The Most Beautiful National Parks Seen on Screen in the World
10 places in 6 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful national parks seen on screen in the world are Banff National Park (Canada), Kakadu National Park (Australia) and Plitvice Lakes National Park (Croatia). The list covers 10 national parks seen on screen in 6 countries. The United States has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
National parks were created to keep landscapes as they are, and that is exactly what makes them valuable to filmmakers: a horizon without roads, a canyon without buildings, a forest that can pass for any century or any planet. Westerns found their frontier in them, fantasy found its other worlds, and climbing and wildlife films found their subjects.
Yosemite has been on screen since the silent era; Captain Kirk climbs El Capitan in the opening of Star Trek V, and the documentary Free Solo follows Alex Honnold up the same granite wall without a rope. Zion's sandstone canyons in Utah appear in westerns from the 1920s to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Badlands National Park in South Dakota, a maze of eroded buttes and pinnacles, was partly used for Dances with Wolves, while Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado offers some of the steepest and darkest cliffs on the continent, its walls of ancient gneiss falling sheer to the river.
Fiordland in New Zealand, with Milford Sound and its glacier-cut valleys, stood in for the Misty Mountains in The Lord of the Rings. Plitvice Lakes in Croatia was the setting of the 1960s Karl May westerns, including Treasure of Silver Lake. Banff, Canada's oldest national park, founded in 1885, frames turquoise glacial lakes beneath the limestone peaks of the Rockies.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Banff National Park | Protected area | Canada | |
| 2 | Kakadu National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 3 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 4 | Fiordland National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 5 | Zion National Park | National park | United States | |
| 6 | Teide National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 7 | Yosemite National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 8 | Badlands National Park | National park | United States | |
| 9 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | United States | |
| 10 | Timanfaya National Park | National park | Spain |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 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.
10 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 national parks seen on screen in the world?
- On our list, Banff National Park (Canada) ranks first, followed by Kakadu National Park (Australia) and Plitvice Lakes National Park (Croatia).
- Which country has the most national parks seen on screen in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (4), Spain (2) and Australia (1).
- Which movies were filmed in Yosemite National Park?
- Yosemite appears in the opening of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), in Maverick (1994), and in the Oscar-winning climbing documentary Free Solo (2018), which follows Alex Honnold's rope-free ascent of El Capitan.
- Where were the Karl May Winnetou films shot?
- Many of the 1960s Karl May westerns, including Treasure of Silver Lake, were filmed in Yugoslavia, with Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia among the best-known locations.
- What was filmed in Badlands National Park?
- Dances with Wolves (1990) and Thunderheart (1992) were partly filmed among the eroded buttes of Badlands National Park in South Dakota.
- How many national parks seen on screen are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 10 national parks seen on screen in 6 countries. The United States has the most, with 4.