The Most Spectacular Viewpoints Seen on Screen in the World
5 places in 4 countries · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular viewpoints seen on screen in the world are Eiffel Tower (France), Aiguille du Midi (France) and Big Ben (United Kingdom). The list covers 5 viewpoints seen on screen in 4 countries. France has the most, with 2. Last updated 6 October 2026.
A viewpoint on screen does double work: it shows the place and the view from it. Directors use high platforms and cliff edges to open a story with a sweeping establishing shot, to stage a confrontation above a drop, or to end one with a long look over the land. The viewpoints that recur in films are those whose outline is recognisable from below and whose panorama is unmistakable from above.
The Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 World's Fair, is both: its iron lattice is cinema's quickest way to say Paris, and its summit looks out over the whole city. High above Chamonix, the Aiguille du Midi is reached by cable car and faces Mont Blanc across a world of glaciers and granite spires, a natural set for mountain thrillers. In London, the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster that everyone calls Big Ben has framed films from Disney's Peter Pan to modern spy stories.
Two quieter places complete the picture. On Lanzarote, the artist César Manrique built the Mirador del Río into a clifftop, looking down across the strait to the island of La Graciosa. In Utah, Dead Horse Point overlooks a deep gooseneck bend of the Colorado River, and the canyon country just beyond it stood in for the Grand Canyon in the final scenes of Thelma & Louise.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | France | ✓ |
| 2 | Aiguille du Midi | Scenic viewpoint | France | |
| 3 | Big Ben | Clock tower | United Kingdom | |
| 4 | Mirador del Río | Scenic viewpoint | Spain | |
| 5 | Dead Horse Point State Park | Scenic viewpoint | United States |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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 spectacular viewpoints seen on screen in the world?
- On our list, Eiffel Tower (France) ranks first, followed by Aiguille du Midi (France) and Big Ben (United Kingdom).
- Which country has the most viewpoints seen on screen in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from France (2), Spain (1) and the United Kingdom (1).
- How high is the Aiguille du Midi?
- Its summit stands at 3,842 metres. A cable car from Chamonix reaches the top station in two stages, via the Plan de l'Aiguille.
- Is Big Ben the name of the tower?
- Strictly, Big Ben is the great bell inside the clock tower at the north end of the Palace of Westminster. The tower itself was renamed Elizabeth Tower in 2012.
- Where was the ending of Thelma & Louise filmed?
- The Grand Canyon scenes of Thelma & Louise (1991) were shot in Utah, just south of Dead Horse Point State Park near Moab.
- How many viewpoints seen on screen are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 5 viewpoints seen on screen in 4 countries. France has the most, with 2.