The Most Beautiful Film Locations in France
36 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful film locations in France are Louvre Museum, Place de la Concorde and Eiffel Tower. The list covers 36 film locations. Last updated 14 October 2026.
France invented cinema, and it has been filming itself ever since. The Lumière brothers pointed their camera at Paris streets in 1895, and the country's monuments have never left the screen: royal palaces built to impress, Gothic cathedrals, Roman arenas, alpine needles and an Atlantic coast of sand and pine. Few countries have such a range within a day's travel, or a film industry so attached to its own landscapes.
Paris provides the icons. The Da Vinci Code was filmed inside the Louvre and around its glass pyramid, and the Eiffel Tower has been the scene of chases and leaps, from A View to a Kill onwards. Père Lachaise, where Chopin, Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison are buried, is a city of tombs that film-makers return to for its atmosphere.
The châteaux bring fairy tale and power. Jacques Demy filmed Peau d'âne at Chambord, with its double-helix staircase and forest of chimneys, and Sofia Coppola was allowed to shoot Marie Antoinette at the Palace of Versailles. Jean Renoir set part of La Grande Illusion in the rebuilt castle of Haut-Koenigsbourg in Alsace. Elsewhere, the Roman arena of Nîmes still hosts spectacles, the pink sandstone spire of Strasbourg Cathedral rises above the Rhine plain, and the Dune of Pilat, the tallest sand dune in Europe, overlooks the Bay of Arcachon. At the Aiguille du Midi a cable car climbs above Chamonix, and at Padirac a river flows deep underground, while the Millau Viaduct carries a motorway on slender masts high above the Tarn.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Louvre Museum | Museum | |
| 2 | Place de la Concorde | Square | |
| 3 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | ✓ |
| 4 | Dune of Pilat | Dune | |
| 5 | Château de Chambord | Manor house | ✓ |
| 6 | Palace of Versailles | Palace | ✓ |
| 7 | Millau Viaduct | Viaduct | |
| 8 | Arena of Nîmes | Amphitheatre | |
| 9 | Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg | Cathedral | |
| 10 | Aiguille du Midi | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 11 | Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg | Castle | |
| 12 | Tuileries Garden | Urban park | |
| 13 | Padirac Cave | Show cave | |
| 14 | Château de Vincennes | Castle | |
| 15 | Pont Neuf | Bridge | |
| 16 | Père Lachaise Cemetery | Cemetery | |
| 17 | Notre-Dame de Paris | Cathedral | |
| 18 | Jardin du Luxembourg | Urban park | |
| 19 | Abbey of Fontenay | Monastery | ✓ |
| 20 | Parc des Buttes-Chaumont | Urban park | |
| 21 | Palace of Fontainebleau | Palace | ✓ |
| 22 | Place des Vosges | Square | |
| 23 | Basilica of Saint-Denis | Cathedral | |
| 24 | Garabit Viaduct | Viaduct | |
| 25 | Notre-Dame de Chartres | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 26 | Pont Alexandre III | Bridge | |
| 27 | Lake Annecy | Lake | |
| 28 | Château de Blois | Castle | |
| 29 | Mer de Glace | Glacier | |
| 30 | Palais Garnier | Opera house |
01 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.
02 Place de la Concorde
France · 2.5 km from Paris48.866° N 2.321° E
Image by westcoast_dave from Pixabay 6 hectares of open ground at the eastern end of the Champs-Élysées, between the Tuileries Garden and the Seine. It began as a royal flattery. In 1748 the merchants of Paris commissioned an equestrian statue of Louis XV to celebrate his recovery from illness, and the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel laid out an octagonal square around it, finished by 1772 and ringed with a dry moat and balustrades.
