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The record
11.53 million annual visits
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
United States
The record
The most visited national park in the world is Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in the United States — 11.53 million annual visits.
Source: NPS Visitor Use Statistics 2025. Verified .
Japan's Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park reports well over 100 million visitors a year, and England's Lake District close to 18 million, yet neither appears below. Both numbers count everyone moving through a lived-in region of towns, railways and commuter roads rather than people visiting a park. This countdown ranks something narrower and genuinely comparable: annual visits counted at the park itself, by the agency that manages it, for the 2025 reporting year.
It runs from 11.53 million down to 3.79 million across six countries and four continents, and every park on it is open today. The rule costs the list some famous names, including Australia's Blue Mountains and its 7.8 million, which comes from a biennial population survey rather than a count. It also rewards some unexpected ones: a Seoul hillside that outdraws Yellowstone, and a Polish valley that outdraws the Grand Canyon.
Fun Facts About the World's Most Visited National Parks
The busiest national park on earth charges nothing to enter — Tennessee handed over the road through the Smokies on condition that no toll ever be charged, so Great Smoky Mountains National Park still has no entrance fee.
The most crowded national park per square kilometre is inside a capital city — Guinness World Records lists Bukhansan National Park, partly within Seoul and reachable by subway, for exactly that.
Japan reports a national park with more than 100 million visitors a year — but Fuji-Hakone-Izu is a zoned region containing resort towns and commuter railways, and the count covers everyone using that area, which is why it is not ranked here.
The forest around Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer was planted by hand — coffee estates had stripped the slopes bare and the city's water was failing, so Tijuca National Park was replanted seedling by seedling in the nineteenth century.
Poland's Tatra National Park produces the cleanest number on this list — every visitor buys a ticket at a staffed trail gate, so its 5,266,672 visits in 2025 are an actual count rather than an estimate.
At 11.53 million visits in 2025, Great Smoky Mountains National Park is not just the busiest national park on earth, it is half as busy again as the park behind it.
Two things inflate that lead. The park charges no entrance fee, a condition of the land transfer that created it, so there is no toll booth to discourage a casual afternoon. And U.S. 441 climbs straight over the ridge between Tennessee and North Carolina, so the counters pick up drivers simply crossing the mountains along with everyone who came to hike.
Strip the through-traffic out and what remains is still the most visited landscape in the Appalachians. The park protects roughly 800 square miles of layered blue ridgelines, the mist that named them rising off one of the oldest forests in North America.
Cades Cove draws the crowds to its loop road and its preserved homesteads, the Appalachian Trail runs the spine for seventy miles, and the salamander population is diverse enough that biologists call this the salamander capital of the world.
Bukhansan National Park recorded 7.53 million visits in 2025, counted at its trailhead gates by the Korea National Park Service, which is 17.4 percent of every national park visit in South Korea. What makes that figure remarkable is where the gates are.
Bukhansan sits partly inside Seoul's city limits, close enough that a commuter can leave a subway station and be climbing granite within half an hour. Guinness World Records lists it as the most visited national park per unit area anywhere.
The park is essentially three granite domes and the ridges between them, scoured bare and pale above a skirt of forest. Baegundae, the high point at 836 metres, is reached by a scramble with fixed cables near the summit and rewards it with the whole Seoul basin laid out below. Insubong draws rock climbers to routes that run several hundred metres. Buddhist temples are tucked into the valleys, and an eighteenth-century fortress wall still traces the ridgeline.
Poland's Tatra National Park counted 5,266,672 visits in 2025, a record, and it produces the cleanest number on this list: every visitor buys a ticket at a staffed trail entrance, so the total is an actual count rather than an estimate. That is 5.27 million people funnelled into Poland's only alpine range, a compact band of granite peaks along the Slovak border that draws more visitors than Yellowstone from an area some forty times smaller.
The pressure is concentrated to an extraordinary degree. More than 1.1 million walked the single valley road to Morskie Oko, a glacial lake ringed by cliffs that is probably the most photographed spot in Poland. Another 656,000 took the Kościeliska valley, and 573,000 rode the cable car to Kasprowy Wierch. Rysy, at 2,499 metres, is the highest ground in the country, and the summit ridge is the frontier itself.
Teide National Park drew 5.11 million visits in 2025, making it comfortably the most visited national park in Europe and the busiest in Spain's network by a factor of more than two. The count comes from traffic monitoring on the roads that cross the park, which matters here: the TF-21 and TF-24 are public highways over the middle of Tenerife, so a share of that total is island traffic passing through the caldera rather than stopping in it.
