Regions
Regions cover the whole Field Guide — every place has exactly one. Each carries its own map.
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Region · 49 entries
Europe & the North Atlantic
Old stone and cold water: castles and caves, pilgrim roads and island monasteries, glaciers and sea cliffs, in land that people have worked and built on for thousands of years.
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Region · 44 entries
North America
Canyons, geysers and great waterfalls, big tides and giant trees, polar bears on the bay, and a walled city above a river.
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Region · 41 entries
Latin America & the Caribbean
Glaciers and salt flats, rainforest, reef and great waterfalls, a canal between two oceans, and the works of peoples who built here long before Europeans arrived.
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Region · 41 entries
Asia
Temple cities and mountain shrines, limestone towers and vast caves, high pastures and island coasts, from the steppe to the tropics.
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Region · 38 entries
Oceania & the Pacific
Remote islands and atolls, ancient dry country, young volcanic ground, and the marae and stone figures of the peoples who crossed the open ocean between them.
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Region · 18 entries
The Poles
The far south and the far north: ice and open ocean, short seasons and long crossings.
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Region · 32 entries
Africa
Dunes, deltas and salt pans, great rivers and big wildlife, mud-brick villages and a storytellers' square, and volcanic islands off the coasts.
Collections
Collections cross and subdivide the regions, because some places make more sense together: how a season works, how a route runs, what an area is actually like. A place can belong to several.
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Collection · 7 entries
The Antarctic & Southern Ocean
No country, no visa, no scheduled service — how the expedition season actually works.
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Collection · 6 entries
Patagonia
One name, two countries: ice and granite in the west, desert and whale coast in the east.
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Collection · 10 entries
Canada
The highest tides on Earth, the planet's mantle above ground, and wild country so large that much of it is known only from the air.
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Collection · 12 entries
The US National Parks
Each park a different reason the idea of a national park caught on.
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Collection · 5 entries
French Polynesia
Five archipelagos and an ocean the size of Europe.
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Collection · 22 entries
Australia & New Zealand
Old dry country and young volcanic ground, remote islands and long coasts, and wildlife found nowhere else.
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Collection · 12 entries
Waterfalls
Rivers at the point where they fall, and what the drop does to the land, the wildlife and the people around it.
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Collection · 12 entries
Volcanoes
Active volcanoes and the ground older ones left behind, and the ways people and wildlife live with them.
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Collection · 17 entries
Deserts
Dry country of many kinds, from dunes and salt lakes to stony plains, and what people and wildlife have made of it.
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Collection · 35 entries
Sacred & ancient places
Places people have held sacred or built to last, from Stone Age villages to monasteries still in use.
All entries
Entry № 001Skara Brae
A Neolithic village of eight stone houses, buried in sand for four thousand years and uncovered in a single night by the storm of 1850.
Entry № 002The Wadden Sea
The largest unbroken tidal flat on Earth, where twice a day the North Sea withdraws far enough to walk across its floor to an island.
- Entry № 003
Aogashima
Around 170 people living inside an active double caldera, cooking with volcanic steam, on an island the ferry often cannot reach.
Entry № 004Gros Morne Tablelands
A slab of the Earth's mantle pushed to the surface — orange, barren, and part of the evidence that proved plate tectonics.
Entry № 005Chiloé
Sixteen wooden churches raised without iron nails by island shipwrights, and a ghost ship people still half-believe in.
Entry № 006The Drake Passage
Two days of open water where the largest current on Earth meets no land at all — and the gap whose opening let Antarctica freeze.
- Entry № 007
South Georgia
King penguins in the hundreds of thousands, a rusting whaling station, and the grave where every passing ship still stops to raise a glass.
- Entry № 008
Port Lockroy
The world's most southerly post office, on an island the size of a football pitch, run by a core team of four among a gentoo colony of 445 breeding pairs.
- Entry № 009
Fakarava
A UNESCO Biosphere Reserve atoll whose southern pass holds hundreds of grey reef sharks stacked in the current — visible even to snorkellers.
- Entry № 010
The Marquesas
Vertical volcanic islands with no reef to soften the Pacific, monumental stone tiki, and two famous graves above Atuona.