03 Eiffel Tower
Tour Eiffel
France · 4.3 km from Paris48.858° N 2.294° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay The tower's basic shape wasn't originally Gustave Eiffel's idea at all. Two engineers working inside Eiffel's own company, Émile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, sketched the concept for an enormously tall iron tower in June 1884, intended as the centrepiece for the 1889 World's Fair marking the centenary of the French Revolution. Eiffel reportedly found Koechlin's earliest, bare-bones sketch unconvincing.
Did you know? According to a popular anecdote, Guy de Maupassant lunched at the tower daily because it was the one place in Paris he could not see it.
04 Dune of Pilat
Dune du Pilat
France44.590° N 1.212° W
Image by weareaway from Pixabay At around 105 metres, the Dune of Pilat is the tallest sand dune in Europe, a single ridge stretching nearly three kilometres along the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux. But the number that matters more than its height is its speed: driven by onshore wind, the whole dune creeps inland by four to five metres every year.
Did you know? The dune holds roughly 60 million cubic metres of sand, piled about 500 metres wide from the ocean to the forest.
05 Château de Chambord
France47.616° N 1.517° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by juliacasado1 from Pixabay Francis I commissioned this in 1519, at 25 years old, ostensibly as a hunting lodge — and then let it grow into a 440-room palace ringed by a wall roughly 32 kilometres long, enclosing what remains Europe's largest walled forest. Deer, wild boar, roe deer and Corsican mouflon still roam inside that boundary today, essentially free, exactly as they were meant to five centuries ago.
Did you know? The château counts 282 fireplaces and 84 staircases, and its roofline bristles with eleven kinds of towers and three types of chimneys.
06 Palace of Versailles
Château de Versailles
France · 1.1 km from Versailles48.805° N 2.120° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SLPix from Pixabay Versailles began as a small brick-and-stone hunting lodge that Louis XIII built in 1623 amid marshes southwest of Paris, a building contemporaries mocked as a house of cards. His son turned it into the stage set of absolute monarchy.
Did you know? Water was too scarce to run every fountain at once, so fountaineers whistled to each other as the king approached and shut each one off after he passed.
07 Millau Viaduct
France44.080° N 3.022° E
Image by SchrijverijDrenthe from Pixabay The Millau Viaduct carries the A75 motorway across the gorge of the Tarn west of Millau, in the Aveyron department of southern France, and it is one of the most beautiful bridges built in our time.
Did you know? Pier P2 rises 245 metres to the level of the road, making it the tallest bridge pier in the world when it was finished in 2003.
08 Arena of Nîmes
Arènes de Nîmes
France · 0.9 km from Nîmes43.835° N 4.360° E
Krzysztof Golik · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Roman amphitheatre of Nîmes rises straight out of the city's streets, an oval 133 metres long and 101 wide, its outer wall 21 metres high and pierced by two storeys of sixty arches. Built around 100 AD, only some twenty years after the Colosseum, it is among the best-preserved Roman amphitheatres anywhere and one of the twenty largest of the roughly four hundred known.
Did you know? François Truffaut shot scenes of his short film Les Mistons here in 1957, before he became a leading director of the French New Wave.
09 Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Strasbourg
France · 0.2 km from Strasbourg48.582° N 7.751° E
Image by jackmac34 from Pixabay Strasbourg's cathedral is a building of one tower, and that asymmetry is its signature. The west front was begun in 1277, with Erwin von Steinbach credited as master builder until his death in 1318, and it was planned with two spires. Only the north one was ever built: an octagonal tower and openwork spire by Ulrich Ensingen and Johannes Hültz, finished in 1439.
Did you know? In 1794 radical revolutionaries planned to pull down the spire as an insult to equality; citizens saved it by crowning it with a giant tin Phrygian cap.
10 Aiguille du Midi
France · 36.8 km from Aosta45.879° N 6.888° E
Image by Simon from Pixabay The Aiguille du Midi is a 3,842-metre rock needle in the Mont Blanc massif, and one of the few places in the Alps where anyone can stand face to face with the high mountains without climbing. Its name means "needle of midday". From the summit the view takes in Mont Blanc to the south, a whole horizon of peaks and glaciers, and, straight down, the rooftops of Chamonix more than two and a half kilometres below.
