The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests Seen on Screen in Europe
8 places in 4 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in Europe are Plitvice Lakes National Park (Croatia), Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park (Spain) and Tuileries Garden (France). The list covers 8 gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in 4 countries. France has the most, with 3. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Film crews come to Europe's parks and gardens for two opposite reasons. Wild landscapes such as karst lakes, desert coasts, sandstone labyrinths and volcanic plateaus can stand in for other continents or invented worlds, while the formal gardens of Paris supply instant elegance and a recognisable city. Within a few hours' travel, a production can find both untouched nature and three centuries of designed landscape.
Croatia's Plitvice Lakes, a chain of turquoise lakes stepped down through travertine barriers and waterfalls, served as the American West in the Winnetou westerns of the 1960s. In southern Spain, the volcanic coast of Cabo de Gata-Níjar near Almería hosted spaghetti westerns and the beach scene of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Teide National Park on Tenerife, with its lava fields beneath Spain's highest summit, has played ancient and alien worlds alike.
In Paris, the Tuileries Garden was redesigned by André Le Nôtre in the 1660s along the axis that runs from the Louvre, and the Jardin du Luxembourg grew from Marie de' Medici's palace garden of the 17th century. The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, opened in 1867 on a former quarry, crowns its cliff with a small temple. In Bohemia, the Adršpach-Teplice Rocks form a sandstone city of towers and narrow gorges.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 2 | Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park | Nature reserve | Spain | |
| 3 | Tuileries Garden | Urban park | France | |
| 4 | Adršpach-Teplice Rocks | Rock formation | Czech Republic | |
| 5 | Jardin du Luxembourg | Urban park | France | |
| 6 | Parc des Buttes-Chaumont | Urban park | France | |
| 7 | Teide National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 8 | Timanfaya National Park | National park | Spain |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 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 Europe?
- On our list, Plitvice Lakes National Park (Croatia) ranks first, followed by Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park (Spain) and Tuileries Garden (France).
- Which country has the most gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from France (3), Spain (3) and Croatia (1).
- How were the Plitvice Lakes formed?
- The lakes are dammed by barriers of travertine, a rock deposited as calcium carbonate settles out of the water with the help of mosses and algae. The barriers keep growing, so the lakes and waterfalls are still changing.
- Which Indiana Jones film was shot in Cabo de Gata?
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) filmed on Playa de Mónsul in Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park, the beach where Henry Jones scatters seagulls into the path of a plane.
- What was the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont before it was a park?
- The site was a gypsum and limestone quarry and a dumping ground on the edge of Paris. Under Napoleon III it was transformed by Jean-Charles Alphand into a park with artificial cliffs, a lake and a waterfall.
- How many gardens, parks and forests seen on screen are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 8 gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in 4 countries. France has the most, with 3.