About 35 kilometres off the southern coast of São Paulo, Brazil, a small, forested island rises from the Atlantic Ocean. From a distance, Ilha da Queimada Grande looks like an ordinary patch of green surrounded by blue water. Its steep, rocky shoreline and thick vegetation, however, conceal something unusual: a venomous snake found naturally nowhere else on Earth.
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| Ilha da Queimada Grande rises from the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil's southeastern coast. |
On the southern coast of Sydney, the Pacific Ocean has created something that looks almost too neat to be natural. Cut into a wide sandstone platform in the Royal National Park, the Figure 8 Pools are a collection of shallow rock pools, including one famous formation shaped remarkably like the number 8.
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| The famous Figure 8 Pool is a natural sandstone formation shaped by the long-term action of ocean waves. |
At first glance, Devils Golf Course looks less like a landscape and more like something carved from another world. The ground is covered with sharp ridges, rough mounds, and irregular spires of salt and mud, stretching across the floor of Death Valley. Green grass, a fairway, and an ordinary golf course are absent. The name comes from the brutally uneven terrain, said to be so rough that only the devil could play golf there.
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| The jagged salt formations of Devils Golf Course in Death Valley National Park, California. |
The first thing that makes Elche unusual is the way its palm trees fit into the city. Instead of standing in a remote desert oasis, thousands of date palms grow among streets, historic buildings, gardens, and old agricultural plots. This is the Palmeral of Elche, a remarkable landscape in Alicante province on Spain’s Mediterranean coast.
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| The Palmeral of Elche is a historic date-palm landscape that is recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. |
Out in the Tasman Sea, far from Australia’s mainland, a dark column of rock rises sharply from the water. It looks almost too steep and isolated to be real. This is Ball’s Pyramid, a spectacular volcanic sea stack belonging to the Lord Howe Island Group. The first sight of Ball’s Pyramid is particularly difficult to forget. There is no broad shoreline or gentle slope around it. Instead, the rock rises abruptly from the ocean, making it look like a giant piece of the ancient landscape was left standing after everything around it disappeared.
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| Ball’s Pyramid rises sharply from the Tasman Sea as part of the Lord Howe Island Group World Heritage Area. |
At first glance, Lake McDonald in Montana looks like a classic mountain lake, with clear water, evergreen forests, and rugged peaks reflected along its shoreline. Walk down to the water’s edge, however, and you’ll notice another detail: hundreds of small stones in shades of red, green, blue, purple, and rust.
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| Multicoloured stones line the clear shoreline of Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park. |
Abraham Lake looks like an ordinary mountain reservoir in the summer. In winter, however, the lake develops a strange feature that has made it famous far beyond Alberta: hundreds of pale bubbles appear trapped beneath the clear ice.
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| Methane bubbles trapped beneath the winter ice of Abraham Lake in Alberta, Canada. |
On Russia's Black Sea coast, near the resort city of Gelendzhik, a remarkable slab of sandstone rises almost vertically from the shoreline. Known as Parus Rock, or Sail Rock, it looks surprisingly like the sail of a ship standing against the sea. The unusual shape is not the result of human construction. It is a natural rock formation shaped by the long interaction of the coastline, erosion, and differences in the strength of the surrounding rocks.
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| Parus Rock, also known as Sail Rock, stands dramatically along the Black Sea coast near Praskoveyevka in Krasnodar Krai, Russia. |
In the mountains of Guizhou Province in southwestern China, there is a cliff with a name that sounds more like a legend than a geological feature. Known as Chan Dan Ya, often translated as the “egg-laying cliff", it is famous for its smooth, oval stones that appear to sit inside the rock face before eventually becoming exposed and falling away.
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| Chan Dan Ya in Guizhou is famous for rounded stones that appear to emerge from the cliff face. |
Balanced Rock is one of the most recognisable formations in the Garden of the Gods Park in Colorado Springs. Its considerable mass of red rock appears to rest on a much narrower base, creating the impression that the formation could topple at any moment. It is a simple shape, but seeing it in person makes the illusion much more striking than a photograph suggests.
