The Most Beautiful Water Wonders in Portugal
9 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful water wonders in Portugal are Lagoa das Sete Cidades, Lagoa do Fogo and São Miguel Island. The list covers 9 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Portugal's waters belong to two very different landscapes. On the mainland, the Atlantic beats against cliffs of limestone and sandstone, carving the Algarve into golden coves, arches and stacks, while the granite of the Serra da Estrela holds glacial hollows and mountain reservoirs. Far out in the ocean, the Azores sit on the meeting point of three tectonic plates, and their volcanoes have left crater lakes, hot springs and sea-level platforms of green land beneath towering cliffs.
On São Miguel, Lagoa das Sete Cidades fills a great caldera with two linked lakes, one looking blue and the other green, and Lagoa do Fogo lies wild and undeveloped in another crater higher up. Off the south coast of the same island, the Ilhéu de Vila Franca is the ring of an old volcanic crater flooded by the sea into an almost circular natural pool. At Ponta da Ferraria, hot springs well up among black lava rocks, warming a sheltered inlet of the ocean.
On São Jorge, the Fajã dos Cubres is a flat shelf of land formed by collapse at the foot of the cliffs, with a small lagoon by the sea. On the mainland, Praia da Marinha in the Algarve sits beneath eroded limestone arches and stacks, and Praia da Ursa, close to Cabo da Roca west of Sintra, is reached on foot down a steep cliff path among jagged sea stacks. In the Serra da Estrela, Covão dos Conchos is a mountain reservoir whose round spillway looks like a hole in the surface of the lake.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lagoa das Sete Cidades | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 2 | Lagoa do Fogo | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 3 | São Miguel Island | Island | |
| 4 | Praia da Marinha | Beach | |
| 5 | Ilhéu de Vila Franca | Island | |
| 6 | Covão dos Conchos | Reservoir | |
| 7 | Praia da Ursa | Beach | |
| 8 | Ponta da Ferraria | Hot spring | |
| 9 | Fajã dos Cubres | Lagoon |
01 Lagoa das Sete Cidades
Portugal · 15.9 km from Ponta Delgada37.855° N 25.786° W
Image by katharina-kiese from Pixabay The crater is the product of a volcano that is anything but extinct. The Sete Cidades massif collapsed on itself in three major explosive episodes, roughly 36,000, 29,000 and 16,000 years ago, leaving a nested caldera whose walls rise between about 200 and 500 m above the floor.
Did you know? None of the lake's fish are native: carp, pike, perch, roach and trout were all introduced by people.
02 Lagoa do Fogo
Portugal · 17.3 km from Ponta Delgada37.763° N 25.471° W
Image by funsk8 from Pixabay The name recalls a violent past. The volcano is the youngest on São Miguel: it began to form about 15,000 years ago, its summit collapsed into the present caldera around 5,000 years ago, and it last erupted in 1563. Since then the crater has been left to nature. Nothing has been built inside it, and there are no settlements; the lake is fed by rain and runoff and in turn supplies drinking water to the villages on the southern flanks.
Did you know? The lake sits in an inner caldera that lies within a much older outer caldera, formed between about 30,000 and 45,000 years ago.
03 São Miguel Island
Portugal · 15.8 km from Ponta Delgada37.800° N 25.500° W
Image by Comanche0 from Pixabay At the western end, the caldera of Sete Cidades shelters a twin lake split by a narrow strait and crossed by a bridge; one half reads as green, the other as blue. Local legend tells of a princess and a shepherd forbidden to marry, whose tears filled the two lakes in the colours of their eyes. 5 km, its shore at 575 m, enclosed by steep crater walls rising to around 949 m, with no buildings allowed around it.
Did you know? The Furnas volcano has produced ten sub-Plinian eruptions in the last 5,000 years, and an eruption in 1630 temporarily drove the settlers out of the valley.
04 Praia da Marinha
Portugal · 11.8 km from Portimão37.090° N 8.412° W
Klugschnacker · CC BY-SA 3.0 From the top, the view east takes in a sequence of sea stacks standing just offshore and a double arch that frames the water below — the picture most people carry away. Down on the sand, the stacks turn into islands you can almost touch at low tide, and the sea around them is clear enough to see the bottom several metres down.
