The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments Seen on Screen in the World
19 places in 9 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments seen on screen in the world are Mount Rushmore (United States), Place de la Concorde (France) and Eiffel Tower (France). The list covers 19 squares, streets and monuments seen on screen in 9 countries. France has the most, with 5. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Squares and monuments are a director's quickest way to tell an audience where a story is: one frame of a fountain, a staircase or a carved mountainside places a scene before a word is spoken. The landmarks that cinema returns to are the ones whose form is simple enough to read at a glance and rich enough to hold a scene — steps to climb, water to wade into, a summit to hang from. The same qualities make them the natural gathering places of their cities.
Rome contributes two of the best known. Anita Ekberg's walk into the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita fixed the baroque fountain in film history, and the Spanish Steps are where Audrey Hepburn eats gelato in Roman Holiday. Hitchcock staged the climax of North by Northwest on the presidents' faces of Mount Rushmore, and the Statue of Liberty, half buried in sand, gives Planet of the Apes its final image.
The list also gathers squares that are spectacles in themselves. Saint Peter's Square in Vatican City is embraced by Bernini's curved colonnades, the Grand-Place in Brussels is walled by gilded guildhalls, and the Place des Vosges in Paris, completed in 1612, is the city's oldest planned square, with matching red-brick pavilions on all sides. Red Square in Moscow opens beside the Kremlin walls, while the Aiguille du Midi, reached by cable car from Chamonix, puts a terrace in front of Mont Blanc at about 3,842 metres. The Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal need no introduction on any screen.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Rushmore | Monument | United States | |
| 2 | Place de la Concorde | Square | France | |
| 3 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | France | ✓ |
| 4 | Statue of Liberty | Monument | United States | ✓ |
| 5 | Taj Mahal | Mausoleum | India | ✓ |
| 6 | Trevi Fountain | Sculpture | Italy | |
| 7 | Aiguille du Midi | Scenic viewpoint | France | |
| 8 | Spanish Steps | Stairs | Italy | |
| 9 | Saint Peter's Square | Square | Vatican City | |
| 10 | Place des Vosges | Square | France | |
| 11 | Grand-Place | Square | Belgium | ✓ |
| 12 | Red Square | Square | Russia | ✓ |
| 13 | León Cathedral | Cathedral | Spain | ✓ |
| 14 | Lincoln Memorial | Monument | United States | |
| 15 | Big Ben | Clock tower | United Kingdom | |
| 16 | Royal Alcázar of Seville | Palace | Spain | ✓ |
| 17 | Mirador del Río | Scenic viewpoint | Spain | |
| 18 | Passage Pommeraye | Covered passageway | France | |
| 19 | Dead Horse Point State Park | Scenic viewpoint | United States |
01 Mount Rushmore
United States · 29 km from Rapid City43.879° N 103.459° W
Dean Franklin · Public domain The four faces on Mount Rushmore were not the original plan. Gutzon Borglum's first brief called for figures tied to the American West — Lewis and Clark, their guide Sacagawea, and Lakota leaders Red Cloud and Crazy Horse were all part of early discussions — before Borglum redirected the project toward four presidents on the theory that it would draw broader national interest.
Did you know? Behind Lincoln's head lies an unfinished Hall of Records, where a vault holding 16 enamel panels on American history was sealed in 1998.
02 Place de la Concorde
France · 2.5 km from Paris48.866° N 2.321° E
Image by westcoast_dave from Pixabay 6 hectares of open ground at the eastern end of the Champs-Élysées, between the Tuileries Garden and the Seine. It began as a royal flattery. In 1748 the merchants of Paris commissioned an equestrian statue of Louis XV to celebrate his recovery from illness, and the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel laid out an octagonal square around it, finished by 1772 and ringed with a dry moat and balustrades.
03 Eiffel Tower
Tour Eiffel
France · 4.3 km from Paris48.858° N 2.294° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay The tower's basic shape wasn't originally Gustave Eiffel's idea at all. Two engineers working inside Eiffel's own company, Émile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, sketched the concept for an enormously tall iron tower in June 1884, intended as the centrepiece for the 1889 World's Fair marking the centenary of the French Revolution. Eiffel reportedly found Koechlin's earliest, bare-bones sketch unconvincing.
Did you know? According to a popular anecdote, Guy de Maupassant lunched at the tower daily because it was the one place in Paris he could not see it.
