"Simply the best": searching for the world's top geotourism destinations

Several attempts have been made over recent years to list the world’s top tourism, nature or geological sites. In this presentation an attempt will be made to identify the world’s 10 top geotourism destinations, with alternative sites in some cases, using the criteria of visual impact, site quality, educational potential and reasonable tourist accessibility. An additional requirement is to ensure that the list presents sites that are both internally geodiverse and represents the world’s geodiversity as far as this is possible in a limited assessment. The list has also been designed to include sites from all the continents. Most of the sites are geomorphologically based. The proposed list of sites is intended to be the start rather than the end of a process that may eventually lead to an internationally endorsed list of the world’s top geotourism destinations that can be used to raise the public profile of geology/geomorphology, geotourism and geoheritage.