The Most Beautiful Film Locations in North America
28 places in 4 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful film locations in North America are Mount Rushmore (United States), Niagara Falls (Canada) and Hoover Dam (United States). The list covers 28 film locations in 4 countries. The United States has the most, with 24. Last updated 14 October 2026.
North America gave cinema its first great landscapes. Hollywood grew up within reach of deserts, granite valleys, redwood coasts and snow peaks, and the continent's national parks, monuments and engineering feats became the backdrop of American storytelling. From the Canadian Rockies to the rainforests of Central America, the scale of the land is part of the plot: a figure on a cliff, a car on a bridge, a city lit against the dark.
Alfred Hitchcock staged the climax of North by Northwest on the faces of Mount Rushmore and sent Vertigo beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. Marilyn Monroe starred in Niagara against the thunder of the falls, and the Hoover Dam, a concrete wall across the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, has hidden secret bases and staged disasters. The final scene of Planet of the Apes, with the Statue of Liberty half buried in sand, is one of the most quoted images in film.
The mountains bring a different kind of drama. El Capitan in Yosemite is the granite wall of Free Solo, the documentary of Alex Honnold's climb without ropes, and Mount Rainier and the peaks of Banff National Park stand for wilderness itself. The Corleone family's lakeside compound in The Godfather Part II was filmed on Lake Tahoe. Further south, the Maya temples of Tikal rising above the Guatemalan forest became the rebel base in the first Star Wars film, and the turquoise cascades of Agua Azul in Chiapas run through jungle.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Rushmore | Monument | United States | |
| 2 | Niagara Falls | Waterfall | Canada | |
| 3 | Hoover Dam | Dam | United States | |
| 4 | Mount Rainier | Volcano | United States | |
| 5 | Banff National Park | Protected area | Canada | |
| 6 | El Capitan | Rock formation | United States | |
| 7 | Metropolitan Museum of Art | Museum | United States | |
| 8 | Statue of Liberty | Monument | United States | ✓ |
| 9 | Tikal | Archaeological site | Guatemala | ✓ |
| 10 | Golden Gate Bridge | Bridge | United States | |
| 11 | Palace of Fine Arts | Folly | United States | |
| 12 | Agua Azul Waterfalls | Waterfall | Mexico | |
| 13 | Lake Tahoe | Lake | United States | |
| 14 | Central Park | Urban park | United States | |
| 15 | Empire State Building | Skyscraper | United States | |
| 16 | Zion National Park | National park | United States | |
| 17 | Yosemite National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 18 | Brooklyn Bridge | Bridge | United States | |
| 19 | Lincoln Memorial | Monument | United States | |
| 20 | Badlands National Park | National park | United States | |
| 21 | Chrysler Building | Skyscraper | United States | |
| 22 | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | Museum | United States | ✓ |
| 23 | Grand Central Terminal | Railway station | United States | |
| 24 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | United States | |
| 25 | Mammoth Cave | Cave | United States | |
| 26 | New York Public Library Main Branch | Library building | United States | |
| 27 | Caddo Lake | Reservoir | United States | |
| 28 | Dead Horse Point State Park | Scenic viewpoint | United States |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 Banff National Park
Canada · 2 km from Banff51.167° N 115.550° W
Image by NUNZG from Pixabay Banff was Canada's first national park, created in 1885 when the government set aside a small reserve around hot springs that railway workers had stumbled on at Cave and Basin; it has since grown to about 6,641 square kilometres of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta. The peaks are slabs of sedimentary rock pushed eastward 80 to 55 million years ago and then sculpted by glaciers into horns, cirques and U-shaped valleys.
Did you know? A scene of Lake Louise appeared on the back of the Canadian 20-dollar banknote in the 1969 to 1979 series.
06 El Capitan
United States37.734° N 119.637° W
Image by carelbron0 from Pixabay El Capitan is the granite wall that greets you at the western end of Yosemite Valley: a single, almost unjointed monolith rising roughly 900 metres from the valley floor to its rounded top.
Did you know? Despite its towering face, El Capitan's summit has only about 3 metres of topographic prominence, because it is attached to higher ground behind.
