15 Amazing Desert Landscapes Resplendent with Cinematic Beauty

Suspension of disbelief is fun and all that, but you do know that those iconic Tatooine scenes in Star Wars weren’t really filmed in a galaxy far far away. It’s not just Star Wars. Many of our most beloved films were shot in deserts all around the world. Here are some of them.

Found in Namibia’s Namib-Naukluft National Park, this desert is a dry lake of salt and clay. Full of huge, rust red dunes, stands of skeletal trees and colorful sand flats of nearly otherworldly beauty, Sossusvlei has been the backdrop of a bunch of films and videos, including the 2000 movie The Cell.

If you’re a fan of the great director John Ford, you’ve seen Monument Valley in his films. This majestic desert is famous for its breathtaking buttes and arches beneath a huge, cobalt blue sky. These features give films and TV shows of far lesser quality than The Searchers a touch of grandeur.

Like areas of Sossusvlei, Salar de Uyuni is a salt flat. Stand on this desert on a hot clear day, and see salt crystallized into six sided forms to the distant mountains. Filmmakers find such a location irresistible, and you won’t be surprised to know that it stood in for the planet Crait in The Last Jedi. 

The undulating dunes of this desert get their white color from gypsum and can grow to 60 feet tall and 30 feet deep. Like so many desert locales, White Sands was the setting for a slew of westerns. You’ll recognize this glorious landscape in such films as Hang ‘Em High and Young Guns II. The David Bowie flick The Man Who Fell to Earth was also filmed here as was Denzel’s The Book of Eli.

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think this desert, found where Jordan meets Saudi Arabia, was indeed a valley on the moon. Replete with mountains whose red color comes from an abundance of iron, salt pans and sand dunes shaped and reshaped by the wind, this desert was memorialized by T.E. Lawrence. Indeed, Lawrence of Arabia, one of the greatest films ever made, was shot here in 1962.

An erg is a sea of sand, and Erg Chebbi is found in the western corner of the Sahara in Morocco. The dunes here are what you think of when you think of sand dunes. They’re mountainous, red and ever shifting. Films that used Erg Chebbi as a setting include The Mummy, a number of TV shows and Prince of Persia.

Found in Western Australia, this desert is famous for the jagged limestone pillars that thrust up from its golden sands. This locale is so wonderfully weird looking that it looks like another planet. Thus, the Pinnacles was the setting for Star Trek V, Lost in Space and Battlestar Galactica among others.

Though deserts are thought to be hot, the Atacama can be surprisingly chilly. It’s also one of the driest places on earth and at best gets only a fraction of an inch of rain per year. The lack of crushing heat and no rain delays make the Atacama a great place for filming. Films shot here include Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets and the trailer for Season 2 of The Mandalorian.

California’s Death Valley rivals Monument Valley when it comes to films shot there. Films crews need to take care though, as Death Valley comes by its name honestly. It’s one of the hottest and driest places on earth, but it can’t be beat when it comes to a type of existential beauty. Movies shot in Death Valley include Chimmie Fadden Out West, shot in 1915, 20 Mule Team, Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

There are at least two salt flats called the Salinas Grandes in Argentina. The one found in the Jujuy and Salta provinces is over 11,000 feet above sea level and famous for its blinding white sand. Director Gus Van Sant loved the beautiful desolation so much that he partially filmed his movie Gerry there.

Also called the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness, this desert is one of the more extra-terrestrial looking places on earth. Rock formations crop up like gigantic, fossilized mushrooms, and rock beds amaze with their swirling colors of purple, brown, white and green and patterns that look like your nervous system. It’s a challenging place to film, and the most famous movie shot here was William Friedkin's Sorcerer. It was also used in the background for a Star Wars fan film.

The name of this Tunisian salt lake means “Lagoon of the Land of Palms,” even though hellish temperatures dry it up in summer. If the place looks familiar, it is. It’s where a good number of the Star Wars movies were filmed. The Lars homestead set is still there.