The Most Beautiful Lagoons in the World

14 places in 13 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Bay of Kotor

   Бока Которска

   Montenegro42.450° N 18.670° E

   

   Guidebooks reach for the word "fjord" to describe Kotor's bay so often that it's become the default description, and geologically it's not quite right — this is Europe's southernmost inlet of its kind, but it wasn't carved by a glacier the way a true fjord is. What actually happened is that an ancient river valley, part of a drainage system geologists trace back toward the Bojana river, collapsed and flooded as the Adriatic Sea rose after the last ice age, leaving behind a shape that looks like a fjord — steep limestone walls, a winding, deep channel — without the ice-age mechanism that usually produces one.

   Did you know? Crkvice, in the mountains above the bay, receives close to 5,000 mm of rain a year, among the wettest inhabited places in Europe.

   More about Bay of Kotor →

2. 02 Jökulsárlón

   Iceland64.076° N 16.230° W

   

   Jökulsárlón is a lake that did not exist a century ago. Breiðamerkurjökull, an outlet glacier of the vast Vatnajökull ice cap, began to retreat from its moraine at the end of the nineteenth century, and in the 1930s meltwater began to pool in the hollow it left behind. The lagoon has grown ever since: it quadrupled in size after the 1970s and now covers about 25 square kilometres, stretching some 8 km from the glacier front to the sea. It is also the deepest lake in Iceland, at more than 284 metres. The glacier is still retreating, by roughly 200 metres a year in recent times, so the lagoon you see is never quite the same twice.

   Did you know? When Iceland was first settled around 870, the glacier's edge lay roughly 20 km further inland than it does today.

   More about Jökulsárlón →

3. 03 Balos Lagoon

   Λιμνοθάλασσα του Μπάλου

   Greece · 39.5 km from Chania35.582° N 23.589° E

   

   At the far north-western corner of Crete, the Gramvousa peninsula runs out into the sea as a bare, rocky finger, and at its tip the land nearly touches the offshore islet of Cape Tigani. Between them lies Balos, a shallow lagoon that the sea fills and empties across a sand bar, so that the water shifts from pale milky turquoise over the sand to deep blue where the bottom drops away. Tigani, whose name means "frying pan" in Greek, rises from the lagoon as a rounded rock joined to the shore by that thin strip of sand.

   Did you know? An earthquake in AD 365 lifted the coast of Gramvousa by six to nine metres, and the old shoreline can still be traced in the rock.

   More about Balos Lagoon →

4. 04 Kabira Bay

   Japan24.451° N 124.144° E

   

   Kabira Bay, on the north-western coast of Ishigaki Island in Japan's far south, is a small sheltered bay of white sand and turquoise water whose colours shift constantly with the light and with the rise and fall of the tide. Densely wooded shores and a scatter of small islets frame it, and beneath the surface many species of reef-building coral grow in dense communities. It is regarded as the signature landscape of Ishigaki.

   Did you know? Before the Second World War the pearl pioneer Mikimoto Kokichi ran a black-lip pearl oyster farm in the bay for many years.

   More about Kabira Bay →

5. 05 Charco Verde

   Spain · 28.3 km from Arrecife28.977° N 13.828° W

   

   On the western shore of Lanzarote a small lagoon of startling emerald green lies cupped between a dark volcanic crater wall and a beach of black gravel, with the Atlantic breaking only a few dozen metres away. Known as Charco Verde or Charco de los Clicos, it is often held up as an emblem of Lanzarote itself, an island made by fire and sea, and the contrast is the whole point: green water, black sand, banded volcanic rock and the blue of the open ocean, all in a single frame.

   Did you know? The crater holding the lagoon is a basaltic tuff cone, built by violent explosions that happened when rising magma met seawater.

   More about Charco Verde →

6. 06 Khawr al Udayd

   Qatar24.630° N 51.296° E

   

   Khor Al Adaid is where the sand sea of southern Qatar runs straight into the Gulf. A winding tidal channel about 10 km long leads inland from the coast and opens into a lagoon roughly 10 km long and 5 km wide, enclosed by dunes that rise to between about 38 and 67 metres. Known to English speakers in Qatar as the Inland Sea, it lies at the southern edge of the country on the border with Saudi Arabia.

   Did you know? Only in November 2021 did a Qatar–Saudi Arabia border demarcation move the line south and give Qatar the whole of the inlet.

   More about Khawr al Udayd →

7. 07 Lake Bacalar

   Laguna de Bacalar

   Mexico · 27.7 km from Chetumal18.750° N 88.315° W

   

   Lake Bacalar, on the southern edge of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula near the border with Belize, is a long, narrow ribbon of fresh water, more than 50 km from north to south and barely two kilometres across at its widest. It is often called the "lagoon of seven colours", and the name is earned: over its pale limestone bed the water shifts from almost white along the shallows through turquoise and cobalt to near black where the bottom drops away into sunken cenotes. The deepest of these, the Cenote Negro, reaches about 55 metres. It is one of the few large surface lakes on a peninsula where porous limestone swallows almost all the rain, and it is fed from below by underground rivers.

   Did you know? Bacalar began as a Maya city, traditionally said to have been founded in AD 415 under the name Sian Ka'an Bakhalal.

