The Most Beautiful Crater Lakes in Indonesia
6 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful crater lakes in Indonesia are Lake Toba, Lake Batur and Ijen Crater Lake. The list covers 6 crater lakes. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Indonesia lies along the Sunda Arc, a curve of volcanoes created as the Indo-Australian Plate slides beneath Eurasia, and it has more active volcanoes than any other country. Their craters and calderas fill with rain and volcanic fluids, producing lakes that range from a vast freshwater caldera to some of the most acidic water on Earth, coloured by sulphur, iron and other minerals.
Lake Toba in North Sumatra fills the caldera of a supereruption about 74,000 years ago and is the largest volcanic lake in the world, with Samosir Island in its centre. The Ijen crater lake in East Java is intensely acidic and turquoise, and at night burning sulphur gas around it glows blue. Kelimutu on Flores has three crater lakes side by side, whose colours change independently over the years. Kawah Putih south of Bandung is a pale, milky green lake inside the crater of Mount Patuha, ringed by white sulphurous ground.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lake Toba | Lake | |
| 2 | Lake Batur | Volcanic crater lake | ✓ |
| 3 | Ijen Crater Lake | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 4 | Kelimutu | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 5 | Lake Segara Anak | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 6 | Kawah Putih | Volcanic crater lake |
01 Lake Toba
Indonesia · 37.6 km from Pematangsiantar2.670° N 98.888° E
Image by 12019 from Pixabay The people of the lake are mostly Toba Batak, and their culture gives the landscape its character. Traditional Batak houses, with saddle-shaped roofs sweeping up at both ends like the hull of a boat and richly painted gables, still stand in villages such as Ambarita on Samosir, and Batak canoes once carried carved prows. A local folk tale explains the lake's origin through a fisherman who caught a golden fish, with Samosir as the fish's son. On the northern side of the lake, near the village of Tongging, is the Sipiso-piso waterfall.
Did you know? The caldera is the youngest of four overlapping calderas at Toba, the earliest of which formed around 1.2 million years ago.
02 Lake Batur
Indonesia · 38 km from Singaraja8.257° S 115.409° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Made agus devayana · CC BY-SA 4.0 Down at the waterline the lake is a working landscape. Hot springs at Toya Bungkah, fed by the volcano, run into the lake and have been developed for visitors, farmers cultivate a wide range of crops on the caldera floor, and floating cages raise tilapia. The pressures show, too: ash sediment, farm runoff and spreading water hyacinth are recurring worries for the lake's health. The classic view is from the rim at Kintamani, looking down on the lake with the lava fields and the cone beyond; a road descends to Kedisan, Toya Bungkah and Songan on the shore.
03 Ijen Crater Lake
Indonesia · 20.8 km from Banyuwangi8.057° S 114.242° E
Image by Andrea_Maverick from Pixabay The combination — a pale turquoise lake, a yellow shoreline, blue flames before dawn and a grey rim of rock above — makes Ijen one of the most otherworldly landscapes in Indonesia. The surrounding area was recognised as the Ijen UNESCO Global Geopark in 2023.
Did you know? The Ijen cone that holds the lake is young: it began to form only about 2,600 years ago, inside a caldera left by a far older volcano.
04 Kelimutu
Indonesia · 21.4 km from Ende8.770° S 121.820° E
Image by annieclairejane from Pixabay What makes the site more than a curiosity is the combination: this is one of the very few places on Earth where three adjacent crater lakes on the same small volcanic peak display independently different colors at the same time, a geological rarity that happens to sit directly underneath a centuries-old belief system built to explain exactly that.
Did you know? Vents on the lake beds release sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide, and the upwelling gas can be heard as a boiling sound.
05 Lake Segara Anak
Indonesia · 35.1 km from Mataram8.404° S 116.400° E
Image by arhnue from Pixabay Because magma lies not far beneath, the water is several degrees warmer than a lake at this altitude should be, around 20–22°C, and gas bubbles rise from the bottom. The lake had no fish until 1985, when the provincial government stocked it with tilapia and carp, and fishing is now a local livelihood. For trekkers on Rinjani the lakeshore, with Barujari opposite and the summit of Rinjani, at 3,726 metres, above, is one of the great moments of the climb.
06 Kawah Putih
Indonesia · 30.3 km from Bandung7.166° S 107.402° E
Image by ignartonosbg from Pixabay The state forestry company Perhutani began developing the crater for visitors in 1991, and it is now a favourite excursion from Bandung. A path leads down into the bowl of the crater, where you can walk along the shore, and trails climb through montane forest, with Javanese edelweiss and highland shrubs, towards the summit of Patuha. The surrounding hills are strawberry country, and hot springs lie nearby.
Did you know? Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, who reached the crater in 1837, was in the Priangan highlands to cultivate cinchona trees, the source of quinine, and later drew the lake.
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 Indonesia?
- On our list, Lake Toba ranks first, followed by Lake Batur and Ijen Crater Lake.
- Why do the Kelimutu lakes change colour?
- Each of the three lakes is fed by different volcanic gases and fluids, and the balance of minerals, oxygen and acidity in each one changes over time. As the chemistry shifts, so does the colour, which has ranged through turquoise, green, red and black.
- What is the blue fire at Ijen?
- The blue flames come from sulphuric gases that escape from cracks in the crater at high temperature and ignite in contact with air. Some of the sulphur condenses and burns as it flows, which is why the glow is visible only at night.
- How many crater lakes are on this list in Indonesia?
- The list covers 6 crater lakes.