The Most Beautiful Hot Springs in Asia
6 places in 4 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful hot springs in Asia are Pamukkale (Turkey), Badab-e Surt (Iran) and Jigokudani Monkey Park (Japan). The list covers 6 hot springs in 4 countries. Japan has the most, with 3. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Asia's hot springs are fed by some of the most active geology on Earth. Japan sits where several tectonic plates meet and has thousands of thermal springs, woven into a bathing culture of onsen that goes back over a thousand years. In Anatolia and northern Iran, mineral-laden waters rise along fault lines and build terraces of travertine in white and rust-red.
Pamukkale in Turkey, the Cotton Castle, is a hillside of white travertine terraces and pools, crowned by the ruins of the Greco-Roman spa city of Hierapolis. In Iran's Mazandaran province, Badab-e Surt forms similar terraces, coloured orange and red by iron in the water. In the mountains of Nagano, the Jigokudani Monkey Park is famous for Japanese macaques that sit in a hot spring through the snowy winter. The Hells of Beppu are hot pools too hot for bathing, in startling colours from the cobalt blue of Umi Jigoku to the red of Chinoike Jigoku. Ginzan Onsen in Yamagata, a former silver-mining village, lines a narrow river with wooden inns from the early 20th century.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pamukkale | Hot spring | Turkey | ✓ |
| 2 | Badab-e Surt | Hot spring | Iran | |
| 3 | Jigokudani Monkey Park | Hot spring | Japan | |
| 4 | Baishuitai | Hot spring | People's Republic of China | |
| 5 | Hells of Beppu | Hot spring | Japan | |
| 6 | Ginzan Onsen | Hot spring | Japan |
01 Pamukkale
Turkey · 17.4 km from Denizli37.924° N 29.122° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by neponu from Pixabay The city built on top of it, Hierapolis, wasn't founded for the view. A shrine had stood on the site since at least the 7th century BC, and the Hellenistic king Eumenes II turned it into a proper spa town in the 2nd century BC on the strength of exactly what still draws people today: a belief that the thermal water cured what regular medicine couldn't. It worked well enough, or was believed to work well enough, that Hierapolis grew into a city of roughly 100,000 people, survived a devastating earthquake under the emperor Nero in 60 CE, and was rebuilt as a fully Roman city afterward.
Did you know? Priests of Cybele went down into the poisonous cave and came out unharmed, while visitors could buy birds and small animals to see how deadly its fumes were.
02 Badab-e Surt
Iran36.355° N 53.856° E
Siamaksabet · CC BY-SA 3.0 What makes the place unlike most travertine terraces is its colour. Instead of the chalk-white of Pamukkale, the rock here is dyed by iron oxide, so that the pools run from pale cream at their edges to a deep, almost metallic orange where the sediment is thickest. Two springs feed the site and they are strikingly different: one is salty and has long been used locally as a remedy for rheumatism and skin complaints, while the other tastes sour and carries the iron-rich sediment that gives the terraces their glow.
Did you know? The minerals first settle out as soft, jelly-like deposits of iron and calcium carbonate, which only later harden into solid travertine.
03 Jigokudani Monkey Park
Japan · 27.7 km from Nagano36.733° N 138.463° E
Image by 3503898 from Pixabay The habit has a known beginning. In the early 1960s macaques were seen copying the guests of the Korakukan, an old inn in the valley, and climbing into its outdoor bath. Local people, keen to draw the troop away from farms where it was being hunted for raiding crops, had already been luring the monkeys towards the inn. Because the inn's bath was meant for people, a separate pool was built for the monkeys across the river, and in 1964 the Jigokudani Yaen-koen, the wild monkey park, opened around it. The animals are not caged or tamed: they come down from the forest and are fed by the park's staff, which keeps the troop close, but visitors are forbidden to touch or feed them.
Did you know? The monkeys bathe to keep warm, not to wash: as the weather turns mild in spring they largely stop using the pool.
04 Baishuitai
People's Republic of China27.502° N 100.032° E
Chensiyuan · CC BY-SA 4.0 The terraces lie on the northern flank of Haba Snow Mountain, near the upper valley of the Yangtze, at an altitude of roughly 2,400 metres. They are built by chemistry rather than by hand. Groundwater moving through limestone dissolves calcium carbonate; when the springs emerge and the water spreads out, loses carbon dioxide and evaporates, the carbonate comes out of solution and is laid down as travertine along the rims of the pools, raising them little by little.
Did you know? Naxi tradition holds that Dongba Shilo, credited with creating the pictographic Dongba script and its rituals, meditated in a cave near the terraces.
05 Hells of Beppu
Japan · 14.5 km from Ōita33.316° N 131.469° E
663highland · CC BY 2.5 Five of the hells lie close together in the Kannawa district. Umi Jigoku, the Sea Hell, is the largest and the most beautiful, a pool of startling cobalt blue at about 98 °C that is said to have formed some 1,200 years ago in an eruption of Mount Tsurumi; its heat is used to cook onsen eggs. Oniishibōzu Jigoku is a field of grey mud that heaves up into round bubbles, likened to the shaven heads of monks. Shiraike Jigoku, the White Pond, is a pale, milky blue pool, warm enough that its heat keeps a tropical fish aquarium alongside it, while Kamado Jigoku, the Cooking-Pot Hell, has several springs, one of which shifts colour with temperature and weather.
Did you know? Chinoike is said to have erupted violently in 1927, throwing material about 220 metres into the air.
06 Ginzan Onsen
Japan · 38 km from Yamagata38.570° N 140.531° E
lumoplank · CC0 The village began as a silver-mining settlement. Tradition places the discovery of the hot springs by miners some five centuries ago, and the Nobesawa silver mine behind the village made it prosperous until production faded toward the end of the seventeenth century. What survived was the spring — clear sulphur and sulphate water with a faintly salty taste — and in the early twentieth century a revival of bathing tourism produced the tall wooden inns that give Ginzan its face today. Up the valley, the Shirogane waterfall adds a white thread of water to the walk beyond the inns.
Did you know? A great flood destroyed the spa town in 1913, and the timber inns seen today were built during the reconstruction that followed.
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 hot springs in Asia?
- On our list, Pamukkale (Turkey) ranks first, followed by Badab-e Surt (Iran) and Jigokudani Monkey Park (Japan).
- Which country has the most hot springs in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (3), Iran (1) and the People's Republic of China (1).
- How were the terraces of Pamukkale formed?
- Warm spring water saturated with calcium carbonate flows down the slope, and as it cools the mineral is deposited as travertine, building white basins and terraces over thousands of years.
- Why do monkeys bathe in hot springs at Jigokudani?
- Japanese macaques in the cold mountains of Nagano began bathing in a hot spring to keep warm in winter, a behaviour first observed there in the 1960s and since passed on through the troop.
- Why are the Hells of Beppu so colourful?
- Each pool takes its colour from what it dissolves and carries: the blue of Umi Jigoku comes from minerals in very hot water, while Chinoike Jigoku is stained red by iron-rich clay.
- How many hot springs are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 6 hot springs in 4 countries. Japan has the most, with 3.