Entry № 129
Gocta Falls
A waterfall of 771 metres in two drops in northern Peru, in full view of the villages below it, which the wider world heard of only in 2006, together with a world ranking disputed ever since.
- Entry № 130
Moorea
The jagged island facing Tahiti, whose native tree snails were lost in the wild, bred in zoos and carried home, each with a dot of paint. The ones found without a dot were born there.
- Entry № 131
The Panama Canal
A shortcut between two oceans that lifts every ship 26 metres on fresh water from a lake, then lets the water run to the sea. When the rain fails, fewer ships cross. Bound for the Pacific, a ship sails south-east.
- Entry № 132
Hội An
A trading port that lost its trade when its river silted, and so kept its timber houses, its assembly halls and a little covered bridge with a temple on it. The river still floods the old town most autumns.
- Entry № 133
Maya Bay
A cove on a limestone island in the Andaman Sea, reshaped for a film and then overrun, closed for three and a half years to recover and reopened with swimming banned. Its shallows are now a nursery for blacktip reef sharks.
- Entry № 134
The Li River
A river winding between limestone towers that rise one by one from flat green fields, from Guilin down to Yangshuo. One bend near Xingping is on the back of China's 20-yuan note, and people stand there holding the note up to the view.
- Entry № 135
Aït Benhaddou
A fortified hillside village of rammed earth and mud brick in southern Morocco. Its families have mostly moved across the river, and what keeps its walls standing is restoration, helped along by the film crews that keep returning.
- Entry № 136
Ushuaia
Argentina's southernmost city calls itself the world's. Across the Beagle Channel, Chile's Puerto Williams lies about 15 km farther south and has counted as a city since 2019.
- Entry № 137
Chobe National Park
In the dry season elephants of Africa's largest population come down to the Chobe River by the family. In the river is a grassy island Botswana and Namibia took to the World Court.
- Entry № 138
Marble Caves
On a Patagonian lake big enough to raise real waves, the water has hollowed a marble shore into chapels and tunnels, and glacial silt in the water turns the walls blue.
- Entry № 139
Lac Rose
Senegal's pink lake gets its colour from an alga that blushes under salt and sun. After the 2022 floods it went green; by 2025 it was pink again.
- Entry № 140
The Pinnacles
Thousands of limestone pillars in yellow sand north of Perth, called a desert where it rains most winters. In 2024 iron nodules on the pillars were used to date them.
- Entry № 141
Yosemite
For most of a century a waterfall of burning embers was pushed off a Yosemite cliff every summer night. The Park Service stopped it in 1968. Each February the sun now sets a real waterfall alight.
- Entry № 142
Mont-Saint-Michel
A raised causeway nearly turned this tidal island into land. A dam that stores the sea and then lets it go, and a bridge on piles, are making it an island again on the biggest tides.
- Entry № 143
Stonehenge
Everyone looks at Stonehenge’s standing stones. The six-tonne slab lying in the middle was traced in 2024 to north-east Scotland, at least 750 km away.
- Entry № 144
Prague
Every hour a skeleton rings the bell on Prague’s astronomical clock. The legend of the clockmaker blinded for building it is told about a man who did not.
- Entry № 145
Arches
More than 2,000 sandstone arches stand over a buried salt bed in Utah. One fell in the night in 2008, and the Park Service says new ones form about as fast as old ones fall.
- Entry № 146
Crater Lake
A lake in the collapsed top of a volcano, with no river in or out: rain and snow keep it full. It is the deepest in the United States, and until the end of 2028 nobody can walk down to it.
- Entry № 147
Quebec City
The only walled city north of Mexico nearly pulled its walls down in the 1870s. A governor general stopped it, and the gates you walk through were rebuilt afterwards, wider and for show.
- Entry № 148
Gullfoss
A glacial river that turns and drops twice into a canyon. A farmer's daughter fought the plan to dam it and stands above it in stone; the lease itself died when the rent stopped.
- Entry № 149
Our Lady of the Rocks
An islet in the Bay of Kotor made of dropped stones and sunken ships, around a reef where, by tradition, seamen found an icon in 1452. Every July the town goes out and adds more.
- Entry № 150
Easter Island
Hundreds of stone ancestors that Rapa Nui stories say walked to their places. Two archaeologists roped a replica and walked it, and the argument over how is not quite over. You visit with a local guide.
- Entry № 151
Lake Kaindy
A mountain lake that an earthquake made in a single night in 1911, drowning a spruce forest where it stood. The trunks still rise from the water, pale above and green below.
