The Most Beautiful Water Wonders in New Zealand
12 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful water wonders in New Zealand are Lake Tekapo, Lake Wakatipu and Champagne Pool. The list covers 12 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches. Last updated 14 October 2026.
New Zealand sits on the boundary of two tectonic plates, and its waters show both sides of that collision. In the south, the rising Southern Alps feed glaciers that grind rock into fine flour, and the meltwater carries it into lakes of a pale, almost opaque blue. In the north, the volcanic plateau and the Taupō zone bring crater lakes, boiling pools and an island volcano offshore. Between them lie fiords, rainforest coasts and beaches exposed to the full sweep of the Tasman Sea and the Pacific.
Lake Tekapo and Lake Pukaki are the classic glacial lakes, Pukaki looking straight up the valley to Aoraki / Mount Cook. Lake Wakatipu, beside Queenstown, bends like a lightning bolt between steep ranges, while Lake Matheson on the West Coast is famous for mirror reflections of the highest peaks. Rotomairewhenua, the Blue Lake in Nelson Lakes National Park, has the clearest fresh water ever measured. Sutherland Falls, on the Milford Track, plunges about 580 metres in three steps.
The volcanic side is just as varied. Champagne Pool at Wai-O-Tapu steams within a rim stained orange by arsenic and antimony minerals, the Emerald Lakes glow beside the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, and Whakaari / White Island smokes in the Bay of Plenty. On the coast, Wharariki Beach faces the Archway Islands, Cathedral Cove cuts through a headland on the Coromandel, and Nugget Point's rocks trail out to sea in the Catlins.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lake Tekapo | Lake | |
| 2 | Lake Wakatipu | Lake | |
| 3 | Champagne Pool | Hot spring | |
| 4 | Whakaari / White Island | Island | |
| 5 | Lake Pukaki | Lake | |
| 6 | Wharariki Beach | Beach | |
| 7 | Nugget Point | Stack | |
| 8 | Sutherland Falls | Waterfall | |
| 9 | Emerald Lakes | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 10 | Rotomairewhenua / Blue Lake | Lake | |
| 11 | Lake Matheson | Lake | |
| 12 | Cathedral Cove | Beach |
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. 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? Even in midsummer the surface water warms only to about 17 °C, falling below 6 °C in September.
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.
Did you know? Gold found on the run of pastoralist William Gilbert Rees in the 1860s set off the rush that created the town of Queenstown.
03 Champagne Pool
New Zealand · 27.4 km from Rotorua38.359° S 176.369° E
Image by alexandramorcos from Pixabay For all its calm, the pool is young and violent in origin. It was blown out by a hydrothermal eruption about 900 years ago, and the crater it fills reaches roughly 62 metres at its deepest, holding some 50,000 cubic metres of water. Down in the system the geothermal fluid is thought to be around 260 °C; at the surface the pool sits at about 73 to 75 °C, with a mildly acidic pH held steady by the stream of carbon dioxide.
Did you know? Its DNA has a G+C content of only 29.3 percent, the lowest reported for any species of its order, the Aquificales.
04 Whakaari / White Island
New Zealand37.520° S 177.183° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay 7 kilometres into the sky while 47 tourists and guides were on the crater floor, most of them day-trippers from cruise ships docked at nearby Tauranga and Whakatāne.
Did you know? Sulphur mining was attempted in the mid-1880s, from 1898 to 1901, in 1913–1914 and again from 1923 until the 1930s, when the ore proved too poor.
05 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.
Did you know? Pukaki is the largest of the three parallel glacial lakes of the Mackenzie Basin, the others being Tekapo and Ōhau.
06 Wharariki Beach
New Zealand40.504° S 172.674° E
Image by kiwibu from Pixabay Offshore stand the Archway Islands, a group of four rock stacks, the nearest joined to the beach at low tide and the farthest roughly 250 metres out. The largest is pierced by two natural arches, which gave the group its name, and one of the stacks rises some 66 metres from the sea.
Did you know? Wharariki is the Māori name of a plant native to New Zealand.
07 Nugget Point
New Zealand46.447° S 169.814° E
Noel Jhinku, aka Njhinku · CC BY 2.5 The lighthouse was built in 1869 from locally quarried stone and first lit on 4 July 1870. Its light stands 76 metres above the water. It burned oil until 1949, then switched to electricity, first from a diesel generator and later from the mains, and has been automatic since 1989, maintained by Maritime New Zealand. The walk to it along the ridge, with views down both sides, is the real experience.
Did you know? The old lamp gave way to an LED beacon in 2006, and in 2020 the station was converted to solar power.
08 Sutherland Falls
New Zealand44.800° S 167.730° E
rheins · CC BY 3.0 The source is Lake Quill, a small lake perched above the cliff. It takes its name from the man who first reached it in 1890 by climbing the rock face beside the falls. The waterfall itself is named after Donald Sutherland, a Scottish settler at Milford Sound who came upon it in 1880.
Did you know? Donald Sutherland had fought with Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand in Italy before he settled at Milford Sound as a hermit-explorer.
09 Emerald Lakes
New Zealand · 21.3 km from Tūrangi39.134° S 175.654° E
Marcus Holland-Moritz · CC BY-SA 2.0 The colour is chemistry. The craters belong to a small chain of vents blasted open by gas and steam eruptions within the last 1,800 years, and they are fed by water that seeps through the surrounding volcanic rock and picks up dissolved minerals, among them calcium carbonate, that tint the pools. Steam vents on the slope above fill the air with a sulphurous smell, a reminder that this is an active volcanic landscape.
Did you know? Bulbous rush, a weed native to Eurasia and North Africa, once invaded the lakes; rangers attacked it twice a year from 2019.
10 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.
Did you know? Its exceptional clarity was first noticed in 2001 by a tramper who later co-authored the scientific study that confirmed the record.
11 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? The hollow formed where a mass of ice, buried and insulated under moraine gravel, slowly melted after the glacier withdrew.
12 Cathedral Cove
New Zealand · 39 km from Thames36.828° S 175.790° E
Image by 9500456 from Pixabay The rock is ignimbrite, a light-coloured mixture of volcanic ash and pumice laid down when eruptions built this coastline and the islands of Te Whanganui-o-Hei / Mercury Bay about eight million years ago. It is soft stuff, and the sea exploits every weakness: waves working along a fracture in the headland hollowed out caves from both sides until they met and became the arch.
Did you know? Beneath the water the reserve hides reefs, intricate sea caves and underwater arches, echoing the forms carved along the cliffs above.
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 New Zealand?
- On our list, Lake Tekapo ranks first, followed by Lake Wakatipu and Champagne Pool.
- Why is Lake Tekapo so blue?
- Glaciers in the Southern Alps grind rock into a very fine powder called glacial flour, which stays suspended in the meltwater feeding Lake Tekapo and scatters sunlight to give the lake its milky turquoise colour.
- What is the clearest lake in the world?
- Rotomairewhenua, or Blue Lake, in New Zealand's Nelson Lakes National Park has the clearest natural fresh water ever measured, with visibility of around 70–80 metres, comparable to distilled water.
- Why is Champagne Pool orange?
- The orange rim of Champagne Pool at Wai-O-Tapu comes from deposits of arsenic and antimony sulfide minerals, while bubbles of carbon dioxide rising through the hot water give the pool its name.
- How many lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches are on this list in New Zealand?
- The list covers 12 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches.