The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests Seen on Screen in the United States
5 places ยท updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests seen on screen in the United States are Central Park, Zion National Park and Yosemite National Park. The list covers 5 gardens, parks and forests seen on screen. Last updated 6 October 2026.
American cinema grew up alongside American parks. The Western needed open country and sandstone walls, the road movie needed canyons, and the New York film needed one green rectangle in a grid of streets. A park seen on screen carries two lives at once: the place itself and the scenes millions of viewers already hold in memory.
Central Park, laid out to Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's Greensward Plan of 1858, has served as the backdrop for more New York films than anyone can count. Zion National Park in Utah sets its narrow canyons between towering cliffs of red and cream Navajo sandstone. Yosemite holds El Capitan, the granite wall climbed without ropes by Alex Honnold in the documentary Free Solo, along with Half Dome and the falls of Yosemite Valley. Badlands National Park in South Dakota is a maze of eroded buttes and spires striped in sediment. Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado is so deep and narrow that sunlight barely reaches parts of its floor.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Central Park | Urban park | |
| 2 | Zion National Park | National park | |
| 3 | Yosemite National Park | National park | โ |
| 4 | Badlands National Park | National park | |
| 5 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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 the United States?
- On our list, Central Park ranks first, followed by Zion National Park and Yosemite National Park.
- Who designed Central Park?
- Central Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, whose Greensward Plan won the design competition in 1858. Almost all of its lakes, hills and meadows are man-made.
- How deep is the Black Canyon of the Gunnison?
- At its deepest point, near Warner Point, the canyon drops about 2,700 feet (around 830 m). Its Painted Wall, streaked with pale bands of pegmatite, is the tallest cliff in Colorado.
- How many gardens, parks and forests seen on screen are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 5 gardens, parks and forests seen on screen.