The Most Beautiful Lakes in the World

105 places in 46 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Issyk-Kul

   Kyrgyzstan · 29.5 km from Cholpon-Ata42.417° N 77.250° E

   

   Issyk-Kul is a sea set high in the Tian Shan: a lake 182 kilometres long and up to 60 wide, lying at 1,607 metres between two parallel walls of mountains — the Kungey Ala-Too on the north shore, which divides Kyrgyzstan from Kazakhstan, and the higher, snowier Teskey Ala-Too on the south. It is the second-largest mountain lake in the world after Titicaca, among the ten deepest on Earth at 668 metres. Its name means "hot lake", and it earns it: fed by some 118 rivers and streams, hot springs among them, and slightly salty, with about a sixth of the salinity of seawater, it hardly ever freezes despite the altitude and the hard winters.

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2. 02 Lake Baikal

   Russia53.303° N 108.005° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Baikal holds roughly a fifth of all the unfrozen fresh water on Earth's surface — more than all five of North America's Great Lakes combined — despite a surface area that's a fraction of theirs, because the lake plunges to a maximum depth of about 1,642 metres, deeper than almost any point on the ocean floor within a thousand kilometres of shore. It's also old in a way lakes almost never get to be: most lakes on the planet are geologically short-lived, filling with sediment within tens of thousands of years, but Baikal sits in an active continental rift that keeps deepening it faster than it can silt up, and it's been open water for an estimated 25 million years.

   Did you know? About 330 rivers flow into Baikal, yet only one, the Angara, flows out of it.

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3. 03 Dead Sea

   Israel · 38.9 km from Jerusalem31.521° N 35.484° E

   

   The Dead Sea's basic party trick — you cannot sink in it — comes down to raw density. At roughly 34% salinity, nearly ten times saltier than the ocean, the water itself weighs about 1.24 kg per liter, dense enough that a human body floats almost involuntarily. The real hazard hides in that same fact: flipping face-down is dangerous, because the hyper-salty water is difficult to right yourself out of and swallowing even a little can be harmful; most safety warnings here exist for a genuine, non-obvious reason, not to spoil the fun.

   Did you know? At about 304 metres deep, the Dead Sea is the deepest hypersaline lake in the world.

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4. 04 Lake Garda

   Lago di Garda

   Italy · 33.1 km from Verona45.633° N 10.667° E

   

   Lake Garda is the largest lake in Italy and the most varied of the great Alpine lakes. Its shape explains its character: in the north it is a narrow fjord of deep water squeezed between steep mountains, while in the south it opens into a broad basin fringed by gentle morainic hills, vineyards and olive groves. The lake is about 52 km long, up to 16 km wide and 346 metres deep at its deepest point, and its shores are divided between Lombardy (the province of Brescia), the Veneto (Verona) and Trentino.

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5. 05 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.

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6. 06 Lake Ohrid

   North Macedonia · 15.5 km from Pogradec41.033° N 20.717° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   Lake Ohrid is old in a way few lakes are. Most bodies of water fill with sediment and disappear within tens of thousands of years; Ohrid sits in a tectonic rift in the mountains between North Macedonia and Albania that began opening some millions of years ago, and its oldest sediments may date back three to five million years. It survives because it is deep — up to 288 m, the deepest lake in the Balkans — because the ground beneath it is still sinking, and because much of its water arrives not by muddy rivers but through underground karst channels from Lake Prespa, 10 km away and some 150 m higher, emerging as springs along the eastern shore and beneath the surface.

   Did you know? In 2010 NASA gave Lake Ohrid's name to one of the lakes on Saturn's moon Titan.

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7. 07 Morskie Oko

   Poland49.197° N 20.071° E

   

   Morskie Oko is the largest lake in the Tatras and probably the most famous view in Poland: a sheet of clear green water at 1,395 metres, ringed by granite walls that rise about a kilometre above it. Behind the far shore stand Mięguszowiecki Szczyt and, higher up the valley, Rysy, at 2,499 metres the highest point of the country, while the rock tooth of Mnich rises to the west. The lake is dammed by a glacial moraine, covers about 35 hectares and reaches a depth of just over 50 metres.

   Did you know? In 2014 The Wall Street Journal ranked Morskie Oko among the five most beautiful lakes in the world, alongside Lake Powell, Nakuru, Saimaa and Lake Lucerne.

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8. 08 Lake Khövsgöl

   Mongolia51.100° N 100.500° E

   

   Lake Khövsgöl is a long blade of exceptionally clear water laid across the far north of Mongolia, 1,645 metres above sea level and only a short distance from the Russian border. It stretches about 136 km from north to south and is at most some 36 km wide, covering roughly 2,760 km². With a maximum depth of 267 metres and a volume of around 380 km³, it holds close to 70 percent of Mongolia's fresh water and about 0.4 percent of all the fresh water on the planet. Only Uvs Lake is larger in surface area within the country.

   Did you know? Mongolians call the lake "Mother Sea", and it is also known as the Khövsgöl Sea.

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9. 09 Inle Lake

   Myanmar · 28.6 km from Taunggyi20.550° N 96.917° E

   

   Inle Lake fills a broad, shallow valley in the Shan Hills of eastern Myanmar at around 880 metres above sea level. It is the country's second-largest lake, covering over a hundred square kilometres, yet in the dry season it is only about two metres deep, rising by a metre or more once the monsoon arrives. That shallowness is the key to everything that makes Inle extraordinary: across much of its surface the line between lake and land is blurred by floating gardens, channels and whole villages of bamboo houses built on stilts, so that a boat trip here feels less like crossing open water than moving through a floating landscape.

   Did you know? Inle is one of only two places, with Cambodia, where cloth is woven from fibres drawn out of lotus stems, prized for robes for Buddha images.

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10. 10 Sørvágsvatn

    Faroe Islands · 21.7 km from Tórshavn62.050° N 7.233° W

    

    Sørvágsvatn is the largest lake in the Faroe Islands, sitting on Vágar just tens of meters above sea level and draining to the Atlantic over the short Bøsdalafossur waterfall. Its fame rests entirely on where you stand: from the Trælanípa cliff, the sea cliffs framing both the lake and the ocean beyond erase any normal sense of scale, making the lake appear to float hundreds of meters above the water when the real vertical gap between them is only around 30 meters. It's one of the most convincing naturally occurring optical illusions on Earth, and it only works from specific vantage points on the ridge — walk down to the shoreline and it looks like an ordinary lake near a coast.

    Did you know? Neighbouring villages still disagree on its name: Sørvágur calls it Sørvágsvatn, Miðvágur and Sandavágur call it Leitisvatn, and most locals simply say Vatnið, the lake.

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11. 11 Lake Ritsa

    Georgia43.481° N 40.541° E

    

    Lake Ritsa lies in a deep forested gorge of the western Caucasus in Abkhazia, about 950 metres above sea level, hemmed in by mountains that rise to more than 3,000 metres. The water is cold and very clear, and its colour shifts with the seasons, from a greenish-yellow in spring and summer to a cold blue in autumn and winter, as the clarity of the inflowing rivers and the growth of microscopic algae change through the year.

    Did you know? The lake is geologically very young: it is thought to have formed only about 250 years ago, when part of Mount Pshegishkha collapsed into the Lashipse river.

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12. 12 Lake Nakuru

    Kenya · 9.7 km from Nakuru0.367° S 36.083° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    For most of the twentieth century, Lake Nakuru was described by ornithologists in almost hyperbolic terms — one famous account called the sight of its flamingo flocks "the greatest bird spectacle on Earth," with counts at times estimated well over a million birds packed onto a single shallow lake. That reputation was built on genuine chemistry: Nakuru is a soda lake, alkaline enough that it grows dense blooms of blue-green algae, and lesser flamingos filter that algae out of the water in numbers few other places on the planet can match.

    Did you know? About 10,000 years ago Nakuru, Elementaita and Bogoria formed a single deep freshwater lake, which later dried into three separate alkaline remnants.

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13. 13 Lake Toba

    Indonesia · 37.6 km from Pematangsiantar2.670° N 98.888° E

    

    Lake Toba fills the caldera of a supervolcano in the highlands of North Sumatra. It is the largest lake in Indonesia and the largest volcanic lake on Earth: about 100 km long and 30 km wide, up to 505 m deep, with its surface at around 900 m above sea level. In the middle rises Samosir Island, which is in fact the resurgent floor of the volcano, pushed up at least 450 m by magma since the great eruption. The whole caldera is a UNESCO Global Geopark, recognised in 2020.

    Did you know? Samosir, at about 630 square kilometres, is the world's largest island within an island, sitting in a lake on the island of Sumatra.

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14. 14 Laguna Colorada

    Bolivia22.199° S 67.781° W

    

    Laguna Colorada is barely a lake in depth — under a meter across roughly 60 square kilometers — but it packs an unusual amount going on in that shallow water. The red color comes from the same broad phenomenon as Lake Hillier's pink or Lake Natron's crimson: salt-tolerant Dunaliella algae producing carotenoid pigments to survive intense high-altitude UV radiation and extreme salinity, here concentrated further by iron-rich sediment that pushes the tone toward rust-red rather than pink.

    Did you know? James's flamingo, long feared extinct, was rediscovered nesting on a salt island in Laguna Colorada in the mid-1950s by an expedition led by ornithologist A. W. Johnson.

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15. 15 Lake Louise

    Canada51.412° N 116.228° W

    

    Lake Louise is small – about 2 km long and half a kilometre wide – but few mountain lakes are so perfectly composed. At its western end the Victoria Glacier hangs on the shoulder of Mount Victoria, and the whole scene funnels towards it between steep forested walls. The water, up to 70 m deep and lying at about 1,750 m, takes its startling turquoise from rock flour: glacial meltwater carries a fine silt of ground stone that stays suspended and scatters the light. The colour shifts through the summer as the melt rises and falls, and on a still morning the glacier is doubled on the surface.

    Did you know? The province of Alberta and the lake share a namesake: Princess Louise Caroline Alberta gave her last name to the province and her first to the lake.

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16. 16 Lake Maggiore

    Lago Maggiore

    Italy · 22.3 km from Lugano46.098° N 8.715° E

    

    Lake Maggiore is the long, winding lake that runs for about 64 km from Locarno in Switzerland to Arona in Italy, on the southern side of the Alps. Its western shore belongs to Piedmont, its eastern shore to Lombardy, and its northern tip reaches into the Swiss canton of Ticino, where the lake surface, at 193 m, is the lowest point in Switzerland. It is the second largest lake in Italy and the westernmost of the three great pre-Alpine lakes. It is also deep: its bed lies below sea level almost everywhere, reaching 372 m at the deepest point.

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17. 17 Plitvice Lakes National Park

    Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera

    Croatia44.880° N 15.616° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The barriers that create Plitvice's sixteen terraced lakes are, in a very real sense, alive — or at least built by living things. As water flows over limestone, it releases dissolved carbon dioxide, which shifts the water's chemistry so that calcium carbonate starts crystallising out of solution. Left alone, that process would just leave mineral crusts. What actually happens here is that mosses, algae and cyanobacteria growing on every submerged surface trap those crystals and keep building on them, layer by layer, into travertine barriers that dam the river's flow and stack the lakes into their famous cascading terraces.

    Did you know? Plitvice was among the very first natural sites on the World Heritage List, inscribed in 1979 and extended in 2000.

    More about Plitvice Lakes National Park →

18. 18 Lake Bled

    Blejsko jezero

    Slovenia · 32.9 km from Klagenfurt46.364° N 14.095° E

    

    Lake Bled is small, about 2.1 km long and 1.4 km wide, and part of its fame is exactly that scale: from almost any point on its shore you can take in the whole scene at once. A castle stands on a cliff above the northern shore, a church rises from the only island, and the peaks of the Julian Alps fill the background. The lake is of mixed glacial and tectonic origin, reaches 29.5 metres at its deepest, and is fed in part by a warm spring, which lets the surface water reach the low twenties Celsius at the height of summer.

    Did you know? Bled Island covers only about 0.82 hectares and rises some 18 metres above the water, a limestone knoll rounded off by glaciers.

