Colour wheel

Rainbow Mountains, China

Someone let Mother Nature loose with a paintbrush. For millennia, the Rainbow Mountains have been the canvas for an organic artwork, thanks to changes in the mineral make-up of the layers of sandstone that are the peaks’ base material, leading to the unexpected palette of colours. The mountainsides are dominated by a deep crimson, turned so by an iron-oxide coating, but veins of gold, amber, cobalt and forest-green also stripe them. In the right light, the striations are even more dramatic.

The sandstone deposits that form the multi-coloured exterior existed before the Himalayas came into being. But the mountains themselves were born from the same tectonic shifts that shaped the Himalayan region some 55 million years ago. The range is now part of the Zhangye Danxia Landform Geological Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site about 30 minutes drive from Zhangye in China’s north-western Gansu province.