Natural wonders of Asia

22 to explore

• Watch Natural wonder Ajanta Caves The Ajanta Caves are about 30 halls and rooms carved by hand into a curving cliff above the Waghora River in western India. Buddhist communities made them in two big phases, starting more than 2,000 years ago. Their wall paintings and stone carvings are some of the most famous ancient art in India, and they have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1983.
• Watch Natural wonder Chitwan National Park Chitwan National Park, in the lowlands of southern Nepal, was Nepal's first national park. Its sal forests, tall grasslands and rivers are home to the second-largest population of greater one-horned rhinoceroses in the world, 694 in 2021, and to Bengal tigers, 145 counted in and around the park in 2026.
• Watch Natural wonder Dead Sea The Dead Sea is a salt lake in the Middle East, with Jordan on its eastern shore and the Palestinian West Bank along part of its western shore. Its surface lies far below sea level, about 435 meters down in 2019, and its water is nearly ten times saltier than the ocean, so swimmers bob on top without trying.
• Watch Natural wonder Ganges The Ganges, called the Ganga in India, flows about 2,510 kilometers from a glacier in the Himalayas across the plains of northern India to the Bay of Bengal, through India and Bangladesh. Its basin is home to hundreds of millions of people who farm, fish and travel on it. For many Hindus it is the holiest of rivers. Near the sea it builds a giant delta with the Brahmaputra.
• Watch Natural wonder Gobi Desert The Gobi is a giant desert stretching across Mongolia and China. Britannica says its name comes from a Mongolian word meaning waterless place. Much of it is bare rock and gravel rather than sand, winters are bitterly cold and summers hot, and its rocks hold remarkable dinosaur fossils, including the first dinosaur eggs known to science.
• Watch Natural wonder Ha Long Bay Ha Long Bay is a bay in northeast Vietnam where more than a thousand limestone islands rise straight out of the sea. Over millions of years, water dissolved the limestone into towers and caves, and then the sea flooded in around them. Together with the nearby Cat Ba Archipelago it is a World Heritage site.
• Watch Natural wonder Himalayas The Himalayas are a giant wall of mountains in Asia, between the high Plateau of Tibet and the plains of India. They hold the highest mountains in the world, including Mount Everest. They rose when the land carrying India crashed into Asia, and their snow and ice feed great rivers such as the Ganges and the Indus.
• Watch Natural wonder K2 K2 is the world's second highest mountain, 8,611 meters tall, in the Karakoram Range of Asia. It got its short name in 1856, when a surveyor marked it as the second peak he measured in the Karakoram. It is one of the hardest mountains to climb, and its summit was first reached in 1954.
• Watch Natural wonder Kaziranga National Park Kaziranga National Park lies beside the great Brahmaputra River in Assam, in northeastern India. Every year the river floods parts of the park, keeping its tall grasslands, marshes and pools alive. It is home to the world's largest population of greater one-horned rhinoceroses, more than 2,600 in 2024, which grew from only a handful about a hundred years earlier.
• Watch Natural wonder Komodo National Park Komodo National Park, in Indonesia, is a group of rugged, dry islands between Sumbawa and Flores. Its three main islands, Komodo, Rinca and Padar, were made by volcanoes. The park contains most of the places where wild Komodo dragons, the largest living lizards, still live, along with rich coral reefs visited by turtles, dolphins and whales.
• Watch Natural wonder Lake Baikal Lake Baikal, in southern Siberia, Russia, fills a deep crack in the Earth's crust where the land is pulling apart. UNESCO calls it the oldest and deepest lake in the world, about 25 million years old, and it holds about a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh water. Many of its animals, like the Baikal seal, live nowhere else.
• Watch Natural wonder Mount Agung Mount Agung is a cone-shaped volcano on the eastern end of Bali, in Indonesia, and the island's highest point at about 3,000 meters. It erupted strongly in 1963 and 1964, and again with explosions, ash clouds and lava in its crater from 2017 to 2019. Scientists watch it all the time and set safety zones around it when it is restless.
• Watch Natural wonder Mount Ararat Mount Ararat is a huge volcanic mountain in the far east of Türkiye, close to where Türkiye, Iran and Armenia meet. It has two peaks: Great Ararat, about 5,165 meters high and the tallest mountain in Türkiye, and the smaller, cone-shaped Little Ararat. Snow covers the top all year, and a glacier clings to its north side.
• Watch Natural wonder Mount Everest Mount Everest, in the Himalayas on the border of Nepal and China, is what Britannica calls the highest mountain in the world. In 2020 China and Nepal announced its height as 8,848.86 meters. It grew as two giant plates of Earth's crust pushed together, and it is still rising a tiny bit each year.
• Watch Natural wonder Mount Fuji Mount Fuji, 3,776 meters high, is the highest mountain in Japan and an active volcano that last erupted in 1707. Its almost perfect cone was built by three volcanoes, one on top of another, and it has inspired artists for hundreds of years.
• Watch Natural wonder Negev The Negev is a dry region in the Middle East, shaped like a triangle with its point at the Red Sea. Its name comes from a Hebrew word meaning to dry. It has huge craters called makhteshim, carved by erosion, ancient towns on an old incense trade route, and farms watered by pipelines.
• Watch Natural wonder Pamukkale Pamukkale, in southwestern Türkiye, is a hillside of bright white terraces and pools built by warm spring water. The water is full of a dissolved mineral called calcium carbonate, and as it flows over the slope it leaves the mineral behind as a rock called travertine. Its name means "cotton castle". On top stand the ruins of Hierapolis, an ancient spa town.
• Watch Natural wonder Phong Nha–Ke Bang National Park Phong Nha–Ke Bang National Park, in central Vietnam near the border with Laos, protects one of the world's great limestone landscapes. UNESCO says its rocks began forming about 400 million years ago, and more than 220 kilometers of caves and underground rivers have been mapped. One of them, Son Doong, holds the world's largest known cave passage.
• Watch Natural wonder Son Doong Cave Son Doong is a cave in the mountains of central Vietnam, inside Phong Nha–Ke Bang National Park. A river carved it, and its main passage is so wide and tall that a whole city block of skyscrapers could fit inside. Explorers first went in only in 2009. UNESCO says it holds the world's largest documented cave passage.
• Watch Natural wonder Sundarbans The Sundarbans is a vast mangrove forest where the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers meet the Bay of Bengal. It is shared by Bangladesh and India. Twice a day the tides flood its muddy islands, and its trees are made to live in salty water. It is one of the last homes of the Bengal tiger, and both countries protect it as a World Heritage Site.
• Watch Natural wonder Wadi Rum Wadi Rum, in southern Jordan, is a desert of towering sandstone and granite mountains rising from valleys of red sand. Wind, water and salt have carved arches, gorges and honeycomb patterns into the rock. People have lived here for at least 12,000 years, leaving behind about 25,000 rock carvings and 20,000 inscriptions.
• Watch Natural wonder Yangtze River The Yangtze, called Chang Jiang (Long River) in China, is the longest river in Asia, about 6,300 kilometers. It starts in glacier meltwater on the Plateau of Tibet, cuts through deep gorges, passes huge cities like Chongqing, Wuhan and Nanjing, and reaches the East China Sea at Shanghai. Nearly a third of China's people live in its basin.