Did you know? The rock needle was first climbed on 4 August 1818 by the Polish count Antoni Malczewski with Jean-Michel Balmat and five other guides.
11 Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg
France48.249° N 7.344° E
Image by Efraimstochter from Pixabay Haut-Koenigsbourg stands on a sandstone spur at 757 metres in the Vosges, above the Alsace plain, and on a clear day it can be seen from as far away as Colmar. The rock was first recorded under Charlemagne. By 1147 the Hohenstaufen dukes of Swabia had a castle here, built without permission on land that belonged to the abbey of Saint-Denis, and by the 1190s it was called Königsburg, the "King's Castle".
Did you know? Hayao Miyazaki's 2004 animated film Howl's Moving Castle drew inspiration from Haut-Koenigsbourg.
12 Tuileries Garden
Jardin des Tuileries
France · 2.1 km from Paris48.864° N 2.326° E
Agence Rol · Public domain 5 hectares of gravel walks, rows of trees, basins and statues laid out on the grand axis that Le Nôtre meant to carry on westward towards what became the Champs-Élysées. It takes its name from the tile works, tuileries, that stood here before Catherine de' Medici bought the land in 1564 to build a new palace and commissioned a Florentine, Bernard de Carnesse, to lay out an Italian Renaissance garden beside it.
13 Padirac Cave
Gouffre de Padirac
France · 36.7 km from Brive-la-Gaillarde44.858° N 1.750° E
Luc Viatour · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Gouffre de Padirac opens in the Jurassic limestone of the Causse de Gramat, in the Lot department of southwestern France, as a nearly circular shaft about 35 metres across and 103 metres deep. It was once a closed underground chamber; at some unknown moment its roof collapsed, leaving an open well that local people long associated with the devil.
Did you know? In 1948 cave diver Guy de Lavaur explored the Montvalent spring in a wetsuit his wife made by gluing foam rubber onto his old-fashioned bathing costume.
14 Château de Vincennes
France · 6.3 km from Paris48.843° N 2.436° E
Thesupermat · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Château de Vincennes holds the tallest medieval keep in Europe, and its walls enclose seven centuries of French history on the eastern edge of Paris. Louis VII founded a royal hunting residence in the forest here in 1178, and Saint Louis used it often; he said farewell to his family at Vincennes before leaving on the crusade from which he did not return.
15 Pont Neuf
France · 0.8 km from Paris48.858° N 2.342° E
Image by edmondlafoto from Pixabay The name means "New Bridge", yet this is the oldest standing bridge across the Seine in Paris. Its first stone went down on 31 May 1578 under Henri III, and after long interruptions during the Wars of Religion the crossing was finished in 1606 and opened the following year under Henri IV. The design is credited to Baptiste Androuet du Cerceau and Guillaume Marchand.
16 Père Lachaise Cemetery
France · 3 km from Paris48.861° N 2.394° E
Image by 139904 from Pixabay Père Lachaise is the largest cemetery in Paris, 44 hectares of tree-lined paths and closely packed tombs on a hillside in the 20th arrondissement, and more than a million people have been buried here.
Did you know? Since 2014 a glass screen has guarded the lower part of Wilde's tomb from lipstick; Ireland's Office of Public Works paid for it as an Irish monument abroad.
17 Notre-Dame de Paris
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris
France · 0.6 km from Paris48.853° N 2.350° E
Image by edmondlafoto from Pixabay Bishop Maurice de Sully tore down the older cathedral on the Île de la Cité around 1160 and started again at a far larger scale. The first stone was laid in the spring of 1163, in the presence of King Louis VII and Pope Alexander III, and the high altar was consecrated in 1182.
Did you know? Napoleon crowned himself Emperor inside the cathedral on 2 December 1804.
