The Most Beautiful Film Locations in the World
221 places in 58 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful film locations in the world are Petra (Jordan), Meteora (Greece) and Salar de Uyuni (Bolivia). The list covers 221 film locations in 58 countries. France has the most, with 36. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A place earns its role on screen when it can tell part of the story without a word of dialogue. A palace says power, a dam says scale, an abandoned island says that something went wrong. The best film locations look extraordinary from any angle a camera might choose, and they keep that quality after the crew has gone, which is why audiences still go looking for them.
This collection mixes stately backdrops with industrial giants. Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna brings its Baroque facades and formal gardens, and the Dune of Pilat on the French Atlantic coast offers the tallest sand dune in Europe. The Verzasca Dam in Switzerland is the concrete wall from which James Bond bungee-jumps at the start of GoldenEye, and the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, joined by their skybridge, appear in Entrapment. Hashima Island in Japan, a deserted mining settlement of concrete blocks, inspired the villain's lair in Skyfall, and Mount Rushmore set the stage for the climax of North by Northwest.
Places here are chosen for how they look and ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a spot on the map, and the section opens by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Petra | Archaeological site | Jordan | ✓ |
| 2 | Meteora | Rock formation | Greece | ✓ |
| 3 | Salar de Uyuni | Salt flat | Bolivia | |
| 4 | Angkor Wat | Archaeological site | Cambodia | ✓ |
| 5 | Skellig Michael | Island | Ireland | ✓ |
| 6 | Machu Picchu | Archaeological site | Peru | |
| 7 | Lençóis Maranhenses National Park | Dune | Brazil | ✓ |
| 8 | Neuschwanstein Castle | Palace | Germany | ✓ |
| 9 | Fiordland National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 10 | Huangshan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 11 | Colosseum | Archaeological site | Italy | |
| 12 | Mount Olympus | Mountain | Greece | |
| 13 | Louvre Museum | Museum | France | |
| 14 | Mount Rushmore | Monument | United States | |
| 15 | Taipei 101 | Skyscraper | Taiwan | |
| 16 | Petronas Towers | Skyscraper | Malaysia | |
| 17 | Uluru | Rock formation | Australia | |
| 18 | Niagara Falls | Waterfall | Canada | |
| 19 | Hoover Dam | Dam | United States | |
| 20 | Schönbrunn Palace | Palace | Austria | ✓ |
| 21 | Mount Rainier | Volcano | United States | |
| 22 | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao | Museum | Spain | |
| 23 | Lake Baikal | Lake | Russia | ✓ |
| 24 | Hashima Island | Abandoned mine | Japan | ✓ |
| 25 | Mount Everest | Mountain | Nepal | |
| 26 | Masai Mara | Protected area | Kenya | |
| 27 | Dead Sea | Lake | Israel | |
| 28 | Krak des Chevaliers | Castle | Syria | ✓ |
| 29 | La Scala | Opera house | Italy | |
| 30 | Lake Garda | Lake | Italy |
01 Petra
Jordan · 32.1 km from Ma'an30.329° N 35.442° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay For centuries Petra existed mainly in local Bedouin knowledge and old texts, unseen by European travelers, until the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt talked his way in in 1812 by posing as a Muslim pilgrim — the disguise mattered because outsiders weren't otherwise let anywhere near the site.
Did you know? The Monastery, Ad Deir, is the largest monument at Petra, about 45 metres tall and 50 metres wide.
02 Meteora
Μετέωρα
Greece39.712° N 21.627° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by shogun from Pixabay Monastic life came here before any monastery did. From around the 11th century, hermits climbed into natural fissures and caves high in these sandstone pillars using removable rope ladders — inaccessibility itself was the point, a way of withdrawing from the world that the rock simply handed them.
Did you know? The Holy Trinity monastery was a filming location for the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, and Linkin Park named a 2003 album after Meteora.
03 Salar de Uyuni
Bolivia20.333° S 67.700° W
Image by WaSZI from Pixabay Salar de Uyuni is not a desert that happens to be white — it is the exposed, dried-out bottom of a chain of prehistoric lakes (geologists call the last big one Lake Tauca) that repeatedly filled and evaporated over tens of thousands of years. Each cycle left another sheet of salt, and today those layers stack up to 10 meters thick over an area the size of a small country.
Did you know? According to Aymara legend, the flat formed from the tears and milk of Tunupa, a mountain deserted by her giant husband; many locals prefer the name Salar de Tunupa.
04 Angkor Wat
Cambodia · 5.4 km from Siem Reap13.412° N 103.867° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by The_5ifth from Pixabay Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument on Earth and the one building every Cambodian knows. It appears on the national flag. King Suryavarman II commissioned it in the first half of the 12th century as the state temple of his capital, Yaśodharapura, and dedicated it to Vishnu. It was most likely also intended as his mausoleum.