Entry № 011The Aletsch Glacier
The longest ice in the Alps — and the valley wall it was buttressing, which began to move once the glacier thinned.
- Entry № 012
Sequoia National Park
The largest tree on Earth by volume, and a species whose cones can stay sealed for twenty years until fire, a squirrel or a beetle opens them.
Entry № 013Cueva de las Manos
Hundreds of hands stencilled on a canyon wall in blown pigment. More than nine in ten are left hands, and one has six fingers.
- Entry № 014
Perito Moreno Glacier
A glacier that has dammed an arm of the lake, held the water back for years, and then lost, and that is now retreating.
Entry № 015Acadia National Park
The national park private citizens bought back acre by acre and gave away — with 45 miles of roads built to keep cars out.
Entry № 016Škocjan Caves
A river vanishes into a plateau and resurfaces near the Adriatic. The route in between has never been fully mapped.
- Entry № 017
Torres del Paine
A granite laccolith built in ninety thousand years and sliced open by ice — a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 1978, though not a World Heritage Site.
Entry № 018Península Valdés
Orcas that throw themselves onto the beach on purpose to hunt, using a technique the adults teach the young.
Entry № 019Isle Royale
A wilderness island in Lake Superior where wolves and moose have been studied since 1958 — the longest-running predator-prey study on Earth.
Entry № 020The Dry Tortugas
Sixteen million bricks, seventy miles out to sea: the largest brick structure in the Americas, never finished and never attacked.
- Entry № 021
Katmai & Brooks Falls
Brown bears stand at the lip of a waterfall catching leaping salmon — the most honest queue in nature, with a platform for watching it.
Entry № 022Fernandina
The youngest Galápagos island: no introduced species recorded, an active volcano, the biggest marine iguanas — and a tortoise that hid for 113 years.
Entry № 023Kaikōura
A deep-sea canyon starts almost at the beach, so sperm whales feed year-round within sight of a town whose name means 'eat crayfish'.
Entry № 024Lord Howe Island
An island capped at 400 guests at a time, with the world's southernmost coral reef and the tallest sea stack on Earth next door.
Entry № 025The Bay of Fundy
The highest tides on Earth: walk the ocean floor at low water, paddle over your footprints six hours later.
- Entry № 026
Nahanni
Náįlįcho, a waterfall twice Niagara's height, and four great canyons in a roadless reserve — among the first UNESCO sites ever listed.
Entry № 027The Osa Peninsula
The most biologically intense place on Earth, by National Geographic's famous description — tapirs at the ranger station, macaws over the beach.
Entry № 028Coober Pedy
The opal capital of the world solved the desert sun by moving underground — homes, churches, hotels, and a golf course with no grass at all.
Entry № 029Pico
Portugal's highest mountain in the mid-Atlantic, with UNESCO vineyards walled in black lava and whales off the old whaling coast.
Entry № 030Mykines
The westernmost Faroe: vast puffin colonies, the islands' only gannets, and a lighthouse across a sea gorge.
Entry № 031Sedona
Sandstone stained by rust, a chapel grown from a cliff, and a town named for the postmaster's wife.
Entry № 032The Iberá Wetlands
Shining waters where jaguars walk free again after seventy years — rewilding's great showcase, patrolled by unbothered capybaras.
- Entry № 033
Sossusvlei & Deadvlei
A forest that died six centuries ago and never fell — black trees on white clay beneath the rusted-red dunes of the Namib.
Entry № 034Hang Sơn Đoòng
The world's largest cave keeps its own clouds and grows its own jungle — found by a farmer sheltering from a storm, then lost for eighteen years.
Entry № 035Living Root Bridges
In the wettest inhabited place on Earth, the Khasi grow bridges from living fig roots — architecture that heals itself and strengthens with age.
- Entry № 036
Song-Köl
A lake two miles up with no town and no trees — only a season: yurts and herds arrive each June, and by October it all belongs to the wind again.
Entry № 037Zhangjiajie & Wulingyuan
Three thousand stone towers wearing trees for hats — when the mist rises past their feet, whole mountains cast off and float.
