The Most Beautiful Water Wonders in Indonesia
14 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful water wonders in Indonesia are Lake Toba, Lake Batur and Raja Ampat Islands. The list covers 14 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Indonesia lies along the Ring of Fire and across the Coral Triangle, and that pairing explains its waters. More than a hundred active volcanoes have left crater lakes coloured by acid, sulfur and iron, while the warm, shallow seas between its thousands of islands hold the richest marine life on Earth. Add monsoon rain falling on young volcanic slopes, and rivers plunge into gorges that look tropical and alpine at once.
Lake Toba in Sumatra fills the caldera of one of the largest known volcanic eruptions, with Samosir Island rising in its middle. Ijen in East Java holds a turquoise lake of extreme acidity, where burning sulfur gas glows blue at night. On Flores, the three crater lakes of Kelimutu change colour independently of one another, and Kawah Putih near Bandung is a pale, milky crater lake in a white sulfur basin. Anak Krakatau, the child of Krakatoa, rose from the sea inside the caldera left by the eruption of 1883.
The islands are just as remarkable. Raja Ampat, off West Papua, is a maze of karst islets above some of the most diverse reefs anywhere. Padar and Komodo, in Komodo National Park, combine dry ridges, bays of pink and white sand and the Komodo dragon. Kakaban Island hides a marine lake full of jellyfish that have lost their sting, and Kelingking Beach on Nusa Penida sits below a headland shaped like a dinosaur. In Java, Tumpak Sewu falls in a wide curtain and Madakaripura in a narrow, shadowed canyon.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lake Toba | Lake | |
| 2 | Lake Batur | Volcanic crater lake | ✓ |
| 3 | Raja Ampat Islands | Coral reef | |
| 4 | Padar Island | Island | |
| 5 | Komodo Island | Island | |
| 6 | Ijen Crater Lake | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 7 | Kelimutu | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 8 | Anak Krakatau | Island | |
| 9 | Lake Segara Anak | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 10 | Kawah Putih | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 11 | Tumpak Sewu Waterfalls | Waterfall | |
| 12 | Madakaripura Waterfall | Waterfall | |
| 13 | Kakaban Island | Island | |
| 14 | Kelingking Beach | Beach |
01 Lake Toba
Indonesia · 37.6 km from Pematangsiantar2.670° N 98.888° E
Image by 12019 from Pixabay 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.
02 Lake Batur
Indonesia · 38 km from Singaraja8.257° S 115.409° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Made agus devayana · CC BY-SA 4.0 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.
03 Raja Ampat Islands
Indonesia0.233° S 130.517° E
Image by Ady_Fauzan from Pixabay 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.
04 Padar Island
Indonesia8.656° S 119.572° E
YUS JULIADI · CC BY-SA 4.0 The landscape owes its look to a dry climate. Instead of rainforest, Padar is covered with grassland and scattered shrubs, a savanna-like cover in which every ridge line and gully stands out sharply in low sun. The island is uninhabited and is the third largest in Komodo National Park, established in 1980 and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991.
Did you know? Padar lies in Wallacea, the transition zone between Asian and Australian wildlife, and is divided from Rinca by the narrow Lintah Strait.
05 Komodo Island
Indonesia8.577° S 119.451° E
Image by topochart_app from Pixabay The island belongs to the Lesser Sundas deciduous forest ecoregion. Besides the dragons, it holds Javan deer (introduced, and a mainstay of the dragons' diet), water buffalo, wild pigs, macaques and cockatoos. The surrounding sea is part of the Coral Triangle, among the richest marine regions on the planet, which is why the waters around Komodo draw divers as much as the land draws naturalists.
Did you know? A Komodo dragon can eat up to 80 percent of its own body weight in a single meal.
06 Ijen Crater Lake
Indonesia · 20.8 km from Banyuwangi8.057° S 114.242° E
Image by Andrea_Maverick from Pixabay The lake sits in a crater roughly 722 m wide within the Ijen volcanic complex, which rises to 2,769 m. On its shore, vents pour out volcanic gases rich in sulphur. Where the gas meets air it can ignite, burning with flames up to 5 m high at temperatures of around 600 °C — the famous "blue fire", visible only in darkness, which is why visitors begin the climb in the middle of the night.
Did you know? In the dry season from May to October the lake can drop by about four metres, and its surface sometimes grows warmer than the air above it.
07 Kelimutu
Indonesia · 21.4 km from Ende8.770° S 121.820° E
Image by annieclairejane from Pixabay The local explanation for the phenomenon predates any chemistry.
Did you know? Whether a lake turns red, green or blue depends largely on its oxidation state and dissolved iron and manganese, balanced between volcanic gas and rainfall.
