The Most Beautiful Lakes Seen on Screen in the World
9 places in 8 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful lakes seen on screen in the world are Lake Baikal (Russia), Dead Sea (Israel) and Lake Garda (Italy). The list covers 9 lakes seen on screen in 8 countries. Italy has the most, with 2. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Lakes give a camera what it needs most: a horizon, a mirror and a mood. A still surface doubles mountains and sky, a frozen or salt-crusted one turns the familiar into an alien plain, and a shoreline makes a natural stage for stories of leisure, isolation or power. The lakes that recur on screen tend to have one strong, legible feature — clarity, salt, ice or a perfectly framed backdrop — that reads in a single wide shot.
Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world, freezes in winter into clear blue ice cracked into patterns that draw filmmakers and photographers to Siberia. The Dead Sea, whose shore lies more than 400 metres below sea level, is so salty that a swimmer floats without effort. Lake Khövsgöl in northern Mongolia, ringed by taiga and mountains, holds most of the country's fresh water and drains, by way of the Selenga, into Baikal itself. Plitvice in Croatia, a staircase of lakes divided by travertine, served as the frontier of the 1960s Winnetou westerns.
Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the largest salt flat on Earth and a vast mirror after rain, stood in for the planet Crait in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada was the setting of the Corleone family's lakeside estate in The Godfather Part II, and Lake Annecy in the French Alps is the summer backdrop of Éric Rohmer's Claire's Knee.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lake Baikal | Lake | Russia | ✓ |
| 2 | Dead Sea | Lake | Israel | |
| 3 | Lake Garda | Lake | Italy | |
| 4 | Lake Khövsgöl | Lake | Mongolia | |
| 5 | Plitvice Lakes National Park | National park | Croatia | ✓ |
| 6 | Lake Como | Lake | Italy | |
| 7 | Lake Tahoe | Lake | United States | |
| 8 | Salar de Uyuni | Salt flat | Bolivia | |
| 9 | Lake Annecy | Lake | France |
01 Lake Baikal
Russia53.303° N 108.005° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Peggy_Marco from Pixabay 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.
Did you know? About 330 rivers flow into Baikal, yet only one, the Angara, flows out of it.
02 Dead Sea
Israel · 38.9 km from Jerusalem31.521° N 35.484° E
Image by mirkosajkov from Pixabay The Dead Sea's basic party trick — you cannot sink in it — comes down to raw density. 24 kg per liter, dense enough that a human body floats almost involuntarily.
Did you know? At about 304 metres deep, the Dead Sea is the deepest hypersaline lake in the world.
03 Lake Garda
Lago di Garda
Italy · 33.1 km from Verona45.633° N 10.667° E
Image by Leonhard_Niederwimmer from Pixabay 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.
04 Lake Khövsgöl
Mongolia51.100° N 100.500° E
Bernard Gagnon · CC0 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. 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.
05 Plitvice Lakes National Park
Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera
Croatia44.880° N 15.616° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Hobbyfotography from Pixabay 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.
Did you know? Several Winnetou westerns based on Karl May's novels were filmed here between 1962 and 1968.
06 Lake Como
Lago di Como
Italy · 25.6 km from Como46.000° N 9.267° E
Image by GPoulsen from Pixabay 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.
07 Lake Tahoe
United States · 24.8 km from Carson City39.083° N 120.033° W
Image by Anwic from Pixabay 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.
Did you know? A drop of water entering Lake Tahoe stays in it for about 650 years on average before leaving.
08 Salar de Uyuni
Bolivia20.333° S 67.700° W
Image by WaSZI from Pixabay Salar de Uyuni is not a desert that happens to be white — it is the exposed, dried-out bottom of a chain of prehistoric lakes (geologists call the last big one Lake Tauca) that repeatedly filled and evaporated over tens of thousands of years. Each cycle left another sheet of salt, and today those layers stack up to 10 meters thick over an area the size of a small country.
Did you know? According to Aymara legend, the flat formed from the tears and milk of Tunupa, a mountain deserted by her giant husband; many locals prefer the name Salar de Tunupa.
09 Lake Annecy
France · 6.8 km from Annecy45.850° N 6.167° E
Image by 1466325 from Pixabay Lake Annecy fills a glacial basin in the Pre-Alps of Haute-Savoie, left behind when the great Alpine glaciers melted some 17,000–18,000 years ago. 6 km², which makes it the third-largest lake in France, and it lies at roughly 447 m above sea level.
Did you know? Prehistoric pile-dwelling villages ringed the lake from about 5000 to 500 BC, and three sites joined the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2011.
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 lakes seen on screen in the world?
- On our list, Lake Baikal (Russia) ranks first, followed by Dead Sea (Israel) and Lake Garda (Italy).
- Which country has the most lakes seen on screen in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (2), Bolivia (1) and Croatia (1).
- Why can you float in the Dead Sea?
- The Dead Sea is roughly ten times saltier than the ocean, and all that dissolved salt makes the water dense enough to hold a human body near the surface without any effort.
- Where was the planet Crait filmed in The Last Jedi?
- The white salt plains of Crait were filmed at Salar de Uyuni in south-west Bolivia, the largest salt flat in the world.
- Which lake appears in The Godfather Part II?
- Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada. Michael Corleone's lakeside compound, where much of the film's family drama unfolds, is set on its shore.
- How many lakes seen on screen are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 9 lakes seen on screen in 8 countries. Italy has the most, with 2.