The Most Beautiful Film Locations in the Canary Islands
7 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful film locations in the Canary Islands are Teide, Lanzarote and La Gomera. The list covers 7 film locations. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Film-makers come to the Canary Islands for landscapes that look like nowhere else on earth. Young volcanic islands in the Atlantic, they offer black lava fields, cinder cones, red and ochre craters and sheer sea cliffs within short distances of each other, which lets crews stage the dawn of the world, the realms of Greek myth or a distant planet without building sets. A place seen on screen gains a second life: viewers recognise the shapes of its mountains long before they arrive.
Teide, the volcano at the heart of Tenerife and Spain's highest mountain, rises above a high caldera of lava flows and rock towers that served as a mythical Greece in Clash of the Titans and its sequel Wrath of the Titans. The surrounding national park also appeared in the cave-dweller adventure One Million Years B.C., whose exteriors were shot on Tenerife and Lanzarote in the winter of 1965.
Lanzarote itself, with its lava fields of the 1730s eruptions and the green lagoon of El Golfo, inspired Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces, where the island is the lovers' refuge. Its northern cliff hides the Mirador del Río, a viewpoint built into the rock by César Manrique, looking down onto the island of La Graciosa. To the west, La Gomera is a round island of deep ravines and terraced slopes, crowned by the misty laurel forest of Garajonay.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Teide | Volcano | |
| 2 | Lanzarote | Island | |
| 3 | La Gomera | Island | |
| 4 | Teide National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 5 | La Palma | Island | |
| 6 | Timanfaya National Park | National park | |
| 7 | Mirador del Río | Scenic viewpoint |
01 Teide
Spain28.273° N 16.644° W
Image by javierAlamo from Pixabay Teide, 3,715 m, is the highest point in Spain and the highest summit of any island in the Atlantic. Measured from the ocean floor it stands some 7,500 m tall, making it the third-largest volcanic structure on Earth after Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Did you know? The last eruption from Teide's summit happened around 850 AD and produced the Lavas Negras, the black flows that still cover much of its flanks.
02 Lanzarote
Spain · 12 km from Arrecife29.035° N 13.635° W
Bybbisch94, Christian Gebhardt · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lanzarote's black-and-red volcanic badlands aren't ancient history — they're the result of an eruption sequence that ran from 1730 to 1736, one of the longest continuously documented volcanic events anywhere in recorded history, and one that buried a third of the island's most fertile land under lava in the process.
Did you know? The 1730–1736 eruptions opened 32 new volcanoes along an 18 km fissure and buried 11 villages, a catastrophe chronicled day by day by Yaiza's parish priest.
03 La Gomera
Spain28.115° N 17.225° W
Image by guayota from Pixabay La Gomera, one of the smaller Canary Islands, is roughly round and about 22 km across, yet it rises to 1,487 metres at Alto de Garajonay. Its shape has been compared to half an orange split into segments: deep ravines, the barrancos, radiate from the central plateau to the sea, with steep ridges between them.
04 Teide National Park
Parque Nacional del Teide
Spain28.276° N 16.643° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Barni1 from Pixabay Teide National Park covers the high heart of Tenerife: a vast volcanic caldera, Las Cañadas, and the cone of Teide rising out of it to 3,718 metres, the highest point in Spain. Measured from the ocean floor, Teide is one of the tallest volcanoes on the planet, and together with its neighbour Pico Viejo it forms the only pair of peaks in the Canaries above 3,000 metres.
05 La Palma
Spain28.660° N 17.860° W
Image by b_gofron from Pixabay The north-westernmost of the Canary Islands rises out of the Atlantic as a single steep volcanic mass. From the shore the land climbs to 2,426 metres at the Roque de los Muchachos, and the whole volcanic edifice stands almost seven kilometres above the ocean floor.
Did you know? La Palma's highest point, the Roque de los Muchachos, stands 2,426 metres above sea level.
06 Timanfaya National Park
Parque Nacional de Timanfaya
Spain · 24.1 km from Arrecife29.014° N 13.780° W
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay On the night of 1 September 1730 the ground opened in the south-west of Lanzarote, and it did not settle again for almost six years. The eruptions that followed, among the longest and largest ever witnessed in the Canary Islands, poured lava and ash over a fertile farming district, buried villages and reshaped a large part of the island before they died away in April 1736. A short new eruption followed in 1824.
Did you know? The eruptions that created much of Timanfaya lasted from September 1730 to April 1736.
07 Mirador del Río
Spain · 27.8 km from Arrecife29.214° N 13.481° W
Image by lapping from Pixabay Mirador del Río is a viewpoint at the northern tip of Lanzarote that is almost invisible until you are inside it. César Manrique, the island's artist and architect, built it between 1971 and 1973 into the edge of the Famara cliffs at a spot called Batería del Río, about 475 metres above the sea, and clad it in rough volcanic stone so that from the outside it reads as part of the rock.
Did you know? A sculpture of a bird and a fish greets visitors at the entrance, introducing the twin themes of air and sea.
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 are the most beautiful film locations in the Canary Islands?
- On our list, Teide ranks first, followed by Lanzarote and La Gomera.
- Which films were shot on Mount Teide?
- The landscapes of Teide National Park appear in One Million Years B.C. (1966), Clash of the Titans (2010) and Wrath of the Titans (2012), among others.
- Where was One Million Years B.C. filmed?
- The location scenes of the 1966 Hammer film starring Raquel Welch were shot on Lanzarote and Tenerife in the Canary Islands in the winter of 1965, while the dinosaur effects by Ray Harryhausen were made in his studio in London.
- Who designed the Mirador del Río?
- The Lanzarote artist and architect César Manrique built the viewpoint in the early 1970s into the cliffs of the Risco de Famara, on the site of an old gun battery, so that it almost disappears into the rock.
- How many film locations are on this list in the Canary Islands?
- The list covers 7 film locations.