08 Anak Krakatau
Indonesia6.098° S 105.426° E
Image by SEI from Pixabay Since then it has grown in fits and starts, an almost textbook stratovolcano built of andesite, dacite and basalt, rising by several metres a year for decades until it reached about 338 metres. On 22 December 2018 its south-western flank collapsed into the sea and set off a tsunami that struck the coasts of Java and Sumatra and killed several hundred people.
Did you know? For about eight hours before the 2018 collapse, sensors are believed to have picked up a sustained infrasound signal from the volcano.
09 Lake Segara Anak
Indonesia · 35.1 km from Mataram8.404° S 116.400° E
Image by arhnue from Pixabay The caldera is the scar of one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the last few thousand years. In 1257 Mount Samalas, which is thought to have stood around 4,200 metres high, blew itself apart, ejecting enough ash and sulphur to leave traces in polar ice cores and cool the global climate for several years; some researchers link it to the onset of the Little Ice Age.
10 Kawah Putih
Indonesia · 30.3 km from Bandung7.166° S 107.402° E
Image by ignartonosbg from Pixabay Patuha has shown no significant eruptive activity since around 1600, but the crater is far from dead: steam and sulphurous gas bubble through the water, and the smell is strong. Local stories once told of birds that refused to fly over the forest here, and it was curiosity about these tales that brought the German naturalist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn to the crater in 1837.
Did you know? Perhutani staff have estimated around 300,000 visitors a year, with up to 10,000 arriving on a single busy holiday.
11 Tumpak Sewu Waterfalls
Indonesia8.230° S 112.917° E
Lutfi adn · CC BY-SA 4.0 The name describes the view. In Javanese, tumpak sewu means roughly "a thousand stacked up", evoking countless waterfalls piled side by side; locals also call it Coban Sewu, "the thousand waterfall". It is classed as a tiered fall, and its curtain-like appearance comes from the way the water spreads across the curved cliff before gathering in a valley that runs southwards at around 450 to 500 metres above sea level.
Did you know? Semeru, whose slopes feed the Glidik River and the falls, has been erupting almost continuously since 1967, mostly with small to moderate explosions.
12 Madakaripura Waterfall
Indonesia · 18 km from Probolinggo7.845° S 113.017° E
ESCapade · CC BY-SA 3.0 The main fall is only part of the spectacle. Water seeps and drips across the whole face of the surrounding cliffs, falling as a constant fine rain over anyone approaching the basin, and several of these trickles gather into further falls of their own. The upper part of the gorge sits at around 1,000 metres above sea level, and the air in the canyon is noticeably cool and damp.
Did you know? Of the many trickles running down the surrounding cliffs, three are strong enough to form separate waterfalls of their own.
13 Kakaban Island
Indonesia2.144° N 118.536° E
Riza Nugraha from Singapore, Singapore · CC BY 2.0 Isolation turned the lake into a natural laboratory. Four kinds of jellyfish live in it, and none of them can harm a swimmer: a transparent Aurelia moon jelly, the tiny box jellyfish Tripedalia cystophora, a Mastigias close to the golden jellyfish, and the upside-down jellyfish Cassiopea ornata, which rests on the bottom with its tentacles turned toward the light. Swimming among them is the experience the island is known for.
Did you know? Endemic sea cucumbers and a tunicate found nowhere else have evolved in the isolated lake water.
14 Kelingking Beach
Indonesia · 29.9 km from Denpasar8.750° S 115.473° E
Dini Rosyadah Tridya · CC BY-SA 4.0 The drama is a matter of scale and colour. The cliffs rise about 180 metres, the vegetation clinging to their ledges is an intense tropical green, and the water shifts from deep blue offshore to milky turquoise over the sand. The best moments are early, before the midday haze flattens the colours, and late afternoon, when the sun drops behind the ridge and the headland throws its shadow across the bay.
Did you know? Nusa Penida first appears in history on the Belanjong pillar of 914 AD, which records a military expedition by Bali's first known king.
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 Indonesia?
- On our list, Lake Toba ranks first, followed by Lake Batur and Raja Ampat Islands.
- Why do the Kelimutu lakes change colour?
- Each of the three crater lakes on Kelimutu has its own volcanic gas and mineral input, and changes in oxidation and chemistry shift their colours between turquoise, green, red-brown and black, independently of one another.
- What is the blue fire at Ijen?
- The blue flames at Ijen are sulfuric gases that ignite as they escape from vents in the crater at high temperature; they are best seen at night.
- How was Lake Toba formed?
- Lake Toba fills a caldera created by a supervolcanic eruption about 74,000 years ago, one of the largest known on Earth, and it is the largest volcanic lake in the world.
- How many lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches are on this list in Indonesia?
- The list covers 14 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches.