The Most Beautiful Film Locations in Spain
14 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful film locations in Spain are Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Teide and Lanzarote. The list covers 14 film locations. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Spain can play almost any country on screen. Its southeast holds the only true desert landscapes in Europe, which is why the westerns of Sergio Leone were shot around Almería; the Canary Islands look like the surface of another planet; and Moorish palaces and Castilian castles stand in for Jerusalem, the Holy Land or a fantasy kingdom. Add strong, reliable light and centuries of architecture, and the country has become one of Europe's busiest film sets.
The medieval and Moorish past dominates. Ridley Scott filmed Kingdom of Heaven at Loarre Castle, a Romanesque fortress on a rock spur in Aragon. Game of Thrones used the gardens of the Royal Alcázar of Seville for the Water Gardens of Dorne and the walls of the Alcazaba of Almería for the same southern kingdom. In León, the cathedral's huge expanse of medieval stained glass and the painted royal pantheon of the Basilica of San Isidoro show why Castile needed no studio.
The volcanic islands offer the strangest scenery. Teide, the volcano at the centre of Tenerife, provided the alien slopes of Clash of the Titans, and Lanzarote's lava fields were the prehistoric world of One Million Years B.C. On the island's northern cliffs, César Manrique built the Mirador del Río into the rock, looking down on the island of La Graciosa. And in Bilbao, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum, its curves sheathed in titanium, opened a James Bond film with a chase on the river below.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao | Museum | |
| 2 | Teide | Volcano | |
| 3 | Lanzarote | Island | |
| 4 | Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park | Nature reserve | |
| 5 | La Gomera | Island | |
| 6 | Teide National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 7 | León Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 8 | La Palma | Island | |
| 9 | Alcazaba of Almería | Castle | |
| 10 | Basilica of San Isidoro, León | Church building | ✓ |
| 11 | Loarre Castle | Castle | |
| 12 | Timanfaya National Park | National park | |
| 13 | Royal Alcázar of Seville | Palace | ✓ |
| 14 | Mirador del Río | Scenic viewpoint |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park
Parque natural del Cabo de Gata-Níjar
Spain · 36.5 km from Almería36.900° N 2.030° W
- UNESCO Global Geopark
- biosphere reserve
Image by WildFox from Pixabay Cabo de Gata-Níjar is the wild south-eastern corner of Spain: a coast of dark volcanic headlands, pale coves and desert light that somehow escaped the concrete that lines most of the Mediterranean. It was declared Andalusia's first combined land-and-sea natural park in December 1987, and it remains the largest protected coastal area in the region.
05 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.
06 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.
07 León Cathedral
Catedral de Santa María de Regla de León
Spain · 2.2 km from León42.599° N 5.567° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TerapiasNaturales from Pixabay León's cathedral, Santa María de Regla, is the Spanish cathedral that went furthest in the Gothic dream of replacing walls with light. It has around 125 windows and about 1,800 square metres of stained glass, most of it made between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, one of the largest collections of medieval glass anywhere.
Did you know? For centuries a dried hide over a door was said to be a mole that wrecked the builders' work by night; in the 1990s it proved a leatherback turtle shell.
08 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.
09 Alcazaba of Almería
Spain · 3.9 km from Almería36.841° N 2.472° W
ANE · CC BY 3.0 The Alcazaba of Almería spreads along a ridge above the old town and the harbour, a chain of walled enclosures that is one of the largest Moorish citadels in Spain. Its walls, more than three metres thick, are tied into longer lines of defences that run across the ravine of La Hoya to the hill of San Cristóbal, so that citadel, ravine and hill form a single fortified landscape.
Did you know? More than 30 films and TV productions have been shot at or around the fortress since Cleopatra in 1963, among them Patton and Conan the Barbarian.
10 Basilica of San Isidoro, León
Basílica de San Isidoro de León
Spain · 2.3 km from León42.601° N 5.571° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Amfeli · CC BY 4.0 Beneath the Basilica of San Isidoro in León lies one of the best-preserved painted interiors of the Romanesque age.
Did you know? The Royal Pantheon is so richly painted that it is often nicknamed the Sistine Chapel of Romanesque art.
11 Loarre Castle
Castillo de Loarre
Spain42.326° N 0.612° W
Image by matressa_ from Pixabay Loarre is often called the best-preserved Romanesque castle in Europe, and standing below it you understand why the claim sticks. Its walls and towers rise straight out of a limestone spur where the Pre-Pyrenees drop to the plain of the Hoya de Huesca, and the rock itself serves as the foundation, which made the walls impossible to undermine.
Did you know? Villagers from Loarre appeared as extras when Kingdom of Heaven was filmed here, and the castle also serves as a prison in the TV series El Ministerio del Tiempo.
12 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.
13 Royal Alcázar of Seville
Spain · 2.5 km from Seville37.384° N 5.991° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Danor from Pixabay The Royal Alcázar of Seville is a palace built as a sequence of courtyards, each opening into the next: arcades carved with lace-like plaster, tiled walls, pools and channels of water, and beyond them a maze of gardens full of orange trees and palms.
Did you know? Arabic inscriptions in Pedro I's palace refer to the Christian king as 'Sultan Don Bidru'.
14 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 Spain?
- On our list, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao ranks first, followed by Teide and Lanzarote.
- Why were so many westerns filmed in Spain?
- The Tabernas Desert near Almería looks much like the American Southwest and was cheaper to film in. Sergio Leone shot much of the Dollars trilogy there in the 1960s, and several western sets are still standing.
- Which film was shot at Loarre Castle?
- Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (2005) shot scenes at the Romanesque Loarre Castle in Aragon, along with locations in Segovia, Ávila and Seville.
- Where was Game of Thrones filmed in Seville?
- The gardens and halls of the Royal Alcázar of Seville appear as the Water Gardens of Dorne, the palace of House Martell, from the fifth season onward.
- How many film locations are on this list in Spain?
- The list covers 14 film locations.