Parks of the Americas Outside the Usual Lists, From a Mexican Canyon to Patagonia

Established in 1981 in the Sierra Madre Occidental, this park protects Basaseachic Falls, the second-tallest waterfall in Mexico at 246 meters, and the Candameña Canyon whose walls rise as high as 1,640 meters. The trail starts here, in a pine-oak forest with 92 conifer and 76 oak species.

In eastern Jamaica, about 495 square kilometers of mountain forest take their name from the Blue Mountains and from the turkey vulture, locally called the John crow. The park shelters the giant swallowtail butterfly and the endangered Jamaican blackbird, and it was inscribed as a mixed natural and cultural World Heritage Site in 2015.

Founded in 1989 on Basse-Terre, the park protects two-thirds of the island's tropical rainforest and climbs to 1,467 meters at the active volcano La Soufrière. It became a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1992 and includes the Carbet Falls and the Grand Cul-de-Sac Marin mangroves.

Panama's southernmost park covers some 5,790 square kilometers of the natural land bridge between North and South America and holds the Darien Gap, the only break in the Pan-American Highway. It was established in 1980, became a World Heritage Site in 1981, and is still home to two native tribes.

Guyana's only national park, set up in 1929 and enlarged to 242 square miles in 1999, is built around Kaieteur Falls, the largest single-drop waterfall on Earth by volume of water. The golden rocket frog, found nowhere else, breeds only inside particular bromeliad plants here.

Created in 2007, this is the largest national park in France and the European Union, covering about 41 percent of French Guiana. It can be reached only by airplane or by pirogue on the Maroni and Oyapock rivers, and the Wayana, Wayampi, Teko and Aluku keep territories inside it.

Established in 1934 in Misiones Province, the park protects the Argentine side of Iguazu Falls and about 677 square kilometers of subtropical jungle. It became a World Heritage Site in 1984 and faces Brazil's separately run Iguacu National Park across the river.

Covering most of Easter Island, some 3,700 kilometers from mainland Chile, the park was established in 1935 and protects 887 surviving moai carved between about 300 and 1200 AD. Since December 2017 the indigenous Ma'u Henua community has run it, the first arrangement to reinvest park revenue locally.

Off the Aysén Region, this island park was created as a forest reserve in 1967 and became a national park in June 1983. Its high point is the Mentolat volcano at 1,660 meters, about 4,000 millimeters of rain fall each year, and it has no infrastructure at all, so it can be reached only by sea.

The trail ends in the Chacabuco Valley, which links the arid Patagonian steppe with southern beech forest between General Carrera and Cochrane lakes. The park of about 3,045 square kilometers was formally established in 2018 after Tompkins Conservation handed the land to the Chilean state.