The Most Beautiful Water Wonders in Oceania
45 places in 8 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful water wonders in Oceania are Great Barrier Reef (Australia), Moorea (French Polynesia) and The Twelve Apostles (Australia). The list covers 45 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches in 8 countries. Australia has the most, with 23. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Oceania's water wonders span warm reef seas, glacial lakes and volcanic craters. Australia's ancient, stable continent is fringed by coral and limestone coasts shaped by an open ocean, while New Zealand sits on an active plate boundary where glaciers and volcanoes create lakes of startling color. Across the Pacific, islands rise as volcanic peaks ringed with lagoons, or as low coral atolls barely above the waves, and some carry the traces of seafaring cultures that settled them.
The Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of Queensland, is the largest coral reef system in the world, a chain of thousands of reefs and islands stretching for some 2,300 kilometres. On the Victorian coast, the Twelve Apostles are limestone stacks standing in the surf off the Great Ocean Road, and in Tasmania the Bay of Fires pairs white sand and clear water with granite boulders splashed with orange lichen. Lord Howe Island rises from the Tasman Sea with steep volcanic peaks above a coral lagoon.
In New Zealand, Lake Tekapo and Lake Pukaki glow a milky turquoise from glacial flour, Pukaki with Aoraki / Mount Cook at its head, and Lake Wakatipu winds in a long zigzag through the mountains around Queenstown. The geothermal Champagne Pool fizzes with gas inside an orange mineral rim, and Whakaari / White Island is an active volcano rising straight from the sea. In South Australia, the Blue Lake fills an old crater at Mount Gambier, and on Pohnpei, Nan Madol is a ceremonial city of basalt columns built on artificial islets in a lagoon, while Aitutaki in the Cook Islands encircles a turquoise lagoon with small motu.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Great Barrier Reef | Coral reef | Australia | ✓ |
| 2 | Moorea | Island | French Polynesia | |
| 3 | The Twelve Apostles | Stack | Australia | |
| 4 | Lake Tekapo | Lake | New Zealand | |
| 5 | Lake Wakatipu | Lake | New Zealand | |
| 6 | Kangaroo Island | Island | Australia | |
| 7 | K'gari | Island | Australia | ✓ |
| 8 | Blue Lake (Warwar) | Volcanic crater lake | Australia | |
| 9 | Champagne Pool | Hot spring | New Zealand | |
| 10 | Lord Howe Island | Island | Australia | ✓ |
| 11 | Whakaari / White Island | Island | New Zealand | |
| 12 | Aitutaki | Island | Cook Islands | |
| 13 | Bay of Fires | Beach | Australia | |
| 14 | Nan Madol | Ruins | Federated States of Micronesia | ✓ |
| 15 | Lake Pukaki | Lake | New Zealand | |
| 16 | Bora Bora | Island | French Polynesia | |
| 17 | Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre | Salt flat | Australia | |
| 18 | Christmas Island | Island | Australia | |
| 19 | Ball's Pyramid | Stack | Australia | ✓ |
| 20 | Ningaloo Reef | Coral reef | Australia | ✓ |
| 21 | Fakarava | Coral reef | French Polynesia | |
| 22 | Maupiti | Island | French Polynesia | |
| 23 | New Caledonia Barrier Reef | Coral reef | New Caledonia | |
| 24 | Macquarie Island | Island | Australia | ✓ |
| 25 | Jellyfish Lake | Lake | Palau | |
| 26 | Horizontal Falls | Waterfall | Australia | |
| 27 | Wharariki Beach | Beach | New Zealand | |
| 28 | Lake Hillier | Lake | Australia | |
| 29 | Nugget Point | Stack | New Zealand | |
| 30 | Sutherland Falls | Waterfall | New Zealand |
01 Great Barrier Reef
Australia · 37.6 km from Port Douglas16.400° S 145.800° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by alicia3690 from Pixabay That scale hasn't made it immune to stress. When water gets unusually warm, corals expel the colorful algae living in their tissue and turn ghostly white — a process called bleaching that isn't always fatal on its own, but leaves coral weakened and vulnerable if the heat doesn't ease up.