Enough of them stop. The park fills a caldera sixteen kilometres across, floored with lava fields in ochre, black and rust that stand in for Mars in more than one film. Mount Teide rises 3,715 metres from that floor, the highest point in Spain and, measured from the Atlantic seabed, one of the tallest volcanic structures on the planet. A cable car climbs most of the way; the final summit cone needs a permit.
Zion National Park logged 4.98 million visits in 2025, counted at its entrance stations, and it absorbs them in a space that barely has room. The heart of the park is a single canyon roughly fifteen miles long and in places only a few hundred feet wide, which is why private cars are kept out of Zion Canyon for most of the year and a shuttle carries visitors up the scenic drive instead.
The walls are Navajo sandstone, laid down as desert dunes and cut through by the Virgin River, rising as much as 2,000 feet in cliffs stained cream and vermilion. The Narrows sends walkers upstream through water between walls close enough to touch. Angels Landing, the spine of rock reached by a chain-assisted final half mile, now requires a permit awarded by lottery, which is itself a measure of how many people want to stand on it.
Tijuca National Park received 4,907,563 visits in 2025, a record and comfortably Brazil's most visited park, with more than 2.8 million of those going to Corcovado alone. That single peak is why the number is so large: the statue of Christ the Redeemer stands on its summit, reached by a cog railway and a road, and it is ticketed, so more than half the park's visitors are counted arriving at one viewpoint.
The forest they arrive in is not wild. It is planted. When coffee estates stripped these slopes bare in the nineteenth century and Rio's water supply began to fail, the hillsides were replanted by hand, seedling by seedling, over decades. The result is one of the largest urban forests in the world, dense enough for capuchins and toucans, wrapped around a city of six million, with waterfalls and the sheer bulk of Pedra da Gávea inside its boundary.
Yellowstone National Park counted 4.76 million visits in 2025 across five entrance stations, spread over 2.2 million acres of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. It was the first national park anywhere, signed into existence in 1872, and effectively invented the idea that a government might hold scenery in trust for the public rather than sell it.
The reason it exists is underneath it. Yellowstone sits on an active volcanic system, and the heat drives roughly half of all the active geysers on the planet into one caldera.
Old Faithful is the famous one, but Grand Prismatic Spring is the image that travels: a hot pool 370 feet across, ringed in bands of orange and green where heat-loving bacteria grade off from the scalding blue centre. Bison, elk and wolves move across the Lamar Valley, which is as close to intact temperate wildlife as the continent offers.
Banff National Park reached 4.52 million visits in its 2025-26 reporting year, a record for Canada's oldest and busiest park. Parks Canada counts vehicles entering, and the boundary here is unusually permeable: the Trans-Canada Highway runs the length of the valley and the town of Banff, home to several thousand people, sits inside the park itself, so residents and cross-country traffic are part of the flow.
The pressure lands in a few places. Lake Louise and Moraine Lake together take about 2.6 million people a year, drawn by glacier-fed water whose colour comes from rock flour ground fine enough to hang in suspension and scatter light back turquoise. Beyond them the park is 2,500 square miles of the Canadian Rockies, and the Icefields Parkway north towards Jasper is widely held to be one of the great mountain drives.
Grand Canyon National Park recorded 4.43 million visits in 2025, and the distribution of them says as much as the total. The overwhelming majority arrive on the South Rim, which is open year-round and an easy drive from Flagstaff and Las Vegas. The North Rim, a thousand feet higher and reached by a long detour, takes only a small fraction and closes under snow for months at a time.
What they come to see is 277 river miles of canyon, a mile deep and as much as eighteen miles across, cut by the Colorado River through rock that steps back nearly two billion years at the bottom. The scale defeats most first-time visitors, who find that the far rim reads as a flat backdrop until the light moves and the buttes between separate out. Mule trains still descend the Bright Angel Trail to the river.
Yosemite National Park counted 4.28 million visits in 2025, and almost all of them go to the same place. Yosemite Valley is about seven square miles of a park that covers nearly 1,200, which means a park the size of Rhode Island concentrates its crowds into a strip of meadow and river a few miles long, hemmed in by walls.
Those walls are the draw. El Capitan rises around 3,000 feet in a single granite sweep and is the most storied big wall in climbing. Half Dome closes the head of the valley, sheared flat on one face by glaciers that quarried the rock away. Yosemite Falls drops 2,425 feet in three tiers and runs hardest in late spring, then fades as the snowpack goes. Away from the valley, Mariposa Grove holds giant sequoias more than 2,000 years old.
Gyeongju National Park took 4.21 million visits in 2025, second in South Korea, and it is the one park here that was designated around human history rather than landscape. Gyeongju is Korea's only historic national park: its boundary gathers up the temples, tombs and hillside carvings scattered across the old Silla capital, which is why the counters sit at cultural sites as much as at trailheads.
