The Most Beautiful Water Wonders in Chile
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful water wonders in Chile are Easter Island, Laguna Miscanti and Lake Chungará. The list covers 5 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Chile stretches more than 4,000 kilometres from the Atacama to Patagonia, and its water takes every form that climate allows. In the north, salt-fringed lakes lie at altitudes above 4,000 metres beneath volcanoes; in the south, glaciers from the Patagonian ice fields reach the sea and rivers race over lava. Far out in the Pacific lies one of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth.
Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is known for its moai, the hundreds of stone figures carved by its Polynesian settlers. Laguna Miscanti in the Atacama altiplano is a deep blue lake below the volcano of the same name, often visited together with Laguna Miñiques. Lake Chungará in Lauca National Park, one of the highest lakes in the world, reflects the snow cone of Parinacota. San Rafael Lagoon in Aysén is fed by the San Rafael Glacier, which drops icebergs from the Northern Patagonian Ice Field. The Petrohué Waterfalls rush over black volcanic rock in sight of the Osorno volcano.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Easter Island | Island | |
| 2 | Laguna Miscanti | Lake | |
| 3 | Lake Chungará | Lake | |
| 4 | San Rafael Lagoon | Lagoon | |
| 5 | Petrohué Waterfalls | Waterfall |
01 Easter Island
Chile27.120° S 109.350° W
Image by 3282700 from Pixabay The island's popular reputation as a case study in self-destruction — a society that felled every tree and collapsed into civil war before Europeans arrived — has taken a beating from more recent research. Radiocarbon dates now show statue-building continued steadily for roughly three centuries and that the population was still large and organised when the first Dutch ships anchored in 1722.
Did you know? The nearest inhabited land, Pitcairn Island, is about 2,075 km away, and the Chilean coast lies some 3,500 km to the east.
02 Laguna Miscanti
Chile23.725° S 67.765° W
Godot13 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The lake is young in geological terms. Roughly twenty-two thousand years ago tectonic movement and volcanic rock dammed this basin, and since then it has filled a hollow of some 13 square kilometres, though rarely more than about ten metres deep.
Did you know? Meadows of the green alga Chara globularis cover most of the lake floor.
03 Lake Chungará
Chile18.242° S 69.153° W
Fabolu · CC BY-SA 3.0 The lake owes its existence to a catastrophe. Some thousands of years ago, the earlier cone of Parinacota collapsed in a gigantic landslide, and the avalanche of debris swept across the valley and blocked the course of the Lauca River. Water pooled behind the natural dam, and Chungará was born. The lake is about 8.75 kilometres long and covers some 22 square kilometres. Other volcanoes ring the basin, among them Quisiquisini and Ajoya.
Did you know? Around ten metres of sediment have settled on the lake floor since the landslide dam first held back its water.
04 San Rafael Lagoon
Laguna San Rafael
Chile46.667° S 73.933° W
Vincent Huang · CC BY 2.0 The lagoon covers roughly 123 square kilometres and is enclosed on the south by the Isthmus of Ofqui, a narrow neck of land that separates it from the Gulf of Penas. To the north the Témpanos River, whose name means "river of icebergs", links it to the Moraleda Channel and the open sea. The glacier itself drains about 760 square kilometres of ice.
Did you know? Chile began cutting a canal across that isthmus in the 20th century to avoid the stormy open sea around the Taitao Peninsula, but the works were abandoned.
05 Petrohué Waterfalls
Saltos de Petrohué
Chile41.172° S 72.447° W
P. Hughes · CC BY 4.0 The colour is the second surprise. In normal conditions the water is clear with a green and blue cast, bright against the volcanic stone; during the thaw it can turn brown and dark. Above it all rises the cone of Osorno, 2,652 m high, so that from the viewpoints the falls, the rock that made them and the volcano that produced that rock appear in a single frame.
Did you know? From the lake to the sea at the Reloncaví Estuary, the Petrohué River runs only about 36 kilometres.
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 water wonders in Chile?
- On our list, Easter Island ranks first, followed by Laguna Miscanti and Lake Chungará.
- How many moai are on Easter Island?
- Close to 1,000 moai are known on the island. Most were carved from volcanic tuff at the Rano Raraku quarry, and many still lie there unfinished.
- How high is Lake Chungará?
- Lake Chungará lies at about 4,500 metres above sea level in the Andes of northern Chile, at the foot of the Parinacota volcano.
- How many lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches are on this list in Chile?
- The list covers 5 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches.