Where is Virgin River filmed?
There’s Virgin River the show: a cozy, soapy drama about finding true love and learning life lessons along the way. There’s Virgin River the cast of characters: a traumatized, beautiful nurse practitioner who just rolled into town, a hunky bartender with baggage, a meddling town mayor. Then there’s Virgin River the place: an absolutely stunning series of interiors, exteriors, dense forests, waterfalls, mountain vistas and more. The environment of Virgin River looms so breathtakingly large, it often feels like more than just a location — it’s the story, it’s a character, and it’s a reason to keep coming back to the show.
The gorgeous setting may have you wondering: Where is Virgin River filmed? Like so many other productions, the show takes place in the United States — Northern California, specifically — but is actually shot in Vancouver, British Columbia and its surrounding mountainous areas.
One of the key people behind Virgin River’s scenery is a location manager and scout named W. Robert “Fluffy” Millar, LMGI. He’s been in the location scouting industry since 1997, and over the years, he’s secured spots for scenes in dozens of films and television series, including A Dog’s Way Home, Shooter, and the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy — all of which were also shot in Vancouver.
“Just living in B.C. and being here and seeing beautiful locations, I always take a picture,” he told Tudum from the set of the show in 2022. “Luckily, with the geo-tagging on phone photographs, if I see something really cool, I can just go click, take a picture of it, and then a year down the road I could be just like, ‘Oh, there was that one spot that was near Vernon and the Okanagan.’”
While on location filming Season 5 of the show, Millar talked to Tudum about the spoils of British Columbia, the often logistically challenging prospect of filming on the sides of mountains, and what happened when the crew learned that Mel’s (Alexandra Breckenridge) cabin, one of the core locations in Virgin River, and the first one we see in Season 1, was sinking into the ground.
