The biggest protected place on Earth is not a national park at all. Papahānaumokuākea, north-west of Hawaii, covers over 1.5 million square kilometres — but it is a marine national monument, and New Caledonia's larger Natural Park of the Coral Sea is a natural park. This countdown ranks only areas their own governments have designated national parks, which is a stricter rule than it sounds. We measure total designated area, land and sea together, so Mexico's almost entirely oceanic Revillagigedo lands third. And we count parks that hold the designation today. That single rule costs us Algeria's Ahaggar, ranked second on most lists at 450,000 km² but moved to Algeria's cultural-park regime in 2011, and Argentina's 68,834 km² Yaganes, which is a marine protected area split across three management categories, only one of them a park. What survives runs from 36,000 km² to 972,000 km², across fourteen countries and every inhabited continent.
15 Largest National Parks in the World (2026)
The record The largest national park in the world is Northeast Greenland National Park, in Greenland — 972,000 km² (375,291 sq mi), total designated area. Source: Wikipedia / Government of Greenland. Verified .
Largest National Parks in the World The Ranking at a Glance
Fun Facts About the World's Largest National Parks
- The largest protected area on Earth is not a national park at all — Papahanaumokuakea, north-west of Hawaii, covers over 1.5 million km², but it is designated a marine national monument, so it does not qualify for this list.
- Northeast Greenland National Park is larger than France and Germany combined — at 972,000 km² it would rank around the 30th largest country in the world if it were one. See Northeast Greenland National Park.
- The park most lists rank second has not been a national park since 2011 — Algeria reclassified Ahaggar, at 450,000 km², into its cultural-park regime, yet it still appears near the top of most published rankings.
- Only one of these fifteen parks is in the United States — Wrangell-St. Elias, which is also the largest unit in the entire US National Park System and bigger than Switzerland.
- Three of the fifteen are almost entirely ocean — Revillagigedo, Russian Arctic and Cocos Island protect far more sea than land, which is why marine parks dominate the upper reaches of the ranking.
- Wood Buffalo National Park holds the longest beaver dam in the world — roughly 850 metres of it, recognised by Guinness World Records and large enough to pick out in satellite imagery.
1. Northeast Greenland National Park
At 972,000 km² (375,000 sq mi), Northeast Greenland National Park is larger than France and Germany combined, and bigger than all but about thirty of the world's countries. It was established in 1974 and expanded in 1988 by a further 272,000 km², reaching a size no other protected area has matched since. Nothing about it is on a human scale: it covers the entire north-eastern quadrant of Greenland, most of it ice sheet, fjord and rock.
There is no permanent civilian population inside its boundaries. The people who are there staff a handful of research stations and the Sirius Patrol, a Danish military dog-sled unit that ranges the coastline. Musk oxen graze the tundra in the thousands, polar bears and walrus work the sea ice, and the whole park doubles as a biosphere reserve. Visiting means an organised expedition and a permit, not a park gate.
2. Sanjiangyuan National Park
Sanjiangyuan National Park protects 190,700 km² of the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai Province, making it the largest national park in Asia by a wide margin. Its name means "source of three rivers", and that is precisely its job: the headwaters of the Yangtze, the Yellow and the Mekong all rise inside it. China calls the region its water tower, and the rivers born here supply water to a substantial share of Asia downstream.
It became one of China's first five formally designated national parks in October 2021. Note that many published rankings still quote 123,100 km² for Sanjiangyuan — that was the area of the pilot project run from 2016, and the park was enlarged when it was formally established. Most of it sits above 4,000 metres, a high, cold grassland where snow leopards, Tibetan antelope and wild yak live at altitudes that leave visitors short of breath.
3. Revillagigedo National Park
Revillagigedo National Park covers 148,088 km² of the Mexican Pacific, and almost all of it is open ocean. The founding decree, published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on 27 November 2017, set the protected area at 14,808,780 hectares surrounding four volcanic islands — Socorro, San Benedicto, Clarión and Roca Partida — several hundred kilometres off the Baja peninsula.
The archipelago is sometimes called Mexico's little Galápagos, and it earned UNESCO World Heritage status in 2016 for the endemic species that evolved on its isolated peaks. The real spectacle is underwater. Giant oceanic manta rays with wingspans of several metres approach divers here, and the islands draw sharks in numbers that have largely thinned elsewhere. Fishing is prohibited across the whole park, which is what makes it the largest fully protected marine reserve in North America.
4. Wadi Howar National Park
Wadi Howar National Park spans 100,000 km² of the eastern Sahara across Sudan's North Darfur and Northern states. It was proclaimed on 18 July 2001 and submitted to UNESCO's Tentative World Heritage List in 2004, and its subject is a river that no longer runs: the Yellow Nile, a major tributary that flowed some 1,100 kilometres from the Ennedi highlands of Chad to the main Nile.
