Grand Canyon National Park
Arizona, United States
The Grand Canyon, in northern Arizona, is the most famous natural sight in the United States, and the first thing a…
180 tickets & tours
By type
Best canyon parks to visit worldwide
Canyon parks are the ones you look into before you walk into. The Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce and Canyonlands set the pattern: a rim road with viewpoints, a shuttle bus in season, and a few trails that drop below the rim for those with the legs and the water. Most visitors come on a day tour from Las Vegas, and the first thing to settle is which rim the tour actually goes to, since West, South and North are hours apart and quite different.
Thingvellir National Park
Iceland
Thingvellir lies forty-five kilometres, about three quarters of an hour by a good road, north-east of Reykjavik, and it…
176 tickets & tours
Blue Mountains National Park
New South Wales, Australia
The Blue Mountains begin about sixty kilometres west of the centre of Sydney, and their national park, a vast…
92 tickets & tours
Zion National Park
Utah, United States
Zion is the most visited of Utah's parks and the closest to Las Vegas, about two and a half hours away, and the…
45 tickets & tours
Samaria Gorge National Park
Greece
Samaria is the great gorge of western Crete, sixteen kilometres from the Omalos plateau down to the sea at Agia…
41 tickets & tours
Bryce Canyon National Park
Utah, United States
Bryce Canyon, in southern Utah, is a small park with one overwhelming sight, a series of natural amphitheatres filled…
19 tickets & tours
Yosemite National Park
California, United States
Yosemite lies on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, in central California, about four hours by road from San…
17 tickets & tours
Bohemian Switzerland National Park
Czech Republic
Bohemian Switzerland is the sandstone park on the Czech–German border north of Prague, an hour and a half from the…
16 tickets & tours
Saklikent National Park
Turkey
Saklıkent is the gorge in the mountains fifty kilometres from Fethiye and sixty-five from Kaş on Turkey's Lycian…
14 tickets & tours
Saxon Switzerland National Park
Germany
Saxon Switzerland is the sandstone park on the Elbe south-east of Dresden, forty minutes from the city by train and two…
13 tickets & tours
Watarrka National Park
Northern Territory, Australia
Watarrka National Park, in the desert of the southern Northern Territory, contains Kings Canyon, a great cleft of red…
11 tickets & tours
Alcantara Gorges (Alcantara River Park)
Sicily, Italy
The Alcantara gorges lie on the north side of Etna, forty minutes from Taormina and an hour from Catania, and they are…
10 tickets & tours
Dana Biosphere Reserve
Jordan
Dana is Jordan's largest nature reserve, on the King's Highway between Kerak and Petra, three hours from…
9 tickets & tours
Canyonlands National Park
Utah, United States
Canyonlands is the larger, emptier neighbour of Arches, outside Moab in south-eastern Utah, and the first thing to know…
8 tickets & tours
Tjoritja / West MacDonnell National Park
Northern Territory, Australia
The West MacDonnell Ranges run due west from Alice Springs in the centre of Australia, and the park's first gorge,…
8 tickets & tours
Mesa Verde National Park
Colorado, United States
Mesa Verde is in the south-west corner of Colorado, its entrance ten miles east of Cortez and thirty-five west of…
7 tickets & tours
Blyde River Canyon Nature Reserve
Mpumalanga, South Africa
The Blyde River Canyon, officially renamed Motlatse, lies on the edge of the Drakensberg escarpment in Mpumalanga,…
6 tickets & tours
Charyn Canyon National Park
Kazakhstan
Charyn Canyon lies two hundred kilometres east of Almaty, three to three and a half hours by road across the steppe…
6 tickets & tours
Pieniny National Park
Poland
Pieniny is a very small park in the far south of Poland, on the Slovak border two hours from Kraków and an hour east of…
5 tickets & tours
Chicamocha National Park (Panachi)
Colombia
Chicamocha National Park, universally known by its acronym Panachi, is not a national park in the conservation sense at…
4 tickets & tours
Göreme National Park
Turkey
Göreme National Park is the core of Cappadocia, in central Turkey, reached by air to Kayseri or Nevşehir, an…
4 tickets & tours
Jacques-Cartier National Park
Quebec, Canada
Jacques-Cartier is the nearest real wilderness to Quebec City, its entrance at kilometre 74 of the highway to Saguenay,…
4 tickets & tours
Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park
Aragon, Spain
Ordesa y Monte Perdido lies in the central Pyrenees, in the province of Huesca in Aragon, in the north of Spain,…
4 tickets & tours
Verdon Regional Natural Park
France
The Verdon gorge is the deepest and most spectacular river canyon in France, in the hills of Haute-Provence between the…
4 tickets & tours
Europe’s gorges are walked end to end: Samaria in a long day downhill to the Libyan Sea, Vikos in the Pindus, the ladders and chains of Slovak Paradise, the sandstone towers of Saxon and Bohemian Switzerland. Australia’s Blue Mountains, Watarrka and the West MacDonnell gaps combine lookouts with short gorge walks. Flash floods close slot canyons, heat closes desert trails in summer, and Samaria shuts altogether from November to April. The pages give the opening season, the length and drop of the main walk, and the transport at the far end.