The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders Seen on Screen in the World
31 places in 19 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful natural wonders seen on screen in the world are Mount Olympus (Greece), Uluru (Australia) and Mount Rainier (United States). The list covers 31 natural wonders seen on screen in 19 countries. France has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Directors use real landscapes when no set can match the scale, and a mountain, cliff or dune that appears on screen often defines how millions of people picture that place. Some films are about the place itself, a climb or an expedition. Others borrow a landscape to stand for another world, so that a volcanic plateau becomes an alien planet and a pillar of rock becomes a fortress.
Climbing films take mountains at their word. El Capitan in Yosemite, a granite wall nearly a kilometre high, is the stage of Free Solo, which follows Alex Honnold's climb without ropes and won the Academy Award for best documentary. The 2015 film Everest dramatised the 1996 disaster on Mount Everest, and Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, one of the fourteen peaks above 8,000 metres, gave its name to a film about Reinhold and Günther Messner's 1970 expedition. Mount Kilimanjaro, the freestanding volcano rising above the plains of Tanzania, lent its name to Hemingway's story and the 1952 film The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
Other landscapes appear as scenery with a strong character. Meteora's monasteries on sandstone pillars staged the climax of For Your Eyes Only, the White Cliffs of Dover mark England's coast in countless films, and the Dune of Pilat on the Bay of Arcachon is the tallest sand dune in Europe. Teide on Tenerife, Spain's highest peak, and Mount Etna on Sicily give films their lunar lava fields. Uluru, the great sandstone monolith sacred to the Anangu people, and Mount Rainier, glaciated above Seattle, are equally unmistakable when they fill the frame.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Olympus | Mountain | Greece | |
| 2 | Uluru | Rock formation | Australia | |
| 3 | Mount Rainier | Volcano | United States | |
| 4 | Mount Everest | Mountain | Nepal | |
| 5 | White Cliffs of Dover | Cliff | United Kingdom | |
| 6 | Dune of Pilat | Dune | France | |
| 7 | Teide | Volcano | Spain | |
| 8 | El Capitan | Rock formation | United States | |
| 9 | Nanga Parbat | Summit | Pakistan | |
| 10 | Mount Kilimanjaro | Volcano | Tanzania | |
| 11 | Meteora | Rock formation | Greece | ✓ |
| 12 | Mount Etna | Volcano | Italy | |
| 13 | Aiguille du Midi | Scenic viewpoint | France | |
| 14 | Lençóis Maranhenses National Park | Dune | Brazil | ✓ |
| 15 | Vatnajökull | Glacier | Iceland | |
| 16 | Padirac Cave | Show cave | France | |
| 17 | Mount Sinai | Mountain | Egypt | |
| 18 | Lysefjord | Fjord | Norway | |
| 19 | Adršpach-Teplice Rocks | Rock formation | Czech Republic | |
| 20 | Stromboli | Volcano | Italy | ✓ |
| 21 | Salar de Uyuni | Salt flat | Bolivia | |
| 22 | Durdle Door | Natural arch | United Kingdom | |
| 23 | Neptune's Grotto | Show cave | Italy | |
| 24 | Taranaki Maunga | Volcano | New Zealand | |
| 25 | Mer de Glace | Glacier | France | |
| 26 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | United States | |
| 27 | Sakurajima | Volcano | Japan | |
| 28 | Castellana Caves | Show cave | Italy | |
| 29 | Mammoth Cave | Cave | United States | |
| 30 | Postojna Cave | Show cave | Slovenia |
01 Mount Olympus
Όλυμπος
Greece · 24.7 km from Katerini40.083° N 22.350° E
- biosphere reserve
Image by zremus from Pixabay Mount Olympus, the home of the gods in Greek myth, is also a real and demanding mountain: a massif of some 52 peaks rising almost straight from the Aegean coast, with its summit, Mytikas, at 2,918 metres — the highest point in Greece.
Did you know? Ancient pottery, coins and traces of sacrificial ash dated to around 400 BC have been found near the summit.
02 Uluru
Australia25.345° S 131.036° E
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay 4 km around its base. That makes it one of the most recognisable landforms on the continent. Geologists call it an inselberg: an isolated remnant that outlasted the rock around it because it has almost no joints or bedding partings for erosion to exploit. Its strata are tilted almost vertical, and much of the formation continues underground.
Did you know? The rock's sandstone layers stand almost on end, dipping at about 85 degrees, and at least 2.4 km of their thickness is exposed at the surface.
03 Mount Rainier
United States46.852° N 121.760° W
Image by Kranich17 from Pixabay On a clear day Mount Rainier floats over Seattle and Tacoma like a second horizon; locals simply call it "the Mountain". The volcano rises to about 4,391 metres, and because it stands alone above the lower Cascades it is the most topographically prominent peak in the contiguous United States.
