The 24 Most Iconic Destinations in Africa

The Great Pyramid of Giza is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one still standing, built as a tomb for Pharaoh Khufu around 2560 BC.

The three pyramids on the Giza plateau, together with the Great Sphinx, are the most recognisable ancient monuments on earth.

Pink-granite boulders sculpted by centuries of erosion line this powder-white beach on La Digue, shaded by takamaka trees and broken into a series of small coves and rock pools.

Some of the boulders are the size of houses.

The water is calm and shallow enough to wade a long way out, which makes it better for drifting about than for swimming properly.

Getting in means paying to cross a private plantation.

Sossusvlei is a salt and clay pan in the Namib-Naukluft National Park in Namibia, surrounded by massive red sand dunes — among the tallest in the world at over 300 metres.

The dead white camelthorn trees in the Deadvlei pan, set against deep orange sand and cobalt sky, have become one of Africa's most iconic landscapes.

Giant pink-granite boulders line the pale sand and shallow turquoise water of Anse Source d'Argent, the best known of a string of coves along La Digue's coast.

The island moves at bicycle pace - there are barely any cars, and the whole place can be crossed in an hour on two wheels.

Development stays low-rise, and the interior is dense palm and takamaka forest.

Every wall, staircase and doorway in this Rif Mountains town is washed in shades of blue, a tradition with disputed origins that's turned the entire medina into one continuous wash of colour.

Cats doze in doorways and potted plants spill over blue-painted steps, with barely a corner that doesn't reward a second look.

Founded as a 15th-century fortress town, its alleys were never built for cars.

Built on the site of ancient Thebes, Luxor holds more of the world's ancient monuments than almost anywhere else on Earth — Karnak Temple's forest of towering columns, Luxor Temple lit dramatically at night, and across the Nile, the Valley of the Kings, where Tutankhamun's tomb and dozens of other pharaohs lie buried in the desert hills.

A hot-air balloon ride at dawn over the West Bank is one of Egypt's most memorable experiences.

A sea of orange dunes rising up to 150 metres at the edge of the Sahara, the most accessible major dune field in Morocco and the base for camel treks and overnight desert camps.

The dunes shift constantly with the wind, and sunrise and sunset turn the sand from deep gold to burnt red.

Nights in a Berber camp under an unpolluted sky are as much the draw as the dunes themselves.

A classic river cruise between Luxor and Aswan, tracing the same stretch of the Nile that carried travellers to Egypt's temples for millennia.

Days combine sailing with shore visits to Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, Edfu, Kom Ombo, and Philae, often timed for sunrise to beat the heat.

Traditional felucca sailboats still cross the river alongside the larger ships.

Palm-lined banks and desert cliffs frame the water throughout.

Marrakech's main square transforms completely between day and night: by afternoon it's snake charmers, henna artists and orange juice stalls, and by dusk it becomes one of the world's great open-air food markets, dozens of numbered stalls filling the square with smoke, spice and the calls of vendors.

UNESCO declared it a Masterpiece of Oral Heritage.

Endless golden grassland stretches to the horizon across this legendary plain, home to the largest overland wildlife migration on Earth.

Wildebeest and zebra herds move across the landscape in numbers that make the scale of the place as much the subject as any single animal.

Hot-air balloon flights at dawn take in the migrating herds and scattered acacia trees from above.

A vast, shimmering salt pan visible from space anchors this national park, where waterholes along its edges concentrate wildlife in a way few other African parks match, especially in the dry season when animals converge to drink.

Self-drive visitors can park at floodlit waterholes after dark and watch elephants, rhinos and predators arrive, without needing a guide.

The pan itself is striking even without the wildlife around its rim.

The world's largest intact volcanic caldera holds an entire self-contained ecosystem within its walls, its crater floor packed with one of Africa's densest concentrations of wildlife, including the 'Big Five' all visible on a single day's game drive.

Unlike the Serengeti's open plains, animals here rarely migrate beyond the crater's rim, making sightings unusually reliable year-round.

Blyde River Canyon is one of the largest canyons in the world, the centrepiece of South Africa's Panorama Route, a red-rock gorge cut through the Mpumalanga escarpment.

Viewpoints along the rim look down on the Three Rondavels rock formations and the canyon's dammed river bend, while short walks lead to Bourke's Luck Potholes and God's Window.

It is a self-drive destination best covered over a full day of short stops rather than one overlook.

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.

Four colossal 20-meter statues of Ramesses II guard the entrance to this rock-cut temple complex, built to intimidate travelers approaching from the south and, remarkably, entirely relocated in the 1960s to save it from the rising waters of Lake Nasser after the Aswan Dam was built.

Twice a year, sunlight penetrates 60 meters into the temple to illuminate statues in the inner sanctuary — a feat of ancient astronomical engineering.

Table Mountain's flat-topped summit, draped in its famous tablecloth of cloud, presides over Cape Town and offers 360-degree panoramas stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to the Winelands.

The mountain is home to an extraordinary number of endemic plant species found nowhere else on earth.

Africa's highest mountain stands alone on the Tanzanian plains, rising 5,895 metres above sea level as the world's tallest free-standing mountain.

Its snow-capped volcanic summit, increasingly threatened by climate change, can be reached by non-technical trekkers via several routes through dramatically changing ecosystems.

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.

Morocco's most visited city layers a maze-like medina of souks, riads and palaces against the backdrop of the snow-capped Atlas Mountains.

Beyond Djemaa el-Fna's nightly spectacle, the city holds the tiled Bahia Palace, the cactus-filled Majorelle Garden, and endless alleys of dyers, leatherworkers and spice sellers.

Getting deliberately lost in the medina, then finding a rooftop café to reorient, is as much the experience as any single sight.

A cracked white clay pan sits ringed by some of the world's tallest sand dunes, its floor scattered with the blackened skeletons of camel thorn trees that died some 600-900 years ago and never decomposed in the bone-dry desert air.

The contrast of black dead wood, white clay and deep-orange dunes against a bright blue sky has made it one of Africa's most photographed landscapes, genuinely striking to stand in regardless of camera skill.

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.

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.

Egypt's sprawling capital is an overwhelming mix of ancient and modern — the Egyptian Museum's trove of pharaonic artifacts (including much of Tutankhamun's treasure), the medieval alleys and mosques of Islamic Cairo, and the chaotic bargaining of Khan el-Khalili bazaar, all set against relentless traffic and one of the world's largest urban populations.

The density of history alongside the Giza Pyramids nearby makes it hard to skip.

Dedicated to the goddess Isis, this graceful temple was dismantled stone by stone and rebuilt on higher ground at Agilkia Island to save it from flooding after the Aswan High Dam was built, in a UNESCO rescue project that ran alongside Abu Simbel's.

Reached by a short boat ride across Lake Nasser's reservoir, its columned courtyards and hieroglyph-covered walls are less crowded than Luxor's temples and set in a genuinely scenic island location.