07 Metropolitan Museum of Art
United States · 7 km from New York City40.779° N 73.963° W
Image by marekr from Pixabay The Metropolitan Museum of Art occupies almost a quarter of a mile of Fifth Avenue along the eastern edge of Central Park, and inside it holds something close to the whole history of art. 5 million works across 17 curatorial departments, from Palaeolithic flints to contemporary painting.
08 Statue of Liberty
United States · 5.5 km from New York City40.689° N 74.044° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by itou365 from Pixabay The name most people reach for is Bartholdi, and that's correct as far as it goes — Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi conceived the whole figure, from her raised torch to the broken chains at her feet, and sculpted the copper skin that visitors actually see, a figure standing some 46 metres from base to torch. What's murkier, and worth untangling, is who built what's actually holding her up.
Did you know? Her copper skin is only about 2.4 millimetres thick across the entire figure.
09 Tikal
Guatemala17.222° N 89.624° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JancickaL from Pixabay Tikal is the Maya city at its most theatrical: grey limestone pyramids breaking through the canopy of the Petén rainforest in northern Guatemala, with howler monkeys and ocellated turkeys for company. It was the capital of one of the most powerful Maya kingdoms, occupied from at least the 4th century BC and at its height between about AD 200 and 900, before its population drained away and the forest closed over it.
Did you know? Tikal stood in for the rebel base on the moon Yavin 4 in the original 1977 Star Wars film.
10 Golden Gate Bridge
United States · 8 km from San Francisco37.820° N 122.479° W
Image by Pexels from Pixabay The bridge's color exists because nobody could agree on one. The steel arrived from the fabricators already coated in a burnt-orange sealant primer meant only to protect it from rust during shipping and assembly. The US Navy, worried about ships colliding with it in fog, wanted it painted black with yellow stripes; the Army Air Corps wanted red-and-white candy-cane bands for aircraft visibility.
Did you know? In 2020 new railing slats began making the bridge hum in strong winds; one analysis found the tones match the notes F, G, A and B.
11 Palace of Fine Arts
United States · 4.8 km from San Francisco37.803° N 122.448° W
Kevin Cole ( en:User:Kevinlcole ) · CC BY 2.0 The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco was meant to look like a ruin from the start. Bernard Maybeck designed it for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 as a quiet place between the crowded fairgrounds and the art galleries, and he took his cue from an etching by Piranesi of a ruined Roman temple and from Arnold Böcklin's painting Isle of the Dead.
Did you know? It is the only structure from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition still standing on its original site.
12 Agua Azul Waterfalls
Cascadas de Agua Azul
Mexico17.256° N 92.116° W
Own work · CC BY-SA 4.0 Agua Azul is not one waterfall but a long staircase of them. In the forested hills of northern Chiapas, where the municipalities of Tumbalá, Chilón and Salto de Agua meet, the Xanil River tumbles through a chain of cataracts and terraced pools, the largest drops only around six metres high but repeated again and again over a long stretch of river.
Did you know? Below the falls the water continues via the Shumulá and Tulijá rivers into the Grijalva system, one of Mexico's largest river basins.
13 Lake Tahoe
United States · 24.8 km from Carson City39.083° N 120.033° W
Image by Anwic from Pixabay Lake Tahoe fills a fault-block basin high in the Sierra Nevada, its surface sitting about 1,897 metres above sea level with California on two-thirds of the shore and Nevada on the rest. It is the largest alpine lake in North America and astonishingly deep: 501 metres at its lowest point, second in the United States only to Crater Lake.
Did you know? A drop of water entering Lake Tahoe stays in it for about 650 years on average before leaving.
14 Central Park
United States · 7.2 km from New York City40.782° N 73.966° W
Image by Josmanu1970 from Pixabay Central Park looks natural, but almost none of it is. Every hill, boulder outcrop, lake and winding path was engineered by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who won a design competition in 1858 with a plan called "Greensward" that treated 843 acres of swampy, rocky Manhattan bedrock as a blank canvas for staged wilderness.