18 Jardin du Luxembourg
France · 1.7 km from Paris48.847° N 2.337° E
Image by liudanao1991 from Pixabay The Jardin du Luxembourg is the most Parisian of gardens, laid out in 1612 for Marie de' Medici, widow of Henry IV. The palace was designed by Salomon de Brosse and the gardens by Tommaso Francini, and today both belong to the French Senate, which sits in the palace. The garden covers some 23 hectares on the Left Bank, between Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter.
Did you know? During the French Revolution the Luxembourg Palace became a prison holding about 800 detainees, among them Danton, Camille Desmoulins and the painter Jacques-Louis David.
19 Abbey of Fontenay
Abbaye de Fontenay
France47.640° N 4.389° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by guy_dugas from Pixabay Fontenay is the Cistercian ideal almost untouched: a monastery founded by Bernard of Clairvaux in 1118 in a wooded Burgundy valley near Montbard, and still standing with nearly all of its 12th-century buildings. Bernard wanted an order stricter than Cîteaux itself, and the architecture shows it.
Did you know? The abbey has served as a film location for Angélique, Marquise des Anges in 1964 and Cyrano de Bergerac in 1990.
20 Parc des Buttes-Chaumont
France · 3.3 km from Paris48.880° N 2.383° E
Heidi Meudt · CC BY 4.0 Few city parks began life in such a grim place. For some five centuries the bare hill in north-eastern Paris carried the Gibbet of Montfaucon, where the bodies of the executed were left on display; after the Revolution the ground served as a rubbish tip, a knacker's yard for dead horses and a sewage dump, and its gypsum and limestone were quarried until the seams gave out in the late 1850s.
Did you know? In Jean Grémillon's 1937 film Gueule d'amour, Jean Gabin and Mireille Balin stroll through the park and cross its suspension bridge.
21 Palace of Fontainebleau
Château de Fontainebleau
France · 14.8 km from Melun48.402° N 2.701° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by MustangJoe from Pixabay Fontainebleau is the palace where French kings lived for eight centuries, and it shows every one of them. It began as a hunting lodge in the forest, recorded under Louis VII in 1137, and nearly every ruler afterwards added a wing, a courtyard or a staircase, so that the buildings sprawl across several courts in a mix of styles that no single plan ever tidied up.
Did you know? Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, consecrated the chapel of the royal castle here in 1169.
22 Place des Vosges
France · 1 km from Paris48.856° N 2.366° E
Image by beanitwoman from Pixabay The Place des Vosges is the oldest planned square in Paris and still one of the most perfect: a square exactly 140 metres a side, closed on all four sides by houses of the same design, with a formal garden of lawns, gravel and clipped trees in the middle.
Did you know? The square stands on the site of the Hôtel des Tournelles, where King Henri II was mortally wounded in the eye by a lance during a joust in 1559.
23 Basilica of Saint-Denis
Basilique Saint-Denis
France · 8.6 km from Paris48.936° N 2.360° E
Zairon · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the northern edge of Paris, in the town of Saint-Denis, stands the church where Gothic architecture was invented. Abbot Suger, adviser to Louis VI and Louis VII, rebuilt the old abbey church from about 1135, first with a new west front and then with a choir completed in 1144 that combined pointed arches, rib vaults and walls opened up for large windows into a new, light-filled whole.
Did you know? In 2004 the mummified heart of the boy who would have been Louis XVII, confirmed by DNA testing, was sealed in a crystal vase in the crypt.
24 Garabit Viaduct
Viaduc de Garabit
France44.975° N 3.177° E
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Garabit viaduct carries a single railway track across the gorge of the Truyère in the Cantal, high in the Massif Central. Its centre is one great parabolic arch of wrought iron, 165 m wide and 52 m high, painted red and set against green hillsides. The whole structure is 565 m long.
Did you know? Besides The Cassandra Crossing, it appears in Costa-Gavras's 1967 film Un homme de trop and in the comedy Camping 2.
