These Natural Wonders Should Be on Your Travel Bucket List for 2025

Travel is the ultimate teacher. It breaks down your assumptions, rewires your brain, and throws your senses into beautiful disarray. It’s one thing to watch a puffin bob along the Scottish coastline on YouTube.

It’s another thing entirely to stand in the salt-laced wind of the Orkney Islands and watch a colony explode into motion around you. Nature is one of the best reasons to leave your bubble—and in 2025, Earth is showing off.

Where to Travel in 2025

First up: Ringing Rocks Park in Pennsylvania, where an entire boulder field hums when struck with a hammer. This natural xylophone is one of the strangest geological puzzles in the U.S., and no one’s entirely sure why it makes music. The only way to experience it? Grab a hammer and go.

Or hop a flight to Western Australia, home to the surreal Horizontal Falls, where massive tidal movements create sideways waterfalls that churn through rugged coastal gorges. The phenomenon is so powerful, David Attenborough once called it one of the greatest natural wonders on Earth. It’s a bit tricky to get to, since you can’t arrive by land, but it’s worth it.

In Scotland, particularly on the island of Staffa, puffin season hits its peak from late spring into summer, and it’s downright magical. Tiny, clown-faced birds with wings that beat like hummingbirds take over cliffs and coves, returning to breed after months at sea.

Farther north in Greenland, the Ilulissat Icefjord—aka “the iceberg capital of the world”—is a surreal place to confront the scale of our planet’s glacial power. Towering ice formations creak, groan, and crash into the sea, reminding you that nature moves with both grace and destruction.

Dominica, often called the nature island of the Caribbean, is home to the world’s first sperm whale reserve, The Dominica Sperm Whale Project. You can snorkel and dive near these gentle giants, often accompanied by scientists working to protect them.

Then there’s Thrihnukagigur, Iceland’s dormant volcano where you can actually descend into the cooled magma chamber—a kaleidoscope of colors and ancient rock formations. It’s the only place on Earth where this kind of journey is possible.

Want something a little more otherworldly? Check out the bioluminescent bays along Florida’s Space Coast, where microorganisms light up the water at night like blue fireflies. Or plan ahead for the next blood moon or lunar eclipse, moments where the sky reminds us just how tiny—and lucky—we are.

These are so much more than just photo ops. They’re soul-level reset buttons. And sometimes, the best way to understand your place in the world is to leave it—at least for a little while.