The Most Beautiful Ice Caves in the World
5 places in 4 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful ice caves in the world are Eisriesenwelt (Austria), Dobšinská Ice Cave (Slovakia) and Kungur Ice Cave (Russia). The list covers 5 ice caves in 4 countries. Austria has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
An ice cave is a rock cave that holds ice all year round. It works as a cold trap: in winter heavy, freezing air sinks through the entrance and settles inside, and in spring meltwater seeps in and freezes on contact. Over centuries this builds floors of layered ice, frozen waterfalls, columns and curtains, and in some caves the ice is thousands of years old, so its layers keep a record of past climates. Lit by lamps in the dark, the ice turns blue, white and amber, and the halls feel more like a cathedral than a cellar.
This collection opens in Austria with Eisriesenwelt above Werfen, the longest ice cave known, where the ice fills only the first part of a huge system running deep into the mountain. The Dachstein Giant Ice Cave near Obertraun has ice halls named after the legends of King Arthur. Scărișoara in Romania's Apuseni Mountains shelters one of the largest underground glaciers in the world. Dobšinská in Slovakia is part of a UNESCO karst site, and Kungur in the Urals is a gypsum cave with grottoes and lakes.
The places here were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the section also opens into separate pages by country.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eisriesenwelt | Ice cave | Austria | |
| 2 | Dobšinská Ice Cave | Ice cave | Slovakia | ✓ |
| 3 | Kungur Ice Cave | Ice cave | Russia | |
| 4 | Scărișoara Cave | Ice cave | Romania | |
| 5 | Dachstein Giant Ice Cave | Ice cave | Austria |
01 Eisriesenwelt
Austria · 36 km from Salzburg47.503° N 13.190° E
Image by dirgiS22 from Pixabay In 1879, a Salzburg naturalist named Anton von Posselt-Czorich became the first documented person to enter this cave above the Salzach valley. He got about 200 metres in, by torchlight, before turning back — not because the passage stopped, but because what lay ahead unsettled him enough that he wrote of fearing he'd found an entrance to the underworld. It's easy to see why: the cave breathes. Cold, dense winter air sinks into the mountain and pools in its vast chambers, and when warmer, moisture-laden air meets it in spring and summer, that moisture freezes on contact — not from an ancient glacier dragged inside, but built up season after season, meltwater by meltwater, for roughly a thousand years in the oldest layers.
Did you know? Explorer Alexander von Mörk was the first to pass the Sturmsee, a then-flooded passage, and found beyond it the vast hall later named after him.
02 Dobšinská Ice Cave
Dobšinská ľadová jaskyňa
Slovakia48.868° N 20.304° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Michal Klajban · CC BY-SA 3.0 Dobšinská Ice Cave, in the Slovak Paradise National Park, is one of the largest ice caves in the world and has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage site Caves of Aggtelek Karst and Slovak Karst since 2000. Its entrance, long known to shepherds as the "Cold Hole", sits at about 970 metres on the northern slope of the Duča hill, some 130 metres above the Hnilec River, and is remarkably low for a cave of its kind.
Did you know? The floor ice is built of thin layers, each only about 3–5 millimetres thick, stacked up to roughly 25 metres deep.
03 Kungur Ice Cave
Russia · 3.2 km from Kungur57.440° N 57.007° E
Владимир Чуприков / reworked by A.Savin · CC BY-SA 4.0 Kungur Ice Cave lies under the Ice Mountain, a gypsum ridge on the right bank of the Sylva River at the village of Filippovka on the edge of Kungur, in Russia's Perm Krai. It is one of the largest karst caves in European Russia and one of the longest gypsum caves in the world: surveys as of 2021 put its length at about 8.2 km, of which around 2 km were equipped for visitors. Water dissolving the gypsum and anhydrite over thousands of years has produced some 48 grottoes, around seventy underground lakes and more than a hundred "organ pipes", vertical shafts that climb almost to the surface. In the section nearest the entrance, cold winter air is trapped, so the floor stays iced and the ceilings bristle with ice crystals all year; deeper in, the temperature hovers just above or below freezing and the air is saturated with moisture.
Did you know? In a 1736 essay on the mammoth, Vasily Tatishchev explained that the giant beast locals said had dug the cave was in fact the extinct mammoth.
04 Scărișoara Cave
Peștera Scărișoara
Romania46.490° N 22.810° E
Țetcu Mircea Rareș · CC BY-SA 4.0 Scărișoara Cave, known locally as the Ghețar, "the glacier", holds the largest underground ice mass in Romania. It lies at about 1,150 metres in the Apuseni Mountains, at the edge of a forested karst plateau above the Arieș valley. The entrance is a spectacular shaft some 60 metres wide and nearly 50 metres deep, whose floor keeps a thick layer of snow through the year; from there a portal about 24 metres wide and 17 metres high leads into the Great Hall.
Did you know? Radiocarbon dating of tiny leaf and wood fragments trapped in the ice suggests the cave glacier is at least 10,500 years old, among the oldest known outside the polar regions.
05 Dachstein Giant Ice Cave
Dachstein-Rieseneishöhle
Austria47.535° N 13.719° E
Tigerente · CC BY-SA 4.0 High inside the Dachstein massif above Obertraun, the Giant Ice Cave holds one of the most spectacular underground ice landscapes in the Alps. The visitor tour leads through a sequence of vast halls in which ice has built up for centuries: frozen floors, walls and formations, and in the Tristan Dome a mass of ice up to fifteen metres thick, crossed on a walkway suspended above an icy chasm. Lit from below, the ice glows blue and white against the dark limestone, and walking into it from a summer mountainside feels like entering another world.
Did you know? Pollen analysis suggests the cave's ice is about 500 years old, and the cave has probably frozen and thawed several times since the last ice age.
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 largest ice cave in the world?
- Eisriesenwelt in Austria is the longest ice cave known; its passages run for more than 40 km, though ice covers only the first kilometre or so.
- How do ice caves form?
- Most ice caves act as cold traps: cold, dense air flows in during winter and cannot escape in summer, so water that enters freezes and the ice survives year after year.
- What is the difference between an ice cave and a glacier cave?
- An ice cave is a cave in rock that contains permanent ice. A glacier cave is carved inside a glacier itself by meltwater or warm air, so its walls are ice and it changes or disappears as the glacier moves.
- Which country has the most ice caves?
- In our collection, the most come from Austria (2), Romania (1) and Russia (1).
- How many ice caves are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 5 ice caves in 4 countries. Austria has the most, with 2.