Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

The Rainbow Atlas

Rate this book
Take a colorful tour of 500 eye-poppingly brilliant spots around the world with The Rainbow Atlas.

Spanning natural phenomena, architectural wonders, art installations, and more, the contents of this book range from the pink salt lakes of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula to the eye-catching home façades of Cobh, Ireland.

Spectacularly colorful and packed with dreamy photographs, The Rainbow Atlas introduces readers to the most vibrant landmarks the world has to offer.

Entries offer surprising facts and expert advice on when to visit these surreal settings.
Provides readers with hours of inspiration for their future adventures
Explore and learn about places like China's Rainbow Mountains and the colorful streets of Cape Town.

The Rainbow Atlas is organized by longitude, creating fun and unexpected juxtapositions.

Paired with stunning photographs of each location, The Rainbow Atlas advises readers of the best time of year to visit each spot and explains the particularities of each riotous rainbow locale.

Spectacularly colorful and packed with dreamy rainbow content
The perfect and unique gift for adventure seekers, color enthusiasts, photographers, rainbow chasers, travel addicts, and explorers everywhere
Add it to your collection of books like Atlas An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton; The Bucket 1000 Adventures Big & Small by Kath Stathers; and The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St Clair

Hardcover

31 people are currently reading
288 people want to read

About the author

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
39 (29%)
4 stars
39 (29%)
3 stars
37 (28%)
2 stars
12 (9%)
1 star
4 (3%)
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
Profile Image for Sean Sweeney.
45 reviews
July 4, 2020
This book would have benefited from a review by a fresh set of eyes before it went to print. Supposedly organized by longitude, I was reading about places in Central and South America when all of a sudden...Uzbekistan! A simple error that should have been caught. Another criticism is that some incredible sounding places don’t warrant a picture, while a full two-page spread is given to a dessert museum...

Enjoyed reading it, but could have been improved.
May 9, 2021
It is a coffee table book - but it does a bad job even at that.

It appears that the author, reviewer, editor all failed in their basic geography classes. For a book that is organized by longitudes, it is full of errors. While glossy colorful pictures are good to look at, the fact that the book contains very basic errors, makes it hard for me to trust the research behind the book.

Most probably would land on coffee table in the waiting area of a struggling dentist in suburban Dallas.
Profile Image for Marisa.
193 reviews20 followers
September 14, 2021
I mean…it’s a travel book, dedicated to the world’s most colorful places…I’m going to love it. Also, Columbus (and the Midwest in general) now seems like a vague, gray and brown block town without any sense of style. Sorry not sorry 🤷‍♀️
Profile Image for OutlawPoet.
1,833 reviews68 followers
July 28, 2020
This is a travel book full of glorious color.

The Rainbow Atlas takes you around the world - and gives you every color ever imagined.

From colorful shotgun houses in New Orleans to entire rainbow villages, you'll find vistas that simply make you smile - especially in these dark days.

While travel right now is just a dream, you'll definitely make plans for the future. And some of these places may be in your own back yard.

Beautiful and inspirational. Such wanderlust!

*Review Copy provided by the Publisher
Profile Image for Jeanne.
1,522 reviews
July 13, 2024
Stunning photographs on a colorful worldwide tour.
Profile Image for Alyssa King.
149 reviews2 followers
January 5, 2021
Not the best travel photography book I’ve read- the arrangements on the pages made me think of my high school yearbook class, and the book/pages/photos were far too small.
Profile Image for Nic.
376 reviews11 followers
June 7, 2024
While there are some truly gorgeous photos, it could’ve been so much better.

Why there were so many places they described as being beautiful but included no photos of is a mystery. And then certain places received 2 pages of pictures, fine- but have photos for all of these colorful places— that’s the whole point of the book.

I got annoyed at the constant addition of the authors in stereotypical instagram style shots. Ah, incredible naturally occurring pastel beach? Woman standing in a goofy position right in the middle. A pink desert… and oh look, another woman. “The most incredible paintings on these buildings” blocked by another woman.
Profile Image for Nahia.
782 reviews101 followers
December 4, 2021
Los sitios están bien, me han entrado ganas de viajar a unos cuantos. Pero el libro no me ha gustado tanto. Sobre todo porque no hay fotos de todos los lugares pero de otros hay hasta 5 fotos o más. Y el orden... Se supone que el libro está dividido en coordenadas pero de repente, cuando está en la zona este de México y toda esa zona de América te encuentras Uzbekistán o Azerbaiyán o lugares así que, hasta donde yo sé, están bastante lejos de la zona en la que supuestamente se están centrando en esa sección.
Profile Image for Taylor Fuller.
4 reviews4 followers
March 3, 2020
This book is my pride and joy and I hope that everyone who picks it up falls in love with the vibrant destinations featured in the pages!
Profile Image for christinemm.
107 reviews1 follower
April 13, 2020

Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

I read The Rainbow Atlas for inspiration for color and to see visually interesting landscapes. This is an armchair travel book with 500 locations organized by longitude which stretch across the world. Not every location has a photograph. This is not a large format coffee table books so some of the photographs are as small as 2 x 2“ or 1.5 x 2“. While others are whole page or sometimes more than one page in size. Each location has about one paragraph of text describing the place. This book is filled with colorful eye candy and I enjoyed it.

I plan to use this for short visual escape reading and for inspiration to paint abstracted landscapes. I can use this as a starting point for research. I was curious about some of the locations, so I went on the Internet to view even more photos of the same places.

