The best Jurassic Park filming locations you can actually visit

From Kauai's helicopter-only Jurassic Falls to the Oahu ranch where the franchise's most iconic stampede scenes were filmed

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The landscapes that stood in for Isla Nublar were not conjured by set designers. The cliffs, waterfalls, botanical gardens, and open valleys that made the Jurassic Park films feel convincingly prehistoric are real places, and most of them are on islands reachable by commercial flight. The decision to film primarily in Hawaii was deliberate: the islands' volcanic geology, dense tropical vegetation, and dramatic coastal formations create a natural environment that no studio backlot could replicate at the same scale. The result is a travel destination built into the films themselves, which is why fans have been making pilgrimages to Kauai and Oahu since the first film's release in 1993.

The franchise extended its geographic reach as the films multiplied. Jurassic World: Dominion $D added Malta and British Columbia to the location catalog, which gave the series a wider global footprint than the Hawaii-centric original trilogy. Universal Studios Hollywood, where several of the most technically complex interior scenes were shot, brings the franchise to Southern California in a way that makes it accessible to tours. The range of ways to experience these locations varies considerably: some are accessible by a short walk, others require a helicopter, a charter boat, or a studio tour reservation.

The filming locations below appear in Travel Leisure, drawn from a list of 16 spanning Hawaii, California, Malta, and Canada. Each offers a genuine encounter with the landscapes the franchise made famous, along with the practical information needed to reach them.

1. Kualoa Ranch on Oahu anchors the franchise's most iconic stampede scenes

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Kualoa Ranch on the windward coast of Oahu appears in "Jurassic Park," "Jurassic World," and "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom," serving as the expansive terrain where the film's most celebrated herd sequences play out. The ranch's scale — thousands of acres of valley, ridgeline, and coastal land — gives the property the visual depth the stampede scenes required, and the lush green vegetation covering the surrounding Ko'olau Mountains gives the location a tropical density that few other accessible filming destinations can match.

The ranch has built a substantial tourism operation around its film history, offering guided tours of the property and its major filming locations by bus, boat, ATV, and e-bike. Each format gives a different perspective on the same terrain: bus tours cover the valley's full extent with narration about specific filming locations, while ATV routes take smaller groups into terrain that larger vehicles cannot access. The boat tours offer a maritime vantage point on the coastal scenery that land-based tours do not, and the e-bike option offers a self-paced experience of the valley's main routes.

Kualoa's filming resume extends well beyond the Jurassic Park franchise — the ranch has appeared in "Godzilla," "50 First Dates," "Lost," "Hawaii Five-0," and dozens of other productions, which gives a visit a broader film tourism dimension that the dinosaur-themed tours address directly. The ranch's active agricultural and cultural operations give the property a function beyond tourism that the guided tours incorporate, including Hawaiian cultural history and ranching heritage alongside the film location content.

2. The Na Pali Coast on Kauai forms the visual foundation of the fictional Isla Nublar

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Kauai appears in every film in the Jurassic Park franchise as the fictional Isla Nublar, and the Na Pali Coast is the location within that island that captures the films' most cinematically overwhelming imagery. The Na Pali's towering green cliffs, which rise thousands of feet directly from the ocean along Kauai's northwest shore, produce a geological drama specific to this coastline: no road reaches the Na Pali, which gives the cliffs an inaccessibility that the franchise's premise — a remote island where dinosaurs roam — required as a fundamental visual condition.

The absence of road access to the Na Pali gives visitors two options: water or air. Charter boat tours with companies like Makana Charters approach the cliffs from the ocean, offering passengers a perspective on the full height of the formations that land-based viewpoints cannot match. Helicopter tours with operators like Blue Hawaiian Helicopters fly over........

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