The Most Beautiful Crater Lakes in Asia
13 places in 6 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful crater lakes in Asia are Lake Toba (Indonesia), Lake Nemrut (Turkey) and Lake Batur (Indonesia). The list covers 13 crater lakes in 6 countries. Indonesia has the most, with 6. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Asia is wrapped by some of the most active volcanic belts on the planet. The Pacific Ring of Fire runs through Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia, and further west volcanoes rise over the Anatolian plateau and the borderlands of Manchuria. When a volcano collapses into its emptied magma chamber or blasts out a crater, rain and snowmelt fill the hollow, and the result can be anything from a vast caldera lake to a small pool tinted by sulphur, iron and algae.
Lake Toba in Sumatra is the largest volcanic lake on Earth, filling the caldera of a supereruption about 74,000 years ago, with the island of Samosir rising from its centre. Ijen in East Java holds one of the most acidic lakes known, a milky turquoise pool tended by sulphur miners. On Flores, the three Kelimutu lakes sit side by side yet show different colours that change over the years, and Kawah Putih near Bandung is a pale green lake inside the crater of Mount Patuha. Lake Pinatubo in the Philippines formed only after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo.
Farther north, Lake Mashū in Hokkaido is famous for its clear water and frequent fog, and Okama on Mount Zaō is a round emerald lake whose colour shifts with the light. Heaven Lake sits in the summit caldera of Paektu Mountain, known in China as Changbai. In eastern Turkey, Lake Nemrut fills the caldera of Nemrut volcano near Lake Van, while Al Wahbah in Saudi Arabia is a deep maar crater with a white salt floor.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lake Toba | Lake | Indonesia | |
| 2 | Lake Nemrut | Volcanic crater lake | Turkey | |
| 3 | Lake Batur | Volcanic crater lake | Indonesia | ✓ |
| 4 | Heaven Lake | Volcanic crater lake | People's Republic of China | |
| 5 | Lake Mashū | Volcanic crater lake | Japan | |
| 6 | Ijen Crater Lake | Volcanic crater lake | Indonesia | |
| 7 | Kelimutu | Volcanic crater lake | Indonesia | |
| 8 | Lake Pinatubo | Volcanic crater lake | Philippines | |
| 9 | Lake Segara Anak | Volcanic crater lake | Indonesia | |
| 10 | Okama Crater Lake (Zaō) | Volcanic crater lake | Japan | |
| 11 | Al Wahbah crater | Volcanic crater lake | Saudi Arabia | |
| 12 | Kawah Putih | Volcanic crater lake | Indonesia | |
| 13 | Kagami-numa (Hachimantai Dragon Eye) | Volcanic crater lake | Japan |
01 Lake Toba
Indonesia · 37.6 km from Pematangsiantar2.670° N 98.888° E
Image by 12019 from Pixabay That eruption, about 74,000 years ago, was the largest explosive eruption on Earth in the last 25 million years. It threw out at least 2,800 cubic kilometres of material, left ash hundreds of metres thick near the vent, and dropped a layer of ash across South Asia, up to 6 m deep at one site in central India. Scientists have long debated whether the volcanic winter that followed nearly wiped out early humans; more recent studies have found little evidence of a lasting population crash, but the eruption remains one of the landmark events of the Ice Age.
Did you know? Seismic studies suggest the volcano's eruptible magma, stored in stacked sills nicknamed magma pancakes, could total about 50,000 cubic kilometres.
02 Lake Nemrut
Nemrut Gölü
Turkey · 13.6 km from Tatvan38.619° N 42.222° E
EvgenyGenkin · CC BY 2.5 Nemrut is a young volcano, its cone still barely eroded, and it has shaped the whole region: its lava flows are what dammed the basin and created Lake Van, the largest lake in Turkey. The crater floor holds several smaller lakes as well, two of them permanent. The smaller, Ilı Göl, sits right over the volcanic fault and is warmed by hot springs along its shore, while hot water seeping into the main lake keeps it from freezing entirely in winter. Much of the crater floor is covered by obsidian and tuff, and the black volcanic glass glints along the paths.
Did you know? The volcano's last recorded eruption took place in 1692, and steam and hot springs on the caldera floor show that it is dormant rather than extinct.
03 Lake Batur
Indonesia · 38 km from Singaraja8.257° S 115.409° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Made agus devayana · CC BY-SA 4.0 The volcano is very much alive. Its first recorded eruption was in 1804 and its most recent in 2000, and the black, barely weathered lava of the 1963 eruption still spreads across the slopes, clearly visible from the caldera rim at Kintamani. The climb from the lakeside villages to the summit crater is straightforward enough to have become a popular trek, with views over the lake and the neighbouring Mount Abang.
04 Heaven Lake
People's Republic of China42.006° N 128.057° E
Gertjerry · CC BY-SA 3.0 The mountain above it, known as Paektu to Koreans and Changbai to the Chinese, is considered a sacred ancestral homeland by both Korean and Manchu tradition, and the lake itself sits almost exactly on the border between China and North Korea — one of the few natural features on Earth genuinely split down the middle by an international line.
Did you know? The lake averages about 213 metres deep and holds roughly two cubic kilometres of water, making it one of the deepest crater lakes in Asia.
05 Lake Mashū
Japan43.583° N 144.517° E
Miya.m · CC BY-SA 3.0 The basin is young in geological terms. The present caldera was blown out by a large eruption about 7,000 years ago and the volcano stayed active until a last explosive eruption around 2,000 years ago; the peak of Mashū-dake still rises from the rim. The lake reaches 211 metres at its deepest, and its water became famous in 1931, when a transparency of 41.6 metres was measured, more than the figure then recorded for Lake Baikal. Clarity has since settled at around twenty to thirty metres, still enough to give the water its deep, almost inky blue.
Did you know? With an average depth of about 137 metres, the lake holds close to 2.9 cubic kilometres of water.
06 Ijen Crater Lake
Indonesia · 20.8 km from Banyuwangi8.057° S 114.242° E
Image by Andrea_Maverick from Pixabay The lake sits in a crater roughly 722 m wide within the Ijen volcanic complex, which rises to 2,769 m. On its shore, vents pour out volcanic gases rich in sulphur. Where the gas meets air it can ignite, burning with flames up to 5 m high at temperatures of around 600 °C — the famous "blue fire", visible only in darkness, which is why visitors begin the climb in the middle of the night. The same gases condense into yellow sulphur, and the crater has long been worked by hand: around 200 miners break the solidified sulphur from pipes at the vents, load it into baskets of 75 to 90 kg, carry it some 300 m up the crater wall and then 3 km down the mountain.
Did you know? In 1921 Dutch colonial engineers built a dam at that breach to control the lake level and protect villages and coffee plantations in the caldera below.
07 Kelimutu
Indonesia · 21.4 km from Ende8.770° S 121.820° E
Image by annieclairejane from Pixabay The local explanation for the phenomenon predates any chemistry. The Lio people who live around the volcano hold that each lake is a resting place for the souls of the dead, and the traditional belief assigns different lakes to different kinds of people: Tiwu Ata Mbupu, the Lake of Old People, receives souls of the elderly; Tiwu Nuwa Muri Koo Fai, the Lake of Young Men and Maidens, receives those who died young; and Tiwu Ata Polo — the name translates roughly to "Bewitched" or "Enchanted" Lake — is said to hold the souls of those who lived badly.
Did you know? Kelimutu's three crater lakes were pictured on the back of Indonesia's 5,000-rupiah banknote issued in 1992.
08 Lake Pinatubo
Philippines · 21 km from Angeles15.130° N 120.350° E
Andre Lloyd Torres · CC BY-SA 4.0 Within months, by September 1991, rain had begun to pool in the new caldera. At first the lake was small, hot and strongly acidic, close to pH 2 at about 40 degrees; heavy rains gradually diluted and cooled it, and by 2003 the water was near 26 degrees with a pH of about 5.5. Today the lake lies at roughly 900 metres above sea level, covers about 1.8 square kilometres and was measured at 95 to 115 metres deep in 2002, its colour shifting between turquoise, blue and green against the grey ash cliffs. In 2001 engineers cut a notch in the crater rim to lower the water by around a quarter, to protect the town of Botolan below from a sudden breakout.
Did you know? Before engineers cut a drainage notch in 2001, the lake was rising by about a metre a month, and some 9,000 people were evacuated as a precaution.
