The Most Beautiful Film Locations in South America
8 places in 5 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful film locations in South America are Easter Island (Chile), Iguaçu Falls (Brazil) and Lençóis Maranhenses National Park (Brazil). The list covers 8 film locations in 5 countries. Brazil has the most, with 3. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A place chosen as a film location has passed a particular test: a director needed it to stand for something larger, whether another planet, a lost world or the edge of civilisation. South America supplies landscapes that seem invented, from salt flats and desert towns to waterfalls in tropical forest and ruins high in the Andes, and many of them could not be built on a studio lot. Seeing them on screen is often what first makes people want to see them in person.
Iguaçu Falls, a chain of hundreds of cascades on the border of Brazil and Argentina, provided the waterfall in The Mission, where a missionary is sent over the edge tied to a cross, and appeared later in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Angel Falls in Venezuela, the highest uninterrupted waterfall in the world, drops from the top of a tepui and inspired Paradise Falls in Pixar's Up. On Easter Island, the film Rapa Nui was shot among the moai, the great stone figures carved by the islanders centuries ago.
Other locations owe their appeal to emptiness. Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the largest salt flat in the world, turns into a vast mirror after rain and appeared in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The dunes of Lençóis Maranhenses in Brazil are dotted with freshwater lagoons after the rainy season. Machu Picchu, the Inca citadel on a ridge above the Urubamba, has framed films from The Motorcycle Diaries onward, and the abandoned saltpeter works of Humberstone in the Atacama have served as a ready-made period set.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Easter Island | Island | Chile | |
| 2 | Iguaçu Falls | Waterfall | Brazil | |
| 3 | Lençóis Maranhenses National Park | Dune | Brazil | ✓ |
| 4 | Angel Falls | Waterfall | Venezuela | |
| 5 | Salar de Uyuni | Salt flat | Bolivia | |
| 6 | Amazon rainforest | Forest | Brazil | |
| 7 | Machu Picchu | Archaeological site | Peru | |
| 8 | Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works | Factory | Chile | ✓ |
01 Easter Island
Chile27.120° S 109.350° W
Image by 3282700 from Pixabay The single biggest puzzle Easter Island still hands visitors is how a Polynesian society without draft animals, wheels or metal tools moved statues weighing as much as 80 tons for kilometres over rough ground. For decades the default answer was rollers and ropes, dragged flat.
Did you know? The island's rongorongo script, recorded on about two dozen wooden objects, has never been deciphered, and none of them remain on the island.
02 Iguaçu Falls
Cataratas do Iguaçu
Brazil · 21.2 km from Foz do Iguaçu25.695° S 54.437° W
Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The rock under Iguaçu is 130 million years old and volcanic, laid down when massive flood-basalt eruptions covered a huge swath of what would become southern Brazil and Argentina in repeated lava flows, some sequences over a kilometre thick.
Did you know? The falls appear in the films Moonraker (1979) and The Mission (1986).
03 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.
04 Angel Falls
Salto Ángel
Venezuela5.970° N 62.536° W
JhonnyCatanho · CC BY-SA 3.0 Angel Falls drops from the rim of Auyán-tepui, one of the sheer-sided table mountains of south-eastern Venezuela, and is generally ranked as the tallest uninterrupted waterfall in the world: a total height of 979 metres, of which 807 metres is a single free fall. The rest is a steep run of cascades and rapids below the main drop.
Did you know? Pixar's Paradise Falls in the 2009 film Up was modelled on Angel Falls.
05 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.
06 Amazon rainforest
Floresta amazônica
Brazil · 7.5 km from Manaus3.160° S 60.030° W
Lula Oficial · CC BY-SA 4.0 Manaus sits at a junction that looks wrong even once you know why it happens.
Did you know? The forest holds an estimated 390 billion individual trees belonging to around 16,000 species.
07 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.
08 Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works
Chile · 6.8 km from Pozo Almonte20.208° S 69.794° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 In the bone-dry pampa of the Atacama Desert east of Iquique, two abandoned company towns preserve the world of the nitrate boom that made northern Chile one of the richest mining regions on earth. From the late 19th century saltpetre from here was shipped worldwide as fertiliser, and the pampinos, the workers of the nitrate fields, created a distinctive culture around it.
Did you know? In 2001 Humberstone served as the film set for the Chilean telenovela Pampa Ilusión, which spurred former nitrate workers to campaign for its protection.
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 South America?
- On our list, Easter Island (Chile) ranks first, followed by Iguaçu Falls (Brazil) and Lençóis Maranhenses National Park (Brazil).
- Which country has the most film locations in South America?
- In our collection, the most come from Brazil (3), Chile (2) and Bolivia (1).
- Which film was shot at Iguazu Falls?
- The best known is The Mission (1986), with Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons, which used the falls for its opening and climactic scenes. The falls also appear in Moonraker and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
- Was Paradise Falls in Up based on a real place?
- Yes. Pixar's animators visited the tepuis of Venezuela, and Paradise Falls was inspired by Angel Falls, which drops about 979 metres from the edge of Auyán-tepui.
- Which Star Wars film was filmed at Salar de Uyuni?
- Footage of Salar de Uyuni was used in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) for the salt planet Crait. The flat white crust of the salar made it a natural stand-in.
- How many film locations are on this list in South America?
- The list covers 8 film locations in 5 countries. Brazil has the most, with 3.