25 Notre-Dame de Chartres
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres
France48.448° N 1.488° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
BT · Public domain Chartres Cathedral stands in the old capital of the Beauce, about 80 km southwest of Paris, and it is one of the most complete and influential Gothic cathedrals in Europe. At least five churches stood on this site before it. On the night of 10 June 1194 fire destroyed most of the Romanesque cathedral, sparing only the crypt, the west towers and the west front.
Did you know? The stone screen around the choir holds about 200 statues arranged in 41 scenes from the lives of Christ and the Virgin.
26 Pont Alexandre III
Pont Alexandre-III
France · 3 km from Paris48.864° N 2.314° E
Image by jpnanterre from Pixabay Paris has older bridges and longer ones, but none so openly theatrical. The Pont Alexandre III crosses the Seine in a single low steel arch between the Invalides on the left bank and the Grand Palais and Petit Palais on the right, and it was built as a piece of diplomacy in metal and gilt.
Did you know? The bridge has appeared in films from An American in Paris and Funny Face to Midnight in Paris, and in Adele's Someone Like You video.
27 Lake Annecy
France · 6.8 km from Annecy45.850° N 6.167° E
Image by 1466325 from Pixabay Lake Annecy fills a glacial basin in the Pre-Alps of Haute-Savoie, left behind when the great Alpine glaciers melted some 17,000–18,000 years ago. 6 km², which makes it the third-largest lake in France, and it lies at roughly 447 m above sea level.
Did you know? Prehistoric pile-dwelling villages ringed the lake from about 5000 to 500 BC, and three sites joined the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2011.
28 Château de Blois
France47.586° N 1.331° E
Tango7174 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Château de Blois is four centuries of French architecture arranged around a single courtyard. Standing in the middle, one can turn from a thirteenth-century hall to a late-Gothic wing of red brick and grey stone, then to an exuberant Renaissance façade and finally to a severe classical front — each built by a different master of the house as royal taste changed.
29 Mer de Glace
France · 35.5 km from Aosta45.916° N 6.937° E
Image by Simon from Pixabay The Mer de Glace, the "sea of ice", is a river of ice about 7 km long, or some 12 km if its feeder glaciers are counted, flowing down the northern side of the Mont Blanc massif towards the Chamonix valley. Seen from the Montenvers terrace at 1,913 metres, it curves away between the granite spires of the Drus and the wall of the Grandes Jorasses, its surface ribbed and crevassed and darkened by rock debris.
Did you know? In the 17th century, as the glacier advanced toward homes in the valley, local people held processions and exorcisms to make it stop.
30 Palais Garnier
France · 2.2 km from Paris48.872° N 2.332° E
Image by Pignatta from Pixabay Garnier's opera house sits on ground that fought him from day one. When excavation began in 1861, the site turned out to be waterlogged — wells and steam pumps running around the clock couldn't hold back the groundwater long enough to lay foundations.
Did you know? In May 1896 a counterweight of the great chandelier broke loose and crashed through the ceiling into the seats, killing a concierge, an accident later echoed in Leroux's novel.
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 France?
- On our list, Louvre Museum ranks first, followed by Place de la Concorde and Eiffel Tower.
- Which film was shot at Château de Chambord?
- Jacques Demy's fairy-tale musical Peau d'âne (Donkey Skin, 1970), with Catherine Deneuve, was filmed at Chambord, among other châteaux in the Loire valley.
- Was Marie Antoinette filmed at Versailles?
- Yes. Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006) was given permission to film inside the Palace of Versailles, including the Hall of Mirrors.
- How high is the Dune of Pilat?
- The Dune of Pilat on the Bay of Arcachon rises to a little over 100 metres, which makes it the tallest sand dune in Europe; its height changes as the wind moves the sand inland.
- How many film locations are on this list in France?
- The list covers 36 film locations.