- Entry № 152
Moynaq
A fishing port on the Aral Sea until the rivers that fed the sea were diverted for cotton. The water has gone out of sight; the town's fishing boats lie rusting on the sand, and the town is still lived in.
- Entry № 153
Hampi
The ruined capital of the Vijayanagara Empire, among granite boulders on the Tungabhadra. Its stone chariot is on India's fifty-rupee note, and its oldest temple never stopped holding worship.
- Entry № 154
Kolmanskop
A diamond town in the Namib, built after a railwayman picked up a stone in 1908. It had a ballroom, an X-ray station and free ice delivered daily; since 1956 the sand has been moving in.
- Entry № 155
Liuwa Plain
A grassland in western Zambia that a Lozi king protected in the 1880s. More than 47,000 wildebeest gather on it with the first rains, and about 12,000 people still live inside the park.
- Entry № 156
Loango
A stretch of Gabon's Atlantic coast where elephants, buffalo and hippos walk out of the forest and the lagoons onto the beach. A National Geographic photographer made its hippos in the surf famous.
- Entry № 157
Horizontal Falls
Two narrow gaps in a range of hills on the Kimberley coast, where tides of up to about ten metres heap the sea up on one side and pour it through. To the Dambimangari it is Garaan-ngaddim, a powerful, sacred place.
- Entry № 158
Rock Islands
Hundreds of green limestone islands in a turquoise lagoon, many worn away at the waterline into mushrooms, with a lake of golden jellyfish among them. Every visitor signs a promise to Palau's children before they are let in.
- Entry № 159
Jalapão
A remote stretch of Brazilian savanna with orange dunes, clear rivers and springs that push swimmers back to the surface, and a golden grass that the quilombola village of Mumbuca turned into a craft.
- Entry № 160
Colca Canyon
A gorge in the southern Peruvian Andes where condors rise past the rim in the morning and the valley is stepped with terraces older than the Inca. In 1586 its two peoples told the Spanish they shaped their children's heads after mountains.
- Entry № 161
Great Zimbabwe
The largest precolonial stone city in southern Africa, built without mortar by ancestors of the Shona. A white government once pressed archaeologists to deny who built it; in 1980 an independent country took its name.
- Entry № 162
Nzulezo
A whole village standing on stilts in a lake in western Ghana, reached by an hour's dugout ride through swamp forest. School, church and daily life all happen over the water, and on Thursdays the lake rests.
- Entry № 163
Pico Cão Grande
A needle of grey volcanic rock standing about 370 m straight up out of the rainforest of São Tomé: the hardened core of a volcano that has worn away. Nobody stood on top of it until 1991.
- Entry № 164
Kharkhorin
The capital of the Mongol Empire stood here, with a silver tree that poured drinks for the khan's guests. The city was razed, its stones built into a monastery, and a granite turtle still sits in the grass at its edge.
- Entry № 165
Lanyu
A volcanic island off south-east Taiwan, home of the Tao, who build their fishing boats by hand from planks and arrange their year around the flying fish. Visitors are asked to leave the boats, and the drying fish, alone.
- Entry № 166
Tuktoyaktuk and the Pingos
An Inuvialuit hamlet on the Arctic Ocean at the end of a gravel highway across the tundra, opened in 2017. Nearby stand pingos, smooth green hills with a core of solid ice, among them Canada's tallest.
- Entry № 167
Funafuti
The capital of Tuvalu, on a ring of coral islets so narrow that the airport runway is also the town's playing field. A few flights a week come in from Fiji, by daylight only; in between, the runway belongs to football, volleyball and bicycles.
- Entry № 168
Saba
A green volcano in the Caribbean with cliffs on every side, a runway of about 400 metres that only small planes use, and a road islanders built by hand after engineers said it could not be done. Its women made a trade of drawn-thread lace.
- Entry № 169
Cabo Polonio
A village of scattered houses on a rocky Atlantic cape in Uruguay, reached only across the dunes. Its houses have no mains power, by its residents' own preference; its lighthouse is from 1881, and sea lions crowd the islands offshore.
- Entry № 170
The Missions of Trinidad and Jesús
The sandstone ruins of two Jesuit reductions in southern Paraguay, built with the Guaraní and listed by UNESCO in 1993. One church has a frieze of carved angel musicians; the other was still being built when the Jesuits were expelled, and stands unfinished.
- Entry № 171
Grímsey
A treeless island off north Iceland, the only part of the country the Arctic Circle crosses. A grey concrete sphere marks the line, and it is moved to follow the circle as it drifts north.