09 Lake Segara Anak
Indonesia · 35.1 km from Mataram8.404° S 116.400° E
Image by arhnue from Pixabay The caldera is the scar of one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the last few thousand years. In 1257 Mount Samalas, which is thought to have stood around 4,200 metres high, blew itself apart, ejecting enough ash and sulphur to leave traces in polar ice cores and cool the global climate for several years; some researchers link it to the onset of the Little Ice Age. The mountain's remains are the caldera rim, and the lake gathered in the hollow. From its eastern shore rises Gunung Barujari, "the new mountain", a young volcanic cone, active in 1994–95 and again in 2010, whose lava flows give the lake its crescent shape.
10 Okama Crater Lake (Zaō)
Japan · 18.7 km from Yamagata38.136° N 140.449° E
Qwert1234 · Public domain Its colour is the reason people climb up to look at it. On a calm day in quiet volcanic periods, the water is an intense milky turquoise, often compared to jade or lapis. But it changes: with the angle of the sun, the weather and the season, it shifts through emerald, blue and grey, and when the volcano stirs the water can cloud to white or darker tones. That variability gave it its other name, Goshiki-numa, the five-coloured pond. The water is strongly acidic, with a pH around 3.5, and almost nothing but a few microscopic organisms lives in it — which is part of why it keeps such an unreal clarity of colour.
Did you know? Volcanologists suggest that if the volcano fell completely quiet, the crater could eventually fill with sediment and the lake would disappear.
11 Al Wahbah crater
Saudi Arabia22.900° N 41.139° E
Prof. Mortel · CC BY 2.0 The crater sits on the western edge of Harrat Kishb, a basalt lava field of nearly 6,000 square kilometres in the Hejaz that is dotted with volcanic cones. Its round shape and high walls once led to suggestions that it was made by a meteorite, as at Barringer Crater in Arizona. Geologists now regard it as a maar – a crater blasted out by a steam explosion when rising basaltic magma met groundwater, leaving a hole rather than a cone.
Did you know? It is counted among the largest maar craters in the world, formed during the Pleistocene in a volcanic field of roughly 175 small volcanoes.
12 Kawah Putih
Indonesia · 30.3 km from Bandung7.166° S 107.402° E
Image by ignartonosbg from Pixabay Patuha has shown no significant eruptive activity since around 1600, but the crater is far from dead: steam and sulphurous gas bubble through the water, and the smell is strong. Local stories once told of birds that refused to fly over the forest here, and it was curiosity about these tales that brought the German naturalist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn to the crater in 1837. Under Dutch rule a sulphur works operated by the lake, taken over by the Japanese during the Second World War; entrances to its old tunnels can still be seen around the site.
Did you know? Mount Patuha is a twin volcano: its summit holds two craters about 600 metres apart, and only the south-eastern one holds water, while its neighbour is dry.
13 Kagami-numa (Hachimantai Dragon Eye)
Japan · 35.1 km from Morioka39.954° N 140.854° E
SAGI1955 · CC0 Kagami-numa, whose name means "mirror pond", sits just below the 1,613-metre summit of Hachimantai, on the border between Iwate and Akita prefectures in the Towada-Hachimantai National Park. It is a crater lake: Hachimantai belongs to the Nasu volcanic belt and was shaped by repeated large eruptions during the Quaternary period, and when activity ended, water gathered in the hollow of a vent. The lake has a circumference of roughly one kilometre and is only about three metres deep at most, cradled in a bowl-shaped depression around 50 metres across.
Did you know? In 2025 the dragon eye failed to appear: unusually deep snow made the ice layer so thick and buoyant that the usual ring never formed.
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 are the most beautiful crater lakes in Asia?
- On our list, Lake Toba (Indonesia) ranks first, followed by Lake Nemrut (Turkey) and Lake Batur (Indonesia).
- Which country has the most crater lakes in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from Indonesia (6), Japan (3) and the People's Republic of China (1).
- What is the largest volcanic lake in the world?
- Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. It fills a caldera about 100 kilometres long, created by a supereruption roughly 74,000 years ago, one of the largest known in the last two million years.
- Why do the Kelimutu lakes change colour?
- The three lakes are fed by volcanic gases and minerals from below. Changes in that activity alter the chemistry and oxidation of the water, so each lake shifts independently between shades of turquoise, green, red and black.
- Why is Ijen crater lake so acidic?
- Volcanic gases rich in sulphur dioxide and hydrogen chloride dissolve into the water, making it one of the most acidic natural lakes on Earth. The same gases deposit the sulphur that miners carry out of the crater.
- How many crater lakes are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 13 crater lakes in 6 countries. Indonesia has the most, with 6.