Did you know? Close to 5,000 species of molluscs have been recorded on the reef, from tiny sea snails to giant clams.
02 Moorea
French Polynesia · 26.6 km from Papeete17.535° S 149.835° W
Image by Michelle-Maria from Pixabay The north coast is cut by two deep bays, Cook's Bay and Opunohu Bay, separated by the sharp mass of Mount Rotui. They are among the most beautiful anchorages in the South Pacific: steep green walls drop to calm water, and the peaks are reflected on still mornings. The irony of their names is that James Cook anchored not in the bay that bears his name, but in neighbouring Opunohu, in 1777.
Did you know? Native Partula tree snails were largely wiped out after the predatory rosy wolf snail was introduced to the island in 1977.
03 The Twelve Apostles
Australia38.641° S 143.049° E
Leonard Koh · CC BY-SA 4.0 The stacks are a textbook of how such coasts evolve. Waves exploit weaknesses in a headland to carve caves, the caves meet and become arches, the arches fall and leave free-standing pillars, and the pillars are eventually undermined and collapse themselves. The process is visible in real time here: a 50-metre stack fell in July 2005 and another in 2009, and today seven remain standing, six of them visible from the main viewpoint.
Did you know? The marine park also holds the wreck of the clipper Loch Ard, which struck Mutton Bird Island in 1878.
04 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.
05 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.
06 Kangaroo Island
Australia35.800° S 137.300° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay The western end belongs to Flinders Chase National Park, where the island's most famous sights stand on the edge of the Southern Ocean. The Remarkable Rocks are a cluster of huge granite boulders perched on a dome above the sea, hollowed and sculpted by wind, salt spray and rain and splashed with orange lichen. Nearby, at Cape du Couedic, Admirals Arch is a natural rock bridge hung with stalactites, where fur seals haul out on the ledges below.
Did you know? The Remarkable Rocks are granite boulders shaped over millions of years by wind, spray and rain.
07 K'gari
Australia · 31.6 km from Hervey Bay25.240° S 153.150° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Poidabro · CC BY-SA 4.0 What astonishes visitors is that a heap of sand can hold rainforest. Tall forests grow in its interior, sustained by fungi in the soil that let plants draw nutrients from nothing but sand, fed by spring-fed creeks that run through most of the island's valleys.
08 Blue Lake (Warwar)
Blue Lake
Australia · 2.1 km from Mount Gambier37.847° S 140.778° E
Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 The crater itself belongs to the Mount Gambier maar complex, a group of explosion craters that once held four lakes; two of them have since dried out as the water table fell. Estimates for the last eruption vary widely, and if the youngest proposed date is right it would be among the most recent volcanic events on the Australian mainland.
Did you know? Lieutenant James Grant sighted the volcano in December 1800 from the survey brig Lady Nelson and named it after Admiral James Gambier.
09 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.
10 Lord Howe Island
Australia31.550° S 159.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
EmGer7 · CC BY-SA 3.0 The island was first sighted by Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball in February 1788 and it stayed uninhabited until 1834, when a whaling ship left three men to set up a supply station. Its isolation produced a remarkable roll of endemic life: the Lord Howe woodhen, a ground-dwelling bird found nowhere else; the kentia palm, Howea forsteriana; and the Lord Howe Island stick insect.
Did you know? Rats came ashore when the steamer Makambo ran aground in 1918; after an island-wide baiting campaign, Lord Howe was considered rat-free by 2023.
11 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.
12 Aitutaki
Cook Islands18.850° S 159.790° W
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay The lagoon cruise is the reason to come. Boats run across to Tapuaetai, better known as One Foot Island, in the southeast of the lagoon, where a sandbar stretches out at low tide and the views across the shallows are the best on the atoll. It is the most popular trip on the island, and other motu along the eastern rim, such as Akaiami and Tekopua, are visited on the same cruises.
Did you know? Only two of the fifteen motu around the lagoon are volcanic; all the others are built of coral.
13 Bay of Fires
Australia41.137° S 148.308° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 3.0 The name has nothing to do with the lichen. In 1773 the English navigator Tobias Furneaux, sailing along this coast, saw the fires of Aboriginal people burning on the beaches and named the bay after them. The coast was a meeting place for Aboriginal family groups long before that, and in the palawa kani language the northern headland is larapuna. Dozens of shell middens around Eddystone Point record those gatherings.
Did you know? The Eddystone Point lighthouse and its keepers' cottages were built from granite quarried on the spot, under a head mason brought out from Glasgow.
14 Nan Madol
Federated States of Micronesia · 21.8 km from Palikir6.842° N 158.332° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Uhooep · CC BY-SA 4.0 People were active here from around the first or second century AD. Islet building had begun by the eighth or ninth century, and the monumental basalt architecture dates from about 1180–1200. The stone was brought from a volcanic plug on the far side of the island. The complex had two parts: Madol Powe, the northeastern sector of 58 islets reserved for priests and the dead, and an administrative quarter where the nobility lived.
Did you know? Its original name is said to have been Soun Nan-leng, usually translated as "Reef of Heaven".
15 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.
16 Bora Bora
Bora-Bora
French Polynesia16.498° S 151.736° W
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay The best of Bora Bora is the relationship between these elements, and the island rewards looking at it from several angles.
Did you know? The American base never saw combat, yet all eight of its heavy 7-inch coastal guns are still on the island, emplaced at strategic points.
17 Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre
Australia28.667° S 137.167° E
Stephan Ridgway · CC BY 2.0 A true, near-complete fill has happened only three times in about 160 years of records. When it happens, the transformation is total: pelicans, banded stilts and other waterbirds detect the flood and fly in from hundreds of kilometers away, sometimes overnight, to breed explosively while conditions last, before the water disappears again and the boom-bust cycle resets.
Did you know? When more than 4 metres deep the lake is no saltier than the sea, but as the salt crust dissolves during a big flood, mass fish kills follow.
18 Christmas Island
Australia10.490° S 105.627° E
ChrisBrayPhotography · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes the island famous is the red crab. Tens of millions of these bright scarlet land crabs live in the forest, and at the start of the wet season, usually in October or November, they leave it almost at once and march to the sea to breed. The females release their eggs into the surf at the turn of the high tide in the last quarter of the moon, so the timing of the migration can be predicted with some precision.
19 Ball's Pyramid
Australia31.754° S 159.252° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
PotMart186 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The rock takes its name from Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball of the Royal Navy, after whom it was named in 1788. It was charted in detail in 1853, and the first person known to have set foot on it was the geologist Henry Wilkinson in 1882.
Did you know? Climbers on a failed 1964 attempt found and photographed a dead stick insect on the rock, the first hint the species had survived.
20 Ningaloo Reef
Australia22.739° S 113.628° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 The reef is famous above all for its big visitors. From around March to August, whale sharks — the largest fish in the sea — gather along the outer reef, and Ningaloo is one of the most reliable places on earth to swim beside them. In winter the same waters become a migration route for humpback whales, manta rays, dolphins and dugongs. Within the reef itself live some 500 species of fish, around 300 of coral and some 600 of molluscs.
Did you know? In 2006 marine scientists surveying deeper water beyond the reef discovered previously unknown sponge gardens.
21 Fakarava
French Polynesia16.310° S 145.625° W
Fanny98716 · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes Fakarava exceptional is what happens at its two openings to the ocean. 6 km across, and the tide pours through it in powerful currents that carry divers along walls of coral. In the south, the narrower Tumakohua pass beside the hamlet of Tetamanu is famous for its "wall of sharks": hundreds of grey reef sharks, by some counts up to 700, hold station in the current, one of the densest gatherings of the species known anywhere.
Did you know? Bellingshausen, the first European to record the atoll in 1820, named it Wittgenstein Island; the French navigator Dumont d'Urville called in 1838.
22 Maupiti
French Polynesia16.417° S 152.250° W
Image by palinska from Pixabay The single navigable gap in the reef, the Onoiau pass, is narrow and known for powerful currents, and that difficulty of access has shaped the island's character. Maupiti has around 1,300 inhabitants, its economy rests largely on noni fruit, and visitors stay in family-run guesthouses rather than large resorts.