- Entry № 172
Uummannaq
A Greenlandic town of coloured houses on a rocky island, under a sheer 1,170 m mountain named for its heart shape. No plane can land on the island, so the last leg is by helicopter.
- Entry № 173
Point Wild
A spit of stones under a glacier on Elephant Island, where twenty-two of Shackleton's men lived under two upturned boats for four and a half months until a Chilean Navy tug came for them in August 1916.
- Entry № 174
Tsodilo
Four hills of pale quartzite in the flat Kalahari bush of north-west Botswana, holding over 4,500 rock paintings and revered by the Hambukushu and San as a home of ancestral spirits.
- Entry № 175
The Bazaruto Archipelago
Five islands of sand off the coast of Mozambique, a national park since 1971, with giant white dunes, seagrass meadows and the last viable population of dugongs in the western Indian Ocean.
- Entry № 176
Tsingy de Bemaraha
A limestone plateau in western Madagascar worn into forests of grey blades and needles, so sharp that its Malagasy name warns against walking on it barefoot. It is visited on guided circuits from the village of Bekopaka.
- Entry № 177
Togo Chasm
A chasm in the raised coral on Niue's east coast, reached through rainforest, a field of jagged coral and a long ladder, with a floor of sand and coconut palms. Niue was the first whole country certified as a dark sky place.
- Entry № 178
Maria Island
A mountainous island off the east coast of Tasmania, all of it national park, where wombats graze between the brick buildings of a World Heritage convict station and sandstone cliffs are stained in swirls of orange.
- Entry № 179
Robinson Crusoe Island
A volcanic island far off the coast of Chile where the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk lived alone for four years and four months. Chile renamed it in 1966 after the novel his story helped inspire.
- Entry № 180
Kennecott
A copper-mill town of red timber buildings above a rubble-covered glacier in Alaska, almost empty since 1938. The road stops at a footbridge, and the last five miles are on foot, by bike or by shuttle.
- Entry № 181
Anacapa Island
Three narrow volcanic islets an hour off the California coast, reached by a ladder and 157 stairs, with a forty-foot stone arch at one end and the world’s largest breeding colony of western gulls on top.
- Entry № 182
Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness
A trail-less badland in north-west New Mexico of grey and rust clay mounds, stone caps on thin necks and petrified logs, with no water and no marked paths. Its rocks record the end of the age of dinosaurs.
- Entry № 183
L’Anse aux Meadows
Grassed-over outlines of Norse turf halls at the northern tip of Newfoundland, the only confirmed Norse site in the Americas. Wood cut there has been dated, by its tree rings and a solar storm, to the year 1021.
- Entry № 184
Sark
A car-free island in the Bailiwick of Guernsey, where tractors and horses are the traffic and the sky is kept dark on purpose. Its two halves are joined by La Coupée, a railed road along a ridge high above the sea.
- Entry № 185
St Kilda
A remote island group beyond the Outer Hebrides whose last 36 people left together in 1930. A street of stone houses, about 1,400 turf-capped cleits and Britain’s highest sea stacks remain, a long day-boat ride from Harris.
- Entry № 186
Pond Inlet
An Inuit hamlet of about 1,500 people on a gravel shore in Nunavut, facing the glaciers of Bylot Island across Eclipse Sound. Narwhals spend the summer in the sound, and the way in is by air through Iqaluit.
- Entry № 187
Ischigualasto
A valley of pale, wind-cut badlands under red cliffs in San Juan, Argentina, whose rocks of about 230 million years ago gave up some of the first dinosaurs. A guided circuit of about 40 km leads past a stone mushroom and a stone submarine.
- Entry № 188
Richtersveld
A mountain desert on South Africa’s Orange River border with Namibia, watered mostly by sea fog, owned by the Nama and run with them. Its slopes hold the halfmens, a spiny single-stemmed succulent, and its tracks need a four-wheel drive.
- Entry № 189
Chatham Islands
A windswept archipelago about 800 km east of New Zealand’s South Island that keeps its own clock, 45 minutes ahead. It is home to the Moriori, its first people, and to the black robin, once down to five birds.
- Entry № 190
Hvalsey Church
The best-preserved Norse ruin in Greenland, by UNESCO’s account: a roofless granite church on a fjord near Qaqortoq, where a wedding in September 1408 is the last written record of the Greenland Norse.
- Entry № 191
Kobuk Valley
Bare golden dunes over a hundred feet high, north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, with spruce and tundra at their edge and caribou crossing them. No road goes in: a small plane lands on the sand.
