The Most Beautiful Water Wonders in Asia

114 places in 26 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Issyk-Kul

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

   

   The setting is the great spectacle: the rivers of the Teskey cut deep, wide valleys through the range and spread in fans of gravel at the shore, while the lake itself lies like an inland sea between the ridges.

   More about Issyk-Kul →

2. 02 Lake Baikal

   Russia53.303° N 108.005° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage
   • UNESCO natural beauty

   

   That age is why roughly 80% of the species found in the lake exist nowhere else on Earth. The strangest of them is the golomyanka, a nearly transparent fish with no swim bladder and a body that's up to 40% fat by weight, adaptations that let it live and reproduce at crushing pressure a kilometre or more down — it's essentially the only fish species alive that has fully committed to the lake's abyssal zone as a permanent home.

   Did you know? In winter, visibility in open water can reach 30 to 40 metres.

   More about Lake Baikal →

3. 03 Dead Sea

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

   

   Its shores mark the lowest point of exposed land on any continent, and the number keeps changing — the surface has been dropping by roughly a meter a year since the 1990s. That's not ordinary evaporation; it's downstream of the Jordan River being diverted for agriculture and drinking water by Israel, Jordan and Syria, cutting off more than 90% of the sea's historical inflow.

   Did you know? For centuries the lake was split into two layers of different temperature and saltiness; they mixed in the winter of 1978–79, and layering has since begun to return.

   More about Dead Sea →

4. 04 Socotra

   Yemen · 19.3 km from Hadibu12.510° N 53.920° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The dragon's blood tree is the emblem, and it earns the reputation without needing embellishment: an umbrella-shaped canopy that shades its own roots and funnels scarce rain and dew straight down to them, and a blood-red resin — genuinely called "dragon's blood" — that's been traded and prized since antiquity.

   Did you know? Socotra's dragon's blood trees are on average around 300 years old, and models suggest their suitable habitat could shrink by about 45 percent by 2080.

   More about Socotra →

5. 05 Lake Khövsgöl

   Mongolia51.100° N 100.500° E

   

   The lake is among the world's ancient lakes, more than two million years old, and it is regarded as one of the least disturbed of them. Its waters are so poor in nutrients that visibility often reaches beyond 18 metres. At the southern end the Egiin Gol carries the outflow away; that water eventually joins the Selenge and reaches Lake Baikal after a journey of over 1,000 km and a drop of more than 1,100 metres.

   Did you know? The lake is traditionally regarded as sacred in a country where most lakes are salty.

   More about Lake Khövsgöl →

6. 06 Inle Lake

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

   

   The lake belongs to the Intha, whose way of life has adapted to it in ways found nowhere else. Their fishermen stand at the stern of narrow boats and row with one leg wrapped around the oar, leaving both hands free for the nets, and a silhouette of a leg-rower against the morning haze is the classic image of Inle.

   Did you know? Each winter, from about November to January, some 20,000 migratory gulls gather over the lake.

   More about Inle Lake →

7. 07 Lake Toba

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

   

   That eruption, about 74,000 years ago, was the largest explosive eruption on Earth in the last 25 million years. It threw out at least 2,800 cubic kilometres of material, left ash hundreds of metres thick near the vent, and dropped a layer of ash across South Asia, up to 6 m deep at one site in central India.

   Did you know? Pyroclastic flows from the eruption devastated at least 20,000 square kilometres, and parts of Malaysia were buried under around 9 metres of ash.

   More about Lake Toba →

8. 08 Yamdrok Lake

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

   

   The lake lies at about 4,440 metres, with an average depth of around 30 metres and a maximum near 60. The colour changes through the day and with the weather, from pale milky blue to a saturated green-blue under a clear sky. Further west along the road, beyond Nangartse, the glaciated massif of Noijin Kangsang, a little over 7,200 metres, rises above the Karo La.

   Did you know? According to legend, in 1716 the abbess turned herself and her nuns into sows to scare off a Mongol raid on the monastery.

   More about Yamdrok Lake →

9. 09 West Lake

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

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The lake is as much made as found. It began as a shallow bay of the Qiantang River that silted into a lagoon, and it has survived as open water only because it has been dredged again and again for well over a thousand years.

   Did you know? The alternating pattern of one willow and one peach tree along the Su and Bai causeways goes back to Su Shi's 11th-century planting.

   More about West Lake →

10. 10 Lake Kaindy

    Kazakhstan42.985° N 78.466° E

    

    What keeps the submerged trunks standing over a century later is the cold: at roughly 2,000 meters elevation, the lake's year-round low temperatures dramatically slow decay, so the drowned Picea schrenkiana (Schrenk's spruce) trunks remain upright, stripped of bark, breaking the surface like a leafless, half-sunken forest instead of rotting away.

    Did you know? In winter the lake draws ice divers, who swim among the submerged trunks beneath the frozen surface.

    More about Lake Kaindy →

11. 11 Lake Kawaguchi

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

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The lake has no natural outlet. For centuries that meant floods in the lakeside villages whenever the water rose, until a canal linking it to a tributary of the Sagami River was completed in 1914.

    Did you know? A small wooded island, Unoshima, rises from the middle of the lake.

    More about Lake Kawaguchi →

12. 12 Jog Falls

    India14.230° N 74.813° E

    

    The falls change completely with the seasons. Upstream, the Linganamakki Dam holds back the river for a hydroelectric project, so in the dry months the streams can shrink to threads against the dark rock. During and just after the monsoon they swell into a thundering white wall, often half hidden in drifting spray and cloud, with the forested gorge around them at its greenest.

    Did you know? The hydroelectric scheme that tames the falls was planned by the Kingdom of Mysore in 1943 and has generated power since 1948.

    More about Jog Falls →

13. 13 Pangong Tso

    India33.705° N 78.750° E

    

    What makes it unforgettable is colour. Under the thin, bright air of the plateau the water shifts from turquoise near the shore to deep ultramarine in the middle and to grey and green when clouds pass, against bare slopes of ochre and rust. The lake lies in a closed basin with no outlet, separated from the Indus by a low ridge, and its water changes along its length: the eastern end is nearly fresh, the western end markedly brackish.

    Did you know? The western end is roughly sixteen times saltier than the eastern end, where the water is only slightly mineralised but strongly alkaline.

    More about Pangong Tso →

14. 14 Gurudongmar Lake

    India28.020° N 88.710° E

    

    The lake covers about 118 hectares, with a shoreline of more than five kilometres, and for half the year it is locked in ice, typically from November until the middle of May. Streams leaving it run into Tso Lhamo, another high lake, and together they form one of the headwaters of the Teesta, the great river that later cuts through Sikkim and West Bengal on its way to the Brahmaputra.

    Did you know? The lake lies only about 5 km south of the border with Tibet, on a high plateau north of the Khangchengyao range.

    More about Gurudongmar Lake →

15. 15 Hormuz Island

    Iran · 24 km from Bandar Abbas27.067° N 56.460° E

    

    Most visitors spend a day circling the island with a local driver or guide. The Red Beach is the signature stop: waves wash red at the foot of a hill of ochre, and in places the sand glitters with metallic grains. Rainbow Valley shows the full range of colours in bands on its walls, and the Valley of Statues is a field of wind-carved rock that people read as animals and faces. There are also salt caves and mangroves along the shore.

    Did you know? Augustinian friars settled on the island in 1575 and from here founded a Catholic mission in Isfahan in 1602.

    More about Hormuz Island →

16. 16 Karakul Lake

    Tajikistan39.040° N 73.420° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    A peninsula reaching out from the southern shore and an island off the northern shore divide the lake into two very different basins. The eastern one is shallow, about 13 to 19 metres deep, while the western basin plunges to around 230 metres. Karakul has no outlet, and its water is brackish; after the last ice age its level stood some 35 metres higher than today. Only one species of fish, a loach of the genus Triplophysa, lives in it.