   More about Lake Bacalar →

8. 08 Sandwich Harbour

   Namibia23.367° S 14.483° E

   

   Sandwich Harbour is the place where the Namib Desert runs straight into the Atlantic. Along this stretch of coast south of Walvis Bay, tall dunes rise directly from the surf, their crests sharp against the sky and their seaward flanks dropping to a narrow strip of wet sand that disappears altogether at high tide. Few landscapes show the meeting of desert and ocean so bluntly: on one side, sand to the horizon, on the other, the cold grey-green swell of the Atlantic.

   Did you know? In peak counts more than 300,000 birds have been recorded at Sandwich Harbour, including some 316,000 in January 2001.

   More about Sandwich Harbour →

9. 09 San Rafael Lagoon

   Laguna San Rafael

   Chile46.667° S 73.933° W

   

   At the head of a remote inlet on Chile's Pacific coast, a wall of blue ice breaks into a lagoon studded with floating icebergs. Laguna San Rafael is the meeting point of sea and glacier in the far north of Patagonia: the San Rafael Glacier pours down from the Northern Patagonian Ice Field and ends directly in the water, calving blocks of ice that drift across the lagoon. It is described as the tidewater glacier closest to the equator, an outlier of polar landscape at around 46 degrees south.

   Did you know? Since the late 19th century the glacier front has retreated about 14 km, and between 1880 and 2001 the glacier lost around 72 square kilometres of ice.

   More about San Rafael Lagoon →

10. 10 Blue Lagoon, Comino

    Malta · 21.4 km from Valletta36.014° N 14.323° E

    

    Between the island of Comino and its tiny, uninhabited neighbour Cominotto runs a shallow channel with a floor of pale sand, and it is that sand, reflecting the Mediterranean light back through clear water, that gives the Blue Lagoon its unreal turquoise. From above it looks like a strip of glass laid between two brown limestone islands; from a boat anchored in it, the hulls around you seem to hover over their own shadows.

    Did you know? The lagoon's Maltese name, Bejn il-Kmiemen, translates literally as "Between the Cominos", a nod to the two islands that enclose it.

    More about Blue Lagoon, Comino →

11. 11 Hutt Lagoon

    Australia28.133° S 114.217° E

    

    Hutt Lagoon is a long, shallow salt lake behind the dunes of Western Australia's Mid West coast, and for much of the year it is pink. The colour comes from Dunaliella salina, a microscopic alga that thrives in very salty water and protects itself with beta-carotene, the same pigment that colours carrots. Depending on the season, the cloud and the angle of the sun, the lagoon can look bubblegum pink, deep red or pale lilac, and on a clear day the contrast with the blue Indian Ocean a few hundred metres away, across a strip of dune and the little town of Gregory, is startling. Midday light, when the sun is high, tends to bring out the strongest colour.

    Did you know? Explorer George Grey named the lagoon after William Hutt, a British politician closely involved in colonising Western Australia and brother of the colony's governor John Hutt.

    More about Hutt Lagoon →

12. 12 Rock Islands Southern Lagoon

    Palau · 16.9 km from Koror7.247° N 134.352° E

    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The Rock Islands of Palau rise from a turquoise lagoon as hundreds of rounded green domes, each one a lump of ancient coral limestone capped with dense forest. Many are shaped like mushrooms or umbrellas, pinched in at the waterline where a notch has been worn into the rock. That undercut is the work of the sea and of grazing animals: sponges, bivalves, chitons, snails and sea urchins rasp away at the algae-covered limestone at tide level, slowly narrowing each island's base. Sources count between 250 and 300 islands, together covering about 42 square kilometres, the highest reaching 207 metres.

    Did you know? UNESCO counts 52 marine lakes within the protected area, the highest concentration of such lakes anywhere on Earth.

    More about Rock Islands Southern Lagoon →

13. 13 Fajã dos Cubres

    Portugal38.534° N 28.629° W

    

    Below the sheer green cliffs of São Jorge's northern coast, a flat tongue of land pushes out into the Atlantic, and on it lies a quiet saltwater lagoon with a cluster of houses and a small white chapel at its edge. This is Fajã dos Cubres, one of the island's fajãs: low platforms of debris that formed where the towering cliffs collapsed into the sea, creating level ground in a landscape otherwise almost entirely vertical.

    Did you know? The lagoon is protected under the Ramsar Convention as a wetland of international importance, especially as a habitat for waterbirds.

    More about Fajã dos Cubres →

14. 14 Hamelin Pool

    Australia26.061° S 113.960° E

    

    At first sight the shallows of Hamelin Pool look like a field of dark, rounded stones scattered along the shore. They are in fact stromatolites — rock-like mounds built, grain by grain, by communities of cyanobacteria — and they form the most diverse and abundant collection of living marine stromatolites known anywhere. Structures of this kind are among the oldest records of life on Earth: fossil stromatolites near Marble Bar in Western Australia date back about 3.5 billion years, and for a long time such forms were known only as fossils.

    Did you know? The cyanobacteria here live in communities on the sea bed at densities of around three billion individuals per square metre.

    More about Hamelin Pool →