Entry № 038Þingvellir
A parliament founded in 930 met for eight centuries on a valley floor that was steadily sinking and splitting beneath the argument.
Entry № 039Dominica
Too steep for sugar, so the forest stayed — and offshore, sperm whale families live year-round instead of migrating.
Entry № 040Svalbard
Four months without a sunrise, more than forty nationalities free to move in, and the world's spare seeds sealed inside a mountain.
Entry № 041Paro Taktsang
A monastery glued to a rock wall nine hundred metres above the valley, in a country that writes its forests into its constitution.
Entry № 042Cappadocia & Derinkuyu
Rock soft enough to carve and firm enough to hold a ceiling — so when armies came, whole communities went eighteen storeys down.
Entry № 043Lofoten
Harbours that refuse to freeze at 68° north, and a thousand-year export trade built on one fish keeping an appointment.
Entry № 044Plitvice Lakes
Sixteen lakes held back by dams that moss, algae and bacteria are still building, roughly a centimetre or two a year.
- Entry № 045
Meteora
A river delta turned to stone and stood on end, with fourteenth-century monasteries on the flat bits.
Entry № 046Raja Ampat
The highest reef biodiversity ever recorded, on islands that also happen to be made of battery metal.
Entry № 047The Flaming Cliffs
In 1923 a team here found the first dinosaur eggs anyone recognised as such, and science blamed the wrong animal for stealing them for seventy years.
Entry № 048Taroko Gorge
A river cuts through solid marble while the island keeps rising to meet it — and since 2024, the gorge has been carefully putting itself back together.
Entry № 049The cenotes of the Yucatán
An asteroid cracked the bedrock in a ring 66 million years ago; the sinkholes tracing that ring today are far younger than the shortcut version says.
Entry № 050The Okavango Delta
A flood sourced a thousand kilometres away arrives exactly when Botswana's dry season leaves nothing else wet.
Entry № 051Cirque de Mafate
Around eight hundred people live inside a collapsed volcano with no road — everything they own arrived on a back or under a helicopter.
Entry № 052The Makgadikgadi Pans
A salt flat on the floor of a lake that outlived its rivers, and the zebra still cross it twice a year.
Entry № 053Etosha
A pan so barren that water becomes the scarce thing, so the animals queue for it rather than scatter across the park.
Entry № 054Chã das Caldeiras
A village farming inside an active crater, rebuilt on the lava that buried it in 2014 though the state said not to.
Entry № 055Vallée de Mai
A palm forest holding the largest seed on Earth, which had a mythology for centuries before anyone found the tree.
Entry № 056SG̱ang Gwaay
Cedar mortuary poles left to lean, weather and fall — because the Haida Nation decided they should, and UNESCO's listing accepts it.
Entry № 057Mammoth Cave
The longest cave known, and still growing. The 1972 connection that made it so was already on an enslaved guide’s map, drawn from memory in 1842.
Entry № 058The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks
Earthworks aligned to a lunar cycle of 18.6 years — a pattern nobody could establish alone, since a person sees only about three of them in a lifetime.
Entry № 059Wood Buffalo National Park
Bigger than Switzerland, with the only wild nesting ground of the whooping crane and a beaver dam found from orbit — and 4,000 visitors a year.
Entry № 060Great Sand Dunes
The tallest dunes in North America exist because two creeks carry the escaping sand back. In late spring one of them runs in waves, every twenty seconds.
Entry № 061Hamelin Pool
Microbes have built rock here since before anything could eat them. They survive because the water is twice as salty as the sea.
- Entry № 062
Purnululu
Beehive domes striped orange and black, standing only because a living skin of bacteria binds sandstone that would otherwise fall apart.
Entry № 063Tongariro
Three sacred volcanoes given to the Crown in 1887 to stop them being sold — and the first cultural landscape ever inscribed on the World Heritage List.
Entry № 064Rakiura
No stoats, so the kiwi feed in daylight — which is how kiwi used to be everywhere. Also the southernmost Dark Sky Sanctuary on Earth.