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| Balanced Rock stands among the dramatic red rock formations of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado. |
At first glance, Split Apple Rock looks as though someone took an enormous granite apple and cut it neatly in half. The two rounded sides sit just offshore in the clear coastal waters near Kaiteriteri, on New Zealand’s South Island. There are no signs of human carving, yet the split is so striking that it is hard not to wonder how it happened.
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| Tokangawhā, widely known as Split Apple Rock, is a distinctive granite formation near Kaiteriteri on New Zealand’s South Island. |
Along Highway 3 in British Columbia’s South Okanagan, a small lake can look as if someone has scattered dozens of coloured circles across its surface. Pale rings separate patches of blue, green, yellow, and other shades. The pattern changes with the seasons, and the contrast becomes especially noticeable when summer heat draws down the water.
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| Mineral-rich pools create the distinctive spotted pattern at kłlilx’w in British Columbia. |
Deep in the green heart of Kauaʻi, Hawaii, a mountainside can transform into a curtain of waterfalls. Thin streams of water spill down steep, dark cliffs, appearing and disappearing through clouds and drifting mist. The striking landscape is known as the Wall of Tears, one of the most unusual natural sights associated with Mount Waiʻaleʻale.
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| Rainwater cascades down the steep, green slopes of Mount Waiʻaleʻale, creating the waterfall-covered landscape known as the Wall of Tears. |
From the ground, the Sahara can seem almost endless—sand, rock, dry valleys, and a horizon that goes on for miles. Yet in northern Mauritania, a geological formation's full beauty is difficult to appreciate from the surface. From above, the landscape suddenly forms a gigantic series of circular rings that resemble an enormous eye.
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| The Richat Structure, known as the Eye of the Sahara, forms a huge circular pattern in the Sahara Desert of Mauritania. |
There is a photograph of the Sahara that many people expect to see: endless dunes, a stark blue sky and nothing green for miles. The Ubari Lakes, in southwestern Libya, tell a rather different story. Here, water lies between magnificent ridges of sand, and in places the shoreline is marked by reeds and palms. The contrast is striking, but what makes this landscape worth knowing about goes beyond its appearance.
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| The beautiful Lakes of Ubari sit surrounded by towering Sahara dunes. |
Imagine ordering a grilled meal in a restaurant where the heat comes from beneath the Earth's surface rather than a conventional oven. At El Diablo Restaurant in Lanzarote, Spain, that idea is part of the dining experience. Located in Timanfaya National Park, the restaurant uses natural geothermal heat rising through the volcanic ground to cook meat and vegetables. The setting is just as memorable: a rugged landscape of lava fields and volcanic formations surrounds a building designed by Lanzarote artist César Manrique.
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A restaurant where natural geothermal heat becomes part of the dining experience. |
A landscape of bright white salt stretches almost to the horizon in southwestern Bolivia. In the dry season, its surface breaks into enormous geometric patterns. After rain, a thin layer of water can spread across the plain and turn the entire landscape into a near-perfect reflection of the sky. This is Salar de Uyuni, the Uyuni Salt Flat, one of the most extraordinary landscapes in South America.
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| The vast Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia features geometric salt patterns across one of the world’s largest salt flats. |
Most wells are places where people go to collect water. The Tuhala Witch’s Well in Estonia has a rather different reputation. Every so often, usually during spring flooding, water suddenly rises through the well and spills over its wooden cover. For a while, the quiet countryside around Tuhala appears to have a well that is "boiling".
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| Tuhala Witch’s Well overflows during a spring flood in Estonia, creating the unusual “boiling” effect associated with the site. |
A circular island in the middle of a Dutch lake might look like an unusual piece of land reclamation. But IJsseloog has a far more specific ...
