The Most Beautiful Islands Seen on Screen in the World
11 places in 9 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful islands seen on screen in the world are Great Barrier Reef (Australia), Easter Island (Chile) and Capri (Italy). The list covers 11 islands seen on screen in 9 countries. Spain has the most, with 3. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Islands are ready-made worlds for the screen. A camera can frame one whole, cut it off from everything else and let the sea tell the story: castaway, sanctuary, last outpost, the edge of the known map. The islands filmmakers return to tend to have a silhouette that cannot be mistaken for anywhere else — a pinnacle rising out of the Atlantic, a caldera rim lined with white houses, a field of black lava.
Skellig Michael, off County Kerry, became Luke Skywalker's refuge on the planet Ahch-To in the recent Star Wars trilogy; near its summit cling the drystone beehive cells of an early medieval monastery. Easter Island, with its hundreds of moai carved from volcanic tuff, is the setting of the 1994 film Rapa-Nui. Santorini, the rim of a flooded volcanic caldera in the Aegean, opens Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, and Lanzarote, its landscape remade by the eruptions of the 1730s, played a prehistoric Earth in One Million Years B.C.
The Great Barrier Reef, a maze of coral cays and reefs off Queensland, is the home waters of the clownfish in Finding Nemo and a constant subject of nature films. In the Faroes, the uninhabited islet of Tindhólmur, crowned by a jagged ridge of five peaks, was the model for the Isle of Berk in How to Train Your Dragon.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Great Barrier Reef | Coral reef | Australia | ✓ |
| 2 | Easter Island | Island | Chile | |
| 3 | Capri | Island | Italy | |
| 4 | Lanzarote | Island | Spain | |
| 5 | Santorini | Island | Greece | |
| 6 | Skellig Michael | Island | Ireland | ✓ |
| 7 | La Gomera | Island | Spain | |
| 8 | Isle of Skye | Island | United Kingdom | |
| 9 | La Palma | Island | Spain | |
| 10 | São Miguel Island | Island | Portugal | |
| 11 | Tindhólmur | Island | Faroe Islands |
01 Great Barrier Reef
Australia · 37.6 km from Port Douglas16.400° S 145.800° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by alicia3690 from Pixabay At around 344,400 square kilometers and roughly 2,300 km long, the Great Barrier Reef isn't one reef so much as some 3,000 individual reefs and hundreds of islands strung together — a footprint about the size of Italy or Japan, and by most measures the largest living structure ever built by living organisms, coral included.
Did you know? On 11 June 1770 James Cook's ship Endeavour ran aground on the reef, and repairing her took about seven weeks.
02 Easter Island
Chile27.120° S 109.350° W
Image by 3282700 from Pixabay The single biggest puzzle Easter Island still hands visitors is how a Polynesian society without draft animals, wheels or metal tools moved statues weighing as much as 80 tons for kilometres over rough ground. For decades the default answer was rollers and ropes, dragged flat.
Did you know? The island's rongorongo script, recorded on about two dozen wooden objects, has never been deciphered, and none of them remain on the island.
03 Capri
Isola di Capri
Italy · 32.4 km from Naples40.550° N 14.233° E
Image by babusz from Pixabay Capri is a limestone island of just over 10 square kilometres at the southern entrance to the Gulf of Naples, about 5 km off the tip of the Sorrento Peninsula. It rises in cliffs straight from the sea and is split into two communities: Capri town in the east, around its famous little square, and Anacapri higher up in the west, below Monte Solaro, at 589 m the island's highest point, which you can reach by chairlift.
04 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.
05 Santorini
Σαντορίνη
Greece36.415° N 25.433° E
Image by Gherks from Pixabay Santorini is what remains of a volcano that blew itself apart. The islands of the group — Thera, Therasia, Aspronisi and the young, dark cones of Nea and Palea Kameni in the middle — form a broken ring around a flooded caldera, and on the main island the inner cliff falls more than 300 metres straight to the sea.
Did you know? Bronze Age Akrotiri had twin sets of clay pipes for hot and cold water and indoor toilets, among the oldest such utilities ever found; the hot water was probably volcanic.
06 Skellig Michael
Ireland51.771° N 10.541° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by NakNakNak from Pixabay Around the 6th century, a small group of monks chose the more punishing of Ireland's two available forms of isolation. Egypt had deserts to retreat into; Ireland didn't, so ascetics who wanted the same kind of hardship looked instead for the most inaccessible ground they could find, and a jagged rock rising out of the Atlantic 12 kilometers off the Kerry coast qualified.
Did you know? In 823 Vikings raided the island and carried off its abbot, Eitgal, who died of hunger in captivity; a second attack followed in 838.
07 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.
08 Isle of Skye
United Kingdom57.350° N 6.300° W
Image by FrankyFromGermany from Pixabay Skye is shaped like a hand of rock spread out on the sea: a mountainous core, and from it a ring of peninsulas — Trotternish, Waternish, Duirinish, Minginish, Sleat — separated by sea lochs that cut so deep that nowhere on the island is more than about 8 km from salt water.
Did you know? The MV Glenachulish, which crosses the Kyle Rhea strait between Skye and Glenelg, is the last turntable ferry still operating anywhere in the world.
09 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.
10 São Miguel Island
Portugal · 15.8 km from Ponta Delgada37.800° N 25.500° W
Image by Comanche0 from Pixabay São Miguel, the largest island of the Azores at about 760 km², is a string of volcanoes fused together in the middle of the Atlantic, and its nickname, Ilha Verde — the Green Island — describes what that ground has become: crater walls under pasture and forest, lakes lying in the floors of old calderas. The island grew from east to west.
Did you know? Gorreana, founded in 1883 on the north coast, is the oldest surviving tea plantation in Europe and grows its tea without pesticides.
11 Tindhólmur
Faroe Islands · 32.6 km from Tórshavn62.078° N 7.435° W
Erik Christensen · CC BY-SA 3.0 Tindhólmur's five jagged peaks look uninhabitable, and today they are — but a local legend explains why a place with room for a farm sits empty. The story goes that a farmer named Rasmus once lived on the islet with his family, until a giant eagle swooped down, snatched his two-year-old child, and carried it to the highest peak.
Did you know? The fictional Isle of Berk in How to Train Your Dragon was modelled on Tindhólmur, which also stands in for Berk in the 2025 live-action remake.
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 islands seen on screen in the world?
- On our list, Great Barrier Reef (Australia) ranks first, followed by Easter Island (Chile) and Capri (Italy).
- Which country has the most islands seen on screen in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Spain (3), Australia (1) and Chile (1).
- Where was Ahch-To filmed in Star Wars?
- Luke Skywalker's island on Ahch-To was filmed on Skellig Michael, a rocky island about 12 kilometres off the coast of County Kerry in Ireland, crowned by a medieval monastery of stone beehive huts.
- Which island inspired the Isle of Berk in How to Train Your Dragon?
- The Isle of Berk was based on Tindhólmur, a small uninhabited islet in the Faroe Islands known for its spiky ridge of five peaks.
- Where was One Million Years B.C. filmed?
- The location scenes of the 1966 film were shot in the Canary Islands, largely on Lanzarote, whose volcanic landscapes stood in for a primeval world.
- How many islands seen on screen are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 11 islands seen on screen in 9 countries. Spain has the most, with 3.