The 20 Best Hidden Gems in Africa

Eleven medieval churches here weren't built up from the ground but carved downward into solid volcanic rock, each one excavated as a single monolithic block below ground level.

Narrow trenches and tunnels connect them, and pilgrims in white robes moving through the passages add scale and colour against the bare stone.

Nothing else in the world uses this exact rock-hewn technique at this scale.

A surreal expanse of chalk-white rock formations near Farafra Oasis, carved by millennia of sand-wind erosion into shapes resembling mushrooms, camels, and icebergs scattered across pale desert sand.

Camping overnight among the formations, with no artificial light for miles, is the main way to see it - the white rock glows almost blue under a full moon.

It remains one of the least-visited major landscapes in Egypt outside the Nile corridor.

The second-largest canyon on Earth cuts a 160km gash through the Namibian desert, its layered rock walls dropping 550 metres to the seasonal Fish River below.

A multi-day hike along the canyon floor is one of Southern Africa's classic treks, but the main viewpoint at Hobas delivers the scale in a single sweeping look without any walking required.

Sunset turns the canyon's rust-red rock a deep orange.

One of the hottest, lowest, and strangest inhabited places on Earth, a volcanic depression over 100 metres below sea level where sulphur springs bubble in acid-yellow and electric-green pools beside the active Erta Ale lava lake.

Camel caravans still cross the adjoining Danakil salt flats to mine slabs of salt by hand, much as they have for centuries.

The colours and scale look almost entirely artificial, which is exactly why people make the brutal trip.

Ethiopian Orthodox Christians mark the Epiphany with Timkat, when replicas of the Ark of the Covenant, wrapped in cloth and carried by priests, are paraded from every church to a shared body of water the night before.

Crowds in white robes sing and dance through the night, and at dawn the water is blessed and the crowd surges in for a symbolic re-enactment of Christ's baptism.

Lalibela's rock-hewn churches make the most striking backdrop for it.

A switchback road climbs through this dramatic red-rock gorge in the High Atlas foothills, past strange wind-eroded rock formations locals call the Monkey Fingers.

Kasbahs and Berber villages built from the same red earth blend almost seamlessly into the canyon walls around them.

The valley floor, planted with almond and fig trees, adds a green ribbon through the otherwise stark rust-coloured landscape.

This fortified clay ksar of tightly clustered earthen buildings has stood on a Saharan trade route for centuries and become one of cinema's favorite backdrops, doubling for ancient settings in Gladiator, Game of Thrones and Lawrence of Arabia.

A handful of families still live within its walls.

Climbing to the top for views over the Ounila Valley shows off both the settlement's defensive logic and its striking desert-earth architecture.

A bald granite inselberg rises abruptly out of flat Namibian desert, earning it the nickname the Matterhorn of Africa.

Natural rock arches, San rock paintings and easy scrambling routes over the surrounding boulders fill a day, and with almost no light pollution for hundreds of kilometres the night sky is extraordinary.

Facilities amount to a basic community-run campsite and little else.

The old walled medina of Fes is the world's largest car-free urban area, a dense 9th-century labyrinth of over 9,000 narrow lanes where mules still haul goods past tanneries, madrasas and workshops largely unchanged for centuries.

The Chouara Tannery's terraced dye pits are the best-known sight, but the real experience is the medina itself — genuinely functioning, with artisans working leather, brass and textiles the same way for generations.

The world's second-tallest waterfall drops in five free-falling stages down the Drakensberg escarpment, deep in the Royal Natal National Park.

Reaching the top requires a full-day hike including a stretch up two connected chain ladders bolted to the cliff face.

On a clear day after rain, the full 948-metre drop is visible from the valley floor without any hiking at all.

Named for the whale bones once littering its shore and the shipwrecks still rusting in its surf, this remote stretch of Atlantic coastline is where the Namib Desert's dunes meet a cold, fog-shrouded ocean in a landscape that feels genuinely otherworldly.

Seal colonies numbering in the thousands gather at Cape Cross, while the fog sustains desert-adapted wildlife found nowhere else, including elephants that wander dry riverbeds toward the coast.

The historic heart of Zanzibar City is a dense maze of coral-stone buildings, carved wooden doors and narrow alleys shaped by centuries of Swahili, Arab, Persian and Indian trade and, more darkly, its role as East Africa's largest slave-trading port.

The old fort, sultan's palace and spice markets reflect that layered history, while rooftop restaurants and the Forodhani Gardens night market give it a genuinely lively present-day pulse.

A semi-arid expanse of red sand and scrubby grassland covering much of Botswana, home to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve's black-maned lions, meerkats, and San Bushmen communities with millennia-old tracking traditions.

It lacks the dune drama of the Sahara or Namib, but its vast, flat horizons and dark, unpolluted skies make for some of the best stargazing safaris in Africa.

Wildlife encounters here feel genuinely remote rather than staged.

Isolated deep in Egypt's Western Desert near the Libyan border, Siwa is a genuine oasis town of mudbrick ruins, freshwater springs and palm groves surrounded by dunes, significant enough that Alexander the Great made the arduous journey to consult its oracle temple.

The ruined hilltop fortress of Shali, built entirely from local salt-clay, dominates the town, while nearby salt lakes and hot and cold springs offer a stark contrast.

A fortified Atlantic port town with whitewashed, blue-shuttered buildings and windswept ramparts, Essaouira trades the desert heat of Marrakech for sea breeze, fresh seafood grilled dockside, and some of Morocco's best windsurfing and kitesurfing conditions.

Its 18th-century medina, also UNESCO-listed, is smaller and calmer than Fes or Marrakech, with a strong arts and music scene reflected in its galleries and the annual Gnaoua music festival.

A laid-back diving town on the Gulf of Aqaba, Dahab trades Sharm el-Sheikh's resort scale for a mellow, backpacker-friendly waterfront lined with low-key restaurants right on the reef edge.

It's best known for the Blue Hole, a dramatic underwater sinkhole that's become one of the world's most famous — and most dangerous for unqualified divers — dive sites, alongside gentler reef diving and snorkeling directly off the shore in town.

Far less developed than Zanzibar, Mafia Island sits within a marine park protecting some of East Africa's healthiest coral reefs and is one of the world's most reliable places to swim with whale sharks, which gather offshore between October and March.

The island's slow pace, quiet beaches and small-scale dive lodges attract a niche crowd of divers and snorkelers over the beach-resort tourists who head to Zanzibar instead.

The best-preserved Roman ruins in Morocco sit in open farmland near Meknes, their mosaic floors — remarkably intact after nearly 2,000 years — depicting mythological scenes across the remains of villas, a basilica and a triumphal arch.

Storks nest on top of the surviving columns, and the fertile plain surrounding the site explains why Rome valued this outpost enough to build so substantially here.

Straddling the lush Zambezi and Kwando rivers in Namibia's Caprivi Strip, Bwabwata is a wetter, greener contrast to the desert scenery most visitors associate with Namibia, with elephant, buffalo, hippo and crocodile populations typical of Botswana or Zambia just across the border.

River cruises and game drives along the floodplains draw far fewer visitors than Etosha, giving it an off-the-beaten-path feel in a country already light on crowds.

Namibia's only UNESCO World Heritage Site protects one of Africa's largest, best-preserved collections of rock engravings, with more than 2,000 petroglyphs carved by San hunter-gatherers over some 6,000 years depicting rhino, giraffe, human figures and animal spoor.

Set among rust-colored sandstone outcrops in Damaraland's desert scenery, guided walks explain the engravings' likely ritual and navigational purposes alongside the rock formations.