- Entry № 192
Lemaire Channel
A strait 600 metres wide at its narrowest between ice-hung cliffs on the Antarctic Peninsula, usually as calm as a lake, sometimes blocked by icebergs, and threaded slowly by expedition ships heading south.
- Entry № 193
Ogasawara Islands
Subtropical islands about 1,000 km south of Tokyo with no airport, reached by a ferry of about 24 hours that sails roughly once a week. UNESCO listed them for snails and plants found nowhere else.
- Entry № 194
Ban Gioc Waterfall
A wide, tiered waterfall on the Quay Son River in Vietnam’s far north, falling into a green pool below karst hills. China shares it and calls it Detian; visitors from Vietnam see it from the southern bank.
- Entry № 195
Fernando de Noronha
A volcanic archipelago 354 km off Brazil, mostly a marine national park, where visitors pay a tax for each day they stay, spinner dolphins rest in a bay, and twin peaks stand in the surf.
- Entry № 196
Ofu
A two-mile beach and a clear coral reef under steep green ridges in American Samoa’s Manu’a Islands: the smallest unit of the only US national park south of the equator, on land the Park Service leases from villages.
- Entry № 197
Batanes
The northernmost province of the Philippines: small, steep islands in the Luzon Strait where the Ivatan build in stone and lime under thick grass roofs, against the wind, rather than in wood and bamboo.
- Entry № 198
Laguna Colorada
A shallow lake turned brick-red by algae and sediment, with white islands of borax, at 4,278 metres on Bolivia’s altiplano. James’s flamingo, once thought extinct, was found nesting here in the 1950s.
- Entry № 199
Herschel Island (Qikiqtaruk)
An Arctic island off the Yukon coast where American whalers wintered in the 1890s. Its wooden buildings still stand at Pauline Cove, but the island has no bedrock, and its ice-rich ground is slumping into the Beaufort Sea.
- Entry № 200
Santo Antão
The green island of a dry archipelago: steep volcanic mountains off West Africa, cut by deep valleys terraced for sugar cane and grogue. It has had no airport since the 1990s, so everyone arrives by ferry from Mindelo.
- Entry № 201
Alicudi
The westernmost of the Aeolian Islands, north of Sicily: the cone of an extinct volcano where about 90 people live all year. There are no roads and no cars; stone stairways are the streets, and mules carry the shopping.
- Entry № 202
Skellig Michael (Sceilg Mhichíl)
A twin-peaked rock in the Atlantic off County Kerry, where early medieval monks built beehive huts of dry stone on a ledge near the top. Permitted boats land a small number of visitors a day in summer, weather allowing; 618 stone steps lead up.
- Entry № 203
Christmas Island (Indian Ocean)
An Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, nearer Java than Perth, two-thirds of it national park. At the start of each wet season, red land crabs leave the forest in their millions to spawn in the sea, and roads close to let them cross.
- Entry № 204
Klein Curaçao
A flat, uninhabited island off Curaçao, reached only by day boat across open sea. An old lighthouse stands in the middle, a tanker wreck breaks up on the windward shore, and sea turtles nest on the lee beach.
- Entry № 205
Heimaey
The one inhabited island of Iceland’s Westman Islands. In 1973 a volcano opened at the edge of its town and buried hundreds of homes; the islanders pumped seawater onto the lava to save the harbour, and the island came out larger.
- Entry № 206
Berlenga Grande
A small pink-granite island off Peniche, Portugal, where the nature reserve lets in at most 550 visitors at a time. A 17th-century fort built from a ruined monastery sits on its own islet, reached by an arched bridge.
- Entry № 207
Isla Martín García
A small island in the Río de la Plata that lies in Uruguayan waters but belongs to Argentina. It was a fortress, a penal colony and a prison for three presidents; a 1973 treaty keeps it a nature reserve.
- Entry № 208
Île Bonaventure
A wooded island off Percé at the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula, Quebec, where tens of thousands of pairs of northern gannets nest on the cliff tops. Summer boats cross from Percé; a forest trail leads to the colony.
- Entry № 209
Aride Island
The northernmost granite island of the Seychelles, a nature reserve where more than a million seabirds breed. Visitors land on its one beach from a small boat, in season, and walk with a ranger; only the reserve staff live there.
- Entry № 210
Savai’i
Samoa’s largest island, a shield volcano reached by ferry from Upolu. From 1905 to 1911 lava from Mount Matavanu ran through villages on the north coast; at Sale’aula a church still stands with the lava inside it.
