The Best Hikes in the World: 15 Bucket-List Trails

Long before it was a pilgrimage, it was a story about lights in a forest. In the early 9th century, a hermit named Pelayo followed a strange star and unearthly music through the Galician woods and found a forgotten tomb. The bishop declared the bones inside to be Saint James, carried to that shore after his death, legend says, by a boat guided by angels. They built a church over the spot, and pilgrims have been walking toward it ever since.

The Camino Portuguese is one of the oldest paths to that same tomb, and depending on which route you choose, it runs close to where legend says the saint’s remains first touched Spanish soil, near what’s now Padrón. Every scallop shell strapped to a pilgrim’s pack traces back to that same story.

The full route runs 380 miles (612 km) from Lisbon, but the version most hikers actually walk is a 9-day, week-long stretch covering just the final leg. There are two ways to do it: the final 100 km route runs inland from Tui through Galicia’s woodlands and river towns, while the coastal route starts further back in Oia, Spain, tracing the Atlantic shoreline through fishing villages before the two paths join near Vigo.

Either way, you’re covering 11 to 27.7 km (7 to 17 miles) a day for 6 consecutive days, following the same yellow arrows and scallop shells that have marked this trail for over a thousand years, with a support vehicle carrying your luggage between hotels so all you’re carrying is a daypack.

And unlike its busier cousin, the Camino Francés, you get the same cathedral, the same passport stamps, and the same Compostela certificate at the end, with a little more room to hear your own footsteps along the way.

Madeira didn’t rise from the Atlantic so much as it clawed its way out, forced up by the same volcanic hotspot that birthed the Canaries and the Azores, a fire beneath the seafloor that simply refused to stop building. When Portuguese sailors finally stumbled onto it in 1419, they found no footprints, no fires, no one. Just an entire island cloaked in laurel forest so thick and so ancient they had no name for it but the wood itself.

That forest is still standing today, older than the countries that now claim it, and running through its shadows are the levadas: over 2,000 km (1,240 mi) of water channels carved by hand into sheer volcanic rock, a five-century-old feat of human stubbornness that dragged rain from the drenched north across the island to the parched south. Every levada still has its footpath. Walk one, and you’re retracing the exact steps of the levadeiros who carved a lifeline into a mountain with nothing but tools and will.

Then the island starts showing off. Over 8 days you’ll climb the “Stairway to Heaven” straight into the clouds near Pico do Arieiro, vanish into the primeval hush of the Laurissilva forest, and stand beneath Pico Ruivo as it soars to 1,862 m (6,109 ft), the whole island falling away beneath you.

Some days ask for 14 km (8.7 mi) and 550 m (1,805 ft) of climbing, and every single one of them ends the same impossible way: a 4-star hotel, a pool steaming under the stars, the Atlantic glittering right outside your window.

And Madeira never stops changing its face. Black basalt cliffs give way to dense green jungle within hours, and by the time you reach Porto Moniz, the ocean itself has punched natural pools straight into cooled lava, as if the volcanoes that built this island are still, quietly, unfinished.

In 1926, a schoolteacher in Bellingham, Washington, mentioned an idea to a mountaineer almost in passing: a single trail running the length of the West Coast, from Mexico to Canada. Her name was Catherine Montgomery, and she never lived to see it built, her 1957 obituary didn’t even mention the trail.

It took another 67 years, one stubborn Pasadena advocate who refused to let the idea die, and a golden spike driven into the dirt in 1993, before the Pacific Crest Trail was finally whole: 2,650 mi (4,265 km) of it, stitched together mile by mile.

This 4-day trip covers a hand-picked 25 to 30 mile (40-48 km) stretch of Oregon’s share of that same trail, the crest Montgomery once imagined from a classroom, now threading through lush Pacific Northwest rainforest with Mt. Hood rising in and out of view.

Fewer than one in five thru-hikers who attempt the full trail actually finish it, but here you’ll get real trail time on real terrain: moderate inclines, dry camping on the intermediate route, and up to 610 m (2,000 ft) of elevation change a day.

What makes this trip different is that it’s built for beginners. A guide teaches Leave No Trace principles, campsite selection, and bear-safe food storage as you hike, not before. And since it’s an all-women departure, the same kind of camaraderie that once carried one teacher’s idea into a legendary trail tends to build fast among strangers carrying full packs together for the first time.

Every name on this trail is a piece of old mythology. Landmannalaugar means “People’s Pools,” after the hot springs where Icelanders have bathed for centuries. Þórsmörk, where the trail ends, means “Thor’s Forest,” named for the god of thunder himself. Even Laugavegur simply means “the hot springs route,” which barely hints at what’s actually out there.

