62 Famous Movie Locations You Can Actually Visit

Some places you visit because they're beautiful. Others you visit because you've already been there a hundred times, in a theater, on a couch, on a long flight. Standing where a scene was shot is a strange kind of time travel: the set is gone, the actors are gone, but the light and the landscape are exactly what the camera saw.

So I made a map of 62 filming locations you can actually visit. Not studio backlots, not "inspired by" places, but real spots where real scenes were shot, from New Zealand sheep farms to Icelandic glaciers. Here's a quick tour.

The fantasy pilgrimages

These are the big ones, the places people plan entire trips around.

Hobbiton is the obvious king. The Shire set near Matamata, New Zealand was rebuilt permanently after The Lord of the Rings, and today you can walk past the hobbit holes and drink a beer at the Green Dragon. It's touristy and it doesn't matter one bit.

Skellig Michael, the jagged island off the Irish coast where Luke Skywalker hid at the end of The Force Awakens, is a real sixth-century monastery. The stone beehive huts you saw on screen were built by monks, not set designers. Petra's Treasury in Jordan needs no introduction if you've seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and the walk through the narrow Siq to reach it feels exactly like the film promised.

Aït Benhaddou in Morocco has played more roles than most actors: Gladiator, Game of Thrones, and a dozen other productions have used its mud-brick kasbah. Speaking of Game of Thrones, Dubrovnik's old walls are King's Landing, and you can walk the full circuit above the Adriatic.

And for the Harry Potter crowd, two essentials: the Glenfinnan Viaduct in Scotland, where the Hogwarts Express curves across the arches (steam trains still cross it in season), and Alnwick Castle in England, where first-years learned to fly broomsticks.

The one-shot icons

Some locations are famous for a single frame. Forrest Gump Point on Highway 163 in Utah is where Forrest finally stopped running, with Monument Valley stacked up behind him. Everyone takes the same photo. Take it anyway.

Philadelphia has the Rocky Steps, which people have been sprinting up since 1976, and Georgetown has the much creepier Exorcist Steps, steep and narrow and genuinely unsettling at dusk. In New York, Katz's Delicatessen still hangs a sign over the table from When Harry Met Sally, and the Ghostbusters firehouse in Tribeca is a working fire station that happens to be one of the most photographed buildings in the city.

Bond's greatest hits

James Bond has the best location scouts in the business, so he gets his own category. The Schilthorn in Switzerland is the mountaintop revolving restaurant from On Her Majesty's Secret Service, reachable by a spectacular cable car ride. And in Thailand, the limestone islet from The Man with the Golden Gun is now literally nicknamed James Bond Island. When a place gets renamed after your movie, you've won.

Sci-fi deserts and glaciers

Filmmakers keep going back to the same few otherworldly landscapes, and once you see them you understand why. Wadi Rum in Jordan has played Mars in The Martian and Arrakis in Dune, and camping there under the stars is about as close to another planet as you can get with a passport. In Iceland, the Svínafellsjökull glacier stood in for the ice planet in Interstellar, all cracked blue-grey ice stretching to the horizon.

A note on doorbells

A few spots on the map come with a caveat: they're private homes. The Home Alone house in Winnetka and Walter White's house in Albuquerque are places where real people live, and the Breaking Bad owners in particular have suffered years of pizza being thrown on their roof. View from the street, take your photo quietly, and don't ring the bell. The map notes say so too.

One more that deserves a mention: Sycamore Gap, the lone tree on Hadrian's Wall from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, was illegally felled in 2023. I kept it on the map because the spot remains genuinely moving, a gap in the landscape that people still walk to. Sometimes the absence is the visit.

Filter by film, franchise, or genre

Sixty-two pins is a lot, so the map uses hashtags. Every spot is tagged by its film or franchise: #lotr, #bond, #harrypotter, #got, and so on. Click a tag and the map filters down to just that pilgrimage, which is handy if you're the kind of person planning a Scotland trip entirely around Harry Potter (no judgment, that's a good trip).

There are genre tags too, so you can pull up just the sci-fi landscapes or just the fantasy castles and see how they cluster. A surprising amount of movie geography fits into a single road trip once you see it on a map.

Go stand in the frame

The map is free and public, and if you have an Ikuzo account you can copy the whole thing into your own maps, keep the spots you care about, and build your trip around them. Pick a franchise, pick a country, and go stand exactly where the camera stood.