The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries Seen on Screen in the World
14 places in 9 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful nature sanctuaries seen on screen in the world are Masai Mara (Kenya), Banff National Park (Canada) and Plitvice Lakes National Park (Croatia). The list covers 14 nature sanctuaries seen on screen in 9 countries. The United States has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Wild places on screen do two jobs at once. They are subjects in their own right, filmed for the animals and landscapes they protect, and they are stand-ins for worlds that do not exist — Mars, Middle-earth, a distant moon. Protection is what makes both possible: a reserve keeps its horizon free of roads and wires, so a single shot can show land as it looked before anyone arrived.
The Masai Mara in Kenya, where wildebeest and zebra cross the Mara River on their annual migration, was the stage of the BBC series Big Cat Diary. Wadi Rum in southern Jordan, a desert of red sand and sandstone and granite mountains, gave Lawrence of Arabia its desert scenes and has since doubled for Mars in The Martian and for alien worlds in Rogue One. James Cameron named the granite peaks and sea of clouds of Huangshan in eastern China among his influences for Pandora in Avatar.
North America and Europe add their own classics. Yosemite's El Capitan is the wall of Free Solo, Zion's canyons the backdrop of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the eroded buttes of the Badlands appear in Dances with Wolves. Fiordland in New Zealand stood in for the Misty Mountains in The Lord of the Rings, while the Adršpach-Teplice Rocks in the Czech Republic, a maze of sandstone towers and narrow gorges, have been protected since 1933.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Masai Mara | Protected area | Kenya | |
| 2 | Banff National Park | Protected area | Canada | |
| 3 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 4 | Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park | Nature reserve | Spain | |
| 5 | Fiordland National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 6 | Adršpach-Teplice Rocks | Rock formation | Czech Republic | |
| 7 | Zion National Park | National park | United States | |
| 8 | Huangshan | Protected area | People's Republic of China | ✓ |
| 9 | Wadi Rum | Protected area | Jordan | ✓ |
| 10 | Teide National Park | National park | Spain | ✓ |
| 11 | Yosemite National Park | National park | United States | ✓ |
| 12 | Badlands National Park | National park | United States | |
| 13 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | United States | |
| 14 | Timanfaya National Park | National park | Spain |
01 Masai Mara
Kenya1.490° S 35.140° E
Image by sprinter1973 from Pixabay The reserve's name comes from two different languages layered together. "Maasai" is how the people call themselves; "Mara," in the Maa language, means "spotted" — a description of how the grassland looks from a distance, dotted with the scattered, low trees (mostly Balanites aegyptiaca, the desert date, rather than true acacia) that break up the plain into a mottled pattern.
Did you know? The BBC series Big Cat Diary was filmed here, following individual lions, leopards and cheetahs around the Musiara marsh, Leopard Gorge and the Mara River.
02 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.
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 Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park
Parque natural del Cabo de Gata-Níjar
Spain · 36.5 km from Almería36.900° N 2.030° W
- UNESCO Global Geopark
- biosphere reserve
Image by WildFox from Pixabay Cabo de Gata-Níjar is the wild south-eastern corner of Spain: a coast of dark volcanic headlands, pale coves and desert light that somehow escaped the concrete that lines most of the Mediterranean. It was declared Andalusia's first combined land-and-sea natural park in December 1987, and it remains the largest protected coastal area in the region.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 Huangshan
People's Republic of China30.125° N 118.167° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12412158 from Pixabay Huangshan's peaks are granite, not the limestone karst that shapes so much of scenic China, and that matters: granite fractures into sheer, blocky faces rather than smooth curves, which is why the mountain reads as a forest of vertical spires rather than rolling hills.
Did you know? Some 60,000 stone steps have been cut into the mountain, and nobody knows exactly when the oldest of them were laid.
09 Wadi Rum
Jordan · 33.6 km from Aqaba29.576° N 35.420° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by mailanmaik from Pixabay Wadi Rum is a desert valley in the far south of Jordan, east of Aqaba near the Saudi border, where sheer mountains of sandstone and granite rise out of flat floors of red and apricot sand. Covering about 720 square kilometres, it is the largest wadi in the country.
Did you know? Wadi Rum has stood in for several fictional worlds: Jedha in Rogue One, Pasaana in The Rise of Skywalker and Arrakis in Dune.
10 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.
11 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.
12 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.
13 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.
14 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 nature sanctuaries seen on screen in the world?
- On our list, Masai Mara (Kenya) ranks first, followed by Banff National Park (Canada) and Plitvice Lakes National Park (Croatia).
- Which country has the most nature sanctuaries seen on screen in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (4), Spain (3) and Canada (1).
- Where was Lawrence of Arabia filmed?
- Many of the desert scenes of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) were filmed in Wadi Rum in southern Jordan, with other sequences shot in Spain and Morocco.
- Why is Wadi Rum used for films set on Mars?
- Its red sand, bare sandstone and granite mountains and lack of vegetation look convincingly extraterrestrial on camera, which is why productions such as The Martian chose it to portray the surface of Mars.
- Which mountains inspired the floating mountains in Avatar?
- James Cameron cited the Huangshan range in Anhui as one of his influences, and the sandstone pillars of nearby Wulingyuan in Hunan are also widely associated with the Hallelujah Mountains of Pandora.
- How many nature sanctuaries seen on screen are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 14 nature sanctuaries seen on screen in 9 countries. The United States has the most, with 4.