Did you know? The ice-filled summit craters hold the world’s largest volcanic glacier cave network, with nearly 3.2 km of passages.
04 Mount Everest
Nepal27.988° N 86.925° E
Image by peteranta from Pixabay 86 metres. No point on Earth stands higher above sea level. Nepalis call the mountain Sagarmatha; Tibetans call it Qomolangma, a name that already appears on a Qing imperial atlas of 1721. The English name came from Andrew Waugh, Surveyor General of India, who honoured his predecessor George Everest, even though Everest himself protested that the natives of India could neither write nor pronounce it.
Did you know? More than 200 bodies remain on the mountain because bringing them down from such altitudes is considered too dangerous.
05 White Cliffs of Dover
United Kingdom · 4 km from Dover51.135° N 1.357° E
Image by vjkombajn from Pixabay The White Cliffs of Dover stand on both sides of the port of Dover for about 13 km, a wall of chalk up to 110 metres high facing the narrowest part of the Channel. On a clear day France is visible 32 km away, and from France the cliffs are visible in turn.
Did you know? Over the past 150 years the cliffs have retreated by roughly 22 to 32 cm a year, several times faster than the 2 to 6 cm estimated for earlier millennia.
06 Dune of Pilat
Dune du Pilat
France44.590° N 1.212° W
Image by weareaway from Pixabay At around 105 metres, the Dune of Pilat is the tallest sand dune in Europe, a single ridge stretching nearly three kilometres along the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux. But the number that matters more than its height is its speed: driven by onshore wind, the whole dune creeps inland by four to five metres every year.
Did you know? The dune holds roughly 60 million cubic metres of sand, piled about 500 metres wide from the ocean to the forest.
07 Teide
Spain28.273° N 16.644° W
Image by javierAlamo from Pixabay Teide, 3,715 m, is the highest point in Spain and the highest summit of any island in the Atlantic. Measured from the ocean floor it stands some 7,500 m tall, making it the third-largest volcanic structure on Earth after Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Did you know? The last eruption from Teide's summit happened around 850 AD and produced the Lavas Negras, the black flows that still cover much of its flanks.
08 El Capitan
United States37.734° N 119.637° W
Image by carelbron0 from Pixabay El Capitan is the granite wall that greets you at the western end of Yosemite Valley: a single, almost unjointed monolith rising roughly 900 metres from the valley floor to its rounded top.
Did you know? Despite its towering face, El Capitan's summit has only about 3 metres of topographic prominence, because it is attached to higher ground behind.
09 Nanga Parbat
Pakistan35.239° N 74.590° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay Nanga Parbat, 8,126 m, is the ninth-highest mountain in the world and the western cornerstone of the Himalaya, rising just south of the great bend of the Indus in Gilgit-Baltistan, in the Pakistan-administered part of Kashmir. Few mountains stand so far above their surroundings.
Did you know? Guinness World Records lists it as the fastest-growing mountain on Earth, rising by about 7 mm a year.
10 Mount Kilimanjaro
Tanzania · 30.3 km from Moshi3.067° S 37.359° E
Image by Squirrel_photos from Pixabay Kilimanjaro rises alone out of the plains of northern Tanzania, 5,895 metres high and some 4,900 metres above its own base. It is the highest mountain in Africa and the highest free-standing mountain on Earth, a dormant stratovolcano built by more than two million years of eruptions along the East African Rift.
Did you know? In 2014 the Swiss-Ecuadorian runner Karl Egloff reached the summit in under five hours and was back at the gate in about 6 hours 42 minutes in total.
11 Meteora
Μετέωρα
Greece39.712° N 21.627° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by shogun from Pixabay Monastic life came here before any monastery did. From around the 11th century, hermits climbed into natural fissures and caves high in these sandstone pillars using removable rope ladders — inaccessibility itself was the point, a way of withdrawing from the world that the rock simply handed them.
Did you know? The Holy Trinity monastery was a filming location for the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, and Linkin Park named a 2003 album after Meteora.
12 Mount Etna
Etna
Italy · 28.9 km from Catania37.751° N 14.993° E
Image by 19306 from Pixabay Mount Etna rises on the east coast of Sicily between Catania and Messina, a volcano so large that its base measures about 140 km around and covers some 1,190 square kilometres. It is the highest mountain in Italy south of the Alps, but its height is never fixed: in 2021 the Southeast Crater reached 3,357 metres, and after the eruptions of 2024 the Voragine crater took over as the summit at around 3,403 metres.
Did you know? The whole volcano is creeping towards the Mediterranean at an average of about 14 millimetres a year.