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19. 19 Oeschinen Lake

    Oeschinensee

    Switzerland46.498° N 7.727° E

    

    Oeschinensee is a lake set at the foot of a wall. At 1,578 metres above Kandersteg in the Bernese Oberland, it lies in a basin closed on three sides by the cliffs and glaciers of the Blüemlisalp and the Doldenhorn, which tower far above the water. Its colour shifts with the light, and on still mornings the rock faces and the hanging ice above them are mirrored almost perfectly across the surface. Since 2007 it has been part of the Swiss Alps Jungfrau–Aletsch UNESCO World Heritage Site.

    Did you know? Recent dating suggests the rockslide that created the lake fell only around 2,300 years ago, far later than geologists once assumed.

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20. 20 Lake Como

    Lago di Como

    Italy · 25.6 km from Como46.000° N 9.267° E

    

    Lake Como, or Lario, is shaped like an upside-down Y: a long northern arm splits at the promontory of Bellagio into two southern branches, one ending at the city of Como, the other at Lecco. Mountains rise almost straight out of the water on every side, and the lake is correspondingly deep, reaching about 425 m, with its floor more than 200 m below sea level. It covers 146 km², the third-largest lake in Italy after Garda and Maggiore, and runs about 46 km from end to end. The basin began as river canyons cut when the Mediterranean nearly dried out some six million years ago; Ice Age glaciers of the Adda then scoured them far deeper.

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21. 21 Yamdrok Lake

    People's Republic of China28.978° N 90.746° E

    

    Seen from the Kamba La pass at 4,794 metres, Yamdrok Lake appears suddenly below the road as a long ribbon of improbable turquoise, winding between bare brown hills with snow peaks behind. It is one of the largest lakes in southern Tibet — about 638 square kilometres, stretching for more than 72 km — but it never shows itself all at once. Its many arms and inlets twist around peninsulas and islands, so that from the air it resembles a coiled scorpion, while Tibetans have long compared it to a turquoise earring dropped by a goddess.

    Did you know? In Tibetan tradition Yamdrok is one of four Great Wrathful Lakes, guarded by the goddess Dorje Gegkyi Tso and believed to hold divinatory power.

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22. 22 West Lake

    People's Republic of China · 3.1 km from Hangzhou30.238° N 120.141° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    West Lake, Xihu, lies on the western edge of old Hangzhou, a sheet of shallow water framed on three sides by gentle wooded hills and on the fourth by the city. It is one of the most influential landscapes in East Asia: a place that poets, painters and garden designers in China, and later in Japan, took as a model of how nature and human work can be composed into a single picture. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape in 2011, and the scenic area around it was among the first major attractions in China to abolish admission fees.

    Did you know? The lake last froze over completely in January 1977, when Hangzhou recorded a low of −8.6 °C.

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23. 23 Lake Kaindy

    Kazakhstan42.985° N 78.466° E

    

    Lake Kaindy was born from violence, not slow erosion. The 1911 Kebin earthquake — one of the largest ever recorded in the Tian Shan range, estimated around magnitude 8.2 — triggered a massive limestone landslide that sealed off a narrow gorge. Meltwater and rain then backed up behind that natural dam over the following years, gradually drowning a mountainside spruce forest exactly where it stood, rather than trees drifting in afterward.

    Did you know? Even in summer the lake stays at about 6°C, which is cold enough to keep the drowned spruce trunks from decaying.

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24. 24 Lake Kawaguchi

    Japan · 21.7 km from Kōfu35.515° N 138.757° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Lake Kawaguchi, Kawaguchi-ko, lies at the northern foot of Mount Fuji in Yamanashi Prefecture, and it is the lake that gives most visitors their first full view of the mountain across open water. It is the second-largest of the Fuji Five Lakes by area, the lowest of them at around 800 metres above sea level, and the one with the longest shoreline. Its setting within Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park and its place in Fuji's cultural landscape brought it into the Fujisan World Heritage Site in 2013.

    Did you know? In Hokusai's print of Fuji reflected in this lake, the mirrored mountain is snow-capped while the real peak above it is bare.

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25. 25 Lake Tahoe

    United States · 24.8 km from Carson City39.083° N 120.033° W

    

    Lake Tahoe fills a fault-block basin high in the Sierra Nevada, its surface sitting about 1,897 metres above sea level with California on two-thirds of the shore and Nevada on the rest. It is the largest alpine lake in North America and astonishingly deep: 501 metres at its lowest point, second in the United States only to Crater Lake. The volume is so great that, among American lakes, only the five Great Lakes hold more water. Stand on one shore and look across the long axis, and at water level the far shoreline sinks partly below the horizon, hidden by the curve of the Earth — the lake is 35 km long and 19 km wide.

