The Most Spectacular Sinkholes in the World
14 places in 11 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular sinkholes in the world are Darvaza Gas Crater (Turkmenistan), Great Blue Hole (Belize) and Red Lake (Imotski) (Croatia). The list covers 14 sinkholes in 11 countries. Mexico has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A sinkhole forms when the ground gives way into a void beneath it, usually where water has spent thousands of years dissolving limestone. The great ones combine two things: a sudden, vertical drop in an otherwise ordinary landscape, and what lies at the bottom. That may be a pool of clear groundwater lit from above, a forest growing in a world of its own, or, at sea, a circle of deep blue cut into the pale turquoise of a reef.
Ik Kil in Mexico is the archetypal cenote, an open shaft with roots hanging down to the water, and Cenote Angelita hides a cloud-like layer of hydrogen sulfide that divers describe as an underwater river. Buraco das Araras in Brazil is a vast red-walled pit where scarlet macaws nest. Red Lake near Imotski in Croatia is one of the deepest sinkholes in Europe, Gulpiyuri in Spain is a tiny beach far from the shore, fed by the sea through underground passages, and the Great Blue Hole off Belize is a marine sinkhole visible as a dark disc from the air.
The places here were chosen for how they look and ranked by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph with its author named and a place on the map, and the collection opens into separate pages for each country.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Darvaza Gas Crater | Doline | Turkmenistan | |
| 2 | Great Blue Hole | Blue hole | Belize | ✓ |
| 3 | Red Lake (Imotski) | Doline | Croatia | |
| 4 | Batagaika crater | Doline | Russia | |
| 5 | Sacred Cenote | Doline | Mexico | ✓ |
| 6 | Ik Kil | Cenote | Mexico | |
| 7 | Blue Hole | Blue hole | Egypt | |
| 8 | Xiaozhai Tiankeng | Doline | People's Republic of China | |
| 9 | Dean's Blue Hole | Blue hole | The Bahamas | |
| 10 | Gulpiyuri Beach | Doline | Spain | |
| 11 | Buraco das Araras | Doline | Brazil | |
| 12 | Bimmah Sinkhole | Cenote | Oman | |
| 13 | Cenote Angelita | Cenote | Mexico | |
| 14 | Cenote X-Keken | Cenote | Mexico |
01 Darvaza Gas Crater
Turkmenistan40.253° N 58.439° E
flydime · CC BY-SA 2.0 In the flat sands of the Karakum Desert, far from any town, a pit roughly 60–70 metres across and about 30 metres deep has been burning for decades. Natural gas seeping from the ground feeds countless small flames along its walls and floor, and the heat can be felt well before the rim. By day it is a strange, shimmering hole in the desert; after dark it becomes something else entirely — an orange glow visible from a distance, with the roar of the fire the only sound for miles. Locals and visitors call it the Door to Hell; Turkmenistan's official name is the Shining of Karakum.
Did you know? When George Kourounis descended in 2013, he spent about 17 minutes on the crater floor wearing a heat-resistant suit and breathing apparatus.
02 Great Blue Hole
Belize17.316° N 87.534° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
The TerraMar Project · CC BY 2.0 The Great Blue Hole is a near-perfect circle of deep indigo set in the pale turquoise of Lighthouse Reef, an atoll some 70 kilometres off the coast of Belize. Seen from the air it looks unreal: a ring of coral about 318 metres across, with the water inside dropping away to around 124 metres. It is the centrepiece of the Blue Hole Natural Monument and part of the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Did you know? A 30-metre sediment core drilled from its floor records 574 storms over 5,700 years, showing tropical cyclones becoming more frequent in recent decades.
03 Red Lake (Imotski)
Crveno jezero
Croatia43.455° N 17.198° E
Peter1936F · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Red Lake is not so much a lake as a hole in the earth with water at the bottom. It fills a vast collapse sinkhole on the edge of Imotski in inland Dalmatia, where the roof of an enormous cave gave way and left a shaft with sheer walls. From the rim the cliffs drop more than 240 metres to the water, and the lake itself is deeper still, on the order of 250 to 290 metres, so that its floor lies a few metres below sea level. Measured from rim to bottom, it is counted among the largest sinkholes in the world and is the deepest known collapse doline holding a lake.
Did you know? In May 2017 the French cave diver Frédéric Swierczynski became the first person to reach the lake bed, touching bottom at about 245 metres in a four-hour dive.
04 Batagaika crater
Russia · 10.3 km from Batagay67.580° N 134.771° E
NASA Earth Observatory images by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. · Public domain The Batagaika crater is a wound in the Siberian taiga that keeps opening: a gash about a kilometre long and up to a hundred metres deep, its walls of grey frozen earth and pale ice collapsing a little further every summer. It is not an impact crater or a sinkhole in rock but a thaw slump, formed where the permanently frozen ground beneath the forest has begun to melt and slide away.
Did you know? Batagaika is the largest known permafrost crater in the world, and scientists often call it the Batagay megaslump.
05 Sacred Cenote
Cenote sagrado de Chichén Itzá
Mexico · 38.4 km from Valladolid20.688° N 88.568° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK · CC BY 2.0 The Sacred Cenote is a round shaft of green water sunk into the limestone at the northern edge of Chichén Itzá, and for the Maya it was nothing less than a doorway to the underworld. The northern Yucatán has no rivers or lakes on its surface; water sits underground, and where a cave roof collapses it appears in these natural wells. This one is about 60 metres across, walled by sheer cliffs that drop to the water table far below, and a raised ceremonial causeway some 300 metres long runs straight to it from the plaza of the great pyramid of Kukulcán.