Entry № 065Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre
A salt pan most of the time. When floodwater finally arrives from Queensland, pelicans appear in their tens of thousands, and nobody knows how they know.
Entry № 066The Florida Keys
A hundred and thirteen miles of highway across open water, built on the piers of a railroad a hurricane destroyed in 1935. The old bridges still run alongside.
Entry № 067St John
Sixty per cent of the island is national park, and the forest everyone calls pristine is second growth over terraced sugar plantations.
Entry № 068Upper Svaneti
Stone towers built one per family, entered by a ladder you pulled up behind you — defences against invaders, and against the family next door.
Entry № 069The haenyeo of Jeju
Women who dive to twenty metres on one breath, by rule and without tanks. Over 4,500 of them in 2013; about 2,600 by the end of 2024.
Entry № 070Scoresby Sund
The largest fjord system on Earth, with one town of about 350 people at its mouth — placed there in 1925 to establish a claim.
Entry № 071The Saloum Delta
Mangrove islands that are partly made of shells: 218 mounds of discarded cockles and oysters, piled up over two thousand years. Some of them are cemeteries.
Entry № 072Príncipe
A tiny equatorial island where a 1919 eclipse photographed through cloud helped make Einstein famous — on a cocoa estate with a much harder history.
Entry № 073Gunung Mulu
No road in, some of the largest caves on Earth, and millions of bats pouring out of one at dusk. Several of its famous records are out of date.
Entry № 074Nan Madol
Around a hundred artificial islets walled with basalt columns stacked like logs, on a reef off Pohnpei. The coral inside its first tomb dates it to about 1180.
Entry № 075Deception Island
The best harbour in the South Shetlands is the flooded crater of an active volcano. Ships sail in through a gap in the cliffs, and the beach steams.
- Entry № 076
Victoria Falls
Classed as the largest sheet of falling water on Earth, and a waterfall that keeps walking upriver: the zigzag canyon below it is where it used to be.
- Entry № 077
Machu Picchu
The best-known ruin in the Americas, and possibly not called Machu Picchu at all: two scholars argue that name came from an American's 1911 publications.
Entry № 078Salar de Uyuni
The largest salt flat on Earth, level enough that space agencies test satellites against it, and a mirror when it rains.
Entry № 079The Nazca Lines
Hundreds of huge lines and animal figures scratched into a Peruvian desert, still being found: in 2024 AI helped confirm 303 new ones.
Entry № 080The Great Blue Hole
A perfectly round hole in a Caribbean reef, and a flooded cave: the stalactites in its walls prove it was dry when the ice ages had drawn the sea down.
Entry № 081The Giant’s Causeway
About 40,000 basalt columns stepping into the sea. They helped settle whether basalt comes from water or from volcanoes, and a tray of drying cornflour grows the same pattern.
Entry № 082Venice
The lagoon that protects Venice was kept a lagoon on purpose: for nearly two centuries the Republic dug new beds to carry rivers and their silt around it. Now the barrier faces the other way.
Entry № 083Neuschwanstein
Built as one shy king's retreat from public life, closed to outsiders while he lived, and opened to the public seven weeks after he died. The throne it was built around was never made.
Entry № 084The Alhambra
A palace whose rooms speak in the first person: the Alhambra's court poets wrote verses for the walls, and the Fountain of the Lions describes its own water. Its famous tile-symmetry claim is less settled.
Entry № 085Malta
Paired grooves cut into the bare limestone, crossing like a rail yard at 'Clapham Junction' and running into the sea at Birżebbuġa. Nobody agrees who made them or when.
