The Most Remarkable Rock Formations Seen on Screen in the World
5 places in 5 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable rock formations seen on screen in the world are Uluru (Australia), El Capitan (United States) and Meteora (Greece). The list covers 5 rock formations seen on screen in 5 countries. Australia has the most, with 1. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A rock formation becomes a film location when it can carry a story without a single word. Isolated monoliths, sheer granite walls and towers of sandstone read instantly as another world, a sacred place or a fortress, which is why directors travel across continents to find them. Seen on screen, these places gain a second life, yet what makes them work there is entirely geological: millions of years of erosion leaving shapes no set designer could improve.
Uluru, the great sandstone monolith in Australia's Red Centre and a sacred place for the Anangu people, was the backdrop of A Cry in the Dark, the 1988 film about the Chamberlain case. El Capitan, a granite wall rising roughly a kilometre above Yosemite Valley, appeared in Star Trek V and became the subject of Free Solo, the Oscar-winning documentary about Alex Honnold's rope-free ascent.
Meteora, in central Greece, is a forest of sandstone pillars topped by monasteries; one of them, the Holy Trinity, served as a hideout in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only. In the Czech Republic, the Adršpach-Teplice Rocks form a labyrinth of sandstone towers used for scenes in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In New Zealand, the lone hill of Mount Sunday, in the Canterbury high country, carried the set of Edoras in The Lord of the Rings, dismantled after filming and returned to its natural state.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Uluru | Rock formation | Australia | |
| 2 | El Capitan | Rock formation | United States | |
| 3 | Meteora | Rock formation | Greece | ✓ |
| 4 | Adršpach-Teplice Rocks | Rock formation | Czech Republic | |
| 5 | Mount Sunday | Rock formation | New Zealand |
01 Uluru
Australia25.345° S 131.036° E
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay 4 km around its base. That makes it one of the most recognisable landforms on the continent. Geologists call it an inselberg: an isolated remnant that outlasted the rock around it because it has almost no joints or bedding partings for erosion to exploit. Its strata are tilted almost vertical, and much of the formation continues underground.
Did you know? The rock's sandstone layers stand almost on end, dipping at about 85 degrees, and at least 2.4 km of their thickness is exposed at the surface.
02 El Capitan
United States37.734° N 119.637° W
Image by carelbron0 from Pixabay El Capitan is the granite wall that greets you at the western end of Yosemite Valley: a single, almost unjointed monolith rising roughly 900 metres from the valley floor to its rounded top.
Did you know? Despite its towering face, El Capitan's summit has only about 3 metres of topographic prominence, because it is attached to higher ground behind.
03 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.
04 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.
05 Mount Sunday
New Zealand43.548° S 170.893° E
Jeff Hitchcock from Vancouver, BC, Canada · CC BY 2.0 In the upper valley of the Rangitata River, a lone rocky knoll rises from a broad, braided floodplain ringed by snow-streaked ranges. Mount Sunday is only a modest hill, its summit at about 611 metres, but few places in New Zealand capture the scale of the South Island high country so completely.
Did you know? Mount Sunday served as the site of Edoras, capital of Rohan, in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films.
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 remarkable rock formations seen on screen in the world?
- On our list, Uluru (Australia) ranks first, followed by El Capitan (United States) and Meteora (Greece).
- Which country has the most rock formations seen on screen in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Australia (1), the Czech Republic (1) and Greece (1).
- Where was Edoras filmed in The Lord of the Rings?
- On Mount Sunday, an isolated hill in the Canterbury region of New Zealand's South Island. The set was built on its summit and removed after filming in 1999.
- Which Bond film was shot at Meteora?
- For Your Eyes Only (1981). The climax takes place at the Holy Trinity Monastery, perched on a sandstone pillar.
- What is Uluru made of?
- Uluru is a single mass of arkose, a coarse sandstone rich in feldspar. Its red colour comes from iron minerals oxidising on the surface.
- How many rock formations seen on screen are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 5 rock formations seen on screen in 5 countries. Australia has the most, with 1.