16 breathtaking places that look like fictional worlds from movies and series

When we’re watching our favorite series and movies, we often catch ourselves imagining what it would be like to live in those fantastic worlds. Princess castles, magic schools and even planets with breathtaking landscapes challenge our imagination.

Have you ever wondered where creators get so many wonderful ideas to create the worlds and settings that set these stories? Know that they are usually inspired by our own nature and architecture, even if it is to design alien worlds. Would you like to know some examples?

If you answered yes, you’re in luck, because we do awesome.club we’ve gathered some places around the planet that inspired or could inspire fantastic worlds of fiction!

The Sagano Bamboo Forest is one of the main tourist attractions in Kyoto, Japan. In addition to the beautiful landscape, tourists love to visit the place because of the sounds that the wind causes when it passes through the plantations. China also has several bamboo forests, like the one on Mount Mogan. Locations like this inspire beautiful fight scenes like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the recent Marvel movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

The tunnel formed by vegetation looks more like an assembly, but it exists and is located in a city in Ukraine called Kleven. It has that shape because three times a day a train passes through there, which made the trees acquire that shape. Legend has it that the couple who walk through the tunnel hand in hand will never be separated. The place looks so much out of a fantasy world that it reminds me of a scene from Meu Amigo Totoro, when Mei meets Totoro for the first time.

It’s hard to say where the inspiration for the imposing look of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry actually came from. Filming was done in some castles, schools and even cathedrals in the United Kingdom, but the final appearance of Hogwarts, immortalized in a replica in Orlando, is unique and unmistakable. However, traveling around, you can find some eerily similar places, like this castle in Samara, Russia.

Château (castle) de Chillon was built in a strategic location in Switzerland, to serve as protection and entry control to Europe. At the same time, on the other side, is a beautiful residence on the shores of Lake Geneva, with the snowy peaks of the Swiss Alps in the background. It is a clear inspiration for Prince Eric’s castle, from The Little Mermaid animation.

The Huangshan Mountains, or Yellow Mountains, with their hot springs and granite peaks surrounded by clouds, form a beautiful landscape and inspire Chinese painting and literature. So much so that they served as a setting for the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon which, in turn, was based on books. The tranquil village of Hongcun, which lies at the base of the mountain, also featured in the film.

This table-shaped mountain amidst the clouds is located on the triple border of Brazil with Venezuela and the Guianas, at a height of almost 3,000 meters. The local climate provided the top of Mount Roraima with a different ecosystem from the region: it is rich in caves, reptiles, amphibians and carnivorous plants. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, wrote The Lost World inspired by an expedition to this mountain. The book, in turn, has already inspired series and films.

Unfortunately, none of these works used our mound as a real inspiration or setting. But looking at these images of land so high that it’s in the middle of the clouds immediately brings to mind the animation The Castle in the Sky. In the story, a boy and a girl try to protect a crystal while searching for a legendary floating castle. This castle could well be on Mount Roraima, right?

In China, Zhangjiajie Forest National Park, in addition to a glass bridge, has unique rock formations that look like natural skyscrapers. The park is in a complex called the Wulingyuan Area of ​​Scenic and Historic Interest, and has more than 3,000 sandstone pillars. They inspired the floating rock landscape of the planet Pandora in the movie Avatar.

One of the World Heritage Sites, the Sơn Đoòng cave, in Vietnam, is considered the largest in the world, due to the size of its room. It is 150 meters deep and 9 thousand meters long. Imagine a cave as big as this and with hundreds of dragons living together? If you couldn’t imagine it, just watch the animation How to Train Your Dragon 2.

And speaking of giant caves, Majlis al Jinn is another of the largest caves in the world, and is located in the Sultanate of Oman. The cave has an impressive 4 million cubic meters. The location, size and name of the cave is very reminiscent of Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders. That’s because Jinn is the Arabic word for geniuses. And the name of the cave means “Gathering of Geniuses”.

Before we leave the caves, we still need to talk about the one that seems to have inspired the Fortress of Solitude, present in the stories of Superman and even Supergirl. But none of these stories compare to the beauty of the crystals in the Cave of Crystals at the Naica mine in Mexico. It holds some of the largest crystals in the world, reaching 11 m in height. It is believed that there are other chambers with crystals, but to explore them, it would be necessary to break these crystals first.

Want to pump your instagram? Try taking pictures at this lake in the Parque Natural de las Lagunas de La Mata y Torrevieja, Spain. This is just one of the places in the world that has a pink lake (there are at least four more). The likely reason for the coloration, however, does not inspire much celebration: lack of nutrients and excess algae. Even so, the landscape is so beautiful that it looks like something out of the Candy Kingdom, from Adventure Time, isn’t it true?

Australia’s Jervis Bay puts on a light show at night that looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. In fact, it is a natural phenomenon that makes perfect biological sense: Bioluminescence, which is present, for example, in fireflies. In Jervis and several other beaches around the world it is caused by seaweed. Just like in the movie Life of Pi, which has a glowing whale. After all, there is no better inspiration for fiction than nature itself.

The state of Maranhão fondly guards one of the most breathtaking landscapes we know, the Lençóis Maranhenses National Park. The place is so beautiful and, at the same time, peculiar, that Marvel producers chose it to appear as the planet Vormir, using aerial scenes that received post-production. The result you can see in the movies Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

Our neighboring country, Bolivia, also has a landscape worthy of being considered alien soil. It is the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world, covering over 10,000 square kilometers. The Salar was used as a location for the planet Crait in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. By the way, Star Wars can be considered a champion in finding peculiar landscapes for its planets.

Deadvlei means “death pond”, in a mixture of English and Afrikaans. The place got its name because climate change caused a drought that wiped out the acacia trees that had grown in the fertile white clay soil. Deadvlei is located in the Namib Desert, which has the highest sand dunes in the world. The same desert that served as the location for the movie Mad Max: Fury Road. Interestingly, the film also deals with the scarcity of water in the midst of extreme races.

Continuing in the desert, this time we are going to talk about a creative architecture and engineering project. La Casa De Desierto was built in the Gorafe desert of Spain. Its main objective is to demonstrate the importance of glass in any season of the year. Anyone who watched Black Mirror immediately recognized this house, however vaguely. But we can help you: if you want to see it again, the house appears in the second episode of the fifth season, entitled Smithereens.

It’s beautiful when we realize that our world can be as fantastic as the fictional worlds we admire, isn’t it? Even those impossible to exist are inspired by the wonders of nature and human ingenuity. Now, we want to know if you know of any places that could very well be the setting for a fantasy or science fiction story!