The Most Beautiful Lakes in Oceania
9 places in 3 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful lakes in Oceania are Lake Tekapo (New Zealand), Lake Wakatipu (New Zealand) and Lake Pukaki (New Zealand). The list covers 9 lakes in 3 countries. New Zealand has the most, with 5. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Oceania's lakes are shaped by two very different forces. In New Zealand, glaciers carved deep basins along the Southern Alps and still feed them with finely ground rock that hangs in the water and turns it an opaque, milky turquoise. Australia, the flattest and driest of the inhabited continents, holds the opposite extreme: vast salt pans, pink brines and perched lakes of rainwater cupped in sand. Out in the Pacific, limestone islands enclose marine lakes with life found nowhere else.
Lake Tekapo and Lake Pukaki, side by side in the Mackenzie Basin, owe their unreal colour to glacial rock flour; Pukaki looks straight up the valley to Aoraki / Mount Cook, and Tekapo lies under one of the darkest night skies in the world. Lake Wakatipu, long and bent like a lightning bolt, rises and falls rhythmically by a few centimetres, which Māori tradition explains as the heartbeat of a sleeping giant. Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre, the lowest point in Australia, is usually a crust of salt and fills with water only a few times in a century.
The smaller lakes are just as distinctive. In Palau, Jellyfish Lake on Eil Malk holds millions of golden jellyfish that follow the sun across the water each day. Lake Hillier on Middle Island off Western Australia is bubblegum pink, Lake McKenzie on K'gari is a perched lake of rainwater over pure white silica sand, and Rotomairewhenua / Blue Lake in Nelson Lakes National Park has the clearest natural fresh water ever measured. Lake Matheson, dark with forest tannins, mirrors Aoraki and Mount Tasman on still mornings.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lake Tekapo | Lake | New Zealand | |
| 2 | Lake Wakatipu | Lake | New Zealand | |
| 3 | Lake Pukaki | Lake | New Zealand | |
| 4 | Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre | Salt flat | Australia | |
| 5 | Jellyfish Lake | Lake | Palau | |
| 6 | Lake Hillier | Lake | Australia | |
| 7 | Lake McKenzie | Lake | Australia | |
| 8 | Rotomairewhenua / Blue Lake | Lake | New Zealand | |
| 9 | Lake Matheson | Lake | New Zealand |
01 Lake Tekapo
New Zealand43.900° S 170.525° E
Image by Holgi from Pixabay The Māori name, Takapō, is usually translated as leaving in haste at night, and since 2021 the district has used the dual name. On the southern shore stands the small stone Church of the Good Shepherd, built in 1935 to a design by R.S.D. Harman. It is deliberately modest, and the window behind its altar frames the lake and mountains as the real altarpiece. A short walk away, a bronze sheepdog cast in 1966 from a sculpture by Innes Elliott honours the working dogs without which high-country sheep farming here would have been impossible.
Did you know? According to legend, the small island of Motuariki in mid-lake is an ancestor from the Āraiteuru canoe who failed to return before daylight and was turned to land.
02 Lake Wakatipu
New Zealand · 14.7 km from Queenstown45.085° S 168.561° E
Jamie Wang · CC BY-SA 2.0 The lake breathes. A seiche, a slow standing wave, makes the water at Queenstown Bay rise and fall by about 20 centimetres in a cycle of roughly 27 minutes. Māori tradition gives the lake the name Whakatipu Waimāori, and one interpretation of the name refers to a giant who lies beneath the water, his heartbeat or breath moving the lake. The legend holds that the giant was burned where he slept, and that the lake fills the hollow his body left behind, which is why its outline resembles a figure with knees drawn up.
Did you know? The lake first appeared on a map in 1843, drawn not from a survey but from descriptions given by Māori.
03 Lake Pukaki
New Zealand44.117° S 170.167° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay What makes Pukaki one of the great lake views of the world is what stands behind it. From the southern shore the lake runs north for tens of kilometres towards Aoraki/Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, about 70 km away, so that on a clear day the snow pyramid of the peak rises directly at the far end of the water, with the Southern Alps lined up on either side. In the dry, golden tussock country of the Mackenzie, the blue is all the more startling.
Did you know? The drowned island on the banknote, Te Kohai, became so well known that people called it Five Pound Note Island.
04 Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre
Australia28.667° S 137.167° E
Stephan Ridgway · CC BY 2.0 A true, near-complete fill has happened only three times in about 160 years of records. When it happens, the transformation is total: pelicans, banded stilts and other waterbirds detect the flood and fly in from hundreds of kilometers away, sometimes overnight, to breed explosively while conditions last, before the water disappears again and the boom-bust cycle resets. It's one of the most extreme examples of desert ecology reacting to an unpredictable pulse of water rather than a seasonal calendar.