Did you know? The temple was built from an estimated five to ten million sandstone blocks, the heaviest weighing about 1.5 tonnes.
05 Skellig Michael
Ireland51.771° N 10.541° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by NakNakNak from Pixabay Around the 6th century, a small group of monks chose the more punishing of Ireland's two available forms of isolation. Egypt had deserts to retreat into; Ireland didn't, so ascetics who wanted the same kind of hardship looked instead for the most inaccessible ground they could find, and a jagged rock rising out of the Atlantic 12 kilometers off the Kerry coast qualified.
Did you know? In 823 Vikings raided the island and carried off its abbot, Eitgal, who died of hunger in captivity; a second attack followed in 838.
06 Machu Picchu
Peru13.163° S 72.546° W
Draceane · CC BY-SA 4.0 Machu Picchu sits on a narrow saddle between two peaks in the Andes above the Urubamba River, which loops around the site on three sides at the foot of cliffs some 450 metres high. Morning mist rises out of the gorge and drifts across the terraces, and Huayna Picchu, the sharp peak behind the ruins, appears and disappears in it.
Did you know? At midday on 11 November and 30 January the sun stands almost directly above the Intihuatana stone, so its pillar casts no shadow.
07 Lençóis Maranhenses National Park
Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses
Brazil2.483° S 43.133° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Julius Dadalti · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lençóis Maranhenses means "bedsheets of Maranhão" — the name comes straight from the shape of the dunes, whose parallel ridges look like a tangle of linens left out to dry. That image already hints at the park's real trick: this looks like a desert, but it isn't one.
Did you know? The dunes served as a backdrop for the Brazilian film House of Sand and for scenes in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
08 Neuschwanstein Castle
Schloss Neuschwanstein
Germany47.557° N 10.749° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by derwiki from Pixabay The name suggests a medieval stronghold; the building is closer to a 19th-century stage set with plumbing. Ludwig II commissioned it in 1868, right after the Austro-Prussian War had stripped Bavaria of real independence and left him a king with a crown but shrinking power — and what he built instead of political influence was a retreat modelled on the operas of Richard Wagner, whom he'd idolised since adolescence.
Did you know? Ludwig II spent only 172 days in the palace he had dreamed of, and it was called New Hohenschwangau until after his death.
09 Fiordland National Park
New Zealand45.386° S 167.347° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay 2 million hectares of temperate rainforest and 14 fjords gouged out by glaciers that retreated long enough ago for forest to reclaim nearly every slope down to the waterline. Rudyard Kipling once called Milford Sound the eighth wonder of the world, and the sound alone gets roughly 6,000 to 8,000 millimetres of rain a year — several times London's annual total — spread across some 180 days.
Did you know? Its mountains and fiords have stood in for other worlds in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Alien: Covenant.
10 Huangshan
People's Republic of China30.125° N 118.167° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12412158 from Pixabay Huangshan's peaks are granite, not the limestone karst that shapes so much of scenic China, and that matters: granite fractures into sheer, blocky faces rather than smooth curves, which is why the mountain reads as a forest of vertical spires rather than rolling hills.
Did you know? Some 60,000 stone steps have been cut into the mountain, and nobody knows exactly when the oldest of them were laid.
11 Colosseum
Colosseo
Italy · 1.2 km from Rome41.890° N 12.492° E
Image by MARTINOPHUC from Pixabay The eighty-foot drop beneath the Colosseum's sand floor is where the real machinery of the show lived.
Did you know? Since 2000, Rome has lit the Colosseum in gold whenever a death sentence anywhere in the world is commuted.
12 Mount Olympus
Όλυμπος
Greece · 24.7 km from Katerini40.083° N 22.350° E
- biosphere reserve
Image by zremus from Pixabay Mount Olympus, the home of the gods in Greek myth, is also a real and demanding mountain: a massif of some 52 peaks rising almost straight from the Aegean coast, with its summit, Mytikas, at 2,918 metres — the highest point in Greece.
Did you know? Ancient pottery, coins and traces of sacrificial ash dated to around 400 BC have been found near the summit.
13 Louvre Museum
Musée du Louvre
France · 1.3 km from Paris48.861° N 2.336° E
Image by designerpoint from Pixabay The Louvre is less a building than a stack of eight centuries. Philip II began a fortress here in the late 12th century to guard Paris from the west, and its lower walls can still be seen in the museum's basement. Charles V turned the fortress into a residence.
Did you know? The museum was renamed Musée Napoléon in 1802, when Vivant Denon became its first director.
14 Mount Rushmore
United States · 29 km from Rapid City43.879° N 103.459° W
Dean Franklin · Public domain The four faces on Mount Rushmore were not the original plan. Gutzon Borglum's first brief called for figures tied to the American West — Lewis and Clark, their guide Sacagawea, and Lakota leaders Red Cloud and Crazy Horse were all part of early discussions — before Borglum redirected the project toward four presidents on the theory that it would draw broader national interest.