Did you know? Clearing the rocky site reportedly took more gunpowder than was fired at the Battle of Gettysburg.
15 Empire State Building
United States · 3.1 km from New York City40.748° N 73.986° W
Image by Olga_Fil from Pixabay The Empire State Building is the skyscraper against which other tall buildings are still measured, and it earned that status in a single burst of work at the start of the Great Depression. It stands on the west side of Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets, on the site of the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Did you know? On 28 July 1945 a B-25 bomber flying in thick fog struck the north face between the 78th and 80th floors, killing 14 people.
16 Zion National Park
United States37.203° N 112.988° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Pexels from Pixabay The cliffs that make Zion look otherworldly are, geologically speaking, fossilised weather. The dominant rock, Navajo Sandstone, started out around 180 million years ago as an enormous field of wind-blown sand dunes — think Sahara-scale — and the diagonal cross-bedding cutting through the rock faces is literally the shape of those ancient dune slopes, frozen in stone.
Did you know? When President Taft protected the canyon in 1909, he gave it the Southern Paiute-derived name Mukuntuweap National Monument; it became Zion only later.
17 Yosemite National Park
United States37.742° N 119.537° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Few landscapes explain their own making as plainly as Yosemite. The park's 1,187 square miles sit on the granite of the Sierra Nevada batholith, rock that cooled deep underground, was lifted and tilted with the range some ten million years ago, and was then worked over by ice.
Did you know? On rare clear evenings in mid to late February, the setting sun backlights Horsetail Fall on the eastern edge of El Capitan so that it glows orange.
18 Brooklyn Bridge
United States · 1.8 km from New York City40.706° N 73.996° W
Image by laretalo from Pixabay The man who designed the Brooklyn Bridge never saw a single cable strung. In June 1869, while surveying the site, John Roebling had his foot crushed against a piling by an approaching ferry. He refused amputation, treated the wound himself with a water cure of his own devising, and died of tetanus three weeks later — leaving the project to his 32-year-old son, Washington, before construction had properly begun.
Did you know? Its main span of about 486 metres made it the longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened in 1883.
19 Lincoln Memorial
United States · 3.6 km from Washington38.889° N 77.050° W
Image by MarkThomas from Pixabay The Lincoln Memorial closes the western end of the National Mall like the temple at the end of a sacred way. The architect Henry Bacon gave it the form of a Greek Doric temple in white Yule marble from Colorado, ringed by 36 fluted columns, one for each state of the Union at the time of Lincoln's death, with the names of the 48 states of 1922 carved above.
Did you know? The spot where Martin Luther King Jr. stood in 1963, on a landing eighteen steps below the statue, was engraved in 2003.
20 Badlands National Park
United States43.750° N 102.500° W
Image by victortran0107 from Pixabay The Lakota called this country makȟóšiča, "bad land", and the name stuck in every language that followed. From the rim of the prairie the ground simply falls away into a maze of pinnacles, saw-toothed ridges and fluted buttes, banded in cream, rust, pink and grey. The colours are a timetable.
Did you know? Scenes of Dances with Wolves (1990) and Thunderheart (1992) were filmed among its formations.
21 Chrysler Building
United States · 3.7 km from New York City40.751° N 73.976° W
Image by RJA1988 from Pixabay The Chrysler Building is the purest expression of the optimism New York built for itself at the end of the 1920s. It was designed by William Van Alen and paid for by Walter P. Chrysler out of his own pocket, as an investment for his children rather than as a headquarters for his car company.
Did you know? Van Alen sued Walter Chrysler for his unpaid architect's fee and won, but the lawsuit hurt his reputation so badly that he received few major commissions afterwards.
22 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
United States · 7.5 km from New York City40.783° N 73.959° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jean-Christophe BENOIST · CC BY 3.0 The Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue is a museum people visit as much for the building as for the art. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it as a top-heavy spiral that widens as it rises, a shape that looks nothing like the apartment blocks around it on the Upper East Side, facing Central Park.
Did you know? By 1958 Wright and the director James Johnson Sweeney refused to speak to each other, so Harry Guggenheim had to relay every message between them.
