Natural wonders of Europe

16 to explore

• Watch Natural wonder Alps The Alps are Europe's great mountain range, an arc about 1,200 kilometers long that runs from the Mediterranean coast near Nice, in France, to Vienna, in Austria. Their highest peak is Mont Blanc, which Britannica gives as 4,807 meters. The Alps rose when the plate carrying Africa pushed north into Europe, and Ice Age glaciers carved their sharp peaks and deep valleys.
• Watch Natural wonder Cave of Altamira The Cave of Altamira, in northern Spain, holds some of the most famous prehistoric paintings in the world. People who hunted and gathered their food used the cave between about 36,000 and 13,000 years ago, and painted and engraved bison, horses, deer, hands and signs on its walls and ceiling. It was the first cave where prehistoric cave art was ever recognized.
• Watch Natural wonder Danube The Danube is Europe's second-longest river, after the Volga. It begins as two small streams in Germany's Black Forest and flows about 2,850 kilometers east to the Black Sea, passing through 10 countries and four capital cities. For more than 2,000 years it has been a border, a highway for boats and a home for wildlife, and it ends in a giant delta of reeds, lakes and birds.
• Watch Natural wonder Eyjafjallajökull Eyjafjallajökull is an ice cap in southern Iceland that covers a volcano. In 2010 the volcano erupted for the first time since 1821. Melting ice and hot lava made very fine ash, and winds carried it over Europe. To keep passengers safe, more than 100,000 flights were canceled in one week of April.
• Watch Natural wonder Giant's Causeway The Giant's Causeway, on the north coast of Northern Ireland, is made of some 40,000 columns of dark basalt rock, many of them six-sided, packed together like a honeycomb. They formed about 60 million years ago, when a deep pool of lava cooled slowly, shrank and cracked into columns.
• Watch Natural wonder Matterhorn The Matterhorn is a 4,478-meter mountain in the Alps, on the border between Switzerland and Italy. Its rock was pushed up when Africa moved toward Europe, and glaciers later carved its steep sides into a pyramid shape. Climbers first reached its top on 14 July 1865.
• Watch Natural wonder Mont Blanc Mont Blanc is the highest peak in the Alps, on the border of France and Italy. Its snowy top changes height a little from year to year: in September 2026, French surveyors measured it at 4,807.47 meters. People first climbed it in 1786, and today a long tunnel runs right underneath it.
• Watch Natural wonder Mount Elbrus Mount Elbrus is the highest peak of the Caucasus Mountains, in southwestern Russia. It is an old volcano with two snow-covered tops, the higher one 5,642 meters tall. Twenty-two glaciers cover its slopes and feed rivers below. Whether it counts as Europe's highest mountain depends on where you draw the line between Europe and Asia.
• Watch Natural wonder Mount Etna Mount Etna is a huge, active volcano on the east coast of Sicily, in Italy. UNESCO calls it the most active stratovolcano in the world, and people have written about its eruptions for at least 2,700 years. Its height changes as eruptions build it up and crater rims collapse. Vineyards and orchards grow on its rich lower slopes, and scientists watch it every day.
• Watch Natural wonder Mount Olympus Mount Olympus is the highest mountain in Greece, about 2,918 meters tall, rising almost straight up from the shore of the Aegean Sea. It is made of limestone that formed in a warm, shallow sea long ago. Greece's first national park was created here in 1938, and nearly 2,000 kinds of plants grow on its slopes.
• Watch Natural wonder Mount Vesuvius Mount Vesuvius is an active volcano that rises above the Bay of Naples in southern Italy. In AD 79 it erupted and buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which people can visit today. Its last eruption was in 1944. Because more than two million people live around it, scientists watch it closely, and Italy has a plan to keep everyone safe.
• Watch Natural wonder Rhine The Rhine begins as two small streams high in the Swiss Alps and flows about 1,230 kilometers north and west to the North Sea, through Switzerland, Germany, France and the Netherlands. It tumbles over the Rhine Falls and winds through a gorge lined with castles. After a chemical spill in 1986, the countries along it worked together to clean it, and salmon came back.
• Watch Natural wonder Svalbard Svalbard is a group of Arctic islands, part of Norway, far north of the Arctic Circle. Glaciers and snowfields cover nearly 60 percent of the land. Polar bears hunt seals on the sea ice, walruses rest on the beaches, and inside a mountain on Spitsbergen the world keeps a frozen store of seeds.
• Watch Natural wonder Ural Mountains The Ural Mountains run about 2,500 kilometers from north to south through Russia, and they form most of the traditional boundary between Europe and Asia. They are very old mountains that have been worn down over a very long time; their highest peak, Mount Narodnaya, is 1,895 meters tall. The Urals stretch from icy Arctic tundra to dry steppe and are rich in metals and gems.
• Watch Natural wonder Vatnajökull Vatnajökull, in southeastern Iceland, is a huge ice cap covering about 7,500 square kilometers. It is Europe's largest ice cap by volume. Volcanoes lie hidden beneath the ice, and when they erupt, melting ice can burst out in sudden floods. The ice cap sits at the heart of Vatnajökull National Park, a World Heritage Site of "fire and ice".
• Watch Natural wonder Volga The Volga is Europe's longest river. It rises in the Valdai Hills northwest of Moscow and flows about 3,530 kilometers to the Caspian Sea, all within Russia. Almost half of Russia's people live in its basin. Big dams now turn much of it into a chain of long lakes, and its huge delta shelters up to 750,000 waterbirds in mild winters.