Did you know? Behind Lincoln's head lies an unfinished Hall of Records, where a vault holding 16 enamel panels on American history was sealed in 1998.
15 Taipei 101
Taiwan · 0.4 km from Taipei25.034° N 121.565° E
Image by george17168 from Pixabay The single most photographed part of Taipei 101 isn't visible from the street. Between the 87th and 92nd floors hangs a bright yellow steel sphere weighing 660 tonnes — the largest tuned mass damper ever installed in a building, and one of the few designed to be seen rather than hidden.
Did you know? In January 2026 Alex Honnold climbed the outside of the tower without ropes in about an hour and a half, in an authorised free solo.
16 Petronas Towers
Malaysia · 3.2 km from Kuala Lumpur3.158° N 101.712° E
Image by Pexels from Pixabay 9 metres. The Argentine-American architect César Pelli designed them for the Malaysian state oil company. He deliberately drew on Islamic geometry: each tower's floor plan is an eight-pointed star made of two overlapping squares, with rounded lobes fitted into the angles to gain office space. The steel and glass cladding repeats the pattern as it steps up towards the spires.
Did you know? Climber Alain Robert was stopped at the 60th floor in 1997 and again ten years later, before scaling Tower Two barehanded in 2009.
17 Uluru
Australia25.345° S 131.036° E
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay 4 km around its base. That makes it one of the most recognisable landforms on the continent. Geologists call it an inselberg: an isolated remnant that outlasted the rock around it because it has almost no joints or bedding partings for erosion to exploit. Its strata are tilted almost vertical, and much of the formation continues underground.
Did you know? The rock's sandstone layers stand almost on end, dipping at about 85 degrees, and at least 2.4 km of their thickness is exposed at the surface.
18 Niagara Falls
Canada · 3.2 km from Niagara Falls43.080° N 79.071° W
Image by NeilMorrell from Pixabay Niagara Falls hasn't stayed in one place. When the ice sheets retreated around 12,000 years ago and Lake Erie's outflow first cut through the Niagara Escarpment, the falls formed roughly 11 kilometres downstream from where they stand today, near what's now Lewiston and Queenston.
Did you know? The only recorded time the falls ran almost dry was 29 March 1848, when an ice jam upstream cut the flow to a trickle for up to about 40 hours.
19 Hoover Dam
United States · 9.4 km from Boulder City36.016° N 114.738° W
Image by MrUweS from Pixabay Hoover Dam plugs the Black Canyon of the Colorado River on the border between Nevada and Arizona, a curved wall of concrete standing 726 feet (about 221 metres) from its foundation rock to the roadway on its crest. 25 million cubic yards went into the dam alone. It was handed to the federal government in March 1936, more than two years ahead of schedule.
Did you know? The first recorded death on the project, surveyor J. G. Tierney, drowned on 20 December 1922; his son Patrick died there on 20 December 1935.
20 Schönbrunn Palace
Schloss Schönbrunn
Austria · 4.3 km from Vienna48.185° N 16.312° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Sekau67 from Pixabay Schönbrunn was the summer residence of the Habsburgs, and it grew from a hunting ground. Emperor Maximilian II bought the floodplain of the Wien river in 1569 and stocked it with game; Eleonora Gonzaga added a palace in the 1640s, and the name, from a "beautiful spring" whose water was drunk at court, first appears in 1642.
Did you know? In 1786 the Orangery hosted an imperial musical duel: Mozart's Der Schauspieldirektor and Salieri's Prima la musica e poi le parole were performed at opposite ends of the hall.
21 Mount Rainier
United States46.852° N 121.760° W
Image by Kranich17 from Pixabay On a clear day Mount Rainier floats over Seattle and Tacoma like a second horizon; locals simply call it "the Mountain". The volcano rises to about 4,391 metres, and because it stands alone above the lower Cascades it is the most topographically prominent peak in the contiguous United States.
Did you know? The ice-filled summit craters hold the world’s largest volcanic glacier cave network, with nearly 3.2 km of passages.
22 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Spain · 2.1 km from Bilbao43.269° N 2.934° W
Image by davidvives90 from Pixabay Frank Gehry's museum on the Nervión is the building that gave architecture a phrase: the "Bilbao effect", the idea that one daring cultural project can turn round a declining industrial city. In 1991 the Basque Government offered to pay for a Guggenheim museum on the run-down riverside port land, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation agreed to run it. King Juan Carlos I opened it on 18 October 1997.
Did you know? The museum appears in the pre-title sequence of the 1999 James Bond film The World Is Not Enough.
