The Most Beautiful Hot Springs in the World

20 places in 13 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Grand Prismatic Spring

   United States44.525° N 110.838° W

   

   Seen from above, the Grand Prismatic Spring looks like an eye painted by a colourist: a deep blue pupil, a ring of pale turquoise, then bands of yellow, orange and rust-red spreading out over the grey sinter in rays of runoff. It is the largest hot spring in Yellowstone and the third largest in the world, about 110 metres across and 50 metres deep, releasing some 2,100 litres of water at around 70 °C every minute into the Firehole River basin.

   Did you know? In August 2014 a tourist's drone crashed into the spring, and park officials weighed whether removing it might do more harm than leaving it.

   More about Grand Prismatic Spring →

2. 02 Champagne Pool

   New Zealand · 27.4 km from Rotorua38.359° S 176.369° E

   

   Champagne Pool is a hot spring in the Waiotapu geothermal field on New Zealand's North Island, and it is one of the most painted-looking natural objects on Earth. A near-circular basin about 65 metres across holds water of a milky, glassy green, veiled in steam; around its lip runs a broad ledge of vivid orange, and beyond that a pale grey-white sinter apron spreads out over the ground. Fine bubbles of carbon dioxide rise constantly through the water and break at the surface, which is where the pool got its name.

   Did you know? The orange deposits round the rim are rich not only in arsenic and antimony but also in gold, silver, mercury and thallium.

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3. 03 Mammoth Hot Springs

   United States44.971° N 110.706° W

   

   Mammoth Hot Springs is the place where Yellowstone builds in stone. On a hillside at the park's northern edge, hot water rises through limestone, dissolves it, and on reaching the air drops it again as travertine — more than two tons a day. The result is a staircase of terraces, pools and mounds that grows, dries and shifts from year to year: white where the flow has stopped, and tinted orange, brown, red and green where heat-loving microbes live in the warm water. Terrace Mountain here is the largest known carbonate-depositing spring in the world.

   Did you know? The travertine of Terrace Mountain began forming about 400,000 years ago, making it the oldest documented hydrothermal deposit in all of Yellowstone.

   More about Mammoth Hot Springs →

4. 04 Pamukkale

   Turkey · 17.4 km from Denizli37.924° N 29.122° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Pamukkale means "cotton castle," and the name is literal: mineral-rich water rises from underground springs at around 35°C, then cools as it spills down the slope, and as it cools it can no longer hold all the calcium carbonate dissolved in it. That mineral drops out of the water and hardens into travertine — layer after layer, century after century — building the roughly 2,700-meter run of white terraces and pools that give the hillside its color and shape.

   Did you know? Next to the Temple of Apollo lies Pluto's Gate, a small cave that exhales suffocating carbon dioxide and was revered as an entrance to the underworld.

   More about Pamukkale →

5. 05 Fly Geyser

   United States40.859° N 119.332° W

   

   Fly Geyser exists because two different attempts to find something else both failed in useful ways. In 1916, a well drilled in the Black Rock Desert in search of irrigation water struck a pocket of geothermal heat instead, and a modest geyser began venting on the spot. Decades later, in 1964, a geothermal energy company drilled a second test well nearby hoping to find water hot enough to generate power; the water that came up wasn't quite hot enough for that purpose, but at over 200°F it was more than hot enough to keep flowing once the well was left improperly capped. Nothing about the geyser was designed — it's the unintended byproduct of two commercial failures, decades apart, on the same patch of desert.

   Did you know? Quartz is forming inside Fly Geyser remarkably fast thanks to its very silica-rich water, a process that usually takes up to 10,000 years in geysers.

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6. 06 Boiling Lake

   Dominica · 10.2 km from Roseau15.318° N 61.294° W

   

   High in the volcanic interior of Dominica, at the bottom of a steep-walled basin, a lake of greyish-blue water churns in a constant rolling boil, half hidden by the clouds of steam that rise from its surface. The Boiling Lake is a flooded fumarole: rainwater and two small streams drain into the basin, seep down towards hot magma and are heated until the lake bubbles like a vast pot on a stove. It measures roughly 60 to 75 metres across, which makes it the second-largest hot lake in the world after Frying Pan Lake in New Zealand, and it is usually seen from a cliff-top ledge some 30 metres above its shore.

   Did you know? The lake lies on Morne Watt, a 1,224-metre stratovolcano whose last major eruption, about 1,300 years ago, sent pyroclastic flows down its slopes.

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7. 07 Bagno Vignoni

   Italy · 38.8 km from Siena43.028° N 11.619° E

   

   Most villages are built around a square; Bagno Vignoni is built around a pool. At the heart of this tiny hamlet in southern Tuscany, where a market place would normally be, lies a large rectangular basin of steaming thermal water, enclosed by old stone houses, with the church of St John the Baptist close by. The tank dates from the 16th century and holds the original spring, which rises from a volcanic aquifer beneath the hill; the space is called the Piazza delle Sorgenti, the Square of the Springs.