    Did you know? Even in summer the water warms only to about 12 °C, and it is clear enough to see some 9 metres down.

    More about Karakul Lake →

17. 17 Pamukkale

    Turkey · 17.4 km from Denizli37.924° N 29.122° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    The city built on top of it, Hierapolis, wasn't founded for the view. A shrine had stood on the site since at least the 7th century BC, and the Hellenistic king Eumenes II turned it into a proper spa town in the 2nd century BC on the strength of exactly what still draws people today: a belief that the thermal water cured what regular medicine couldn't.

    Did you know? The travertine first settles as a soft gel of calcium carbonate that only later hardens into stone.

    More about Pamukkale →

18. 18 Big Almaty Lake

    Kazakhstan · 31.3 km from Almaty43.051° N 76.985° E

    

    Its colour is the reason people come and come back. The water changes through the year from a light, milky green to an intense turquoise blue, and the level rises and falls with the seasons, highest in August and lowest in February, when the shoreline widens. 6 kilometres long and up to a kilometre wide, and 30 to 40 metres deep.

    Did you know? Big Almaty Peak, a 3,681-metre pyramid rising near the lake, can be seen from the centre of Almaty.

    More about Big Almaty Lake →

19. 19 Kabira Bay

    Japan24.451° N 124.144° E

    

    Since 1997 the bay, together with Mount Omoto, the island's highest peak at about 525 metres, has been protected as a national Place of Scenic Beauty. When Iriomote National Park was enlarged in 2007 to become Iriomote-Ishigaki National Park, the bay was placed in its Class I special zone. The corals are usually viewed from glass-bottomed boats that cross the bay, and black pearls are cultured in its sheltered waters.

    Did you know? Of nine pearl farms started in post-war Okinawa, the Kabira Bay venture was the only one still operating by 1963.

    More about Kabira Bay →

20. 20 Wadi Rum

    Jordan · 33.6 km from Aqaba29.576° N 35.420° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage
    • UNESCO natural beauty

    

    People have passed through here for thousands of years, and they have left their mark on the rock. Petroglyphs of hunters and antelope, inscriptions in the scripts of ancient Arabia, and a small Nabataean temple excavated near Rum village all testify to an old route between Arabia and the Levant.

    Did you know? Jabal Rum and Jabal Umm Ishrin, facing each other across the valley, are so close in height that they may differ by only about a metre.

    More about Wadi Rum →

21. 21 Kegon Falls

    Japan · 39 km from Utsunomiya36.738° N 139.502° E

    

    The landscape here was shaped by fire. Around 20,000 years ago an eruption of Mount Nantai dammed the valley and created Lake Chūzenji; the short Ōjiri River now spills from the lake and plunges over the edge of the old lava flows. The rock is young and brittle: water leaking through cracks in it feeds the so-called Twelve Falls, a fringe of small cascades that emerge midway down the cliff and never run dry.

    Did you know? According to one theory, the falls once stood about 800 metres further downstream and have cut their gorge by slowly retreating up the valley.

    More about Kegon Falls →

22. 22 Lake Nemrut

    Nemrut Gölü

    Turkey · 13.6 km from Tatvan38.619° N 42.222° E

    

    Nemrut is a young volcano, its cone still barely eroded, and it has shaped the whole region: its lava flows are what dammed the basin and created Lake Van, the largest lake in Turkey. The crater floor holds several smaller lakes as well, two of them permanent. The smaller, Ilı Göl, sits right over the volcanic fault and is warmed by hot springs along its shore, while hot water seeping into the main lake keeps it from freezing entirely in winter.

    Did you know? The lake is fed from below by hot springs, so its deep water is warmer than its surface, and it is slowly turning salty under volcanic influence.

    More about Lake Nemrut →

23. 23 Lake Sary-Chelek

    Kyrgyzstan41.895° N 71.957° E

    

    The lake was created around ten thousand years ago, when a great rockfall blocked a mountain valley. 92 square kilometres. Its depth is remarkable for its size: up to 234 metres, with an average of nearly 100. The water level rises to its highest in May and falls to its lowest in December; ice forms at the end of December and breaks up in April, and in August the surface warms to around 20 °C.