Did you know? On 17 July 1964 Donald Campbell drove Bluebird CN7 across the lake's salt flats to a land speed record of 403.1 mph (about 649 km/h).
05 Jellyfish Lake
Palau · 22.8 km from Koror7.161° N 134.376° E
FoxyStranger Kawasaki · CC BY-SA 3.0 Two kinds of jellyfish live here: moon jellyfish and a subspecies of golden jellyfish, Mastigias papua etpisoni. The golden jellies carry symbiotic algae in their tissues and get part of their food from them, which is why they follow the light. In the early morning they swim from the centre of the western basin toward the east, then turn back in the early afternoon and gather on the western side as sunset approaches. Their population collapsed in 1998, most likely because an El Niño event warmed the water, and then gradually rebuilt, returning to earlier levels by 2012.
Did you know? In Palauan the lake is called Ongeim'l Tketau, which translates as 'Fifth Lake'.
06 Lake Hillier
Australia34.096° S 123.203° E
Aussie Oc · CC BY-SA 4.0 You likely won't walk up to it. Lake Hillier sits on Middle Island, part of the uninhabited Recherche Archipelago nature reserve off Western Australia's south coast, accessible only by permitted boat landing or, far more commonly, by air — which is precisely why almost every photo of it is an aerial shot rather than a beach snapshot. That restriction isn't red tape for its own sake; it's what keeps the fragile microbial community undisturbed.
Did you know? Its salinity is often compared to that of the Dead Sea, yet the water has no known harmful effects on people who swim in it.
07 Lake McKenzie
Australia · 27.9 km from Hervey Bay25.446° S 153.057° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Hagai Agmon-Snir حچاي اچمون-سنير חגי אגמון-שניר · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes it extraordinary is colour and clarity. The shore is almost pure white silica, soft underfoot, and the sand runs out under the water so that the shallows glow a pale aquamarine before the lake drops away into a deep, saturated blue. Because the water is filtered by sand and fed only by rain, it carries almost no nutrients; it is so pure that few plants and animals can live in it, which is exactly why it is so transparent. Seen from the bank on a bright day, the line between the two blues looks drawn with a ruler.
Did you know? Radiocarbon dating revealed that this deep lake nevertheless dried out around 7,500 years ago, overturning the belief that K'gari's lakes had held water ever since the ice age ended.
08 Rotomairewhenua / Blue Lake
New Zealand42.059° S 172.657° E
Mergy at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 2.5 The lake sits at about 1,180 metres above sea level in Nelson Lakes National Park, at the northern end of the Southern Alps. 5 metres deep. Its water stays cold all year, between about 5 and 8 °C. The secret of its clarity lies upstream. Blue Lake is fed by the uppermost reach of the West Sabine River, which in turn emerges from seepage through a huge old landslide that dams the much larger Lake Constance above it. Passing through the rubble, the water is filtered of almost every suspended particle, and what reaches Blue Lake shows the true colour of pure water, a deep blue shading into violet. Its outflow becomes the West Sabine, part of the Buller River system.
Did you know? Its water is clearer than almost all seawater; only patches of the South Pacific near Easter Island and Tahiti are known to rival it.
09 Lake Matheson
New Zealand43.438° S 169.963° E
Image by kiwibu from Pixabay The secret of the mirror is the colour of the water. Streams draining through the surrounding native forest carry organic matter and tannins that stain the lake a deep brown, and the dark surface acts like the backing of a mirror. The lake is sheltered by trees and lies away from the wind, so in calm conditions, especially at dawn and dusk, the reflection is almost flawless.
Did you know? It first appeared on a New Zealand stamp in 1946, on a halfpenny 'Peace' issue, and returned on stamps in 1983, 1996 and 2012.
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 Oceania?
- On our list, Lake Tekapo (New Zealand) ranks first, followed by Lake Wakatipu (New Zealand) and Lake Pukaki (New Zealand).
- Which country has the most lakes in Oceania?
- In our collection, the most come from New Zealand (5), Australia (3) and Palau (1).
- Why is Lake Tekapo so blue?
- Glaciers feeding the lake grind rock into a very fine powder called rock flour. The particles stay suspended in the water and scatter sunlight, giving Tekapo and neighbouring Pukaki their milky turquoise colour.
- Why is Lake Hillier pink?
- Its colour comes from salt-loving microorganisms, chiefly the alga Dunaliella salina and halophilic bacteria, which produce reddish pigments in the hypersaline water. The pink persists even when the water is taken out in a container.
- Does Lake Eyre ever fill with water?
- Rarely. Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre is normally a dry salt pan, and it fills completely only a few times a century after exceptional rains in the catchment far to the north; partial floodings are more frequent.
- How many lakes are on this list in Oceania?
- The list covers 9 lakes in 3 countries. New Zealand has the most, with 5.