The trail starts in a lava field born from a 1477 eruption, now cooled into rhyolite mountains striped in iron red and copper gold, the kind of ground that explains why old Icelandic stories are full of trolls and hidden folk instead of ordinary answers.

This 35-mile (55 km) trek is Iceland’s signature multi-day hike: black sand deserts, steaming geothermal fields, obsidian ridges, and turquoise lakes, all connected by heated mountain huts so you’re never carrying more than a sleeping bag. The 6-day version goes further still, up to the Fimmvörðuháls Pass and past craters from the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption, still young enough to feel warm underfoot.

Come see why the locals never needed to exaggerate the names. The land already does that for them.

Alta Via 1 doesn’t just take you through the Dolomites, it takes you through the Ladin valleys, home to a language and culture found nowhere else on Earth, one that’s been rooted in these mountains for centuries. You’ll hear it in the rifugio kitchens before you see it on any map: a Romance language distinct from both Italian and German, older than either border that now runs through it.

The trail’s real rhythm is simple: climb, arrive, eat, sleep, repeat. Rifugio Lagazuoi sits at the trail’s highest point, 2,752 m (9,029 ft), with the biggest terrace and the best sunset in Cortina. Rifugio Fanes, tucked into a high plateau since 1928, still keeps photographs and relics on its walls from a century of hikers passing through.

And everywhere you stop, the same unofficial menu appears: speck, polenta, canederli dumplings, and strudel, plus whatever the kitchen pulled from the valley that morning.

Along the way, the scenery does most of the talking. You’ll pass beneath the Tre Cime di Lavaredo’s three unmistakable towers, catch the Marmolada glacier glinting from a distance, and walk straight through WWI trenches still cut into the rock, a reminder that these same passes were once a battlefield, not just a backdrop.

Six days, hut to hut, no tent required, just a daypack and an appetite for whatever’s coming out of the kitchen next.

Here’s the strange part: nobody was even looking for Machu Picchu. In 1911, a Yale historian named Hiram Bingham set out through the Andes hunting for Vilcabamba, the actual lost capital of the Inca resistance. He never found it. Instead, a local farmer and an 11-year-old boy led him up a ridge to something nobody outside Peru had ever heard of: an entire citadel, still standing, still nearly perfect, wrapped in four centuries of jungle vines.

The Spanish conquistadors, who tore down most of the Inca Empire, never found this place at all. No records, no looting, no destruction, just silence, and a mountain that kept the secret for them. What you’re walking toward today is one of the only major Inca sites the Spanish never touched.

And you get there the same way pilgrims once did: on foot, along a 500-year-old royal road built by an empire with no wheels, no iron tools, and no written language, just stone cut so precisely it still fits together without mortar.

The classic 4-day trek climbs through cloud forest and over Dead Woman’s Pass, Peru’s highest point on the trail at 4,215 m (13,828 ft), past ruins most tour buses never reach, before the trail delivers its final trick: the Sun Gate, timed for sunrise, so your first glimpse of Machu Picchu is exactly the one the Incas built it for.

There’s no trail here. No sign, no cairn, no worn dirt path to follow, because almost nobody goes where this trip goes. To get in at all, you fly: a floatplane drops you onto a lake in the middle of six million acres of tundra, more land than the entire state of New Hampshire, and once the plane lifts off again, that’s it. No cell signal, no road, no way out until it comes back.

From there, every day starts from scratch. There’s no fixed campsite waiting for you, no marked route on a map, just your guide reading the terrain, the weather, and the river levels fresh each morning and deciding where you’re actually walking.

You’ll cross glacial rivers on foot, pick your way through open tundra, and go entire days without seeing another group, because there simply isn’t another group out here to see.

Grizzlies, caribou, and Dall sheep move through this landscape like it’s still theirs, mostly because it still is. Denali itself might tower over your route in full 20,310 ft (6,190 m) view, or vanish into cloud for a week straight, and either way changes nothing about the trip.

This was never about the summit. It’s about six days of walking through some of the last truly untouched wilderness left in North America, one uncertain, unmarked mile at a time.

Most trips pick a landscape and stick with it. This one refuses to. One week you’re crossing a volcanic desert on the Tongariro Northern Circuit, Ngāuruhoe smoking overhead like it’s still deciding whether to play Mount Doom again, and by the next you’re barefoot on the golden sand of Abel Tasman, timing your walk between headlands to the tide. A few days after that, you’re sleeping under a limestone overhang the size of a ballroom, deep in a canyon most hikers never even hear about.

