The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests Seen on Screen in North America
6 places in 2 countries ยท updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in North America are Banff National Park (Canada), Central Park (United States) and Zion National Park (United States). The list covers 6 gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 5. Last updated 6 October 2026.
North America's parks have shaped how the world imagines wilderness, and much of that image came through the camera. Glaciated granite valleys, red sandstone canyons, eroded badlands and turquoise mountain lakes have stood in for frontier, alien planet and paradise alike, while in the middle of New York a designed landscape has become one of the most filmed places on earth. The screen made these places familiar; standing in them shows how much it left out.
Central Park, laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the 1850s, appears in countless films, from Marathon Man to romantic comedies set on its lawns and lakes. Banff, Canada's first national park, offered its lakes and peaks to Otto Preminger's River of No Return with Marilyn Monroe. In Utah, Zion National Park, with its deep red-walled canyon of the Virgin River, was one of the settings for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Yosemite's sheer granite face of El Capitan is the stage of the documentary Free Solo, and South Dakota's Badlands, with their banded spires and gullies, appear in Dances with Wolves. Black Canyon of the Gunnison, whose dark walls drop almost vertically to the river, completes the list with one of the steepest and narrowest canyons on the continent.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Banff National Park | Protected area | Canada | |
| 2 | Central Park | Urban park | United States | |
| 3 | Zion National Park | National park | United States | |
| 4 | Yosemite National Park | National park | United States | โ |
| 5 | Badlands National Park | National park | United States | |
| 6 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | United States |
01 Banff National Park
Canada ยท 2 km from Banff51.167ยฐ N 115.550ยฐ 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.
02 Central Park
United States ยท 7.2 km from New York City40.782ยฐ N 73.966ยฐ 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.
03 Zion National Park
United States37.203ยฐ N 112.988ยฐ 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 โ think Sahara-scale โ 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.
04 Yosemite National Park
United States37.742ยฐ N 119.537ยฐ 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.
05 Badlands National Park
United States43.750ยฐ N 102.500ยฐ W
Image by victortran0107 from Pixabay The Lakota called this country makศรณลกiฤa, "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.
06 Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
United States ยท 16.6 km from Montrose38.580ยฐ N 107.728ยฐ 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.
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 โ 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 North America?
- On our list, Banff National Park (Canada) ranks first, followed by Central Park (United States) and Zion National Park (United States).
- Which country has the most gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (5) and Canada (1).
- Why is Central Park in so many films?
- Its meadows, lakes, bridges and skyline views sit in the middle of Manhattan, giving filmmakers both open landscape and an instantly recognisable New York setting. It is one of the most filmed locations in the world.
- Where was Free Solo filmed?
- The 2018 documentary was filmed in Yosemite National Park, following Alex Honnold's rope-free climb of El Capitan.
- What was the first national park in Canada?
- Banff, established in 1885 around the hot springs of Sulphur Mountain, was Canada's first national park.
- How many gardens, parks and forests seen on screen are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 6 gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 5.