Did you know? According to legend, the two main peaks are the brothers Hotu Paraoa and Hotu Ae, turned to stone on either side of the island.
23 New Caledonia Barrier Reef
Lagons de Nouvelle-Calédonie
New Caledonia20.412° S 164.566° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay The reef is remarkable for its variety rather than just its scale. Scientists have described well over a hundred distinct reef formations here, from fringing reefs hugging the coast to double barriers, patch reefs and sandy islets, and the counts of life match the larger reefs of the Pacific: more than 2,300 species of fish from nearly 250 families and over 2,000 species of molluscs.
Did you know? The Amédée lighthouse beside Boulari Pass is a 56-metre cast-iron tower, made in Paris in 1862 and shipped to the island in some 1,200 crates weighing 388 tonnes.
24 Macquarie Island
Australia54.630° S 158.860° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
L. R. Blake (d. 1918) · Public domain The island is long and narrow, about 35 km by 5 km, and lies roughly halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica, some 1,500 km southeast of Tasmania. Its beaches carry one of the great wildlife gatherings of the Southern Ocean. The entire world population of royal penguins comes here to breed.
25 Jellyfish Lake
Palau · 22.8 km from Koror7.161° N 134.376° E
FoxyStranger Kawasaki · CC BY-SA 3.0 Two kinds of jellyfish live here: moon jellyfish and a subspecies of golden jellyfish, Mastigias papua etpisoni. The golden jellies carry symbiotic algae in their tissues and get part of their food from them, which is why they follow the light. In the early morning they swim from the centre of the western basin toward the east, then turn back in the early afternoon and gather on the western side as sunset approaches.
Did you know? Seawater enters through three tunnels near the surface, so tides inside the lake are only about a third as high and peak some 100 minutes later than outside.
26 Horizontal Falls
Australia16.380° S 123.959° E
Reefpix · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes the spectacle so strange is that it keeps turning around. As the tide floods, the falls run inward into the basins behind the ridges; when it ebbs, they reverse and run back out to sea. David Attenborough called the falls one of the greatest wonders of the natural world, and the name "Horizontal Falls" is often said to have been his own coinage.
Did you know? The ridges of the McLarty Range that hem in the falls rise only some 150 to 200 metres above the sea.
27 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.
28 Lake Hillier
Australia34.096° S 123.203° E
Aussie Oc · CC BY-SA 4.0 You likely won't walk up to it. Lake Hillier sits on Middle Island, part of the uninhabited Recherche Archipelago nature reserve off Western Australia's south coast, accessible only by permitted boat landing or, far more commonly, by air — which is precisely why almost every photo of it is an aerial shot rather than a beach snapshot. That restriction isn't red tape for its own sake; it's what keeps the fragile microbial community undisturbed.
Did you know? The lake is reportedly named after William Hillier, a crewman of HMS Investigator who died of dysentery in May 1803 before the ship left the island.
29 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.
30 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.
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 Oceania?
- On our list, Great Barrier Reef (Australia) ranks first, followed by Moorea (French Polynesia) and The Twelve Apostles (Australia).
- Which country has the most lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches in Oceania?
- In our collection, the most come from Australia (23), New Zealand (12) and French Polynesia (4).
- How long is the Great Barrier Reef?
- The Great Barrier Reef stretches for about 2,300 kilometres along the coast of Queensland and is made up of thousands of individual reefs and hundreds of islands. It is the largest coral reef system in the world and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981.
- Why are Lake Tekapo and Lake Pukaki so blue?
- Both lakes are fed by glaciers in the Southern Alps, whose meltwater carries finely ground rock known as glacial flour. The suspended particles scatter sunlight and give the water its distinctive milky turquoise color.
- What is Nan Madol?
- Nan Madol is a ruined ceremonial and political centre built on nearly a hundred artificial islets off Pohnpei in Micronesia, using stacked columns of basalt. It was the seat of the Saudeleur dynasty and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- How many lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches are on this list in Oceania?
- The list covers 45 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches in 8 countries. Australia has the most, with 23.