You would be forgiven, if you thought that you had accidentally walked into the very realm of ‘candy land’. But the truth is – this kaleidoscopic landscape belongs to the Zhangye Danxia Landform Geological Park, in the Gansu province of China. The vivacity of the views that you can see from the images, are courtesy of at least 24 millions of years of orogenic movement or tectonic plate movements that had their effect on Earth’s lithosphere (comprising of minerals and sandstone). During such an expansive epoch, natural phenomena like winds, rain, erosion and even oxidization had their influence on the rock formations, thus endowing them with grandiose vibrancy and disparate shapes.

In essence, what you see is real (with minute post-processing effects), so much so that even United Nations had declared the traversable park as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2010. So, it doesn’t really come as a surprise that the national geopark has risen in renown – to be the top tourist spot for the proximate north-western Chinese city of Zhangye.

Images with lesser post-processing effects –

Via: HuffingtonPost