Countries With the Most National Parks: The Top 10, Counted Down

Australia has the most national parks of any country, with about 685, followed by Thailand with 156 and India with 107, counting the areas each government officially designates as a “national park”, as listed by their park authorities and compiled in Wikipedia’s national park lists (checked September 2026). Brazil (about 75), Russia (71), Mexico (67), the United States (63), Indonesia and Ukraine (57 each), and Canada and Norway (48 each) complete the top ten, with ties making it eleven countries. The ranking measures how many parks carry the title, not how much land they protect, which is why Canada’s 48 parks cover more ground than Thailand’s 156.

Why China Has Five National Parks and Australia Has 685

No single global register settles this question, because “national park” is a legal title that each government hands out on its own terms. The International Union for Conservation of Nature treats a national park as its Category II protected area, a large natural zone managed for ecosystem protection and public visits, and it counted 6,555 sites meeting that definition in 2006. Plenty of places with the name do not fit the category. The Swiss National Park is managed as a strict nature reserve (Category Ia), and England’s New Forest National Park is a protected landscape (Category V) with villages and farms inside it. Indonesia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom all use the title for areas that fall outside the IUCN definition.

This list therefore counts titles. The approach produces some surprising gaps. China, which protects enormous areas as nature reserves, has only five national parks, because the title was reserved for a new unified system whose first designation list was released on 12 October 2021. Other countries sit just below the top ten: Chile has 46 national parks covering about 21% of its territory, Turkey has 44 (the first, Yozgat Pine Grove, was declared on 5 February 1958), Colombia has 43 national natural parks inside a wider system of 59 protected areas, Venezuela had 43 in 2007, and Finland has 41, all run by Metsähallitus.

Joint Tenth and Joint Eighth: Norway, Canada, Indonesia and Ukraine

Norway (48). Norway has 41 national parks on the mainland and 7 on Svalbard. Its parks are stricter than most: nearly all motor vehicles are banned inside them, and roads, lodges and visitor centres sit outside the boundaries, although the right to roam still lets hikers and skiers camp freely. Sør-Spitsbergen on Svalbard is the largest at 13,286 km², though only 5,141 km² of that is land. Hardangervidda, at 3,422 km², is the biggest on the mainland, and Østmarka, created in 2023, is the newest.

Canada (48). Parks Canada manages 37 national parks and 11 national park reserves. Banff, established in 1885, was the first, and Parks Canada itself, founded on 19 May 1911, is the oldest national park service in the world. Canada’s modest count hides vast size. Wood Buffalo National Park, created in 1922 across northeastern Alberta and the southern Northwest Territories to protect free-roaming wood bison, covers 44,741 km², which is larger than Switzerland. Our guide to Banff National Park covers the park where the system began.

Indonesia (57). Indonesia created its first five national parks in 1980. The count reached 41 by 2003, jumped to 50 when nine parks were added in 2004, gained Mount Tambora in 2015 and three more in Sumatra, Sulawesi and Bangka in 2016, and reached 57 when Mamberamo Foja in Papua was upgraded in 2024. Six of the parks are World Heritage Sites. Lorentz National Park in Papua, at 25,056 km², is the largest in Southeast Asia and runs from mangrove coast to the equatorial glaciers below Puncak Jaya (4,884 m). The islands of Komodo National Park protect the world’s largest lizard.

Ukraine (57). Ukraine’s parks carry the title “national nature park”, and 57 are listed. The first, Carpathian National Nature Park, was established on 3 June 1980 in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, with its headquarters in Yaremche; Hoverla, at 2,061 m the highest point in Ukraine, stands on its border. Most of the rest came after independence, including 18 designated in 2009 alone. The largest, Podilski Tovtry in Khmelnytskyi Oblast, was created by presidential decree on 27 July 1996 and covers about 80,178 hectares. Together the parks protect roughly 11,100 km², a much smaller area than Indonesia’s 57.

Seventh to Fifth: The United States, Mexico and Russia

United States (63). The country that invented the idea ranks only seventh, because it uses the title sparingly. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill creating Yellowstone in 1872, generally regarded as the first national park in the world. Mackinac followed in 1875 (it was decommissioned in 1895), then Sequoia and Yosemite in 1890, and the Organic Act of 1916 created the National Park Service. Today the service runs 433 units, but only 63 are designated national parks; the rest are national monuments, historic sites, seashores and other categories. Congress, not an agency, creates each national park. For the park that started it all, see our Yellowstone National Park guide.

