We know that people tend to prefer nature over urban environments, but is all nature created equal? Here we compared different types of natural environments in terms of aesthetic pleasure and exploration behaviour. Each participant viewed 78 images from one of three natural categories (beaches, forests, deserts) or an urban category (cities). After viewing each image, participants rated how much they enjoyed looking at that image. We found that the cities are preferred less than beaches and forests, but not deserts. Thus, although deserts represent a natural environment, they do not elicit as much pleasure as other natural environments. Several eye movement measures were also recorded. At a general level, aesthetic preferences for real-world scenes seem not to be related to overall eye movement behaviour, as both beaches and cities are explored more thoroughly (i.e., greater number of fixations, longer saccades) than forests and deserts despite their diverging aesthetic scores. However, image-by-image, visual exploration does relate to aesthetic judgements, though this pattern differs by scene category. For beaches and forests, greater exploration positively relates to aesthetic ratings. This is not the case for cities and deserts, where there is no significant relationship between visual exploration and aesthetic ratings. Taken together, these results imply that images which contain moderate amounts of information to explore may be seen as more interesting and therefore aesthetically pleasing. However, too much (e.g., in cities) or too little (e.g., in deserts) information may be deemed too overwhelming or boring, respectively, and therefore not as aesthetically pleasing.