23 Lake Baikal
Russia53.303° N 108.005° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Peggy_Marco from Pixabay Baikal holds roughly a fifth of all the unfrozen fresh water on Earth's surface — more than all five of North America's Great Lakes combined — despite a surface area that's a fraction of theirs, because the lake plunges to a maximum depth of about 1,642 metres, deeper than almost any point on the ocean floor within a thousand kilometres of shore.
Did you know? About 330 rivers flow into Baikal, yet only one, the Angara, flows out of it.
24 Hashima Island
Japan · 20.5 km from Nagasaki32.628° N 129.738° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JordyMeow from Pixabay Hashima, better known as Gunkanjima or Battleship Island, is a scrap of rock about 15 km from the centre of Nagasaki that was turned into one of the most densely populated places ever recorded. 3 hectares. Encased in its concrete walls and packed with tower blocks, the island looked from the sea like a warship, and the nickname came from its resemblance to the battleship Tosa.
Did you know? Exterior shots of the island appear in the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall, and it was a filming location for the live-action Attack on Titan.
25 Mount Everest
Nepal27.988° N 86.925° E
Image by peteranta from Pixabay 86 metres. No point on Earth stands higher above sea level. Nepalis call the mountain Sagarmatha; Tibetans call it Qomolangma, a name that already appears on a Qing imperial atlas of 1721. The English name came from Andrew Waugh, Surveyor General of India, who honoured his predecessor George Everest, even though Everest himself protested that the natives of India could neither write nor pronounce it.
Did you know? More than 200 bodies remain on the mountain because bringing them down from such altitudes is considered too dangerous.
26 Masai Mara
Kenya1.490° S 35.140° E
Image by sprinter1973 from Pixabay The reserve's name comes from two different languages layered together. "Maasai" is how the people call themselves; "Mara," in the Maa language, means "spotted" — a description of how the grassland looks from a distance, dotted with the scattered, low trees (mostly Balanites aegyptiaca, the desert date, rather than true acacia) that break up the plain into a mottled pattern.
Did you know? The BBC series Big Cat Diary was filmed here, following individual lions, leopards and cheetahs around the Musiara marsh, Leopard Gorge and the Mara River.
27 Dead Sea
Israel · 38.9 km from Jerusalem31.521° N 35.484° E
Image by mirkosajkov from Pixabay The Dead Sea's basic party trick — you cannot sink in it — comes down to raw density. 24 kg per liter, dense enough that a human body floats almost involuntarily.
Did you know? At about 304 metres deep, the Dead Sea is the deepest hypersaline lake in the world.
28 Krak des Chevaliers
Syria · 38.9 km from Homs34.757° N 36.295° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Iyad from Pixabay Krak des Chevaliers sits on a 650-metre spur at the southern end of Syria's coastal mountains, watching over the Homs Gap, the one easy corridor between the port of Tripoli and the inland city of Homs. The site was already fortified in 1031, when the Mirdasid emir of Aleppo stationed Kurdish troops here, which is why Arabic sources still call it Hisn al-Akrad, the fort of the Kurds.
Did you know? T. E. Lawrence judged it possibly the best-preserved and most admirable castle anywhere in the world.
29 La Scala
Teatro alla Scala
Italy · 1.2 km from Milan45.468° N 9.189° E
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay La Scala in Milan is, for many, simply the opera house — the place where a singer's career is made or broken. It opened on 3 August 1778 with Antonio Salieri's Europa riconosciuta, built after fire destroyed the old ducal theatre, and it takes its name from the church of Santa Maria della Scala that was demolished to make room for it.
Did you know? In its early decades the theatre also served as a casino, with gambling going on in the foyer while operas played in the hall.
30 Lake Garda
Lago di Garda
Italy · 33.1 km from Verona45.633° N 10.667° E
Image by Leonhard_Niederwimmer from Pixabay Lake Garda is the largest lake in Italy and the most varied of the great Alpine lakes. Its shape explains its character: in the north it is a narrow fjord of deep water squeezed between steep mountains, while in the south it opens into a broad basin fringed by gentle morainic hills, vineyards and olive groves.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most beautiful film location in the world?
- On our list, Petra (Jordan) ranks first, followed by Meteora (Greece) and Salar de Uyuni (Bolivia).
- Which country has the most film locations?
- In our collection, the most come from France (36), the United Kingdom (29) and the United States (24).
- Where was the GoldenEye bungee jump filmed?
- The opening jump of GoldenEye was filmed at the Verzasca Dam in the Swiss canton of Ticino, where the stuntman dropped from the crest of the dam.
- Was Skyfall filmed on Hashima Island?
- External shots of Hashima Island were used in Skyfall, and its abandoned concrete blocks inspired the villain's island, but the scenes with the actors were shot on sets.
- How many film locations are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 221 film locations in 58 countries. France has the most, with 36.