Engaging with nature provides numerous physical and mental health benefits, including reductions in self-reported pain. However, it remains unclear whether these reduced subjective ratings reflect modulations specific to pain, such as changes in low-level nociceptive or high-level cognitive-emotional processing or can be explained by domain-general factors unspecific to pain. To answer this question, we conducted a preregistered functional MRI experiment during which healthy participants (N = 49) received individually calibrated painful electrical shocks while exposed to audio-visual virtual nature, urban, and indoor environments. Replicating previous findings, exposure to virtual nature (vs. urban or indoor settings) was associated with lower self-reported pain. Using multivoxel machine-learning derived brain patterns, we found that this decrease aligned with reduced low-level nociceptive but not high-level cognitive-emotional pain processing. Furthermore, exposure to virtual nature was characterised by diminished activity in single brain regions associated with nociceptive processing, such as the secondary somatosensory cortex, posterior insula, thalamus, and amygdala. Notably, all effects were specific to nature and not observed in the other two environments. Lastly, exploratory (non-pre-registered) connectivity analyses revealed modulations in functional coupling of the periaqueductal grey and anterior insula with prefrontal and parietal regions when comparing virtual nature and urban environments. These findings suggest that nature exposure may reduce pain predominantly by acting on nociceptive processes. Our study highlights that even brief exposure to audio-visual virtual nature can reduce pain and provides a mechanistic explanation for how such exposure can be used in a simple and cost-effective way in various contexts.