Did you know? The name translates as 'Navy Beach' or 'Marine Beach'.
05 Ilhéu de Vila Franca
Portugal · 20.1 km from Ponta Delgada37.706° N 25.444° W
Jules Verne Times Two · CC BY-SA 4.0 The islet is small, about five to six hectares, and its highest point reaches roughly 62 metres above the sea. The circular crater basin measures about 150 metres across and is up to about 20 metres deep. The rock walls are cut by vertical fractures that give the islet its ribbed, sculpted look, and off its southern tip stands a separate volcanic stack, the Farilhão, about 32 metres high.
Did you know? After the naval battle of Vila Franca in 1582, the Spanish commander had about eighteen French prisoners hanged on the summit as a warning to passing ships.
06 Covão dos Conchos
Portugal · 13 km from Covilhã40.364° N 7.611° W
larahcv · CC0 The funnel is a piece of mid-twentieth-century hydraulic engineering rather than a curiosity built for show. It was constructed in 1955 to divert water from the Ribeira das Naves stream to the Lagoa Comprida reservoir, and it forms part of the hydroelectric system of the Serra da Estrela. 6 metres high and 48 metres around, and the tunnel that carries the water away underground is 1,519 metres long.
Did you know? Today the mountain's hydroelectric network counts six working power plants and two retired ones, built between 1909 and 2003.
07 Praia da Ursa
Portugal · 30.9 km from Lisbon38.790° N 9.492° W
Erico Reis Junior · CC BY-SA 4.0 The beach takes its name from the Ursa stack, whose outline, seen from the north, is said to resemble a bear holding a cub. Local legend tells of a mother bear who refused to leave her cubs behind when the gods ordered the animals north as the ice withdrew from the Sintra hills; as punishment she was turned to stone, and her cubs became the smaller boulders scattered around her.
Did you know? The lighthouse on the cape above stands about 165 metres over the Atlantic and was the first purpose-built new lighthouse in Portugal.
08 Ponta da Ferraria
Portugal · 19.9 km from Ponta Delgada37.853° N 25.850° W
The Cosmonaut · CC BY-SA 4.0 The headland was built before São Miguel was settled. A Strombolian eruption inland raised a cone of cinders and sent a lava flow down the cliff to the sea, where it spread into a new flat promontory. Where the hot lava met seawater, steam explosions threw up a small cone topped by a crater — a pseudocrater, which unlike a true crater has no volcanic vent beneath it.
Did you know? A drawing of the erupting island made from the ship on 19 June 1811 is kept today at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
09 Fajã dos Cubres
Portugal38.534° N 28.629° W
Alberto Garcia from Cartagena, Spain · CC BY-SA 2.0 75 square kilometres in the parish of Ribeira Seca, municipality of Calheta. Much of its present size is attributed to the earthquake of 9 July 1757, the most violent recorded in the Azores, which triggered landslides and rockfalls along the coast and killed more than a thousand people on São Jorge.
Did you know? The settlement was badly damaged again by the Azores earthquake of 1 January 1980, more than two centuries after the 1757 disaster.
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 Portugal?
- On our list, Lagoa das Sete Cidades ranks first, followed by Lagoa do Fogo and São Miguel Island.
- Why does Sete Cidades have a blue and a green lake?
- The two lakes of Sete Cidades are connected but differ in depth, shape and the vegetation reflected in them, so one appears blue and the other green; local legend explains the colours as the tears of a princess and a shepherd.
- Is the hole in Covão dos Conchos natural?
- No. The circular opening in the Covão dos Conchos reservoir is a man-made spillway built in the 1950s to carry water through a tunnel to another lake in the Serra da Estrela.
- Can you bathe in hot springs in the sea in the Azores?
- Yes. At Ponta da Ferraria on São Miguel, volcanic hot springs flow into a rocky inlet, so the seawater there is warmed from below.
- How many lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches are on this list in Portugal?
- The list covers 9 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches.