Top 10 Widest Canyons in The World

#1: Grand Canyon, Arizona, USA (277 mi long; up to 18 mi wide; >6,000 ft deep)

Stand at Desert View or Point Sublime and the far rim can dissolve into mirage, because the Grand Canyon’s widest spans push 18 miles—distance enough for thunderstorms to hammer the North Rim while the South Rim bakes blue and cloudless. Carved by the Colorado River over five to six million years (with older paleocanyons hinted in the rock record), it’s not just a chasm but a geologic library: nearly 40 sedimentary layers, from 270‑million‑year‑old Kaibab Limestone on the rim to 1.8‑billion‑year‑old Vishnu Schist down by the river, all folded, faulted, and sliced open so casual visitors can literally walk through deep time. Rafters know the width viscerally: camps on inner bends feel like islands dwarfed by amphitheaters of sandstone that flare outward, swallowing voices; pilots in the pre‑1956 days flew low through tributary cuts until two planes collided, prompting modern air corridors. Hidden in that immensity are paleontological oddities like fossilized reptile tracks on the Bright Angel Trail, CCC-built stone walls hugging exposure that makes knees wobble, and hanging gardens where seeps sustain columbine in alcoves shaded all day. Indigenous nations—Havasupai, Hopi, Navajo, Hualapai, Zuni—map meaning onto features tourists call “temples,” and sacred springs tucked in Tapeats Sandstone are lifelines older than park boundaries. Interesting stats stack like strata: California condors with nearly 10‑foot wingspans now soar again after lead poisoning nearly erased them; rim-to-rim runners cover 24 miles and 11,000 feet of elevation change, often hallucinating by Phantom Ranch where the mail still comes by mule; winter inversions can plug the canyon with fog, a “cloudfall” that makes the void a soft white sea. Anecdotes ripple: a prospector’s burro that kept returning with ore samples so rich it kicked off a mini copper rush; a tourist who dragged a piano to the South Rim in the 1930s to serenade sunsets; late‑summer monsoons that can raise the Little Colorado 20 feet in an hour, turning turquoise pools brown. The canyon widens because side canyons collapse, because differential erosion eats weaker shale faster than stubborn sandstone, because freeze-thaw pries blocks the size of houses from rims. At twilight, watch alpenglow reverse—darkness climbs from river to rim, swallowing temples named for Himalayan gods and Egyptian deities—and you feel the width not as a number but as a time delay: thunder takes seconds to cross from opposite walls, and it’s in that pause you realize how far 18 miles really is when it’s all air and awe.

#2: Capertee Valley, New South Wales, Australia (length ≈ 20 mi; up to 18 mi wide; cliffs 1,300–2,000 ft high)

Australians like to mention, with a twinkle, that the Capertee Valley is “wider than the Grand Canyon”—and at roughly 18 miles across its broadest east–west span, they’re not wrong. This sandstone bowl west of Sydney, carved by the Capertee River and its tributaries out of Triassic Narrabeen and Permian Coal Measures, reads more like an open-mouthed amphitheater than a trench—its walls a broken horseshoe of 1,500‑foot orange and cream cliffs, capped by weathered pagodas that look like melted candles. The valley floor is a patchwork of grazing paddocks, eucalypt woodland, and remnant forest, so wide you can chase a rainbow from Glen Davis to Coco Creek and never leave the valley. Glen Davis itself is a hidden ghost town where a wartime shale-oil plant once roared; now derelict brick kilns echo with currawongs and the occasional bushwalker’s footsteps. Birders flock (pun intended) here—Capertee is a hotspot for the critically endangered Regent Honeyeater, its black-and-gold flash a needle in a haystack of scribbly gum—and the width gives them room to track migratory flocks against a paler sky. Anecdotes include stockmen riding all day and never seeing the cliffs through smoke haze, only to watch them blaze orange when a southerly buster cleared the air; film crews using Pantone charts to match sunrise’s improbable pinks. The valley’s floor is so broad it hosts its own microclimate: cold-air pools bring frosts that whiten paddocks while the rims bask; summer heat storms explode from convective build-ups you can watch march miles across pasture. Hidden gems include Wollemi Pine groves nearby, a “living fossil” found in the 1990s, and glow-worm tunnels where disused railway cuts now shine emerald at night. Geologically, the width reflects a resistant sandstone cap underlain by softer shales—river incision started, slopes retreated, and what was once a tighter canyon yawed open into a mega-vale. Stand at Pantoneys Crown, a remnant mesa in the middle of it all, and you spin 360 degrees with nothing but a sea of green and a rim of orange—no river far below, just land so wide you could land a zeppelin. At dusk, wallaroos silhouette against a skyline that looks more American Southwest than Austral bush, and you taste that dusty tang that makes the valley’s width feel like a mouth exhaling.

#3: Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon, Tibet, China (length ≈ 300 mi; up to 17 mi wide; >19,000 ft deep relief rim-to-river)

Known mostly for being the deepest canyon on Earth—rim-to-river relief exceeding 19,000 feet where Namcha Barwa (25,531 ft) towers above the gorge—the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon is also astonishingly wide in places, with meanders and tributary amphitheaters opening the trench to spans near 17 miles. Picture a Himalayan river born on the Tibetan Plateau at 14,000 feet, flowing east, then hooking in a hairpin around Namcha Barwa and plunging into a subtropical gorge toward India as the Siang/Brahmaputra; along the bend, walls step back, high glacial cirques feed waterfalls that fall for miles, and rainforest climbs the slopes where snow leopards prowl above tea gardens. The width is felt in climate change within a single cross-section: at the northern rim, alpine meadows and yak herders; mid-slopes host temperate forests of rhododendron as big as houses; at the bottom, banana plants, orchids, and leeches. Hidden gems are literal—bridge-less villages where living root bridges (Ficus elastica) arch over torrents, and hot springs tucked in fault lines steaming on mornings cold enough to freeze moustaches. Anecdotes include “The Last Great First Descent” kayakers who battled through in 2002, describing gorge walls that pinched shut then flared into basins so large clouds formed mid-canyon, lightning striking both rims like a ping-pong volley. Geologic drama abounds: rapid uplift rates measured in millimeters per year, earthquake scars, landslides that dam the river and burst to send walls of water downstream, bedrock knickpoints that migrate and widen the gorge where lithology shifts. Tibetan pilgrims circuit the bend as a kora, walking weeks to accumulate merit, their path weaving between barley fields and cliffs where red pandas slip through moss. The width allows agriculture—terraced maize and chili patches—yet isolation means some villages see the doctor by chopper only. Snowpack feeding glaciers recedes; rainfall patterns shift; scientists install microclimate stations that record how fog pools in canyon hollows. At sunrise, clouds pour in like milk, then evaporate as sun hits, revealing walls stair-stepped back to ridges, each step a product of a million years of weather gnawing at granite. Width here isn’t just horizontal distance—it’s vertical ecosystems laid side by side, a green-to-white gradient so broad you can feel seasons change in an afternoon’s climb.

#4: Fish River Canyon, Namibia (length ≈ 100 mi; up to 17 mi wide; max depth ≈ 1,800 ft)

Namibia’s Fish River Canyon is a basalt-and-dolomite zigzag slicing through the world’s oldest desert, and at its broadest meanders it sprawls to 17 miles—enough space for dust devils to dance without ever touching both walls. Carved over 100 miles by the Fish River and pre-sculpted by tectonic grabens 500 million years ago, its profile is a staircase of cliffs: upper layers of black basalt and sandstone, middle benches of limestone, a bottom of copper-hued quartzites scraped by occasional flash floods. Hikers on the famed 53-mile trail feel the width early: on day one’s descent from Hobas, the opposite rim looks like a mirage across a baked sky; days later, the canyon pinches, then opens into amphitheaters where reedbeds crowd stagnant pools green with algae and catfish lurk like shapes on sonar. Hidden gems include hot springs at Ai-Ais (Afrikaans for “burning water”), where sulfurous pools cure blisters and broken morale; quiver trees perched impossibly on scree fans; and Hartmann’s mountain zebras striping down to the river in the cool of dawn. Anecdotes: a German WWI Schutztruppe detachment used the canyon as a tactic shield, vanishing amid layers that swallowed troop movements; a hiker in the 1990s baked bread on hot rocks, claiming the canyon floor hit 140°F that day; a rare flood in 2018 wiped out cairns, forcing groups to read the river like Bushmen. The width also holds silence—the kind where you can hear your blood in your ears—and at night, a Southern Hemisphere sky so thick with stars the Milky Way looks like spilled milk on basalt. Geologists come for the Vioolsdrif Suite granites and the glacial tillites of the Dwyka Group perched near the rim, relics of a time when Antarctica and Africa were neighbors. Meanwhile, baboons patrol cliff bands, klipspringers hop like goats on Velcro, and heat mirages scribble pools that aren’t there. The canyon’s breadth is a witness to aridity: without constant river scouring, side slopes slumped, walls retreated, meanders exaggerated; a wider canyon is a slower story, each vertical foot costing horizontal acres. At sunset, the basalt glows like coals about to go black, and the opposite rim catches the last light seconds after yours fades—a width measured in time as much as miles.

#5: Blyde River Canyon, Mpumalanga, South Africa (length ≈ 16 mi; up to 16 mi wide; depths to 2,600 ft)

Carpeted in subtropical green, often mist-laced and thunder-rumbled, the Blyde River Canyon is among the largest vegetated canyons on Earth, flaring up to 16 miles wide where the Drakensberg Escarpment breaks off into a labyrinth of buttresses and domes. The red-and-green cliffs of the Three Rondavels (giant hut-shaped dolomite domes) flank a sinuous reservoir, and God’s Window, a viewpoint on the rim, looks out over Lowveld plains so far they fade blue, the canyon’s shoulder acting like a balcony to two worlds. The width translates into micro-seasons: morning clouds pool against the escarpment’s face, dripping into fern forests at Bourke’s Luck Potholes—cylindrical cavities drilled by eddies where gold rushers once panned—while by noon the canyon floor steams under a sun that coaxes cicadas into symphonies. Hidden at bends are Tufa waterfalls depositing limestone curtains over moss; potholes that hide catfish and Platana frogs; and hiking trails where samango monkeys scold from yellowwood branches. Stats layered: 2,600 feet from rim to river in places, 16 miles wide near the Abel Erasmus Pass; lightning strike density worthy of a science paper—summer storms crack like whips, igniting grass, then drenching it in five minutes. Anecdotes range from a 19th‑century digger struck rich at Bourke’s Luck (or not, depending on storyteller) to paragliders catching thermals off Mariepskop, drifting for miles over a canyon so wide landing is a choose-your-own-adventure. The geology flips expectations: a quartzite cap (Transvaal Supergroup) resists erosion, but dolomite beneath dissolves, forming caves and sinkholes that widen the gorge by undermining slopes. The canyon teems: kudu browse on ledges; eagles ride thermals; hippos bellow in the Blydepoort Dam at night; and cycads older than the canyon itself cling to soils thin as potting mix. Drive the Panorama Route and you’ll string together overlooks like beads; stay the night and you’ll hear rain on your rondavel roof, feel humidity turn your maps limp, and wake to clouds pouring over the escarpment lip like dry ice. Width here is a green ocean, waves of forest lapping sheer rock, a canyon that feels less like a wound and more like a cradle—wide enough to hold a whole biome in its arms.

#6: Chicamocha Canyon, Santander, Colombia (length ≈ 141 mi; up to 15 mi wide; depth ≈ 6,600 ft)

Carved by the Río Chicamocha through folded Andean strata, the Chicamocha Canyon sprawls up to 15 miles across at its generous bends, a brown-and-olive amphitheater where condors surf updrafts and paragliders chase them. From the Parque Nacional del Chicamocha’s rim—complete with a cable car that glides 3 miles over the void—the river looks like a silver scribble 6,600 feet below, roads zigzagging down in switchbacks that test brakes and nerves. The width supports a climatic staircase: on the mesa de los Santos top you sip coffee in cool air at 5,900 feet; halfway down, goat herders shade under acacias; at the bottom, cacti and thornscrub bake in 100°F heat. Hidden gems: colonial Camino Real cobblestones connecting tiny towns like Guane and Barichara, each turn revealing a cliffside shrine or petroglyph; caves dripping stalactites where guácharos (oilbirds) roost and spew seeds, replanting forest in the dark. Statistics get playful: the cable car spans a gorge 0.6 miles deep and 3,000 feet across, one of the longest aerial trams in the Americas; the canyon’s width funnels trade winds into afternoon gusts perfect for wingsuits (yes, people have tried) but deadly for careless hang gliders. Anecdotes layer like strata: guerrilla checkpoints in the 1990s turned switchbacks into stories of bribes and bullet holes; mountain bikers now bomb the same grades with GoPros capturing dust plumes and grins. Geologically, the canyon slices through Cretaceous sandstones and shales folded into anticlines, so walls zigzag and widen where weaker layers crumble; landslides occasionally choke the river, creating ephemeral lakes citizens fish until the dam bursts in brown fury. At night, Bucaramanga’s glow flickers like a distant ship, lightning forks over mesas, and the canyon goes quiet except for tree frogs and the hiss of wind in cactus spines. Width here is opportunity: farms on terraces; roads that dare gravity; thermals for birds and daredevils; a cultural corridor linking highland arepas with lowland sancocho, all under cliffs that seem to lean back just enough to let the sky breathe.

#7: Barrancas del Cobre (Copper Canyon), Chihuahua, Mexico (network length > 370 mi; individual canyons up to 12 mi wide; depths to 6,200 ft)

“Copper Canyon” is a misnomer singular for a plural reality: six major canyons—Urique, Batopilas, Sinforosa, Oteros, Candameña, and Chinipas—lacing the Sierra Madre Occidental into a network more extensive than Arizona’s icon and in places up to 12 miles wide from rim to rim. The Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacífico—“El Chepe”—threads across bridges and through 86 tunnels, giving riders glimpses of chasms where Tarahumara (Rarámuri) footpaths stitch vertical miles like spider silk, and waterfalls like Basaseachic plunge 807 feet off cliffs in the Candameña. The width is felt as culture: scattered ranchos with corrugated roofs; Rarámuri women hiking for hours to sell woven pine-needle baskets at Divisadero; drug crops tucked into side ravines the size of Rhode Island hamlets; and ultramarathon routes that loop around mesas and plunge into canyons so wide runners face sunrises and sunsets in a single loop. Hidden gems include crystal-clear pools in the Urique where otters play; petrified tree trunks wedged in conglomerates along the Rim of Sinforosa; and eerie fog waterfalls where moist Pacific air condenses and pours over a lip, falling not as liquid but as cloud. Stats dazzle: the deepest canyon, Urique, drops 6,200 feet; widths hit 12 miles across Batopilas’s mid-section; El Chepe climbs 8,000 feet from sea level to the plateau. Anecdotes: revolutionary Pancho Villa hiding munitions in caves; 1960s hippies chasing peyote trails and getting schooled by Rarámuri runners; a BASE jumper misjudging wind and penduluming into a wall, saved by a miracle bounce and a lot of stitches. Geologically, Tertiary ignimbrites—ash-flow tuffs—blanket older sediments, carving into broad amphitheaters where softer layers give way, widening canyon profiles compared to the sheer quartzites of, say, the Grand Canyon. Monsoon rains turn dusty arroyos into chocolate torrents; winter snows dust pine tops; summers bake saguaro-like cacti on lower slopes. The canyon network’s width is also its defense—services sparse, roads long, law enforcement thin—so the Sierra Tarahumara keeps secrets as wide as its walls. Sunset at Divisadero paints cliffs copper—hence the name—but dawn shows them pink, gray, and green, uranium-rich streaks glinting under condors that have recently begun to return, wide wings in a wider sky.

#8: Colca Canyon, Arequipa, Peru (length ≈ 62 mi; up to 12 mi wide; depth > 10,000 ft rim-to-river)

Tourists come for condors and the headlines—“twice as deep as the Grand Canyon”—but Colca is also impressively wide, flaring to 12 miles in sections where terraced fields climb like amphitheater seats up volcanic andesite walls. The canyon’s 62-mile run from Chivay to Cabanaconde slaloms between stratovolcanoes—Ampato, Sabancaya, Misti—whose ash feeds soils where Quechua and Collagua farmers have etched 5,000 miles of terraces over a millennium, a green geometry mirrored in the Rio Colca’s serpentine. Watch at Cruz del Condor: Andean condors launch off thermals each morning, nine-foot wingspans hanging against air so crisp you can hear feathers hiss; the opposite wall feels like another country, villager whistles echoing seconds later with a Doppler twist. Hidden gems: pre-Inca graves in cliff cavities, skulls still cradled in textile scraps if you hike with someone who knows which talus slope leads where; natural hot baths at La Calera, steaming under canyon stars; a 4,000‑year‑old mummy (Juanita’s “sibling”) found in a side ravine, proof Ampato’s ice once held sacrifices beyond the famous one. Stats tremble: rim-to-river relief near 10,700 feet where the canyon slices between 12,000-foot plateaus; widths shrinking to 0.6 miles at pinches, then yawning open to 12 miles where side valleys merge. Anecdotes: 1981 Polish kayakers descended the upper Colca, “lost” for weeks, emerging skinny, triumphant, and mosquito-eaten, raising canyon legend status; trekkers swapping hallucination tales after three days of switchbacks and too little coca tea. Geologically, the canyon owes width to volcanic layering—soft ash falls erode fast, lava flows stand proud—so side slopes fail easily, widening the profile. Llamas still carry barley sacks up the trails, while tourists ride mules downhill, knuckles white. Fog can fill the canyon in June, making the far rim vanish; in September, dry air sharpens edges like a lens polished. Earthquakes shake loose blocks the size of buses, new talus fans build overnight, and farmers simply rebuild terraces below. Colca’s width isn’t empty: it’s planted, walked, flown, soaked, and prayed over, a lived-in canyon whose breadth feeds people and myths in equal measure.

#9: Blue Nile Gorge, Ethiopia (length ≈ 248 mi; up to 12 mi wide; depths to 4,900 ft)

Often dubbed “Africa’s Grand Canyon,” the Blue Nile Gorge cuts a 248-mile sinuous trench between Lake Tana and the Sudanese border, widening to around 12 miles where tributaries like the Jemma and Muger carve in from the sides. From the Addis Ababa–Bahir Dar highway, buses creep down hairpins blasted into basalt, passengers clutching seats as the road descends 3,000 feet to the bridge, then climbs in engine-screaming low gear back to the plateau, giving everyone a three-hour lesson in vertical miles. The width is more than air—it’s agriculture: patchwork teff and sorghum fields cling to mid-slopes, while the river’s narrow banks host papyrus rafts (tankwas) and fisherman casting nets as hippos grunt at dusk. Hidden gems: 13th‑century rock-hewn churches tucked into alcoves accessible only by goat trails; caves with cross carvings where hermits still fast; colonies of cliff-nesting vultures riding thermals, cleaning carcasses from narrow ledges. Stats that matter: 4,900 feet from rim to river at its deepest; 12 miles across where meanders undercut and set-backs retreat the rim; rainy season raises river height 15 feet, turning gentle flows into a brown fist punching west. Anecdotes: Italian soldiers in the 1930s building a suspension bridge still used, a skeleton that saved days of detour; pilgrims trekking to monasteries, balancing honey wine jugs on heads; the “Blue Nile Rally” of vintage cars in the 1960s, engines boiling over half-way down, drivers siphoning radiator water to drink. Geologically, the gorge slices through layer cake: basalt flows from Miocene eruptions atop softer Mesozoic sandstones and limestones, so slope failures carve broad benches that widen the canyon profile like steps in a stadium. During kremt (rainy season), mist veils the width, lightning stabs rims, and waterfalls materialize on walls; during belg (short rains), grass greens edges while the river shrinks to reveal hippo sandbars. At night, hyenas yip in villages; at dawn, the gorge exhales fog that lifts to show cliff faces glowing ochre. The Blue Nile’s gorge is width as pilgrimage and transit, barrier and lifeline, a continent’s artery cutting its own cathedral into basalt and time.

#10: Hells Canyon, Idaho–Oregon, USA (length ≈ 95 mi; up to 10 mi wide; max depth ≈ 7,900 ft rim-to-river)

Hells Canyon slices 95 miles along the Snake River, claiming North America’s deepest river-carved chasm at nearly 7,900 feet of relief where Seven Devils peaks loom, yet it also sprawls to widths of roughly 10 miles where benches and side canyons step back in a rugged mosaic. Jet boats roar upstream through rapids with names like Granite and Wild Sheep while rafters bounce in 14-foot inflatables, dwarfed by columnar basalts etched with 10,000-year-old petroglyphs of bighorn sheep and hunters. The width shelters ecosystems stacked: cactus on south-facing Idaho slopes, Douglas fir and huckleberries on Oregon’s north aspects, alpine meadows up top, chukar partridge scurrying in talus mid-slope. Hidden relics: homesteader orchards now feral, apples still ripening for bear; mines abandoned with ore carts rusting in alcoves; Chinese miner graves from the 1880s massacres, history carved in stone and silence. Stats mix geology and grit: the Snake River drops about 8 feet per mile here, slicing Columbia River Basalts laid down 15 million years ago; terraces 3,000 feet above current river level mark ancient floodplains sculpted when Ice Age meltwater pulses barreled through. Anecdotes: a mail boat captain who ran the canyon for 40 years without flipping until a freak hole grabbed his bow; a fire lookout who radioed lightning strikes on ridges five miles apart in the same minute; hunters who pack elk quarters up trails that climb 5,000 feet in six miles, cursing every switchback and loving every view. Winter snows lock upper rims while the river corridor stays open, a warm island for mule deer and steelhead anglers; summer bakes the canyon floor at 110°F but leaves alpine lakes chilly enough to numb feet. The Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) tell stories of Coyote carving the canyon, scattering basalt pillars like toys; the Forest Service tells you to carry a fire pan and pack out your poop—different eras, same respect for a place that punishes carelessness. At dawn, fog snakes along the river like a ghost echo of its name; by noon, golden eagles ride thermals up, crossing from rim to rim in minutes, a feat that makes 10 miles feel trivial until you start hiking. Hells Canyon’s width is motion: water, wind, hooves, hulls—everything moving through space carved wider by time and the occasional, spectacular landslide.

Width is more than a number flung across a map; it’s wind picking up speed across a four‑mile bench, a thunderstorm brewing on one rim while sunlight cooks the other, a culture growing crops mid-slope while condors surf thermals from wall to wall. These ten canyons carry rivers, myths, minerals, and migrations in chasms so broad they blur horizon lines and ecological zones. Their metrics—18 miles, 17 miles, 12 miles—anchor our sense of scale, but their true breadth lies in layered stories: ghost towns and gondolas, lava caps and living bridges, prayer flags and petroglyphs. Hike, raft, glide, or simply stand and stare—the widest canyons don’t just drop; they open, and in that opening they hold entire worlds between their rims.