The days themselves stay short enough to actually enjoy, capped around 15 km (9.3 mi), so the real challenge is showing up ready for 24 days in a row, not surviving any single brutal one. Nights swing between backcountry huts, tents pitched wherever the day ends, and the occasional real bed, which keeps the whole trip feeling like a string of small adventures instead of one long grind.

And then there’s the day you don’t hike at all: a boat glides you through Milford Sound instead, waterfalls dropping straight into the water on either side, dolphins surfacing alongside like they’re along for the ride too.

By the time you’re done, you’ll have walked through more versions of New Zealand than most people see in a lifetime of visits, and you’ll understand exactly why the locals never bother explaining which region is “the best one.” Out here, that question doesn’t really make sense.

In 1948, a war veteran named Earl Shaffer set out from Georgia with one plan: walk the entire Appalachian Trail in one go, all 2,190-plus miles of it, because he needed to “walk the war out of my system.” Nobody thought it was possible.

The trail wasn’t even fully finished as a continuous path yet. He didn’t care. Four months later, he stood on Mount Katahdin in Maine, the first person in history to thru-hike the whole thing, and every AT hiker since has been walking in the wake of that decision.

You’re not signing up for four months. This 3-day trip covers either the grassy balds of the Roan Highlands or the sweeping summit of Max Patch, a genuine slice of the same trail Shaffer walked, minus the war he was trying to leave behind and minus three and a half months of it. What you get instead is real backpacking: a full pack on your back, camp under the stars, and the same 360-degree views that have been pulling people onto this trail for over a century.

And you’ll feel the culture immediately, even in just 3 days. Section-hikers and thru-hikers doing the real thing will cross your path on the same ridgelines, swap stories at the same overlooks, and remind you that “trail magic” isn’t a marketing phrase out here, it’s just what happens when strangers share a mountain long enough.

Every morning on the Tour du Mont Blanc starts the same simple way: you wake up, someone hands you coffee, and Mont Blanc is just there, filling the window like it’s been waiting for you. Then you walk toward it, around it, alongside it, for as long as you want, 8 days or 12, through three countries that somehow never feel far apart.

The best part isn’t even the passes, though the passes are stunning. It’s the small stuff. French tartiflette one night, Italian pasta the next, Swiss fondue after that, and never once do you have to cook it, carry it, or clean up after it. Your bag moves ahead of you each day, so you show up to a real bed and someone else’s kitchen, over and over, for as long as the trip lasts.

And then there’s the last day: walking back into Chamonix, Mont Blanc overhead one final time, having circled the whole thing on foot. Around 20,000 people do some version of this loop every year, and somehow it never gets old, because the mountain looks a little different from every single angle, and you just spent over a week proving it.

If the Tour du Mont Blanc is a loop around one mountain, the Haute Route is a straight shot through all of them. Ten of the twelve highest peaks in the Alps show up along this trail, one after another, like the mountains themselves lined up to be introduced.

You start under Mont Blanc in Chamonix, and every day after that trades one iconic view for another: the Matterhorn appearing and disappearing behind ridgelines, glaciers close enough to hear them moving, high passes that make you forget how much climbing it took to reach them. Choose the full 12-day Classic version if you want every mile, or the 9-day Highlights route if you’d rather hit the best parts without giving up your whole month.

And then, after days of watching the Matterhorn tease you from a distance, you finally walk straight into Zermatt with it rising directly overhead, an ending most people spend years dreaming about before they actually get to have it. Long days, real climbing, and a finish line that makes every step of it feel completely worth it.

The O Circuit doesn’t ease you in, it just takes you all the way around. While most visitors to Torres del Paine do the shorter W Trek and call it a day, this one keeps going, tracing the entire Cordillera del Paine in one continuous loop so you see the mountain from every side it has to offer, not just the postcard one.

The turning point comes at John Gardner Pass, the highest ground on the whole circuit, where you crest a ridge and the Southern Patagonian Ice Field just opens up in front of you, endless and blue-white and bigger than anything you were expecting. It’s the kind of view that makes the seven straight days of hiking to get there feel entirely fair.

Nights swing between mountain refuges and tents, whichever the trail and the weather allow, so you’re never locked into one or the other. And the Patagonian wind does exactly what it’s famous for, showing up uninvited and reminding you who’s really in charge out here. Seven days, one loop, and by the end, you’ll have earned every single mile of it.

Most people see the Grand Canyon from the rim, snap a photo, and drive off thinking that’s the whole story. It isn’t. This trip takes you inside it, where the canyon actually reveals itself.

