The 13 Best Natural Features in The World

Japan's cherry blossom season, or sakura, transforms the country for a brief two-week window each spring when thousands of trees burst into pale pink and white flowers.

The most famous displays occur in Tokyo's Ueno Park, Kyoto's Maruyama Park, and along the Philosopher's Path, where petals fall like pink snow.

The Arashiyama Bamboo Grove on the outskirts of Kyoto is one of Japan's most ethereal landscapes, where towering stalks of bamboo create a cathedral-like green canopy above the winding path.

When the wind blows through the grove, the sound is so distinctive it has been designated one of the 100 Soundscapes of Japan.

Jebel Fihrayn, known as the Edge of the World, is a sheer escarpment roughly 1,100 metres above the desert floor, part of the Tuwaiq Mountains that once formed the shoreline of an ancient sea.

A rough 4x4 track and a short walk lead to a cliff edge with no barriers, looking out over a flat desert plain stretching to the horizon, and it has become one of the most visited natural landmarks near Riyadh since the country opened to tourism.

Despite the name, this isn't a desert: seasonal rains fill the valleys between hundreds of square kilometres of white dunes with clear turquoise lagoons, usually June to September.

Outside that window, the dunes stretch out bone-dry and empty.

Reaching the interior means a 4x4 or a walk across shifting sand from the gateway town of Barreirinhas, but the landscape has no real equivalent on the Brazilian coast.

The world's largest tropical wetland, a mosaic of rivers, lagoons, and gallery forest holding the highest concentration of jaguars, caimans, capybaras, and macaws anywhere in South America.

Guided boat and jeep safaris reveal wildlife far more reliably than the denser Amazon rainforest.

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.

Carved into the Cordillera mountains some 2,000 years ago by the Ifugao people using only hand tools, these terraces climb the hillsides in contour lines that follow the land, still irrigated by an ancient engineered system fed from the forests above.

Locals still farm rice here, so the terraces are a living agricultural landscape rather than a preserved relic — often called the 'eighth wonder of the world.

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A series of turquoise limestone pools cascades down a natural stone bridge above the rushing Cahabón River, which vanishes underground beneath the pools before reemerging downstream.

Swimming from one pool to the next, framed by dense jungle on all sides, feels remote in a way that matches the effort of reaching it — the last stretch of road is famously rough.

A steep viewpoint hike above gives the classic aerial view of the stacked terraces.

Over 1,200 near-perfectly conical grass-covered hills spread across Bohol island, turning chocolate-brown in the dry season.

A geological oddity of uncertain origin, best appreciated from the Chocolate Hills Complex viewing deck at sunrise or sunset.

Sapa's mountainsides are carved into thousands of stepped rice terraces, farmed for generations by H'mong, Dao, and Tay communities in the Muong Hoa Valley below Fansipan, Indochina's highest peak.

The fields turn brilliant green after May planting and gold at the September-October harvest.

Most visitors trek between hilltop villages, though a cable car now reaches Fansipan's summit in minutes for those who'd rather skip the climb.

North Cape is a 307-metre cliff on the northern tip of Magerøya island, marketed for two centuries as the northernmost point of mainland Europe - a technicality it doesn't quite hold, but the setting is real.

A visitor centre and a globe monument sit on the plateau above the Barents Sea, with the midnight sun visible from mid-May to late July.

The long, treeless drive across open Arctic tundra is as much a part of it as the cape itself.

Tanah Lot's Hindu sea temple sits on a small rock outcrop just offshore, cut off from the mainland at high tide and reachable on foot when the water recedes.

Built around a natural spring the Balinese consider sacred, it's one of several coastal temples protecting Bali from sea spirits, and among the most photographed silhouettes on the island at sunset.

The temple interior is closed to non-worshippers, so the visit is really about the setting and the ritual crowds gathering for dusk.

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.