The Most Beautiful Waterfalls Seen on Screen in the World
6 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful waterfalls seen on screen in the world are Niagara Falls (Canada), Iguaçu Falls (Brazil) and Plitvice Lakes National Park (Croatia). The list covers 6 waterfalls seen on screen in 6 countries. Brazil has the most, with 1. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A waterfall does on film what few landscapes can: it moves, it roars, and it gives a single frame both scale and sound. Directors use falling water as a threshold to another world, as a test of nerve or as shorthand for raw nature, and the falls that keep returning to the screen are those whose shape reads at once — a horseshoe, a broad curtain, a thread dropping out of the clouds. Being filmed adds a second layer to a waterfall's fame: the place becomes a scene people remember before they ever stand in its spray.
Niagara Falls lent its name to the 1953 thriller Niagara with Marilyn Monroe, and the Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side remain the classic image of water going over an edge. Iguaçu, a chain of roughly 275 drops on the border of Brazil and Argentina, framed the Jesuit drama The Mission. Angel Falls in Venezuela, the highest uninterrupted waterfall on Earth at 979 metres, pours off the flat summit of Auyán-tepui and inspired Paradise Falls in Pixar's Up.
In north Iceland, Dettifoss, the most powerful waterfall in Europe by volume, opens Ridley Scott's Prometheus as the scene of a primordial world. Plitvice Lakes in Croatia, where cascades link terraced lakes held back by travertine, became the American frontier of the Winnetou westerns of the 1960s, while Agua Azul in Chiapas spills turquoise water over limestone steps deep in the Mexican rainforest.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Niagara Falls | Waterfall | Canada | |
| 2 | Iguaçu Falls | Waterfall | Brazil | |
| 3 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 4 | Agua Azul Waterfalls | Waterfall | Mexico | |
| 5 | Angel Falls | Waterfall | Venezuela | |
| 6 | Dettifoss | Waterfall | Iceland |
01 Niagara Falls
Canada · 3.2 km from Niagara Falls43.080° N 79.071° W
Image by NeilMorrell from Pixabay Niagara Falls hasn't stayed in one place. When the ice sheets retreated around 12,000 years ago and Lake Erie's outflow first cut through the Niagara Escarpment, the falls formed roughly 11 kilometres downstream from where they stand today, near what's now Lewiston and Queenston.
Did you know? The only recorded time the falls ran almost dry was 29 March 1848, when an ice jam upstream cut the flow to a trickle for up to about 40 hours.
02 Iguaçu Falls
Cataratas do Iguaçu
Brazil · 21.2 km from Foz do Iguaçu25.695° S 54.437° W
Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The rock under Iguaçu is 130 million years old and volcanic, laid down when massive flood-basalt eruptions covered a huge swath of what would become southern Brazil and Argentina in repeated lava flows, some sequences over a kilometre thick.
Did you know? The falls appear in the films Moonraker (1979) and The Mission (1986).
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 Agua Azul Waterfalls
Cascadas de Agua Azul
Mexico17.256° N 92.116° W
Own work · CC BY-SA 4.0 Agua Azul is not one waterfall but a long staircase of them. In the forested hills of northern Chiapas, where the municipalities of Tumbalá, Chilón and Salto de Agua meet, the Xanil River tumbles through a chain of cataracts and terraced pools, the largest drops only around six metres high but repeated again and again over a long stretch of river.
Did you know? Below the falls the water continues via the Shumulá and Tulijá rivers into the Grijalva system, one of Mexico's largest river basins.
05 Angel Falls
Salto Ángel
Venezuela5.970° N 62.536° W
JhonnyCatanho · CC BY-SA 3.0 Angel Falls drops from the rim of Auyán-tepui, one of the sheer-sided table mountains of south-eastern Venezuela, and is generally ranked as the tallest uninterrupted waterfall in the world: a total height of 979 metres, of which 807 metres is a single free fall. The rest is a steep run of cascades and rapids below the main drop.
Did you know? Pixar's Paradise Falls in the 2009 film Up was modelled on Angel Falls.
06 Dettifoss
Iceland65.822° N 16.388° W
Markus Trienke · CC BY-SA 2.0 Dettifoss is less a waterfall than a collapse of the landscape. The Jökulsá á Fjöllum, a glacial river born under Vatnajökull, arrives across a bare plateau of grey gravel and lava and drops 44 metres over a lip about 100 metres wide into the head of the Jökulsárgljúfur canyon.
Did you know? The name joins the Icelandic detta, meaning to fall or collapse, with foss, waterfall.
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 waterfalls seen on screen in the world?
- On our list, Niagara Falls (Canada) ranks first, followed by Iguaçu Falls (Brazil) and Plitvice Lakes National Park (Croatia).
- Which country has the most waterfalls seen on screen in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Brazil (1), Canada (1) and Croatia (1).
- Which waterfall inspired Paradise Falls in the movie Up?
- Paradise Falls was modelled on Angel Falls and the flat-topped tepui mountains of Venezuela's Canaima region, which the Pixar team visited while developing the film.
- Where was the opening scene of Prometheus filmed?
- The opening sequence of Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012) was filmed at Dettifoss in north-east Iceland, a waterfall on the glacial river Jökulsá á Fjöllum.
- Was The Mission filmed at Iguazu Falls?
- Yes. The waterfall scenes of The Mission (1986), including its famous opening, were filmed at the Iguazu Falls on the border between Argentina and Brazil.
- How many waterfalls seen on screen are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 6 waterfalls seen on screen in 6 countries. Brazil has the most, with 1.