The Most Beautiful Lakes in India
8 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful lakes in India are Pangong Tso, Gurudongmar Lake and Tso Moriri. The list covers 8 lakes. Last updated 14 October 2026.
India's lakes run from the cold desert of Ladakh to the floodplains of the northeast, and the contrast could hardly be greater. High on the Changthang plateau, saline lakes lie at well over 4,000 metres in a rain shadow so dry that their blue shows against bare brown mountains; in the Deccan and in Manipur, lakes formed by a meteorite and by river floods support entire ecosystems of their own.
Pangong Tso in Ladakh is a long, narrow lake at about 4,250 metres whose water shifts from deep blue to green through the day. Tso Moriri, at over 4,500 metres, is a protected wetland where bar-headed geese nest. Lonar Lake in Maharashtra fills a crater blasted into basalt by a meteorite impact, and its water is both saline and strongly alkaline. Loktak Lake in Manipur is dotted with phumdis, floating mats of vegetation that carry the Keibul Lamjao National Park.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pangong Tso | Lake | |
| 2 | Gurudongmar Lake | Lake | |
| 3 | Tso Moriri | Lake | |
| 4 | Dal Lake | Lake | |
| 5 | Kerala backwaters | Lake | |
| 6 | Lonar Lake | Impact crater | |
| 7 | Loktak Lake | Lake | |
| 8 | Roopkund | Lake |
01 Pangong Tso
India33.705° N 78.750° E
Image by divyaagrawal from Pixabay On the Indian side the lake has become one of the celebrated sights of Ladakh, reached over one of the highest road passes in the world; visitors gather at hamlets such as Lukung and Spangmik to watch the colours change through the day. The sense of scale — a lake running out of sight toward the horizon, with nothing but mountains around it — is what stays.
Did you know? The lake once drained into the Shyok River, a tributary of the Indus, until natural damming closed the outlet and left it without an exit.
02 Gurudongmar Lake
India28.020° N 88.710° E
Original: Yoghya Derivative work: UnpetitproleX · CC BY-SA 4.0 The lake takes its name from Guru Padmasambhava, the 8th-century teacher revered as Guru Rinpoche, who brought Buddhism to Tibet. Local tradition holds that when he passed this way the people asked for his help because the lake stayed frozen and gave them no water; he touched a small part of the surface, which from then on never froze, and the lake became holy. It remains a place of Buddhist pilgrimage. Around the turn of the millennium the lake was briefly the focus of a dispute after an army unit built a Sikh shrine on its bank; a state committee concluded that the site was an ancient Buddhist sanctuary, and in 2001 the building was handed to the monastery at Lachen.
Did you know? Local legend says Padmasambhava touched part of the lake so that it would never freeze and the people would always have water.
03 Tso Moriri
India32.900° N 78.300° E
Ingo Mehling · CC BY-SA 3.0 Despite the altitude, the lake and its marshy margins teem with wildlife. Bar-headed geese, brown-headed gulls and great crested grebes are found here, and the black-necked crane visits the wetlands. On the surrounding plateau live kiang, the Tibetan wild ass, as well as bharal, marmots, Tibetan wolves and snow leopards. The lake and its surroundings are protected as the Tso Moriri Wetland Conservation Reserve, and it was designated a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention in 2002.
Did you know? The lake drains a catchment of nearly 2,300 square kilometres of high mountain terrain.
04 Dal Lake
India · 6.8 km from Srinagar34.120° N 74.870° E
Image by thestorychef from Pixabay Srinagar itself, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, straddles the Jhelum River in the heart of the Kashmir Valley and has long been the valley's main market town, known for its wooden mosques, old bridges and craft traditions.
Did you know? The island of Char Chinari is named for the four chinar trees that stand on it.
05 Kerala backwaters
India · 22.7 km from Kochi9.863° N 76.359° E
Image by alleppeyhouseboatclub from Pixabay The waterways are also a racecourse. Long snake boats, crewed by around a hundred rowers each, compete in the region's boat races, the most celebrated being the Nehru Trophy on Punnamada Lake near Alappuzha. It grows from a race held for Jawaharlal Nehru during his visit in 1952, after which the prime minister sent a silver trophy back from Delhi.
Did you know? Farmers in Kuttanad grow rice on fields lying below sea level, a system recognised by the UN's FAO in 2013.
06 Lonar Lake
India19.975° N 76.507° E
Pranabk · CC BY-SA 4.0 The crater is also a place of worship. Local tradition derives the name Lonar from the demon Lonasura, slain here by Vishnu, and the Daitya Sudan temple is associated with that legend. The classic view is from the rim, looking down into the bowl and across to the water. The site is a national geological monument and, since 2020, a Ramsar wetland.
Did you know? A 2019 study by IIT Bombay found minerals in the crater's soil similar to those in Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions.
07 Loktak Lake
India · 32.4 km from Imphal24.550° N 93.783° E
Mongyamba · CC BY-SA 3.0 Moirang, on the south-western shore, is an old Meitei town known for the temple of the deity Thangjing and the legendary love story of Khamba and Thoibi. On 14 April 1944 the flag of the Indian National Army was raised here, an event remembered by a memorial complex in the town.
Did you know? Roughly a fifth of a phumdi's thickness rides above the waterline, enough to carry the weight of deer and other large mammals.
08 Roopkund
India30.262° N 79.732° E
Shubhamrathod15 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Science later complicated the picture. A genetic study published in 2019, based on ancient DNA from 38 individuals, found three distinct groups. Most had South Asian ancestry and died around 800 CE, apparently over more than one event. A second group, dated to around 1800 CE, had ancestry closest to people of the eastern Mediterranean, particularly Greece and Crete, and one individual of the same period had Southeast Asian ancestry. How a party from the Mediterranean came to die at a Himalayan lake remains unexplained.
Did you know? A forest ranger brought the skeletons to wider notice in 1942, during the Second World War.
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 in India?
- On our list, Pangong Tso ranks first, followed by Gurudongmar Lake and Tso Moriri.
- How was Lonar Lake formed?
- Lonar Lake lies in a crater created by a meteorite impact in the basalt of the Deccan Traps. It is one of the very few known impact craters in basalt rock, and its water is saline and alkaline.
- What are the phumdis of Loktak Lake?
- Phumdis are floating masses of soil, vegetation and organic matter. The largest continuous stretch forms Keibul Lamjao National Park, the only floating national park in the world and the last natural home of the sangai, Manipur's brow-antlered deer.
- How many lakes are on this list in India?
- The list covers 8 lakes.