23 Grand Central Terminal
United States · 3.8 km from New York City40.753° N 73.977° W
Image by jplenio from Pixabay Grand Central Terminal is a commuter station that became one of the most visited buildings in the world: some 21 million people came in 2018 just to look, not counting passengers. It stands at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan and opened in 1913, the third station of that name on the site, built by the New York Central Railroad.
Did you know? The constellations on the Main Concourse ceiling are largely painted back to front; a commuter noticed the mistake in 1913, and it has never been corrected.
24 Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
United States · 16.6 km from Montrose38.580° N 107.728° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by misterfarmer from Pixabay Few canyons in North America combine such depth with such narrowness. In western Colorado the Gunnison River has sawn straight down through some of the oldest rock on the continent, leaving a gorge that reaches 2,722 feet (829 m) deep at Warner Point but narrows to only about 40 feet (12 m) at river level in the Narrows.
Did you know? In the deepest, narrowest stretches of the canyon, direct sunlight reaches the river for only about 33 minutes a day.
25 Mammoth Cave
United States · 37.3 km from Bowling Green37.183° N 86.100° W
Daniel Schwen · CC BY-SA 4.0 The most accurate map of Mammoth Cave for nearly forty years was drawn from memory by a man who wasn't free to leave it.
Did you know? Remains of an ancient shark, Saivodus striatus, comparable in size to a modern great white were identified in the cave's limestone in 2020.
26 New York Public Library Main Branch
United States · 3.7 km from New York City40.753° N 73.982° W
ajay_suresh · CC BY 2.0 The main building of the New York Public Library, officially the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building since 2008, occupies the stretch of Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets in Midtown Manhattan. It was designed by the firm of Carrère and Hastings in the Beaux-Arts manner, clad in white Vermont marble, and opened on 23 May 1911 after more than a decade of work; the cornerstone had been laid in November 1902.
Did you know? The lions were first nicknamed Leo Astor and Leo Lenox; Mayor Fiorello La Guardia renamed them Patience and Fortitude during the Great Depression.
27 Caddo Lake
United States · 32.4 km from Shreveport32.710° N 94.010° W
Shiva Shenoy · CC BY 2.0 There are two competing stories for how Caddo Lake came to exist, and they disagree about almost everything except the outcome. The Caddo people's own account holds that the Great Spirit caused a sudden earthquake to punish a disobedient chief, and the lake appeared more or less overnight, around 1811 — the same period as the real, well-documented New Madrid earthquakes.
Did you know? The world's first over-water oil platform, Ferry Lake No. 1, was completed on Caddo Lake in 1911 by the Gulf Refining Company.
28 Dead Horse Point State Park
United States · 17.7 km from Moab38.506° N 109.733° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by ducken99 from Pixabay Dead Horse Point is a narrow finger of mesa in southeastern Utah that ends in a sheer drop of about 2,000 feet (610 m) to the Colorado River. From the overlook at its tip the river makes a tight gooseneck loop directly below, a green-edged ribbon of water folded around a tower of red rock, while the canyon country spreads to the horizon in stepped layers of cliffs, benches and buttes.
Did you know? Film crews have used the point since at least Warlock in 1959, followed by Con Air, John Carter and the series Westworld.
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 North America?
- On our list, Mount Rushmore (United States) ranks first, followed by Niagara Falls (Canada) and Hoover Dam (United States).
- Which country has the most film locations in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (24), Canada (2) and Guatemala (1).
- Which Star Wars film used Tikal?
- Star Wars (1977), later titled A New Hope. A view over the Tikal temples rising out of the forest represents the rebel base on the moon Yavin 4.
- Was North by Northwest filmed on Mount Rushmore?
- Only partly. Exteriors were shot at the memorial, but permission to film actors on the carved faces was refused, so the famous climbing chase was staged on studio replicas.
- Which route did Alex Honnold climb in Free Solo?
- He climbed Freerider, a route on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, without ropes in June 2017; the ascent is the subject of the 2018 documentary Free Solo.
- How many film locations are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 28 film locations in 4 countries. The United States has the most, with 24.