13 Aiguille du Midi
France · 36.8 km from Aosta45.879° N 6.888° E
Image by Simon from Pixabay The Aiguille du Midi is a 3,842-metre rock needle in the Mont Blanc massif, and one of the few places in the Alps where anyone can stand face to face with the high mountains without climbing. Its name means "needle of midday". From the summit the view takes in Mont Blanc to the south, a whole horizon of peaks and glaciers, and, straight down, the rooftops of Chamonix more than two and a half kilometres below.
Did you know? The rock needle was first climbed on 4 August 1818 by the Polish count Antoni Malczewski with Jean-Michel Balmat and five other guides.
14 Lençóis Maranhenses National Park
Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses
Brazil2.483° S 43.133° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Julius Dadalti · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lençóis Maranhenses means "bedsheets of Maranhão" — the name comes straight from the shape of the dunes, whose parallel ridges look like a tangle of linens left out to dry. That image already hints at the park's real trick: this looks like a desert, but it isn't one.
Did you know? The dunes served as a backdrop for the Brazilian film House of Sand and for scenes in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
15 Vatnajökull
Iceland64.400° N 16.800° W
Image by photovicky from Pixabay Vatnajökull is the great ice cap of south-east Iceland and the largest glacier in Europe outside the Arctic, covering more than 7,000 square kilometres. The ice averages around 380 metres thick and reaches about 950 metres at its deepest, holding some 3,000 cubic kilometres of water.
Did you know? In 1362 Öræfajökull, on the ice cap's southern rim, blasted out about 10 cubic kilometres of tephra, an eruption on the scale of Pinatubo in 1991.
16 Padirac Cave
Gouffre de Padirac
France · 36.7 km from Brive-la-Gaillarde44.858° N 1.750° E
Luc Viatour · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Gouffre de Padirac opens in the Jurassic limestone of the Causse de Gramat, in the Lot department of southwestern France, as a nearly circular shaft about 35 metres across and 103 metres deep. It was once a closed underground chamber; at some unknown moment its roof collapsed, leaving an open well that local people long associated with the devil.
Did you know? In 1948 cave diver Guy de Lavaur explored the Montvalent spring in a wetsuit his wife made by gluing foam rubber onto his old-fashioned bathing costume.
17 Mount Sinai
Egypt28.538° N 33.975° E
Berthold Werner · CC BY-SA 3.0 Three religions independently point at the same mountain. Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition all place the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses on this peak — known locally as Jabal Musa, "Mountain of Moses" — making it one of the very few places on Earth where the core narratives of all three Abrahamic faiths physically converge rather than just overlap thematically.
Did you know? The steep direct route to the summit, the Steps of Penitence, climbs some 3,750 rough stone steps up the ravine behind Saint Catherine's Monastery.
18 Lysefjord
Norway · 39.3 km from Stavanger59.010° N 6.359° E
Image by oohajo from Pixabay The Lysefjord cuts 42 km into the mountains of Ryfylke, east of Stavanger, and it is narrow even by Norwegian standards: in places under two kilometres wide, with granite walls dropping almost sheer for a thousand metres. The name is usually explained as "light fjord", after the pale granite of its sides. Glaciers carved the trough during the ice ages and the sea flooded it when they retreated.
Did you know? Preikestolen was the setting for the cliff-top climax of the 2018 film Mission: Impossible – Fallout.
19 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.
20 Stromboli
Isola di Stromboli
Italy38.804° N 15.223° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Wolfgang_Hasselmann from Pixabay Stromboli is a volcano you can watch breathing. The island is simply the top of a cone that rises 926 metres above the Tyrrhenian Sea and continues more than two and a half kilometres below it, and it has been erupting almost without pause for somewhere between two and five thousand years. Every few minutes to every hour or so, a crater near the summit throws up a burst of glowing fragments, then falls quiet again.
Did you know? Jules Verne ended Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) with his explorers shot out of the volcano onto the slopes of Stromboli.
21 Salar de Uyuni
Bolivia20.333° S 67.700° W
Image by WaSZI from Pixabay Salar de Uyuni is not a desert that happens to be white — it is the exposed, dried-out bottom of a chain of prehistoric lakes (geologists call the last big one Lake Tauca) that repeatedly filled and evaporated over tens of thousands of years. Each cycle left another sheet of salt, and today those layers stack up to 10 meters thick over an area the size of a small country.
Did you know? According to Aymara legend, the flat formed from the tears and milk of Tunupa, a mountain deserted by her giant husband; many locals prefer the name Salar de Tunupa.
22 Durdle Door
United Kingdom · 29.2 km from Bournemouth50.621° N 2.277° W
Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay Durdle Door is a natural arch of Portland limestone standing in the sea off the Dorset coast near Lulworth, one of the best-known landmarks of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site.
Did you know? The 2022 Doctor Who special The Power of the Doctor and the 1997 film Wilde both used the arch as a location.