Silla ruled from here for close to a thousand years, and the evidence is everywhere. Grass-covered royal tomb mounds rise out of the middle of the modern town like green hills. Bulguksa temple and the Seokguram grotto, with its granite Buddha facing the sunrise over the East Sea, are together a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Namsan, the mountain south of the city, carries hundreds of carvings and pagodas along its ridges and is essentially an open-air museum.
Rocky Mountain National Park logged 4.17 million visits in 2025, and it is one of the parks that has responded to its own numbers: timed-entry reservations are required to drive in during the busiest months, so a share of the demand is now shaped by the permit system rather than simply counted at the gate.
The park packs more than seventy peaks above 12,000 feet into 415 square miles, straddling the Continental Divide above Estes Park. Trail Ridge Road crosses it at 12,183 feet, the highest continuous paved road in the United States, running for eleven miles above treeline through tundra where the plants are measured in centimetres and the weather turns without warning. In autumn the elk rut fills the meadows with bugling bulls, which is its own reliable traffic jam.
Acadia National Park drew 4.08 million visits in 2025 onto roughly 49,000 acres, which makes it the most crowded of the American parks on this list by area: it takes more visitors than Grand Teton on about a sixth of the ground, most of it on an island. Mount Desert Island off the Maine coast holds the bulk of it, wrapped around the town of Bar Harbor.
The appeal is the collision of granite and North Atlantic. Cadillac Mountain rises 1,530 feet directly from the sea and, for several months of the year, catches the first sunrise in the United States, which is why its summit road runs a vehicle reservation system before dawn. Below it, 45 miles of crushed-stone carriage roads laid out a century ago for horse-drawn traffic still carry no cars, crossing seventeen hand-cut stone bridges through the woods.
Grand Teton National Park counted 3.8 million visits in 2025, helped by geography: it shares a boundary with Yellowstone, joined by the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway, so a large share of visitors arrive as part of a single trip through both parks rather than choosing this one alone.
It is the more startling range to look at. The Tetons have no foothills, because the fault that lifted them dropped the valley floor at the same time, so the peaks stand up roughly 7,000 feet straight out of the flats of Jackson Hole with nothing to soften the transition.
Grand Teton itself reaches 13,775 feet. Jenny Lake sits directly beneath the range and reflects it on still mornings, and the weathered barns of Mormon Row give photographers the foreground that made the view famous.
1515. Hallyeohaesang National Park
South Gyeongsang and South Jeolla Provinces, South Korea
Hallyeohaesang National Park closes the list with 3.79 million visits in 2025, roughly ten thousand behind Grand Teton, which is well inside the margin between two agencies counting different ways. Treat the bottom two as a tie. It was South Korea's first national park, designated in 1968, and it is mostly water: a marine park strung along the south coast between Yeosu and Geoje.
The protected area gathers up several hundred islands and the channels between them, a drowned coastline of steep green humps in a sheltered sea. Ferries and a cable car above Tongyeong do most of the moving. The strait is also where Admiral Yi Sun-sin fought the naval battles that turned back a sixteenth-century invasion, and the park's name comes from that waterway, so the history and the scenery are inseparable here.
FAQ: The World's Most Visited National Parks
What is the most visited national park in the world?
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on the Tennessee–North Carolina border, recorded 11.53 million visits in 2025 — about half as many again as the park in second place. It charges no entrance fee, and a major highway crosses it, so casual and through traffic both feed the total.
Why are so many of the busiest national parks in the United States?
Partly genuine popularity, partly bookkeeping. The US National Park Service counts recreation visits, so one person leaving and re-entering is counted twice, and traffic on public roads through a park is included. Agencies elsewhere more often count ticketed entries, which produces a lower number for the same crowd.
Which national park outside the United States gets the most visitors?
Bukhansan National Park in South Korea, with 7.53 million visits in 2025 — more than any American park except Great Smoky Mountains. It sits partly inside Seoul, reachable by subway, and Guinness World Records lists it as the most visited national park per unit area anywhere on earth.
What is the most visited national park in Europe?
On the counted-entry basis used here, Poland's Tatra National Park leads Europe with 5.27 million entries in 2025, narrowly ahead of Teide National Park on Tenerife at 5.11 million. Teide is more often given the title in print, but the Polish figure is a ticketed count and the gap between them is small.
Why is Japan's Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park not on this list?
Because its reported figure of more than 100 million a year is not a count of park visitors. Japanese national parks are zoned regions containing towns, resorts and commuter railways, and the Ministry of the Environment estimates everyone using that area. Britain's Lake District figure works the same way.