Mexico (67). Mexico recognises 67 federally protected national parks, administered by the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas (CONANP). They lie in 23 of the 31 states and in Mexico City, but together cover only 1,432,024 hectares, or 0.73% of the country, because many are small forested mountains near cities. The oldest, Desierto de los Leones, sits inside Mexico City. President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada made it a forest reserve in 1876 to protect springs supplying the capital, and President Venustiano Carranza declared it a national park in November 1917.

Russia (71). Russia had no national parks at all until 1983. The Soviet system relied on zapovedniks (strict nature reserves) and zakazniks, and the idea of parks open to visitors took hold only after a group of Soviet geographers led by Innokenti Gerasimov toured Yellowstone and the Great Smoky Mountains in 1961. The first two parks, Sochinsky on the Black Sea coast and Losiny Ostrov in Moscow, both opened in 1983. Losiny Ostrov (“Elk Island”) is the largest urban park in Europe, where moose still roam within the city limits. Russia’s 71 parks now cover more than 150,000 km².

Fourth and Third: Brazil’s Amazon Parks and India’s Tiger Reserves

Brazil (about 75). President Getúlio Vargas created Itatiaia National Park, on the border of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, on 14 June 1937 under the forest code of 1934. Early parks protected scenic landmarks near coastal cities, and two of them, Sete Quedas and Paulo Afonso, were later submerged by hydroelectric dams. The first Amazon park, Amazônia National Park on the Tapajós River, came in 1974. There were 18 parks in 1978, 33 in 1990 and 68 by 2012. The biggest is Tumucumaque Mountains National Park in Amapá and Pará, declared on 23 August 2002; at more than 38,800 km² it is the world’s largest tropical forest national park and bigger than Belgium. Access is a weak point: in 2012 only 26 of the 68 parks were officially open to visitors.

India (107). India’s parks are IUCN Category II areas, and there are 107 of them covering 44,402.95 km², or 1.35% of the country. The first, now called Jim Corbett National Park, was established in 1936 in the Nainital district of present-day Uttarakhand and was the first to come under Project Tiger. As recently as 1970 India had only five national parks. The Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 and Project Tiger in 1973 set off the expansion, and another 75 parks, covering 16,608 km², are proposed in the Protected Area Network Report. Madhya Pradesh has the most of any state, with 11, followed by the Andaman and Nicobar Islands with 9.

Second and First: Thailand’s 156 Parks and Australia’s State Systems

Thailand (156). Thailand’s National Park Act was passed in 1961, and Khao Yai became the first park by royal proclamation on 18 September 1962. It was named an ASEAN Heritage Park in 1984 and, on 14 July 2005, inscribed as part of the Dong Phayayen–Khao Yai Forest Complex World Heritage Site. The first marine park, Khao Sam Roi Yot, followed in 1966, and in 1993 the service split into terrestrial and marine divisions. As of 2019 Thailand had 156 national parks alongside 58 wildlife sanctuaries, 67 non-hunting areas and 120 forest parks, together covering almost 31% of the kingdom. Since 2002 they have been run by the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation. The count comes at a cost: island parks such as Ko Samet have been criticised for excessive bungalow development, and northern parks suffer from illegal swidden farming and poaching.

Australia (about 685). Australia’s lead comes from federation. Apart from six parks run by the Commonwealth, including Kakadu and Uluru-Kata Tjuta, national parks are created and managed by the six states and two territories, and many of those systems predate the 1901 federation. Each state names parks freely, so small coastal reserves, rainforest gorges and desert ranges all carry the title. Western Australia alone had 112 national parks in 2023, from John Forrest, proclaimed in 1900, to Pimbee and Bunuba, proclaimed in 2023; 28 were created there in a single year, 2004.

The first was Royal National Park, 29 km south of central Sydney, proclaimed on 26 April 1879 as simply “National Park”, seven years after Yellowstone. It was renamed in 1955 after Elizabeth II passed through by train during her 1954 tour. At the other end of the scale, Kakadu in the Northern Territory covers 19,804 km², about the size of Wales, and is managed jointly by Parks Australia and its Aboriginal traditional owners, whose ancestors have lived there for around 60,000 years. Only Munga-Thirri–Simpson Desert National Park is larger. As of May 2025, all of Australia’s protected areas together covered about 22.57% of its land, and by 2022 Indigenous Protected Areas made up more than 49% of the protected estate.

Taken together, the ranking says more about how countries govern land than about how much wild land they have. Federal systems with many small state-run parks (Australia) or dense lists of forest parks (Thailand, India) rise to the top, as does a country that built most of its system in two decades (Ukraine), while countries that save the title for very large areas (Canada, Norway, the United States) or that only began using it recently (Russia in 1983, China in 2021) rank lower than the land they protect would suggest.