The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders Seen on Screen in Europe
17 places in 9 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful natural wonders seen on screen in Europe are Mount Olympus (Greece), White Cliffs of Dover (United Kingdom) and Dune of Pilat (France). The list covers 17 natural wonders seen on screen in 9 countries. France has the most, with 4. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Europe packs glaciers, active volcanoes, fjords, chalk cliffs and sandstone mazes into a small area, and film crews can reach most of them within a day from a major city. That is why the same continent has stood in for Arctic wastes, alien planets and mythical kingdoms, and why many of its landscapes are now remembered as much for one scene as for their geology.
Iceland has become the most cast landscape of all. Vatnajökull, the largest ice cap in Iceland, sends outlet glaciers down to the coast, and those glaciers stood in for a frozen planet in Interstellar, while the icebergs of the Jökulsárlón lagoon at its edge appeared in James Bond films. In Norway, the cliff of Preikestolen above the Lysefjord was the setting for the climax of Mission: Impossible – Fallout. Meteora's monasteries on sandstone pillars staged the end of For Your Eyes Only.
Volcanoes give films a more elemental mood. Stromboli, which has erupted almost continuously for thousands of years, gave its name to Roberto Rossellini's 1950 film with Ingrid Bergman, and Mount Etna and Teide add their lava fields to the screen. The Aiguille du Midi rises above Chamonix with a cable car to its summit station, the White Cliffs of Dover mark England's southern coast, and the Dune of Pilat climbs higher than any other dune in Europe. Beneath the surface, Padirac Cave in France leads into a vast chasm with an underground river, and the Adršpach-Teplice Rocks in Bohemia form a labyrinth of sandstone towers. Mount Olympus, the mythical home of the gods, completes the list.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Olympus | Mountain | Greece | |
| 2 | White Cliffs of Dover | Cliff | United Kingdom | |
| 3 | Dune of Pilat | Dune | France | |
| 4 | Teide | Volcano | Spain | |
| 5 | Meteora | Rock formation | Greece | ✓ |
| 6 | Mount Etna | Volcano | Italy | |
| 7 | Aiguille du Midi | Scenic viewpoint | France | |
| 8 | Vatnajökull | Glacier | Iceland | |
| 9 | Padirac Cave | Show cave | France | |
| 10 | Lysefjord | Fjord | Norway | |
| 11 | Adršpach-Teplice Rocks | Rock formation | Czech Republic | |
| 12 | Stromboli | Volcano | Italy | ✓ |
| 13 | Durdle Door | Natural arch | United Kingdom | |
| 14 | Neptune's Grotto | Show cave | Italy | |
| 15 | Mer de Glace | Glacier | France | |
| 16 | Castellana Caves | Show cave | Italy | |
| 17 | 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 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 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.
10 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.
11 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.
12 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.
13 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.
14 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.
15 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.
16 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.
17 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 Europe?
- On our list, Mount Olympus (Greece) ranks first, followed by White Cliffs of Dover (United Kingdom) and Dune of Pilat (France).
- Which country has the most natural wonders seen on screen in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from France (4), Italy (4) and Greece (2).
- Where was Interstellar's ice planet filmed?
- On Svínafellsjökull, an outlet glacier of Vatnajökull in southeast Iceland, which served as Dr. Mann's frozen planet.
- Where is the cliff in Mission: Impossible – Fallout?
- The final cliff-top scene was filmed at Preikestolen, a flat rock platform about 600 metres above the Lysefjord in southwestern Norway.
- Why is Stromboli called the Lighthouse of the Mediterranean?
- The volcano has erupted in small, regular bursts for thousands of years, and its glowing explosions at night were visible to sailors from far out at sea.
- How many natural wonders seen on screen are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 17 natural wonders seen on screen in 9 countries. France has the most, with 4.