23 Neptune's Grotto
Grotte di Nettuno
Italy · 39.2 km from Sassari40.565° N 8.160° E
Holger Uwe Schmitt · CC BY-SA 4.0 Neptune's Grotto opens at the foot of Capo Caccia, a sheer headland on the coast near Alghero. Its mouth sits barely a metre above the Mediterranean under cliffs about 110 metres high, and that position decides everything about a visit: the cave can only be entered when the sea is calm.
Did you know? For the 1978 film shoot, the crew built a small ship and a Jules Verne-style platform inside the cave, which became a set for about two months.
24 Taranaki Maunga
New Zealand · 26.7 km from New Plymouth39.296° S 174.065° E
Image by Browser from Pixabay Few mountains look so much like the idea of a volcano. Taranaki Maunga rises to 2,518 metres from the coastal farmland of New Zealand's west coast as an almost perfectly symmetrical cone, snow-capped for much of the year and standing entirely alone, with nothing of comparable height nearby. The resemblance to Mount Fuji is close enough that the mountain stood in for it in the 2003 film The Last Samurai.
Did you know? According to Māori tradition, Taranaki once stood in the centre of the North Island and fled west after losing a battle with Tongariro over the beautiful mountain Pihanga.
25 Mer de Glace
France · 35.5 km from Aosta45.916° N 6.937° E
Image by Simon from Pixabay The Mer de Glace, the "sea of ice", is a river of ice about 7 km long, or some 12 km if its feeder glaciers are counted, flowing down the northern side of the Mont Blanc massif towards the Chamonix valley. Seen from the Montenvers terrace at 1,913 metres, it curves away between the granite spires of the Drus and the wall of the Grandes Jorasses, its surface ribbed and crevassed and darkened by rock debris.
Did you know? In the 17th century, as the glacier advanced toward homes in the valley, local people held processions and exorcisms to make it stop.
26 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.
27 Sakurajima
Japan · 9.2 km from Kagoshima31.581° N 130.658° E
Image by tsunehachi from Pixabay Sakurajima is a volcano that lives in the middle of a city's view. It rises from Kagoshima Bay just 4 km across the water from Kagoshima, a city of some 680,000 people, and it is the most active volcano in Japan: since 1955 it has erupted almost continuously, with thousands of small explosions a year throwing ash kilometres into the sky.
Did you know? Between 1955 and 2024 observers counted more than 15,000 eruptions from the Minami-dake and Showa craters alone.
28 Castellana Caves
Grotte di Castellana
Italy · 35.2 km from Bari40.876° N 17.149° E
Alessandro e Damiano · CC BY 4.0 The Castellana Caves exist on record because of a job that had nothing to do with finding them. In January 1938, the Provincial Tourist Board of Bari brought in Franco Anelli, a speleologist from the Italian Institute of Speleology, simply to assess some already-known local caves for their tourism potential.
Did you know? Between 1953 and 1986 eight films were shot inside the caves.
29 Mammoth Cave
United States · 37.3 km from Bowling Green37.183° N 86.100° W
Daniel Schwen · CC BY-SA 4.0 The most accurate map of Mammoth Cave for nearly forty years was drawn from memory by a man who wasn't free to leave it.
Did you know? Remains of an ancient shark, Saivodus striatus, comparable in size to a modern great white were identified in the cave's limestone in 2020.
30 Postojna Cave
Postojnska jama
Slovenia · 38.4 km from Ljubljana45.783° N 14.204° E
Shesmax · CC BY-SA 4.0 Long before anyone lit a torch in Postojna's deeper chambers, the cave already had a reputation. In 1689 the Slovenian polymath Johann Weikhard von Valvasor recorded local accounts of pale, snake-like creatures that occasionally surfaced in floodwater near the entrance — animals with four small legs, a long tail, and skin the colour of a corpse. People took them for baby dragons.
Did you know? In 1831 the first true cave beetle known to science, the slender-necked Leptodirus, was found here, overturning the belief that caves held no life.
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 natural wonders seen on screen in the world?
- On our list, Mount Olympus (Greece) ranks first, followed by Uluru (Australia) and Mount Rainier (United States).
- Which country has the most natural wonders seen on screen in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from France (4), Italy (4) and the United States (4).
- Which mountain is climbed in Free Solo?
- El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, California. Alex Honnold climbed its Freerider route without ropes in June 2017, and the film won the 2019 Academy Award for best documentary feature.
- Which James Bond film was shot at Meteora?
- For Your Eyes Only (1981). Its climax takes place in a monastery on top of one of Meteora's sandstone pillars in central Greece.
- How tall is the Dune of Pilat?
- Around 100 to 110 metres, varying as the wind moves the sand. It stands on the Atlantic coast near Arcachon and is the tallest sand dune in Europe.
- How many natural wonders seen on screen are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 31 natural wonders seen on screen in 19 countries. France has the most, with 4.