Contact with natural environments clearly benefits individuals’ physical and mental wellbeing. It is unclear, however, how built environments meant to facilitate contact with nature––trails, lookout towers, benches, and bridges––contribute to the benefits of contact with nature. Many natural areas such as national parks make substantial investments in facilities, but the effects of these facilities is not well known. To address this knowledge gap, we collected self-response questionnaires from 73 visitors to two natural areas, a green fort and a national park, in the Netherlands. Furthermore, we equipped each of these visitors with a wearable wristband to measure skin conductance, a proxy for emotional arousal, over the course of their visit, and a smartphone to track their location using GPS. Using QGIS, we distinguished between visitors with higher and lower levels of wellbeing benefit from their visits, and visualized their skin conductance over each natural area, overlaid on land cover and built structure layers. This visualization uncovered where visitors with lower and higher wellbeing benefit became emotional. These findings have implications for the design of built structures and facilities in natural areas. Specifically, facilities that are aimed at continuously unfolding experiences, such as trails and bridges, should be managed for low emotional arousal. On the other hand, facilities that aim for peak moments of awe and overview effects, such as towers and scenic overlooks, should be designed to raise emotional arousal.