Entry № 086The 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 № 087Milford 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 № 088The 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 № 089Aoraki / 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 № 090The 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 № 091The 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 № 092Yellowstone
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 № 093Niagara 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 № 094Banff
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 № 095Churchill
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 № 096Angkor 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 № 097Mount 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 № 098The 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 № 099The 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 № 100Ilulissat 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 № 101Vatican 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 № 102Santiago 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 № 103Ephesus
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 № 104Ronda
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 № 105Patmos
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 № 106Iguazú 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 № 107Kruger 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 № 108Ha 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 № 109Bora 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 № 110Ross 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 № 111The 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 № 112Registan
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 № 113Table 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 № 114Fushimi 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 № 115Atacama 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 № 116Lençóis 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 № 117Borobudur
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 № 118Kīlauea
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 № 119Sigiriya
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 № 120McMurdo 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 № 121South 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 № 122Taputapuātea
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 № 123Jemaa 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 № 124The 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 № 125Hawa 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 № 126Mount 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 № 127Kuang 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 № 128The 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 № 129Gocta 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 № 130Moorea
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 № 131The 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 № 132Hội 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 № 133Maya 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 № 134The 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 № 135Aït 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 № 136Ushuaia
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 № 137Chobe 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 № 138Marble 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 № 139Lac 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 № 140The 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 № 141Yosemite
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 № 142Mont-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 № 143Stonehenge
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 № 144Prague
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 № 145Arches
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 № 146Crater 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 № 147Quebec 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 № 148Gullfoss
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 № 149Our 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 № 150Easter 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 № 151Lake 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 № 152Moynaq
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 № 153Hampi
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 № 154Kolmanskop
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 № 155Liuwa 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 № 156Loango
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 № 157Horizontal 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 № 158Rock 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 № 159Jalapão
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 № 160Colca 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 № 161Great 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 № 162Nzulezo
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 № 163Pico 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 № 164Kharkhorin
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 № 165Lanyu
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 № 166Tuktoyaktuk 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 № 167Funafuti
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 № 168Saba
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 № 169Cabo 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 № 170The 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 № 171Grímsey
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 № 172Uummannaq
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 № 173Point 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 № 174Tsodilo
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 № 175The 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 № 176Tsingy 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 № 177Togo 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 № 178Maria 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 № 179Robinson 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 № 180Kennecott
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 № 181Anacapa 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 № 182Bisti/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 № 183L’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 № 184Sark
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 № 185St 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 № 186Pond 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 № 187Ischigualasto
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 № 188Richtersveld
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 № 189Chatham 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 № 190Hvalsey 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 № 191Kobuk 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 № 192Lemaire 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 № 193Ogasawara 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 № 194Ban 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 № 195Fernando 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 № 196Ofu
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 № 197Batanes
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 № 198Laguna 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 № 199Herschel 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 № 200Santo 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 № 201Alicudi
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 № 202Skellig 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 № 203Christmas 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 № 204Klein 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 № 205Heimaey
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 № 206Berlenga 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 № 207Isla 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 № 208Île 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 № 209Aride 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 № 210Savai’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 № 212Taveuni
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 № 213Fogo 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 № 214Isla 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 № 215Barbuda
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 № 216Tobago 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 № 217Anegada
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 № 218Côn 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 № 219Aotea / 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 № 220Îles 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 № 221Isle 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 № 222Kiritimati
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 № 223El 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 № 224Little 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 № 225Lastovo
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 № 226Fair 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 № 227Norfolk 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 № 228Ouessant 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.
Entry № 229Jigokudani Monkey Park
A steaming gorge in the mountains of Nagano where a troop of wild macaques, fed by the park since 1964 to keep them off the apple orchards, sits up to its necks in a hot-spring pool through the snowy winter.
Entry № 230Shirakawa-go
A village of steep thatched farmhouses in a snowy valley of central Japan, built three and four storeys high under the roof for raising silkworms, where neighbours still gather to re-thatch them and the whole village rehearses each autumn for fire.
Entry № 231White Sands
A field of dunes made of gypsum, not quartz, in a desert basin of southern New Mexico: bright, cool underfoot and the largest of its kind on Earth, wholly surrounded by a missile range whose tests can shut the road for hours.
Entry № 232Hallstatt
A village of a few hundred people squeezed between an Austrian mountain lake and a cliff, above a salt mine worked since prehistory, whose Iron Age graves named an era and whose crowds of day visitors made it Austria’s best-known lesson in overtourism.
Entry № 233The Diquís Stone Spheres
More than 300 carved stone balls, from fist-sized to taller than a person, set in lines near the houses of chiefs on a river delta in southern Costa Rica, found by banana workers in the 1930s, dynamited by gold hunters and still not fully explained.
