The Most Beautiful Places in Kazakhstan
9 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Kazakhstan are Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, Lake Kaindy and Big Almaty Lake. The list covers 9 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country in the world, and its finest places lie at the edges of the steppe. In the south-east, the Tian Shan rise abruptly above the plains with spruce forests, glacial lakes and canyons cut by rivers flowing toward Lake Balkhash; in the far west, the Mangyshlak peninsula and the Ustyurt plateau expose the bed of an ancient sea in white cliffs and strange stones. Between them ran branches of the Silk Road, whose cities left the country's most celebrated monuments.
In Turkistan, the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi was commissioned by Timur in the late fourteenth century and left unfinished, yet its turquoise ribbed dome and great portal made it a model for Timurid architecture across Central Asia. Near Taraz, the small Aisha Bibi mausoleum is covered in carved terracotta tiles in dozens of patterns, a rare survival of the eleventh or twelfth century.
The mountains near Almaty supply the lakes. Big Almaty Lake fills a high basin of glacial blue, the Kolsay Lakes step down a forested valley, and Lake Kaindy was formed when an earthquake in 1911 caused a landslide, leaving drowned spruce trunks standing upright in the water. Charyn Canyon's red walls and pillars line the Charyn River, and in Altyn-Emel the Singing Dune hums in dry weather. Far to the west, Bozzhyra's white chalk spires stand on the Ustyurt escarpment, and the Torysh valley is scattered with spherical stone concretions.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi | Mausoleum | ✓ |
| 2 | Lake Kaindy | Lake | |
| 3 | Big Almaty Lake | Lake | |
| 4 | Charyn Canyon | Canyon | |
| 5 | Aisha Bibi | Mausoleum | |
| 6 | Torysh | Rock formation | |
| 7 | Natural Monument «Singing barchans» | Dune | |
| 8 | Kolsay Lakes | Lake | |
| 9 | Bozzhyra | Rock formation |
01 Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi
Kazakhstan · 1.4 km from Turkistan43.298° N 68.271° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Yuriy75 · CC BY-SA 3.0 The mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi in Turkistan is the building where Timurid architecture began. Timur ordered it in 1389 to replace the small twelfth-century tomb of Yasawi, a Sufi master and poet born in 1093 who spent most of his life in the town, then called Yasi, and died there in 1166.
Did you know? In 1934 the cauldron was taken to the Hermitage in Leningrad, and it was returned to the mausoleum only in 1988.
02 Lake Kaindy
Kazakhstan42.985° N 78.466° E
Bok · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lake Kaindy was born from violence, not slow erosion. 2 — triggered a massive limestone landslide that sealed off a narrow gorge.
Did you know? Mudflows in 1980 and 2010 carried stone and clay down into the basin, making the lake a couple of metres shallower.
03 Big Almaty Lake
Kazakhstan · 31.3 km from Almaty43.051° N 76.985° E
Image by tom_aaa from Pixabay Big Almaty Lake sits in a high bowl of the Trans-Ili Alatau, at about 2,510 metres, only some fifteen kilometres south of the centre of Kazakhstan's largest city, and the contrast is the first surprise: an hour's drive from avenues and apartment blocks brings you to a sheet of cold mountain water framed by peaks of…
Did you know? The Big Almaty River both feeds the lake from the south and drains it, flowing on down towards the city.
04 Charyn Canyon
Kazakhstan · 36.7 km from Chundzha43.362° N 79.091° E
Image by visitalmatykz from Pixabay Charyn Canyon cuts for about 154 kilometres through the dry steppe of south-eastern Kazakhstan, following the Charyn River, which rises in the Tian Shan. Its walls stand 150 to 300 metres high, and for much of the way they are sheer.
Did you know? Marikovsky also nicknamed the Temirlik gorge Nightingale Canyon after the birdsong echoing between its walls.
05 Aisha Bibi
Kazakhstan · 14.6 km from Taraz42.834° N 71.210° E
Lamassu Design Gurdjieff ( talk ). Original uploader was Gurdjieff at en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 Few buildings in Central Asia are as delicate as the small mausoleum of Aisha Bibi. Its walls are faced with carved terracotta tiles, forming a lace of floral and geometric ornament and stylised calligraphy in some sixty different patterns.
Did you know? Wedding parties in Taraz still re-enact the legend, travelling from the Karakhan Mausoleum in the city to Aisha Bibi to ask the lovers for a blessing.
06 Torysh
Kazakhstan44.361° N 51.561° E
Alexandr Babkin · CC BY-SA 4.0 Torysh, often called the Valley of Balls, is a stretch of semi-desert on the Mangyshlak Peninsula in western Kazakhstan where the ground is scattered with near-perfect stone spheres.
Did you know? Published estimates of the spheres' age vary widely, from about 60 million years to as much as 180 million years.
07 Natural Monument «Singing barchans»
Kazakhstan43.867° N 78.567° E
Nikolai Bulykin · CC BY-SA 4.0 In the steppe of south-eastern Kazakhstan, between two bare ridges called the Greater and Lesser Kalkan, a lone mountain of pale sand rises more than a hundred metres above the plain and stretches for well over a kilometre.
Did you know? Only dry sand sings here; once the grains are damp, the moving sand falls silent.
08 Kolsay Lakes
Kazakhstan42.953° N 78.310° E
Нұрлан Рахымжанов at Kazakh Wikipedia · CC0 Three lakes climb one forested gorge on the northern flank of the Tian Shan, each higher, colder and stiller than the one below. The Kolsay chain lies where the Kungey Alatau joins the Trans-Ili Alatau, in the Kegen District of southeastern Kazakhstan, barely ten kilometres short of the Kyrgyz frontier.
Did you know? Rare mammals of the park include the snow leopard, the Turkestan lynx, the Tian Shan argali and the Tian Shan brown bear.
09 Bozzhyra
Kazakhstan43.408° N 54.104° E
Zoin · CC BY-SA 4.0 Bozzhyra — "grey ravine" in Kazakh — is a stretch of the western edge of the Ustyurt plateau in Mangystau, in far western Kazakhstan, where the flat tableland ends in a wall of white cliffs and breaks up into a valley of isolated peaks, ridges and mesas.
Did you know? The surrounding Zhabayushkan state nature reserve covers more than 316,000 hectares of the Ustyurt edge and its plains.
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 places in Kazakhstan?
- On our list, Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi ranks first, followed by Lake Kaindy and Big Almaty Lake.
- Why does the Singing Dune in Altyn-Emel make a sound?
- When dry sand slides down the dune's slope, the uniform grains move together and vibrate, producing a low humming or booming sound. The effect is strongest in dry, windy weather and disappears when the sand is damp.
- How was Lake Kaindy formed?
- Lake Kaindy formed after the Kemin earthquake of 1911 triggered a landslide that dammed a mountain gorge. The rising water drowned a spruce forest, and the trunks still stand upright above the surface of the cold lake.
- Who built the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi?
- It was commissioned by Timur in 1389 over the grave of the Sufi poet and mystic Khoja Ahmed Yasawi. Work stopped after Timur's death in 1405, leaving parts unfinished, and the building became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Kazakhstan?
- In our collection, the places in Kazakhstan are most often lakes (3), rock formations (2), mausoleums (2) and canyons and gorges (1).
- How many places are on this list in Kazakhstan?
- The list covers 9 places.