That river was alive during the African Humid Period, roughly 9,500 to 4,500 years ago, when the Sahara was green. What it left behind is a landscape of paleolakes, desert oases and the volcanic craters of the Meidob Hills, scattered with rock art, pottery and grinding stones from the people who lived along its banks. There is no visitor infrastructure and conservation management on the ground has been minimal, which makes this the least-visited park on the list by a distance.
5. Russian Arctic National Park
Russian Arctic National Park covers 88,260 km², the great majority of it sea, and reaches further north than any other protected area in Russia. It takes in the whole of the Franz Josef Land archipelago and the northern tip of Novaya Zemlya, administered from Arkhangelsk Oblast. Established in 2009 at a modest 14,260 km², it was enlarged in 2016 by roughly 74,000 km² — about 16,000 km² of land and 58,000 km² of ocean.
Franz Josef Land is a scatter of nearly 200 ice-capped islands that sat unknown to cartographers until 1873. The park protects one of the densest polar bear denning regions anywhere, along with Atlantic walrus haul-outs and seabird cliffs that hold hundreds of thousands of birds through the brief summer. Almost every visitor arrives the same way, aboard an icebreaker running the route to the North Pole.
6. Cocos Island National Park
Cocos Island National Park grew to 54,844 km² in December 2021, when Costa Rica expanded it roughly twenty-sevenfold from its previous 2,034 km². The park surrounds Isla del Coco, an uninhabited rainforested island some 550 kilometres off the Pacific coast — the only land in the park, and a tiny fraction of its area.
The expansion was announced alongside an enlarged Bicentennial Marine Managed Area, and together they lifted Costa Rica's protection of its own waters from under three per cent to roughly thirty. The reason for going so big is what gathers here. Cocos sits on a seamount chain where currents converge, drawing schooling scalloped hammerhead sharks in numbers divers travel across the world to see, along with whale sharks, mantas and marbled rays. The island itself is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, ribboned with waterfalls falling straight into the sea.
7. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve covers 53,321 km² of south-eastern Alaska — 13,175,799 acres, larger than Switzerland, and the biggest unit in the United States National Park System. It is worth being precise about that figure: the national park proper accounts for 33,683 km², with the surrounding national preserve making up the balance. Both were designated together in December 1980 and are managed as one park.
Four mountain ranges collide inside its boundaries, and nine of the sixteen highest peaks in the United States stand here, led by Mount St. Elias at 18,008 feet. Glaciers do most of the landscaping: the Malaspina alone is larger than Rhode Island. At the heart of the park sits Kennecott, a red-timbered copper mill town preserved as a National Historic Landmark, reached by a long gravel road that keeps the crowds thin.
8. Namib-Naukluft National Park
Namib-Naukluft National Park protects 49,768 km² of the Namib, widely held to be the oldest desert on Earth. Namibia assembled it in stages, adding Sandwich Harbour in 1941 and settling its present boundaries in 1986, and it remains the largest national park in Africa under a single designation.
Its signature image is Sossusvlei, where rust-red star dunes rise more than 300 metres above a white clay pan. Nearby Deadvlei holds the skeletons of camel thorn trees that died an estimated 600 to 900 years ago and have stood upright ever since, too dry to rot. The park also shelters Welwitschia mirabilis, a plant that grows just two leaves and can live over a thousand years, and the Naukluft massif to the east, where Hartmann's mountain zebra pick their way along the escarpment.
9. Wood Buffalo National Park
Wood Buffalo National Park covers 44,741 km² straddling the Alberta–Northwest Territories border, making it the largest national park in Canada and larger than Switzerland. It was established in 1922 for a single purpose that it still serves: protecting the last herds of wood bison in the country. Around five thousand free-roaming bison live here, the largest such herd anywhere.
It is also the only natural nesting ground of the whooping crane, a bird that came within a couple of dozen individuals of vanishing before its breeding site was found here in 1954. The Peace-Athabasca Delta at the park's heart is one of the world's largest freshwater inland deltas and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Two more superlatives sit inside: the world's largest beaver dam, roughly 850 metres long and visible in satellite imagery, and the world's largest dark-sky preserve.
10. Serrania de Chiribiquete National Park
Serranía de Chiribiquete National Park reached 43,000 km² in July 2018, when Colombia expanded a park first declared in 1989 and UNESCO listed it as a mixed World Heritage Site the same month. It is the largest protected tropical rainforest national park in the world, sitting where the Amazon basin meets the ancient rock of the Guiana Shield.
What rises out of that forest are tepuis — flat-topped sandstone table mountains, their walls dropping hundreds of metres into unbroken canopy. Tens of thousands of rock paintings cover those cliffs, some of them thought to be many thousands of years old, depicting hunting scenes, jaguars and dancing figures. Nobody visits to see them. The park is not open to the public, it shelters Indigenous groups living in voluntary isolation, and it has only ever been surveyed properly from the air.
11. Montanhas do Tumucumaque National Park
Montanhas do Tumucumaque National Park covers 38,874 km² of Amapá and Pará in Brazil's far north, created on 23 August 2002 along the border with French Guiana and Suriname. It is one of the largest blocks of continuously protected tropical rainforest anywhere, and it connects with adjoining reserves across the frontier to form a protected corridor far bigger than the park alone.
The Tumucumaque range is not high by world standards, but it is old — Guiana Shield rock, among the most ancient exposed crust on the planet — and its granite domes push above the canopy in a way that makes the forest look like it is draped over the land. No roads reach it. Access means river travel or a helicopter, and much of the park's biological inventory came from a handful of scientific expeditions that turned up species new to science.
12. Parima-Tapirapeco National Park
Parima-Tapirapecó National Park protects 38,290 km² of Venezuela's Amazonas state, and has been the country's largest national park since it was established on 1 August 1991. It sits hard against the Brazilian border in the upper Orinoco basin, and its purpose is as much cultural as ecological.
The Orinoco itself rises inside the park, on the slopes of the Sierra Parima — one of the last major rivers in the world whose source was pinpointed comparatively recently, in 1951. The park also protects the homeland of the Yanomami, one of the largest Indigenous groups in the Americas still living substantially by traditional means, and it adjoins the vast Yanomami territory on the Brazilian side. Together they form one of the largest areas of protected forest and Indigenous land on the continent, almost entirely without roads.
13. Quttinirpaaq National Park
Quttinirpaaq National Park covers 37,775 km² at the northern end of Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, and its name means "top of the world" in Inuktitut. That is close to literal — it is the northernmost park in Canada and among the northernmost pieces of protected land anywhere. It was set aside in 1988 as Ellesmere Island National Park Reserve and became a full national park in 2000.
Despite the latitude, much of it is polar desert, receiving so little precipitation that it qualifies as arid. Lake Hazen, sheltered by surrounding mountains, forms a thermal oasis warm enough for Arctic hare, musk oxen and Peary caribou to persist far north of where they should. Barbeau Peak, the highest point in Nunavut, stands within the park. Fewer than a hundred visitors reach it in a typical year, all by chartered aircraft.
14. Salonga National Park
Salonga National Park covers 36,000 km² of the central Congo Basin, which makes it Africa's largest protected tropical rainforest and ties it exactly with Munga-Thirri–Simpson Desert National Park at the foot of this list. We give Salonga fourteenth place on the older designation: it was established in 1970, while the Australian park reached its present size in 2021.
The park comes in two blocks separated by a corridor of inhabited land, and it is reached almost entirely by river — there is no road access to speak of. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984, largely for the bonobo, the great ape found nowhere on Earth but the forests south of the Congo River. Forest elephants, the Congolese peacock and slender-snouted crocodiles share the same dense, waterlogged canopy.
15. Munga-Thirri-Simpson Desert National Park
Munga-Thirri–Simpson Desert National Park was proclaimed on 25 November 2021 at 3,600,000 hectares — 36,000 km², double the size of Kakadu and the largest national park in Australia. That figure ties it precisely with Salonga National Park above; the two are separated on this list only by which was designated first, and Salonga dates to 1970.
The park takes in the greater part of the Simpson Desert, a landscape of parallel sand dunes running north-west to south-east in ridges that hold their line for up to 200 kilometres — one of the longest dune systems on the planet. Big Red, the tallest of them, rises around 40 metres near the Queensland side. Munga-Thirri is the name the Wangkangurru Yarluyandi people give this country, and the park now carries it alongside the colonial one.
FAQ: The World's Largest National Parks
What is the largest national park in the world?
Northeast Greenland National Park, at 972,000 km². It covers the entire north-eastern quadrant of Greenland and is larger than France and Germany combined — big enough that if it were a country, it would rank around thirtieth in the world by area. No other protected area designated a national park comes close.
Why isn't Papahanaumokuakea on this list?
Because it is a marine national monument, not a national park. At over 1.5 million km² it is larger than anything here, but this ranking counts only areas their own governments have designated as national parks. The same rule excludes New Caledonia's Natural Park of the Coral Sea and Argentina's Yaganes marine protected area.
What is the largest national park in the United States?
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska, at 53,321 km² — larger than Switzerland and the biggest unit in the National Park System. It is the only US park on this list. The national park portion alone accounts for 33,683 km², with the surrounding national preserve making up the rest.
Which of these parks can you actually visit?
Most, but rarely easily. Namib-Naukluft, Wrangell-St. Elias and Munga-Thirri–Simpson Desert have road access and established routes. Cocos Island and Russian Arctic are reached by liveaboard boat or icebreaker. Chiribiquete is not open to the public at all, and Northeast Greenland requires a permit and an organised expedition.
Why do published rankings of the largest national parks disagree so much?
Because the definition does the ranking. Lists that count marine monuments and nature reserves produce a completely different order from ones that count only national parks, and designations change — Algeria moved Ahaggar out of its national-park system in 2011. Boundary expansions also go unnoticed for years, so figures drift between sources.
Planning more of your trip? Keep exploring more world record-breakers.