    Did you know? A drop of water entering Lake Tahoe stays in it for about 650 years on average before leaving.

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26. 26 Lake Tekapo

    New Zealand43.900° S 170.525° E

    

    Lake Tekapo lies at about 710 metres in the Mackenzie Basin of New Zealand's South Island, a long glacial trough roughly 27 kilometres from end to end and up to 6 kilometres across. Its famous colour is not a trick of the light: the Godley and Macaulay rivers feed it from the north with meltwater from the Southern Alps, and that water carries suspended glacial silt so fine that it hangs in the lake and scatters sunlight into a milky turquoise. The effect is strongest on bright days, when the pale blue sits against brown tussock hills and, far up the valley, snow on the main divide. The lake drains south through the Tekapo River, and since 1951 its outflow has been harnessed by the first power station of a hydroelectric scheme that now shapes the whole basin.

    Did you know? According to Ngāi Tahu tradition, the lake was dug by the explorer Rākaihautū with his digging stick Tūwhakaroria as he travelled down the island creating its lakes.

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27. 27 Lake Wakatipu

    New Zealand · 14.7 km from Queenstown45.085° S 168.561° E

    

    Lake Wakatipu fills a trough that a glacier gouged into the mountains of Central Otago during the last ice age, and it still has the shape of something carved rather than poured: a long, narrow body of water bent twice into a dog leg, 80 kilometres from end to end. That makes it New Zealand's longest lake, and with an area of about 295 square kilometres, its third largest. The surface lies 309 metres above sea level, yet the deepest point is 420 metres down, so the floor of the lake sits more than a hundred metres below the level of the sea. The water, fed by snow and glacier melt through the Dart and Rees rivers at its head, is exceptionally clear and cold, and drains out through the Kawarau River near Frankton.

    Did you know? An eel caught in the lake in 1886 remains the largest known specimen of the New Zealand longfin eel.

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28. 28 Lake Atitlán

    Guatemala · 8.3 km from Sololá14.700° N 91.200° W

    

    Lake Atitlán fills the crater of a supervolcano. Some 79,500 years ago the Los Chocoyos eruption emptied a vast magma chamber beneath the Guatemalan highlands and the ground collapsed into a caldera; water has filled it since. The lake now lies at about 1,562 metres above sea level, covers some 130 square kilometres and plunges to around 340 metres, the deepest lake in Central America. Its name, from Nahuatl, is usually read as "between the waters".

    Did you know? The Los Chocoyos eruption hurled out up to 300 cubic kilometres of ash, which has been traced from Florida to Ecuador.

    More about Lake Atitlán →

29. 29 Pangong Tso

    India33.705° N 78.750° E

    

    Pangong Tso is a long, narrow lake at about 4,300 metres on the border between western Tibet and Ladakh, one of the highest large lakes in the world. It stretches some 134 kilometres from end to end but is never more than about 5 kilometres wide, bending across the landscape like a boomerang laid between bare brown mountains. About two-thirds of its length lies on the Chinese-administered side and the rest on the Indian side.

    Did you know? The name Pangong Tso originally applied only to the westernmost of five linked sub-lakes; the Tibetan parts were known as Nyak Tso and Rum Tso.

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30. 30 Gurudongmar Lake

    India28.020° N 88.710° E

    

    Far up in the north of Sikkim, a few kilometres short of the border with Tibet, Gurudongmar Lake lies in a bare, wind-scoured basin well above 5,000 metres. The state government gives its height as 5,430 metres, while survey maps suggest a little over 5,100, but by either measure it is among the highest lakes in India and in the world. Its water, an intense turquoise against brown moraine and white peaks, is fed by the Gurudongmar glacier and held back by a moraine dam. This is no longer the green, forested Sikkim of the lower valleys: the lake sits on a high, treeless plateau that belongs to the Tibetan side of the Himalaya, north of the Khangchengyao range.

    Did you know? The Government of Sikkim gives Gurudongmar Lake's elevation as 5,430 metres, placing it among the highest lakes in the world.

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