04 Statue of Liberty
United States · 5.5 km from New York City40.689° N 74.044° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by itou365 from Pixabay The name most people reach for is Bartholdi, and that's correct as far as it goes — Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi conceived the whole figure, from her raised torch to the broken chains at her feet, and sculpted the copper skin that visitors actually see, a figure standing some 46 metres from base to torch. What's murkier, and worth untangling, is who built what's actually holding her up.
Did you know? Her copper skin is only about 2.4 millimetres thick across the entire figure.
05 Taj Mahal
India · 2.9 km from Agra27.175° N 78.042° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Taj_Mahal,_Agra,_India_edit2.jpg : Yann ; edited by King of Hearts derivative work: Jbarta ( talk ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 Shah Jahan began building this in 1631 as a tomb for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who had died giving birth to their fourteenth child.
Did you know? Its four minarets, each over 40 metres tall, lean slightly outward so that if one ever collapsed it would fall away from the tomb.
06 Trevi Fountain
Fontana di Trevi
Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.901° N 12.483° E
Image by jdegheest from Pixabay What feeds this fountain isn't ornamental plumbing — it's the working outflow of the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct finished in 19 BC that has been delivering the same spring water to roughly this same spot for over two thousand years. The Roman legend behind the name says a young woman, a virgo, once led thirsty soldiers to the spring; whether or not that's true, the aqueduct itself is real and still functioning.
Did you know? About 26 metres high and 49 metres wide, the Trevi is often called the largest Baroque fountain in the world.
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 Spanish Steps
Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti
Italy · 0.9 km from Rome41.906° N 12.483° E
Image by Leonhard_Niederwimmer from Pixabay The Spanish Steps are Rome's great outdoor staircase, climbing a steep 29-metre slope from the Piazza di Spagna to the church of Trinità dei Monti on the shoulder of the Pincian Hill.
Did you know? Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck were filmed on the steps for Roman Holiday (1953), and they also appear in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999).
09 Saint Peter's Square
Piazza San Pietro
Vatican City · 2.1 km from Rome41.902° N 12.457° E
Diliff · CC BY-SA 3.0 St. Peter's Square is the great forecourt of St. Peter's Basilica, and one of the most successful pieces of urban theatre ever made. Gian Lorenzo Bernini designed it between 1667 and 1676 for Pope Alexander VII, with a simple brief: as many people as possible should be able to see the pope give his blessing, from the basilica facade or from a window of the Vatican Palace.
Did you know? Two marble discs marked "Centro del colonnato" lie between the obelisk and the fountains; from either one, the four rows of columns line up and appear as a single row.
10 Place des Vosges
France · 1 km from Paris48.856° N 2.366° E
Image by beanitwoman from Pixabay The Place des Vosges is the oldest planned square in Paris and still one of the most perfect: a square exactly 140 metres a side, closed on all four sides by houses of the same design, with a formal garden of lawns, gravel and clipped trees in the middle.
Did you know? The square stands on the site of the Hôtel des Tournelles, where King Henri II was mortally wounded in the eye by a lance during a joust in 1559.
11 Grand-Place
Belgium · 2 km from Brussels50.847° N 4.353° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay The Grand-Place, or Grote Markt in Dutch, is the central square of Brussels, and no other square in Europe is so completely enclosed by ornate buildings. It is a fully paved rectangle of about 68 by 110 m, surrounded on all sides by gilded guildhalls, a Gothic town hall and the neo-Gothic King's House.
Did you know? Jan van Essen and Hendrik Vos, the first martyrs of the Protestant Reformation, were burned at the stake on the square in 1523.
12 Red Square
Russia · 0.4 km from Moscow55.754° N 37.620° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by joneybrain from Pixabay Red Square is a long rectangle — about 330 metres from end to end — laid along the eastern wall of the Moscow Kremlin, where the fortress had no river to protect it. That weakness is the square's origin: in the 1490s Ivan III ordered the ground outside the wall cleared of buildings to open a field of fire, and a deep moat was dug in front of the wall in the early sixteenth century.
Did you know? The square covers about 73,000 square metres, some 330 metres long and roughly 70 metres wide.
13 León Cathedral
Catedral de Santa María de Regla de León
Spain · 2.2 km from León42.599° N 5.567° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TerapiasNaturales from Pixabay León's cathedral, Santa María de Regla, is the Spanish cathedral that went furthest in the Gothic dream of replacing walls with light. It has around 125 windows and about 1,800 square metres of stained glass, most of it made between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, one of the largest collections of medieval glass anywhere.
