The Most Beautiful Cenotes in the World
7 places in 3 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful cenotes in the world are Ik Kil (Mexico), Gruta do Lago Azul (Brazil) and Bimmah Sinkhole (Oman). The list covers 7 cenotes in 3 countries. Mexico has the most, with 4. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A cenote is a window into an underground river. Where the roof of a limestone cave collapses, it opens a shaft or pool onto groundwater that has been filtering through rock for ages, so the water is often startlingly clear and tinted blue or green. The finest cenotes combine that clarity with drama of form: a perfect round well open to the sky, a cavern lit by a single shaft of sunlight, roots and vines hanging down to the water, or a flooded passage leading into darkness. For the ancient Maya they were sacred entrances to the underworld.
This collection begins in the Yucatán Peninsula, where cenotes are most famous. Ik Kil near Chichén Itzá is an open round pool framed by hanging vines. Dos Ojos near Tulum takes its name from two neighbouring pools that open into a long flooded cave system, and Cenote Angelita hides a cloud-like layer of hydrogen sulphide that looks like a river flowing underwater. Cenote X-Keken near Valladolid is a dome-shaped cave lit through a small hole in its roof. Further afield, Gruta do Lago Azul in Brazil holds an intensely blue lake deep inside a cave, and Bimmah Sinkhole in Oman sits close to the sea in a bright limestone basin.
Every cenote here was chosen for how it looks and the list is ordered by beauty. Each has its own description, a photograph credited to its author and a place on the map, and the section also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ik Kil | Cenote | Mexico | |
| 2 | Gruta do Lago Azul | Cenote | Brazil | |
| 3 | Bimmah Sinkhole | Cenote | Oman | |
| 4 | Dos Ojos Cenote | Cenote | Mexico | |
| 5 | Poço Encantado | Cenote | Brazil | |
| 6 | Cenote Angelita | Cenote | Mexico | |
| 7 | Cenote X-Keken | Cenote | Mexico |
01 Ik Kil
Mexico · 35.9 km from Valladolid20.666° N 88.545° W
Image by mattiaverga from Pixabay Ik Kil doesn't look like a cave that happened to fill with water — it looks like the ground simply gave way, which is essentially what happened. The cenote sits open to the sky, a nearly circular shaft about 60 metres across where the water sits some 26 metres below the surrounding ground level and continues down to a depth of roughly 48 metres. Vines hang from the rim all the way to the water; it's a hole in solid limestone that happens to be full.
Did you know? In Yucatec Maya the name Ik Kil is usually translated as 'place of the winds'.
02 Gruta do Lago Azul
Monumento Natural da Gruta do Lago Azul
Brazil21.145° S 56.592° W
Luiz Felipe Sahd · CC BY-SA 3.0 Gruta do Lago Azul, the Blue Lake Cave, opens in the limestone hills outside Bonito in Brazil's Mato Grosso do Sul as a wide mouth in the forest, about 40 metres across. A path of roughly 300 steps leads down a steep, sloping chamber hung with stalactites to the cave's prize at the bottom: a still underground lake more than 50 metres long whose water is a blue so saturated that it looks lit from within.
Did you know? A tiny blind crustacean from the lake, Potiicoara brasiliensis, was just the second living species ever discovered in its entire order, Spelaeogriphacea.
03 Bimmah Sinkhole
Oman23.036° N 59.071° E
Prof. Mortel · CC BY 2.0 On the stony coastal plain of eastern Oman, a few hundred metres from the Gulf of Oman, the ground simply opens. Bimmah Sinkhole — Hawiyyat Najm in Arabic — is a near-round pit some 50 by 70 metres across and about 20 metres deep, its pale limestone walls dropping to a pool of startlingly clear turquoise water. Seen from the rim, the colour looks almost artificial against the dun rock around it.
Did you know? Some locals reportedly also call the pit Bayt al-Afreet, the house of the demon, after stories of a creature lurking in its depths.
04 Dos Ojos Cenote
Sistema dos ojos
Mexico20.325° N 87.392° W
Dag Lindgren · CC BY-SA 3.0 Dos Ojos, "Two Eyes", takes its name from a pair of neighbouring cenotes in the jungle of the Yucatán Peninsula, two round openings in the limestone that lead into a single great flooded cavern. Seen from the water, the effect is of looking through the eyes of the earth: shafts of sunlight fall through the openings and travel deep into water so clear that swimmers seem to hang in air above pale rock, while stalactites and stalagmites crowd the edges of the light.
Did you know? In November 2010 the Venezuelan freediver Carlos Coste set a Guinness record here, swimming 150 metres through the cave on a single breath.
05 Poço Encantado
Brazil12.945° S 41.105° W
Cesar Monteiro · CC BY-SA 4.0 For a few months each year, a shaft of sunlight slips through a crack in the roof of a cave in the Chapada Diamantina and lands on a pool of water so clear that it seems not to be there at all. The beam strikes the bottom and the whole lake lights up in an intense, electric blue, while rocks and fallen boulders many metres down appear close enough to touch. This is the Poço Encantado — the "enchanted well" — in the municipality of Itaetê, in the interior of Bahia.
Did you know? The blind catfish of the pool was once thought to live only here, but later studies found it in a regional underground aquifer that also reaches other caves.
06 Cenote Angelita
Mexico20.137° N 87.578° W
Serge Melki from Indianapolis, USA · CC BY 2.0 Cenote Angelita — "little angel" — looks unremarkable from the surface: a round pool of dark water in the forest south of Tulum. Its fame lies some thirty metres down. There the diver reaches a thick, milky layer of hydrogen sulphide that hangs across the whole shaft like a cloud or a ground fog, so that it seems to be an underground river flowing through the middle of the water. Dead trees that fell into the cenote long ago stand upright through the layer, their bare branches reaching out of the mist, and the scene is so strange that it has become one of the most photographed dives in the Yucatán.
Did you know? The sinkhole reaches a total depth of about 60 metres, roughly twice the depth at which the famous cloud appears.
07 Cenote X-Keken
Mexico · 4.6 km from Valladolid20.661° N 88.243° W
Laslovarga · CC BY-SA 3.0 X-Keken is a cenote that keeps its secret underground. From the surface there is almost nothing to see: a low entrance in the scrub a few kilometres outside Valladolid, and a flight of steps cut down into the rock. At the bottom the passage opens into a domed limestone chamber holding a round pool of clear, blue-green fresh water, roughly twenty-five metres across. The vault overhead is studded with stalactites, and the largest of them hang in a dense cluster that reaches down almost to the water, so that swimmers move between stone fingers rather than beneath a bare ceiling.
Did you know? According to Valladolid's tourism office, the cenote was discovered only around 1950, in the middle of the twentieth century.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most beautiful cenote in the world?
- On our list, Ik Kil (Mexico) ranks first, followed by Gruta do Lago Azul (Brazil) and Bimmah Sinkhole (Oman).
- What makes a cenote different from a sinkhole?
- A cenote is a type of sinkhole that exposes groundwater. Sinkholes in general are any depressions formed when the ground collapses into a cavity, while cenotes specifically open onto a water-filled limestone cave or aquifer, as is typical on the Yucatán Peninsula.
- Which country has the most cenotes?
- In our collection, the most come from Mexico (4), Brazil (2) and Oman (1).
- Why is cenote water so clear?
- Cenote water is rainwater that has seeped through porous limestone, which filters out sediment before it reaches the underground pools. With little current and few particles in suspension, light passes through it almost unobstructed.
- How many cenotes are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 7 cenotes in 3 countries. Mexico has the most, with 4.