This is a hard cover book and I appreciate that the pages are nice and thick with richly saturated photographs. Rating 4 stars = Like It.
Profile Image for Luciana.
893 reviews1 follower
February 1, 2021
What a great book for armchair travel!

I loved the format; the globe was divided by longitudinal lines, so, for example, you would read & see photos all about the west coast, then I loved the pictures (much like instagram), I loved the precis written on each picture, I loved how a lot of the book was based on colours found in our natural world not just colour provided by humans, basically, I loved the book! The book was also a comfortable size to hold.

I realize I now have many more places I added to my bucket list that I'd like to visit!

The only reason it got a 4 out of 5 is I believe it should have been better edited. One country, for sure, was definitely in the wrong spot perhaps there were others.
Profile Image for Elizabeth.
706 reviews1 follower
May 2, 2023
Frustrating Book.

First, and most importantly: If you are going to have the word 'atlas' to describe your book, you REALLY need to not make geographical errors. The book is arranged by longitude, and in the section for the longitude that covers the Caribbean region, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan show up! They confused East with West. Someone should have caught that.

Second, yet also important: If you are going to have a book about beautiful places, YOU HAVE TO SHOW A PICTURE OF EACH ONE! Maybe put fewer than 500 things yet SHOW A PICTURE of all of them! There were so many "this neighborhood has colorful houses or graffiti" entries. Maybe cut some of those out for more pictures?
Profile Image for Jayna.
16 reviews
February 1, 2024
Great concept and contains some amazing places and beautiful photos, but I was hoping for a little more emphasis on the photography side rather than the travel. There were quite a few places that were described with no photo at all, and many with a small photo. I think this would've been greatly improved by choosing half the number of colorful places and including a big photograph for each. There's a lot of street art and colorfully painted beach towns that I think could've been narrowed down to the best examples of each.
It is split into sections by longitude, which is a neat concept that works well here.
2 reviews
January 14, 2021
Loved this beautiful and inspiring book but there were a few errors (multiple eastern locations mistakenly listed in the western latitudes) and a few comments that showcased the author’s (white & western) bias. I also would have loved for EVERY location to include a photo. Overall I would recommend this book to anyone looking to be inspired by natural and man-made beauty around the world and/or looking for incredible travel ideas, and I would suggest future editions be more closely copy-edited.
Profile Image for Kelly.
320 reviews40 followers
February 13, 2026
The photographs in the e-book version are about the size of postage stamps, so the formatting is a failure.

Each location only gets about two or three sentences of description and yet much of it is filler, telling you how breathtaking and spectacular everything is, which isn't information. (I expect it all to look great.) If you're only going to use two sentences, use them to tell me something I don't know!

Smacks of someone just rewording the main captions on a travel website. (Not saying that's what they did; it's just how it reads.)
Profile Image for Lenore.
629 reviews2 followers
October 24, 2021
Love the gorgeous coloured photographs which seem to fulfill the promise of the title. My only problem with this book was with descriptions that were not attached to photos. The book is organized by longitude and a lot of reviews claimed that there were several blatant errors connected with this geographical organization. I must confess that the photographs and descriptions were what drew me to the book, not the organization so I didn't even notice.
Profile Image for Holly M.
158 reviews4 followers
March 27, 2025
Beautiful book - visual treat but also disappointed that all the places mentioned are not pictured. Some pictures could be better (The Keukenhof gardens shows a field of tulips that could be anywhere instead of the gorgeous gardens themselves for example, and Cinque Terra deserves it's own two page spread as others have.)
Profile Image for Rachel.
71 reviews
November 25, 2020
Beautiful photos and good resource for spots to check out when planning a trip. The book is divided into longitude sections. Two or three times they had locations from the Middle East in the section with South America. Surprised those weren't caught by the editor.
47 reviews1 follower
June 7, 2021
Beautiful guide for all the most colorful travels. I enjoyed learning about different parts of the world. The only con for me was that not all of the places were pictured. I would think that for a book about color, photographs would be absolutely important, but they were often missing.
Profile Image for Audrey.
1,415 reviews56 followers
September 14, 2020
So many beautiful places added to my bucket list of travel. A bright beautiful collection to inspire, especially if travel is limited and you want to experience it vicariously through these photos.
Profile Image for Linda.
1,046 reviews13 followers
April 10, 2021
Beautiful photos. Some of the spots are in Los Angeles and having actually visited the sites, I think the book owes a lot to the great photography.
Profile Image for Angelica.
176 reviews12 followers
July 29, 2022
Beautiful pictures- so it's too bad not every entry had a picture to go with it. Kind of defeats the purpose
Profile Image for Amanda.
270 reviews25 followers
January 30, 2023
You would think a book (especially a coffee table book) with the words "world's most colorful places" as part of its title would naturally include pictures of each included place, given such a book's reliance on visuals. Oddly, though, that was far from the case with The Rainbow Atlas.

This book left a lot to be desired. As other reviewers have noted, the composition was lacking, particularly due to the fact that for some reason it was deemed that certain locales warranted a picture (or multiple, even) and others did not. There was also the often erroneous arrangement of locales by longitude. It's still unclear why this was done instead of just arranging by region, for example, since this would have guaranteed that places were featured in their accurate parts of the world.

The Rainbow Atlas seemed to promise much but delivered little. A true disappointment through and through.
Profile Image for Nini.
89 reviews1 follower
November 2, 2020
Always fascinated with places worth visiting, celebrating God's creation and man's creativity. Definitely a book for bucket lists, pity though travel is now limited.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.