The world’s best cities for green spaces and nature in 2026

🍃 Green spaces score: 94 percent

Not only is Bath surrounded by the verdant Gloucestershire countryside, but the city itself is peppered with both small green pockets and vast expanses, such as the impressive eighteenth-century Prior Park Landscape Garden, owned by the National Trust. 

Bathgate Landscape Partnership has compiled a comprehensive guide on the best walks – both long and short – to do in and around the city, and Bath’s commitment to green spaces is a priority on Bath and North East Somerset Council’s agenda. In fact, the 2025-35 Greener Places Plan outlines a ‘green infrastructure framework’, which ensures the city ‘has a more sustainable, nature-rich and climate resilient future’, utilising everything from parks and gardens to the canals (blue and green corridors) and sustainable drainage. 

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🍃 Green spaces score: 89 percent

Chicago is a hub of towering glass skyscrapers, but it’s also abundant with green space. One of the city’s many nicknames is ‘the city in a garden’, and the numbers back it up: the Chicago Park District outlines that the city is home to more than 600 parks spread out over 8,800 acres. The Second City does some innovative stuff with its public green spaces, too – take the Wild Mile, the flagship project of non-profit Urban Rivers. It’s the world’s first floating eco-park, with habitats mimicking a natural wetland ecosystem, one that might have been found in the Chicagoland area long before the city was developed. Wander along the riverbanks and you’ll find accessible boardwalks meandering through dense foliage. Cool, right?

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🍃 Green spaces score: 88 percent

Montreal isn’t just a hub lauded and routinely recognised for the expanse and quality of its green space – it’s actually named after it, too. That’s right: back in 1535, French explorer Jacques Cartier dubbed the city’s famous triple-peaked hill ‘Mount Royal’, and it’s thought that the name Montreal derived from this, replacing its previous name Ville-Marie. 

Within this glorious park, which stretches like a blanket over 190 hectares, you’ll not only find trails to hike or bike in summer, and spots for cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, but also ecologically diverse woodlands, wetlands, Beaver Lake, and more than 180 different bird species. The city is also home to intricately manicured Botanical Gardens and Parc Jean-Drapeau, which sweeps across the Sainte-Hélène and Notre-Dame islands. Clearly, Montreal has found the perfect balance between its greyscale grid system and some much-needed swathes of green. 

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🍃 Green spaces score: 87 percent

Looking at the stats alone, Riga has impressive green credentials: according to HUGSI.green, a website that analyses greenery based on satellite data, 47 percent of the city’s land is green space and it also has 39 percent tree coverage. Riga is also part of the EU’s local mayor-led ‘Green City Accord’, and has outlined its commitments to safeguarding city parks to support the city’s microclimate and counter the urban heat island effect (a phenomenon where cities’ abundance of tarmac and concrete mean they trap much more heat than the countryside). 

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🍃 Green spaces score: 87 percent

Australia’s second-largest city, also known as Naarm, was ranked as Time Out’s best city in the whole world last month, and its access to nature and green spaces was definitely a factor in that outcome. The locals really love their green space here – in fact, back in 2018, the city gave 70,000 trees their own email addresses so locals could monitor their condition, but instead, they wrote love letters. That’s right – notes addressed to various trees across Melbourne were compiled by ABC, with Melburnians asking them questions like ‘would you consider your fingers to be your branches or your roots?’. Cute, right?

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🍃 Green spaces score: 86 percent

There are scenic cities, and then there’s Cape Town. The city is nestled in a valley known as the Cape Floral Region – one of the world’s most biologically diverse regions and a Unesco World Heritage Site, divided into 13 different clusters, including Table Mountain National Park and the Garden Route complex. In total, the clusters amount to 1,094,741 hectares, and according to Cape Nature, 70 percent of the plants that grow here can’t be found anywhere else in the world. No wonder 86 percent of Capetonians are grateful for this on their doorstep.

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🍃 Green spaces score: 86 percent

Nature has always been a priority in Singapore. Since 1967, the goal has been for the island to become a ‘Garden City’, and right now, nearly 50 percent of its land is carpeted by green space – according to the Telegraph, the blooming, 250-acre Gardens by the Bay (Singapore’s green lung), which was built on reclaimed land, is integral to this vision. The aim now is to become the world’s greenest city by 2030; a sustainable Green Plan that will see 1 million trees planted in the city and ensure that every household is no further than a 10-minute walk from a green space.

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🍃 Green spaces score: 86 percent

Colombia’s second city topped last year’s ranking of the best hubs for green space, with 92 percent of locals rating its natural offerings highly. Though that approval score dipped by six percent this year, the city’s abundant and innovative green spaces still garnered an impressive 86 percent approval score from locals. The star of Medellín’s nature-packed show is undoubtedly its ‘green corridors’. The metropolis exists in such consistently high daytime temperatures that it’s known as the ‘city of eternal spring’, but these strategically plotted plants – first added along its concrete-heavy streets in 2016 – meant the city’s average temperature fell by 2C in the three years post. Read more about what makes Medellin such a nature-friendly city here. 

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🍃 Green spaces score: 86 percent

The Swedish capital has long been one of the greenest cities in Europe. It was the first city to be awarded the European Green Capital title in 2010 and has maintained impressive environmental standards since. According to a report from the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, 84 percent of Stockholm County residents live in a ‘15-minute city’, which includes access to a green space. It’s also home to the world’s first National City Park, the heart of which is Royal Djurgården, stretching from Sörentorp and Ulriksdal to Djurgården and the island Fjäderholmarna. This vast green lung is home to ancient oak forests, rock swimming and bike trails. 

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🍃 Green spaces score: 85 percent

Rounding out the top 10 best cities for green space is Hamburg. So, why do 85 percent of locals rate it so highly? Well, for the last century, the city has been modelled on a sprawling design project called GrünesNetzHamburg, or ‘Green Network Hamburg’, which links the city’s waterways, public gardens, suburban parks and tree-lined streets into a leafy, interconnected web. Hamburg is also an industry leader when it comes to green roofing and offers residents and businesses incentives to transform their properties.

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Here are the rest of the world’s 20 best cities for green space and access to nature in 2026, according to locals

• Beijing, China (84 percent)
• Vienna, Austria (83 percent) 
• Helsinki, Finland (83 percent)
• Krakow, Poland (82 percent)
• Oslo, Norway (81 percent)
• Seoul, South Korea (80 percent)
• Tallinn, Estonia (79 percent) 
• Auckland, New Zealand (78 percent)
• Luxembourg, Luxembourg (78 percent)
• Sao Paolo, Brazil (76 percent)

Read the full ranking of Time Out’s Best Cities with Intrepid Travel.

Ready to see the world’s best cities for yourself? Book your next trip with Intrepid Travel and start planning the ultimate adventure today. Renowned for the ‘best small group trips’ around, Intrepid is all about locally led adventures that find the sweet spot between authentic cultural experiences and responsible tourism. Trips span more than 100 destinations – from trekking the Inca Trail in Peru to street-food discoveries in Japan and desert camping beneath the stars in Morocco.

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