You start on the North Rim and head down. Bright Angel Creek runs alongside the trail for a while, The Box narrows in tight and shaded, and at the bottom sits Phantom Ranch, a genuine oasis with the Colorado River running right past it, the same river that’s been carving this canyon for longer than anyone can really picture. It’s noticeably hotter down here than up on the rim, one of the sharp little surprises that makes this hike feel so different from anything above ground.

Over 3 days and roughly 24 mi (39 km), you’ll camp beneath the canyon walls, cross the river more than once, and climb back up the other side to the South Rim. Nights cool fast once the sun drops, leaving just you, the group, and a sky full of stars with nothing to block the view.

By the time you’re climbing out, the whole canyon opens up behind you, and you’ll understand exactly why the people who only see it from a viewpoint never get the full picture.

Every night in Scotland on the West Highland Way ends the same good way: boots off, fire lit, a proper Scottish dinner waiting, and if you’re keen, a “wee dram” of whisky to close things out. It’s the kind of trip where the walking is only half the story.

The other half is what you pass through to earn that evening. You’ll cross Rannoch Moor, one of Europe’s last truly wild landscapes, walk the same ground once haunted by the outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor, and spend a night at the Drovers Inn, a 1705 pub with just enough of a reputation for ghosts to make the whisky taste better.

Loch Lomond keeps you company for a good stretch of it, and Glencoe, when you reach it, is the kind of dramatic that photographs never quite capture.

Over 157 km (98 mi) and 9 days, the trail finishes beneath Ben Nevis in Fort William, tired legs and all, having walked through more Scottish history and hospitality than most people manage in a lifetime of visiting. And unlike some of the bigger, more technical treks out there, this one rewards you every single evening, not just at the very end.

Everyone who’s done the Laugavegur thinks they’ve seen Iceland’s highlands. They’ve seen a version of them. This trip goes into the rest, the geothermal valleys, lava fields, and canyons sitting just off that famous route, close enough to share the same otherworldly geology and remote enough that almost no one ever finds them.

Twelve days, roughly 90 mi (150 km), and a rhythm that never really repeats: steam rising out of the ground one day, black lava frozen mid-flow the next, a canyon appearing out of nowhere the day after that. You’re not chasing a single iconic view here. You’re stringing together a dozen quieter ones that most people driving past Iceland’s highlands will never know exist.

What makes it worth doing isn’t just the scenery, it’s the size of the group and the depth of the guide’s knowledge. Seven to thirteen people, one local guide who’s spent real time finding these routes in the first place, and days remote enough that turning back isn’t really an option once you’re in.

You carry what you need and keep moving, which is exactly why this stays one of the few places in Iceland that still feels genuinely undiscovered.

Planning a trip to hike the best hikes in the world takes more prep than a weekend local trail. Budget, season, fitness level, and permit logistics all vary wildly depending on where you’re headed, so here’s what’s worth knowing before you book flights.

What’s the best season for hiking around the world?

It depends entirely on the hemisphere and the terrain. Northern Hemisphere Alpine trails like the Tour du Mont Blanc and Haute Route are best from late June through September, once snow clears the high passes. Iceland’s hiking season is famously short, running from late June to mid-September. Patagonia flips the calendar entirely: November through March is prime season in the Southern Hemisphere, while New Zealand’s summer runs the same months. Plan around your destination’s actual season, not your own.

What’s the hardest hike on this list?

The O Circuit and the Hidden Trails of Iceland both stand out for sustained difficulty among the best hikes in the world on this list: multiple consecutive days of long mileage with no rest days and limited bailout options. The Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim packs serious difficulty into a shorter window, with steep elevation change and extreme temperature swings compressed into just 3 backpacking days.

What’s the best hike for a first-time multi-day hiker?

The Pacific Crest Trail trip in Oregon is built specifically for this: a guide teaches backpacking fundamentals as you go, and the beginner route caps daily mileage and elevation gain. The Camino Portuguese is also a gentle entry point, since luggage transfers mean you’re only ever carrying a daypack.

The World’s Best Hikes Are Waiting

That’s our list of the best hikes in the world, but it’s really just a starting point. Every trail here rewards the effort it takes to get there, whether that’s a short flight to Scotland or a long haul to Patagonia.

Pick the one that matches your fitness, your timeline, and the kind of landscape that pulls at you most. The best hikes in the world aren’t the ones that look good in photos, they’re the ones that change how you see the place once you’ve walked it yourself. Lace up, join us, and find out.