The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests Seen on Screen in the World
22 places in 13 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in the world are Masai Mara (Kenya), Banff National Park (Canada) and Kakadu National Park (Australia). The list covers 22 gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in 13 countries. The United States has the most, with 5. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Film crews go to parks and forests for a simple reason: they need a world that looks real and unlike anything built on a set. A savanna full of animals, a canyon of red sandstone, a ravine of rock towers or a lawn every viewer recognises can carry a scene on its own, and once a landscape has stood in for Mars or Middle-earth, it keeps that second identity for anyone who has seen the film.
Wadi Rum in southern Jordan is the clearest case: its sandstone mountains and red sand served David Lean in Lawrence of Arabia and later played the surface of Mars in The Martian. In New Zealand, the beech forests and lakes of Fiordland were among the places Peter Jackson used for Middle-earth. In the Czech Republic, the maze of sandstone towers at Adršpach-Teplice appeared in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, while Croatia's Plitvice Lakes, a chain of turquoise pools linked by waterfalls, were the backdrop for the 1960s Winnetou westerns.
The Masai Mara has given wildlife filmmaking much of its classic footage, from the wildebeest crossing the Mara River to years of big-cat documentaries. The cities supply the other half: Central Park has appeared in so many New York films that it is almost a recurring character, and in Paris the Jardin du Luxembourg and the cliff-top temple of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, built in a former quarry, frame countless scenes. Zion's canyon walls and Yosemite's granite of El Capitan and Half Dome have been on screen since the early westerns.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Masai Mara | Protected area | Kenya | |
| 2 | Banff National Park | Protected area | Canada | |
| 3 | Kakadu National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 4 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 5 | Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park | Nature reserve | Spain | |
| 6 | Fiordland National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 7 | Tuileries Garden | Urban park | France | |
| 8 | Central Park | Urban park | United States | |
| 9 | Adršpach-Teplice Rocks | Rock formation | Czech Republic | |
| 10 | Zion National Park | National park | United States | |
| 11 | Jardin du Luxembourg | Urban park | France | |
| 12 | Huangshan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 13 | Parc des Buttes-Chaumont | Urban park | France | |
| 14 | Amazon rainforest | Forest | Brazil | |
| 15 | Wadi Rum | Protected area | Jordan | ✓ |
| 16 | Teide National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 17 | Yosemite National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 18 | Taronga Zoo | Zoo | Australia | |
| 19 | Badlands National Park | National park | United States | |
| 20 | Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove | Nature reserve | Nigeria | ✓ |
| 21 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | United States | |
| 22 | Timanfaya National Park | National park | Spain |
01 Masai Mara
Kenya1.490° S 35.140° E
Image by sprinter1973 from Pixabay The reserve's name comes from two different languages layered together. "Maasai" is how the people call themselves; "Mara," in the Maa language, means "spotted" — a description of how the grassland looks from a distance, dotted with the scattered, low trees (mostly Balanites aegyptiaca, the desert date, rather than true acacia) that break up the plain into a mottled pattern.
Did you know? The BBC series Big Cat Diary was filmed here, following individual lions, leopards and cheetahs around the Musiara marsh, Leopard Gorge and the Mara River.
02 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.
03 Kakadu National Park
Australia13.005° S 132.520° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Squirrel_photos from Pixabay Kakadu, in the Top End of Australia's Northern Territory, is the country's largest national park after one desert reserve: about 19,800 square kilometres, roughly the size of Wales, running from tidal rivers on the coast to the sheer sandstone wall of the Arnhem Land escarpment.
04 Plitvice Lakes National Park
Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera
Croatia44.880° N 15.616° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Hobbyfotography from Pixabay The barriers that create Plitvice's sixteen terraced lakes are, in a very real sense, alive — or at least built by living things. As water flows over limestone, it releases dissolved carbon dioxide, which shifts the water's chemistry so that calcium carbonate starts crystallising out of solution. Left alone, that process would just leave mineral crusts.
Did you know? Several Winnetou westerns based on Karl May's novels were filmed here between 1962 and 1968.
05 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.