   Did you know? The thermal pool at the heart of the village measures roughly 49 by 29 metres, taking up the space where a piazza would normally be.

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8. 08 Badab-e Surt

   Iran36.355° N 53.856° E

   

   High in the Alborz range of Mazandaran, at roughly 1,840 metres above sea level, a hillside steps down in a cascade of shallow terraces stained orange, rust and lemon yellow. Badab-e Surt is a travertine spring field: mineral water rising from the slope is saturated with calcium and iron carbonate, and as it reaches the air and loses its dissolved carbon dioxide the minerals settle out, building rim after rim of stone. Over thousands of years the deposits have grown into a natural staircase of hundreds of terraces and dozens of stepped pools.

   Did you know? Badab joins the Persian words for 'gas' and 'water', after the naturally carbonated springs, while Surt is an old name of nearby Orost village.

   More about Badab-e Surt →

9. 09 Terme di Saturnia

   Italy42.658° N 11.516° E

   

   In the hills of southern Tuscany, below the old village of Saturnia, a spring pours out almost 800 litres of warm sulphurous water every second at a steady temperature of about 37 degrees. Local legend credits Saturn with it: tired of human warfare, the god hurled a thunderbolt that opened a crater and released waters meant to calm mankind and bring back a golden age. Geologists tell a slower story, of rain that seeps deep beneath Monte Amiata and travels underground for decades, dissolving the carbonate rocks it passes and picking up sulphur, calcium and magnesium before it rises again.

   More about Terme di Saturnia →

10. 10 Jigokudani Monkey Park

    Japan · 27.7 km from Nagano36.733° N 138.463° E

    

    In a steep, forested valley in the mountains of northern Nagano, steam rises from cracks in the rock and hot water bubbles up along the banks of the Yokoyu River. The place is called Jigokudani, "Hell's Valley", after those vents, and it lies at about 850 metres, under deep snow for around four months of the year. What makes it famous is that the wild Japanese macaques living in these forests have learned to sit in a hot pool through the winter, their faces red, their fur frosted, eyes half-closed in the steam: one of the most improbable and endearing sights in the animal world.

    Did you know? Bathing is mostly done by females and young; adult males rarely join in, perhaps to stay ready to guard the troop or because wet fur makes them look smaller.

    More about Jigokudani Monkey Park →

11. 11 Hammam Meskhoutine

    Algeria · 14.2 km from Guelma36.460° N 7.269° E

    

    At Hammam Meskhoutine in north-eastern Algeria, water emerges from the ground close to boiling point — up to about 98 °C — and as it cools it leaves its minerals behind, building a stepped wall of travertine streaked white, cream, orange and rust. Steam drifts over the terraces, and beside them stand rounded cones of rock left by older springs.

    Did you know? The water is supersaturated in calcite, aragonite and dolomite, so rock starts forming almost as soon as it reaches the air and loses its carbon dioxide.

    More about Hammam Meskhoutine →

12. 12 Námafjall

    Iceland65.636° N 16.823° W

    

    On the eastern side of Námafjall, a low ridge just east of Lake Mývatn in north Iceland, the ground looks as if it belongs to another planet. The slope and the flat below it — the field usually called Hverir or Hverarönd — are stained in bright mineral colours, and they hiss. Steam roars out of vents, some of them natural and others old boreholes now heaped over with stones, while broad pools of grey mud bubble and spit. There are no clear hot-water springs here, only steam and mud, and the acid gases have left the soil sterile and bare of plants, with crusts of yellow sulphur crystallising on the surface.

    Did you know? Underground the heat is intense: temperatures above 200 °C have been measured at a depth of about 1,000 metres in this field.

    More about Námafjall →

13. 13 Las Grutas de Tolantongo

    Tolantongo

    Mexico20.650° N 99.000° W

    

    In the dry hills of the Mezquital Valley in Hidalgo, where the landscape is mostly cactus and scrub, a box canyon with walls up to about 500 metres high hides a warm, milky-turquoise river. Tolantongo takes its name from the Nahuatl for a place where it feels warm, and the description is literal: water heated inside the mountain to around 37 °C pours out of a cave mouth high in the canyon wall and runs down to the valley floor, cooling as it goes. Mineral salts give the river its improbable pale blue colour.

    Did you know? Tolantongo is a misspelling: the place was Tonaltongo, from Nahuatl, until a magazine promoting it in 1975 printed the name wrongly and it stuck.