Entry № 234Waitomo Glowworm Caves
A limestone cave in New Zealand’s North Island where a guide pulls a boat in silence along an underground stream beneath a ceiling of glowworms, on land returned in 1989 to the descendants of the man who first led visitors through it.
Entry № 235Carlsbad Caverns
A cave in the Guadalupe Mountains of New Mexico, dissolved by acid from below, whose Big Room is among the largest cave chambers in North America; on summer evenings a colony of free-tailed bats pours out of its natural entrance.
Entry № 236Spotted Lake
A small lake in the dry hills of southern British Columbia that evaporates each summer into pools of green, blue and yellow minerals: a sacred medicine lake of the Syilx Okanagan Nation, who bought back its land in 2001, and seen, as they ask, from the roadside fence.
Entry № 237Joal-Fadiouth
A village on an island of piled-up shells at the southern end of Senegal’s Petite Côte, reached on foot over a long wooden bridge, where nine in ten people are Christian in a mostly Muslim country and the two faiths bury their dead side by side.
Entry № 238Hill of Crosses
A low mound in the flat farmland of northern Lithuania so covered in crosses, crucifixes and rosaries that no one has counted them in years: bulldozed by Soviet authorities and replanted by night each time, and still growing.
Entry № 239Phobjikha Valley
A wide, marshy valley high in central Bhutan where most of the country’s black-necked cranes spend the winter, below a monastery they are said to circle on arrival, and where electricity reaches the houses underground so that no wires cross the birds’ flight.
Entry № 240Okefenokee Swamp
A vast, shallow peat swamp on the Georgia–Florida line, with tea-dark water, cypress hung with moss and some of North America’s densest alligator country, which a company once tried to drain, loggers stripped, miners nearly reached, and the world listed as heritage in 2026.
Entry № 241Raleighvallen and Voltzberg
A chain of rapids on the Coppename River in the rainforest of central Suriname, reached by charter plane or by road and dugout, and a few hours’ walk away the Voltzberg, a bare granite dome that rises over forest unbroken to every horizon.
Entry № 242Bozzhyra
A valley of white chalk towers and two great pale fangs on the edge of a desert plateau in western Kazakhstan, carved from the floor of a vanished sea and still scattered with its shells, a long 4x4 drive from the Caspian coast.
Entry № 243Lake Mungo
A dry lake in the outback of New South Wales whose crescent of wind-carved dunes, the Walls of China, held burials made more than 40,000 years ago, among the oldest ritual burials known, on the country of the Paakantyi, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa peoples.
Entry № 244Racetrack Playa
A dead-flat dry lakebed in the remote north of Death Valley where rocks of up to hundreds of pounds leave long trails across the mud, a puzzle for decades until scientists filmed thin, windblown ice pushing them in December 2013.
Entry № 245Monsanto
A hill village in eastern Portugal whose granite houses squeeze between, beneath and into boulders the size of houses, one of them roofed by a single rock, below a ruined Templar castle and a clock tower crowned with a silver rooster.
Entry № 246Yehliu Geopark
A cape of sandstone on Taiwan’s north coast where waves and wind have carved hundreds of mushroom rocks, among them the Queen’s Head, a profile in stone whose neck has been measured, guarded and worried over as it wears thinner every year.
Entry № 247Salina Turda
A salt mine in Transylvania worked from the Middle Ages to 1932, whose vast chambers are now a show mine: a lake with rowing boats at the bottom of a bell-shaped pit, a Ferris wheel in the last chamber dug, and rooms for salt-air treatment.
Entry № 248Mistaken Point
A fog-bound headland at the south-eastern tip of Newfoundland where tilted slabs of ancient deep-sea floor are crowded with the imprints of creatures about 565 million years old, among the first large, complex life on Earth, seen only on a guided walk.
Entry № 249Kampong Ayer
A town on stilts over the Brunei River, of wooden houses, schools, mosques and fire stations joined by plank walkways and water taxis, lived in for centuries and facing Brunei’s capital across the water.