- Entry № 211
‘Eua
Tonga’s high island, just across from Tongatapu: pushed up from the sea floor rather than built by a volcano, with a rainforest national park on its eastern cliffs and humpback whales offshore in the winter months.
- Entry № 212
Taveuni
Fiji’s third-largest island, a long rainforested volcano crossed by the 180th meridian. Its mountains hold a crater lake and the tagimoucia, the national flower, which grows wild nowhere else; its reefs and waterfalls draw divers and walkers.
- Entry № 213
Fogo Island (Newfoundland)
The largest of Newfoundland’s offshore islands, a ferry ride from Farewell: old fishing outports of painted wooden houses, icebergs drifting past in spring, and Brimstone Head, one of the four corners of the flat earth, by a joke society’s reckoning.
- Entry № 214
Isla Pingüino (Puerto Deseado)
A rocky island off Puerto Deseado, in Argentine Patagonia, where yellow-crested rockhopper penguins nest from spring to autumn: the only colony of them on the continent that visitors can reach, by authorised boat, beside an old navy lighthouse.
- Entry № 215
Barbuda
A flat, quiet coral island north of Antigua, with a single village, long empty beaches of pink sand, and a great shallow lagoon whose mangroves hold what is called the world’s largest colony of magnificent frigatebirds.
- Entry № 216
Tobago Cays (Grenadines)
Five small uninhabited islands in the Southern Grenadines, set in a shallow lagoon behind the long Horseshoe Reef. The marine park around them is reached only by boat, and green turtles graze its seagrass.
- Entry № 217
Anegada
The flat one among the mountainous British Virgin Islands: a low coral island ringed by a long reef that has wrecked hundreds of ships, with miles of white beach, flamingos in its salt ponds and a rare iguana found nowhere else.
- Entry № 218
Côn Đảo
A group of forested islands off southern Vietnam, mostly national park, where green turtles nest in greater numbers than anywhere else in the country. Its French colonial prison, used from 1861 to 1975, is now a national memorial.
- Entry № 219
Aotea / Great Barrier Island
A big, hilly island at the edge of the Hauraki Gulf, 100 km from Auckland, with no mains power: its people live on sun and wind. Most of it is conservation land, and its night sky earned it the world’s first island dark-sky sanctuary.
- Entry № 220
Îles de la Madeleine (Senegal)
A handful of steep volcanic islets 4 km off Dakar, uninhabited and protected since 1976 as a national park of about 45 hectares. Red-billed tropicbirds breed on the cliffs of the largest, Sarpan, and for Dakar’s Lebu fishing families the islands are the home of the city’s protective spirit.
- Entry № 221
Isle of Skye
Scotland’s second-largest island, all peninsulas and sea lochs around the black peaks of the Cuillin. On its northern arm a vast landslip has left the rock towers of the Quiraing and the Old Man of Storr, and dinosaurs left their footprints on the shore.
- Entry № 222
Kiritimati
A huge raised coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific, its lagoon fading into salt flats, with seabird colonies once counted in the millions and bonefish on the flats. It keeps the world’s farthest-forward clock.
- Entry № 223
El Hierro
The south-westernmost Canary Island: a steep volcanic island of more than 500 cones, with junipers bent flat by the trade winds and a vast bay left by an ancient collapse. For centuries many European maps counted longitude from here.
- Entry № 224
Little Cayman
The smallest of the three Cayman Islands, home to 161 people and thousands of nesting red-footed boobies. Off its north coast, the reef of Bloody Bay Wall drops from snorkelling depth into the deep.
- Entry № 225
Lastovo
One of the most remote inhabited islands of the Adriatic, closed to foreigners as a military zone until 1988. Its old town turns its back on the sea, its chimneys look like miniature minarets, and the archipelago is a nature park.
- Entry № 226
Fair Isle
A small crofting island halfway between Shetland and Orkney, home to 44 people and one of Europe’s great bird observatories. It gave its name to a knitting pattern, and a ship of the Spanish Armada was wrecked on it in 1588.
- Entry № 227
Norfolk Island
A small Australian island in the South Pacific where convicts built a stone town beside a reef lagoon, and where descendants of the Bounty mutineers, resettled from Pitcairn in 1856, still speak a creole of their own under the island’s tall pines.
- Entry № 228
Ouessant and Molène
France’s westernmost island and its small neighbour, off the tip of Brittany: treeless heath, small black sheep, seals among the islets, and a sea so dangerous that lighthouses stand on its rocks in every direction.
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