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14. 14 Baishuitai

    People's Republic of China27.502° N 100.032° E

    

    On a shelf of hillside above the village of Baidi, spring water spreads across a broad white apron of stone and settles into tier after tier of shallow, scalloped pools. Baishuitai, the "White Water Terrace", is a travertine formation in the far north-west of Yunnan, and the comparison it most often draws is with Pamukkale in Turkey: a slope of mineral steps that looks like a frozen cascade, its basins holding water tinted pale blue against the cream-coloured rock.

    Did you know? According to Naxi legend, the gods shaped the white terraces as a model of heaven's fields, teaching people how to build terraced farmland on steep slopes.

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15. 15 Uunartoq

    Greenland60.500° N 45.333° W

    

    Off the southern tip of Greenland, at the mouth of a fjord the Norse called Siglufjord, lies the uninhabited island of Uunartoq — a name that simply means "the hot one". On a low terrace about ten metres above the sea, natural springs collect in pools at between 34 and 38 °C, warm enough to bathe in while icebergs drift past in the sound. Both the Norse settlers and the Inuit knew the springs well.

    Did you know? The springs on Uunartoq are said to be the warmest in all of Greenland, and the missionary Hans Egede was told of them soon after arriving in 1721.

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16. 16 Hells of Beppu

    Japan · 14.5 km from Ōita33.316° N 131.469° E

    

    The Hells of Beppu are hot springs made for looking at rather than bathing in: seven pools, ponds and vents on the hillside above Beppu, each with its own colour and character, strung together as the Jigoku Meguri, the "tour of hells". The name is old. When the scholar Kaibara Ekiken travelled through the region in the 1690s he already called these boiling, steaming places jigoku, hell, and it is easy to see why: the ground here hisses, the water runs at close to boiling point, and clouds of steam roll up among the houses and gardens of the town.

    Did you know? Chinoike Jigoku, the Blood Pond, is mentioned in 8th-century records such as the gazetteer of Bungo Province, where it appears as a red hot spring.

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17. 17 Bagni San Filippo

    Italy42.930° N 11.701° E

    

    On the wooded slopes of Monte Amiata in southern Tuscany, hot sulphurous water pours down a stream bed and has coated everything it touches in brilliant white. At Bagni San Filippo, springs rich in calcium carbonate have built up terraces, basins, small cascades and frozen-looking curtains of travertine along the Fosso Bianco, the White Brook, which runs about 2 km through the forest before joining the Formone river. The largest of these formations is a massive white rock nicknamed the Balena Bianca, the White Whale, for its shape, with warm water spilling over its rounded flanks.

    Did you know? The Balena Bianca, the largest travertine formation, is roughly 15 metres tall and 30 metres wide, and keeps growing as mineral water flows over it.

    More about Bagni San Filippo →

18. 18 Ginzan Onsen

    Japan · 38 km from Yamagata38.570° N 140.531° E

    

    Ginzan Onsen is a single narrow street of wooden inns facing each other across a fast mountain stream, and on a snowy evening it looks like a scene painted rather than built. The ryokan, three and four storeys high, date mostly from the Taishō era (1912–1926): bare timber frames and white plaster, their upper floors looking down on the Ginzan River and the small bridges that cross it. When darkness falls the street is lit by gas lamps whose warm light catches on falling snow and on the steam rising from the baths.

    Did you know? The silver mine behind the village opened in the 1450s, and at its peak in the 1620s–1640s some 20,000 to 30,000 people lived around it.

    More about Ginzan Onsen →

19. 19 Ponta da Ferraria

    Portugal · 19.9 km from Ponta Delgada37.853° N 25.850° W

    

    At the far western tip of São Miguel in the Azores, a black lava platform juts into the Atlantic below a high sea cliff, and in a rocky inlet on its edge the ocean itself runs warm. Hot springs rise beneath the lava and mix with the incoming waves, so that bathers can swim in seawater heated by the volcano — its temperature rising and falling with the tide. Ponta da Ferraria is a lava delta, or fajã lávica, and it is one of the clearest places on the islands to see how the land of the Azores is still being made.

    Did you know? When the crew of HMS Sabrina first saw the 1811 eruption plume, their commander James Tillard took the smoke for a naval battle and sailed towards it.

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20. 20 Cascate del Mulino

    Italy42.648° N 11.513° E

    

    Below the hill village of Saturnia in southern Tuscany, warm water spills over a low ledge beside an old mill and runs down a staircase of pale, rounded pools. The basins were built by the water itself: as the mineral-rich spring water flows and evaporates, it leaves behind calcareous rock that forms terraced rims, and the pools take on a milky blue-white colour against the green Maremma countryside. The Cascate del Mulino, the Mill Falls, are the most famous of Saturnia's thermal cascades and are an open stretch of hillside where people come to sit in the warm water.

    Did you know? The warm water is home to tiny red worms, the larvae of non-biting midges, whose colour comes from a haemoglobin-like protein suited to oxygen-poor sulphurous water.

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