Entry № 250Quebrada de Humahuaca
A high, dry Andean valley in Argentina’s far north where hills banded rose, cream, plum and green stand over adobe villages like Purmamarca, along a route of traders, the Inca and armies that people have travelled for at least 10,000 years.
Entry № 251Going-to-the-Sun Road
Fifty miles across Glacier National Park and over the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, built from 1919 to 1932 with a single switchback west of the Divide where one engineer had wanted fifteen, and opened in full each summer only when the snowplows get through, by early July in most recent years.
Entry № 252Trail Ridge Road
Forty-eight miles of US 34 across Rocky Mountain National Park, eleven of them above the trees and up to 12,183 feet, on what the Park Service calls the highest continuous paved road in the United States; open to through travel only from late May to mid-October, and in summer with a timed-entry reservation from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Entry № 253Big Sur and Highway 1
Two lanes cut into mountains that fall straight into the Pacific, on a coast the US Geological Survey counts among the most landslide-prone in the American West; Highway 1 through Big Sur reopened end to end in January 2026 for the first time in almost three years.
Entry № 254Blue Ridge Parkway
A 469-mile two-lane road along the crests of the Appalachians from Virginia to the Great Smokies, begun as a Depression public-works project in 1935 and finished only in 1987; Hurricane Helene closed every mile of it in 2024, and 458 miles had reopened by October 2026.
Entry № 255Natchez Trace Parkway
A 444-mile two-lane parkway from the Mississippi River at Natchez to the hills south of Nashville, with a 50 mph limit and no commercial traffic, laid along a travel corridor the Park Service says people have used for 10,000 years; two sections were closed for work in autumn 2026.
Entry № 256The Icefields Parkway
Highway 93 North between Lake Louise and Jasper: 232 kilometres along the Continental Divide past glaciers, milky lakes and the Columbia Icefield, with a national park pass required, no cell service along the way, and in winter no fuel or food for the whole distance.
Entry № 257The Cabot Trail
A 298-kilometre loop around the northern tip of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, about a third of it through Cape Breton Highlands National Park, where the road climbs onto a plateau of spruce and bog and drops back to the sea again and again; open all year, with a park pass needed for the national park section.
Entry № 258The Slea Head Drive
A loop of about 48 kilometres from Dingle around the end of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, through Irish-speaking villages and past an Iron Age fort, stone beehive huts, the Blasket Islands and the Gallarus Oratory; visitors are asked to drive it clockwise, because part of the cliff road is a single lane.
Entry № 259The Atlantic Ocean Road
An 8.3-kilometre stretch of County Road 64 on Norway's west coast, carried from islet to islet over causeways and bridges along the exposed sea of Hustadvika; opened in 1989, toll-free since 1999, protected as cultural heritage, and part of a 36-kilometre Norwegian Scenic Route that runs on to the fishing village of Bud.
Entry № 260Aurlandsfjellet, the Snow Road
County Road 5627 between Lærdal and Aurland in western Norway: 47 kilometres over a high, barren plateau where snow lies most of the year, from fjord to fjord, ending at the Stegastein platform 650 metres above the Aurlandsfjord; closed in winter, except the stretch up to Stegastein.
Entry № 261The Transfăgărășan
National road DN7C across the Făgăraș Mountains, Romania's highest, built by army engineers between 1970 and 1974: 151 kilometres from near Pitești to the Sibiu road, climbing to 2,042 metres by Bâlea Lake through the country's longest road tunnel; its high section is open only in summer, and in 2026 only from 7:00 to 21:00.
Entry № 262The Grossglockner High Alpine Road
A toll road over the main ridge of the Alps between Bruck and Heiligenblut, opened in 1935: 48 kilometres and 36 bends to the Hochtor at 2,504 metres, with branches to a viewpoint over Austria's highest mountain and the Pasterze glacier; open from early May to early November, from €46.50 a car in 2026.
Entry № 263The Furka Pass
A road pass at 2,429 metres between Realp in Uri and Gletsch in Valais, on the watershed between the Mediterranean and the North Sea, past the shuttered Hotel Belvédère and the Rhone Glacier, parts of which are covered in white blankets every summer; closed in winter, when a car train runs through the mountain beneath it.
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