Did you know? For centuries a dried hide over a door was said to be a mole that wrecked the builders' work by night; in the 1990s it proved a leatherback turtle shell.
14 Lincoln Memorial
United States · 3.6 km from Washington38.889° N 77.050° W
Image by MarkThomas from Pixabay The Lincoln Memorial closes the western end of the National Mall like the temple at the end of a sacred way. The architect Henry Bacon gave it the form of a Greek Doric temple in white Yule marble from Colorado, ringed by 36 fluted columns, one for each state of the Union at the time of Lincoln's death, with the names of the 48 states of 1922 carved above.
Did you know? The spot where Martin Luther King Jr. stood in 1963, on a landing eighteen steps below the statue, was engraved in 2003.
15 Big Ben
United Kingdom · 0.4 km from London51.501° N 0.125° W
Image by pemacallan from Pixabay Everyone calls the tower Big Ben, but that name actually belongs to the bell inside it — the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster — and the tower itself wasn't even called Elizabeth Tower until 2012, when it was renamed for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Before that it was simply the Clock Tower, which undersells what a fight it took to get built.
Did you know? The Great Bell cracked months after it first rang in 1859; instead of recasting it, workers turned it an eighth of a turn, and it still rings cracked.
16 Royal Alcázar of Seville
Spain · 2.5 km from Seville37.384° N 5.991° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Danor from Pixabay The Royal Alcázar of Seville is a palace built as a sequence of courtyards, each opening into the next: arcades carved with lace-like plaster, tiled walls, pools and channels of water, and beyond them a maze of gardens full of orange trees and palms.
Did you know? Arabic inscriptions in Pedro I's palace refer to the Christian king as 'Sultan Don Bidru'.
17 Mirador del Río
Spain · 27.8 km from Arrecife29.214° N 13.481° W
Image by lapping from Pixabay Mirador del Río is a viewpoint at the northern tip of Lanzarote that is almost invisible until you are inside it. César Manrique, the island's artist and architect, built it between 1971 and 1973 into the edge of the Famara cliffs at a spot called Batería del Río, about 475 metres above the sea, and clad it in rough volcanic stone so that from the outside it reads as part of the rock.
Did you know? A sculpture of a bird and a fish greets visitors at the entrance, introducing the twin themes of air and sea.
18 Passage Pommeraye
France · 2.3 km from Nantes47.213° N 1.560° W
Julien Thibault · CC BY-SA 3.0 Nantes built its fortune on the Atlantic trade, and in the early 1840s the property developer Louis Pommeraye gambled on giving the city's merchants something Paris already had: a glass-roofed shopping arcade. The difficulty was the site. Between rue de la Fosse, down near the old port quarter, and rue Santeuil on the slope towards Place Graslin, the ground drops by more than nine metres.
Did you know? Jacques Demy filmed here three times, including a brief scene of about 25 seconds in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).
19 Dead Horse Point State Park
United States · 17.7 km from Moab38.506° N 109.733° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by ducken99 from Pixabay Dead Horse Point is a narrow finger of mesa in southeastern Utah that ends in a sheer drop of about 2,000 feet (610 m) to the Colorado River. From the overlook at its tip the river makes a tight gooseneck loop directly below, a green-edged ribbon of water folded around a tower of red rock, while the canyon country spreads to the horizon in stepped layers of cliffs, benches and buttes.
Did you know? Film crews have used the point since at least Warlock in 1959, followed by Con Air, John Carter and the series Westworld.
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 squares, streets and monuments seen on screen in the world?
- On our list, Mount Rushmore (United States) ranks first, followed by Place de la Concorde (France) and Eiffel Tower (France).
- Which country has the most squares, streets and monuments seen on screen in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from France (5), the United States (4) and Spain (3).
- Which film features the Trevi Fountain?
- The best-known is Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), in which Anita Ekberg wades into the fountain. It also appears in Roman Holiday and Three Coins in the Fountain.
- Was North by Northwest filmed on Mount Rushmore?
- The climactic chase was filmed largely on studio sets built to replicate the monument, since the National Park Service did not allow filming on the faces themselves; exterior shots of the real memorial appear in the film.
- What is the oldest square in Paris?
- The Place des Vosges, inaugurated in 1612 as the Place Royale, is the oldest planned square in Paris, enclosed by uniform houses of brick and stone.
- How many squares, streets and monuments seen on screen are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 19 squares, streets and monuments seen on screen in 9 countries. France has the most, with 5.