06 Fiordland National Park
New Zealand45.386° S 167.347° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay 2 million hectares of temperate rainforest and 14 fjords gouged out by glaciers that retreated long enough ago for forest to reclaim nearly every slope down to the waterline. Rudyard Kipling once called Milford Sound the eighth wonder of the world, and the sound alone gets roughly 6,000 to 8,000 millimetres of rain a year — several times London's annual total — spread across some 180 days.
Did you know? Its mountains and fiords have stood in for other worlds in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Alien: Covenant.
07 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.
08 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.
09 Adršpach-Teplice Rocks
Czech Republic50.611° N 16.115° E
Lestat (Jan Mehlich) · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Adršpach-Teplice Rocks in north-eastern Bohemia are the largest rock city in Central Europe: a labyrinth of sandstone towers, walls and gorges formed when a continuous plateau of sandstone, laid down in a Cretaceous sea, was split by tectonic movement and then carved by water, frost and wind.
Did you know? In 1824 a forest fire smouldered among the rocks for several weeks and destroyed the entire forest around the rock city.
10 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.
11 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.
12 Huangshan
People's Republic of China30.125° N 118.167° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12412158 from Pixabay Huangshan's peaks are granite, not the limestone karst that shapes so much of scenic China, and that matters: granite fractures into sheer, blocky faces rather than smooth curves, which is why the mountain reads as a forest of vertical spires rather than rolling hills.
Did you know? Some 60,000 stone steps have been cut into the mountain, and nobody knows exactly when the oldest of them were laid.
13 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.
14 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.
15 Wadi Rum
Jordan · 33.6 km from Aqaba29.576° N 35.420° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by mailanmaik from Pixabay Wadi Rum is a desert valley in the far south of Jordan, east of Aqaba near the Saudi border, where sheer mountains of sandstone and granite rise out of flat floors of red and apricot sand. Covering about 720 square kilometres, it is the largest wadi in the country.
Did you know? Wadi Rum has stood in for several fictional worlds: Jedha in Rogue One, Pasaana in The Rise of Skywalker and Arrakis in Dune.
16 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.
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 Taronga Zoo
Australia · 4.1 km from Sydney33.843° S 151.241° E
istolethetv · CC BY 2.0 Taronga Zoo occupies one of the most enviable pieces of land in Sydney: a steep, wooded slope on the northern shore of the harbour at Mosman, looking straight across the water to the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and the towers of the city. The name is said to come from an Aboriginal word meaning "beautiful view", and the setting delivers it.
Did you know? From 1999 to 2014 Taronga cared for three leopard seals rescued sick or injured from New South Wales beaches, at the time the only ones held by any zoo.
19 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.
20 Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove
Osun-Osogbo Grove
Nigeria · 2 km from Osogbo7.755° N 4.551° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jean-fidele E. Ananou · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, on the edge of the city of Osogbo in south-western Nigeria, is one of the last of the sacred forests that once bordered almost every Yoruba town. Its 75 hectares of forest line the meanders of the Osun River and are considered the dwelling of Osun, the Yoruba goddess of the river itself.
Did you know? The Osun-Osogbo Festival is believed to have been celebrated for more than 700 years.
21 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.
22 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.
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 gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in the world?
- On our list, Masai Mara (Kenya) ranks first, followed by Banff National Park (Canada) and Kakadu National Park (Australia).
- Which country has the most gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (5), France (3) and Spain (3).
- Where was The Martian filmed?
- The Martian surface scenes were shot in Wadi Rum in southern Jordan, whose red sand and sandstone mountains had earlier appeared in Lawrence of Arabia.
- Which Czech rock town appears in Narnia?
- The sandstone towers of Adršpach-Teplice Rocks in north-eastern Bohemia were used in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.
- Which films were shot at Plitvice Lakes?
- Plitvice was one of the main locations of the German Winnetou westerns of the 1960s, adapted from Karl May's novels, which used the lakes and waterfalls as the American frontier.
- How many gardens, parks and forests seen on screen are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 22 gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in 13 countries. The United States has the most, with 5.