The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments Seen on Screen in France
5 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments seen on screen in France are Place de la Concorde, Eiffel Tower and Aiguille du Midi. The list covers 5 squares, streets and monuments seen on screen. Last updated 14 October 2026.
France is one of the most filmed countries on earth, and its streets and monuments carry much of that weight. Paris was rebuilt in the 19th century as a city of long avenues and composed vistas, and its squares and towers give a director a recognisable frame in a single shot. Beyond the capital, provincial arcades and Alpine summits offer settings that feel unmistakably French without a postcard in sight.
The Eiffel Tower, built for the World's Fair of 1889, was the tallest structure in the world for four decades and has become cinema's shorthand for Paris. The Place de la Concorde, at the head of the Champs-Élysées, opens around the Luxor obelisk and its fountains, while the Place des Vosges in the Marais keeps the arcaded calm of a royal square inaugurated in 1612, where Victor Hugo once lived.
In Nantes, the Passage Pommeraye of 1843 descends a slope in three levels of galleries, statues and glass roof, and gave Jacques Demy the setting for his film Lola. High above Chamonix, the Aiguille du Midi carries a cable car and viewing terraces to 3,842 metres, facing the summit of Mont Blanc across the glaciers.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Place de la Concorde | Square | |
| 2 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | ✓ |
| 3 | Aiguille du Midi | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 4 | Place des Vosges | Square | |
| 5 | Passage Pommeraye | Covered passageway |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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).
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 France?
- On our list, Place de la Concorde ranks first, followed by Eiffel Tower and Aiguille du Midi.
- Why was the Eiffel Tower built?
- Gustave Eiffel's company built it as the entrance arch to the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, held for the centenary of the French Revolution. It was meant to stand for twenty years but was kept, partly as a radio antenna.
- Which film was shot in the Passage Pommeraye?
- Jacques Demy, who grew up in Nantes, filmed scenes of Lola (1961) in the Passage Pommeraye. The covered arcade, opened in 1843, links two streets at different levels through three tiers of galleries.
- How high is the Aiguille du Midi?
- The Aiguille du Midi in the Mont Blanc massif rises to 3,842 metres. A cable car from Chamonix, completed in 1955, reaches the terraces near the summit.
- How many squares, streets and monuments seen on screen are on this list in France?
- The list covers 5 squares, streets and monuments seen on screen.