    Did you know? The reserve receives about 817 mm of precipitation a year, with average relative humidity around 60 per cent.

    More about Lake Sary-Chelek →

24. 24 Basilica Cistern

    Yerebatan Sarnıcı

    Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.978° E

    

    The columns did not come from one quarry or one workshop. Most were salvaged from older buildings across the empire, which is why Ionic and Corinthian capitals stand side by side and why some shafts are smooth while others are carved. One column is covered in a pattern often described as a hen's eye, with slanting branches and teardrops.

    Did you know? The Medusa blocks probably came from a late Roman building, and there is no sign they ever served as column bases before being placed here.

    More about Basilica Cistern →

25. 25 Kuang Si Falls

    Laos · 21.7 km from Luang Prabang19.749° N 101.992° E

    

    Just inside the entrance, before any of that, is the Tat Kuang Si Bear Rescue Centre, run by the Australian charity Free the Bears. It houses Asiatic black bears — often called moon bears for the pale crescent on their chests — rescued mainly from bile farms and the wildlife trade, where they'd otherwise be kept in cages for the traditional-medicine industry to extract bile from their gallbladders.

    Did you know? After 1975 the government moved hill villages away from the river's source, blaming slash-and-burn farming for drying the stream.

    More about Kuang Si Falls →

26. 26 Lake Batur

    Indonesia · 38 km from Singaraja8.257° S 115.409° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The volcano is very much alive. Its first recorded eruption was in 1804 and its most recent in 2000, and the black, barely weathered lava of the 1963 eruption still spreads across the slopes, clearly visible from the caldera rim at Kintamani. The climb from the lakeside villages to the summit crater is straightforward enough to have become a popular trek, with views over the lake and the neighbouring Mount Abang.

    More about Lake Batur →

27. 27 Matsushima

    Japan · 20.5 km from Sendai38.356° N 141.076° E

    

    The bay's fame owes much to poets. Matsuo Bashō came here in 1689 on the journey he recorded in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The best-known verse about the place, which simply repeats the name in wonder, is popularly credited to him, but it first appeared in an 1820 guidebook and is attributed to the kyōka poet Tawara-bō; the only haiku on Matsushima from that journey was written by Bashō's companion, Kawai Sora.

    Did you know? One theory holds that Date Masamune rebuilt Zuigan-ji as a hidden fortress, with a special room prepared to receive the Emperor.

    More about Matsushima →

28. 28 Raja Ampat Islands

    Indonesia0.233° S 130.517° E

    

    The numbers are almost hard to believe. More than 600 species of hard coral have been recorded here, around three quarters of all the reef-building corals known, together with well over a thousand species of reef fish and hundreds of molluscs.

    Did you know? Lying between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Raja Ampat exchanges coral and fish larvae with both, one reason its reefs are so extraordinarily diverse.

    More about Raja Ampat Islands →

29. 29 Namtso

    People's Republic of China30.721° N 90.468° E

    

    The lake's southern horizon is the Nyenchen Tanglha range, whose highest summit rises to 7,162 metres; its snowfields and glaciers fill the view from almost anywhere on the eastern shore, and on still mornings they repeat themselves in the water.

    Did you know? Namtso is counted among the three great sacred lakes of Tibet.

    More about Namtso →

30. 30 Heaven Lake

    People's Republic of China42.006° N 128.057° E

    

    The mountain above it, known as Paektu to Koreans and Changbai to the Chinese, is considered a sacred ancestral homeland by both Korean and Manchu tradition, and the lake itself sits almost exactly on the border between China and North Korea — one of the few natural features on Earth genuinely split down the middle by an international line.

    Did you know? The centre of the volcano is rising by about 3 millimetres a year as magma accumulates beneath it.

    More about Heaven Lake →