06 Ik Kil
Mexico · 35.9 km from Valladolid20.666° N 88.545° W
Image by mattiaverga from Pixabay Ik Kil doesn't look like a cave that happened to fill with water — it looks like the ground simply gave way, which is essentially what happened. The cenote sits open to the sky, a nearly circular shaft about 60 metres across where the water sits some 26 metres below the surrounding ground level and continues down to a depth of roughly 48 metres. Vines hang from the rim all the way to the water; it's a hole in solid limestone that happens to be full.
Did you know? In Yucatec Maya the name Ik Kil is usually translated as 'place of the winds'.
07 Blue Hole
Egypt28.572° N 34.537° E
S. Ellermann · CC BY-SA 3.0 A few kilometres north of Dahab, on the Sinai coast of the Gulf of Aqaba, the fringing reef opens into a near-circular shaft of dark blue water. The Blue Hole is a submarine sinkhole more than 100 metres deep, cut off from the open sea on the surface by a shallow lip of reef about 6 metres down, known as the Saddle. Deeper down, a tunnel called the Arch links the hole with the outer reef wall: its ceiling lies at about 55 metres, it runs for about 26 metres, and on the seaward side the seabed plunges to more than 1,000 metres. The walls are covered in hard and soft coral and crowded with reef fish, and because the hole is entered straight from the shore with little current, it is one of the best-known freediving sites in the world.
Did you know? Trained freedivers swim through the Arch on a single breath, passing beneath a rock ceiling that lies about 55 metres below the surface.
08 Xiaozhai Tiankeng
People's Republic of China · 33.6 km from Fengjie30.750° N 109.470° E
Brookqi · Public domain In the limestone uplands of Fengjie County, in the far east of Chongqing, the earth drops away into what is considered the deepest sinkhole in the world. Xiaozhai Tiankeng — "heavenly pit" in Chinese — is roughly 626 metres long and 537 metres wide, and between about 511 and 662 metres deep depending on where the rim is measured. Its volume is put at around 119 million cubic metres: space enough to swallow a small mountain.
Did you know? The pit's opening covers about 274,000 square metres, and the rock that once filled it was dissolved and carried away by the river below.
09 Dean's Blue Hole
The Bahamas23.106° N 75.009° W
Ton Engwirda · CC BY-SA 3.0 nl On the coast of Long Island in the southern Bahamas, a small crescent of white sand curls around a patch of sea that suddenly turns from pale turquoise to ink. That dark disc is Dean's Blue Hole, a vertical shaft in the limestone that drops to about 202 metres — the third-deepest blue hole known in the world. At the surface the opening is only some 30 metres across, but below the water the cavity widens into a chamber roughly 100 metres wide, so that a swimmer floating over the rim is hanging above a vast hidden room.
Did you know? Only two blue holes are known to be deeper: Taam Ja' in Mexico's Chetumal Bay and the Dragon Hole in the South China Sea.
10 Gulpiyuri Beach
Playa de Gulpiyuri
Spain43.448° N 4.886° W
Fernando Vázquez · CC BY 3.0 Gulpiyuri is a beach with no sea view. It lies in a meadow on the coast of eastern Asturias, about a hundred metres back from the cliffs, a crescent of sand some 50 metres long at the bottom of a grassy hollow — and with every tide the Cantabrian Sea fills it through passages in the rock, with small waves breaking on the sand among fields.
Did you know? Gulpiyuri is often described as one of the smallest beaches in the world, a disc of sand only about 50 metres across.
11 Buraco das Araras
Reserva Particular do Patrimônio Natural Buraco das Araras
Brazil · 26.3 km from Jardim21.492° S 56.404° W
Mauricio ximenez · CC BY-SA 3.0 Buraco das Araras is a vast, almost perfectly round sinkhole in the cerrado of Mato Grosso do Sul, in Brazil's Centre-West: a hole roughly 500 metres across and 127 metres deep, its sandstone walls falling vertically to a green lake and a floor of forest. It is described as the largest sinkhole in Latin America. The name means "hole of the macaws", and red macaws nest in the crevices of the cliffs, wheeling and calling in pairs above the void.
Did you know? The sinkhole formed when layers of sandstone collapsed into a void left by limestone dissolving deep below the surface.
12 Bimmah Sinkhole
Oman23.036° N 59.071° E
Prof. Mortel · CC BY 2.0 On the stony coastal plain of eastern Oman, a few hundred metres from the Gulf of Oman, the ground simply opens. Bimmah Sinkhole — Hawiyyat Najm in Arabic — is a near-round pit some 50 by 70 metres across and about 20 metres deep, its pale limestone walls dropping to a pool of startlingly clear turquoise water. Seen from the rim, the colour looks almost artificial against the dun rock around it.
Did you know? Some locals reportedly also call the pit Bayt al-Afreet, the house of the demon, after stories of a creature lurking in its depths.
13 Cenote Angelita
Mexico20.137° N 87.578° W
Serge Melki from Indianapolis, USA · CC BY 2.0 Cenote Angelita — "little angel" — looks unremarkable from the surface: a round pool of dark water in the forest south of Tulum. Its fame lies some thirty metres down. There the diver reaches a thick, milky layer of hydrogen sulphide that hangs across the whole shaft like a cloud or a ground fog, so that it seems to be an underground river flowing through the middle of the water. Dead trees that fell into the cenote long ago stand upright through the layer, their bare branches reaching out of the mist, and the scene is so strange that it has become one of the most photographed dives in the Yucatán.
Did you know? The sinkhole reaches a total depth of about 60 metres, roughly twice the depth at which the famous cloud appears.
14 Cenote X-Keken
Mexico · 4.6 km from Valladolid20.661° N 88.243° W
Laslovarga · CC BY-SA 3.0 X-Keken is a cenote that keeps its secret underground. From the surface there is almost nothing to see: a low entrance in the scrub a few kilometres outside Valladolid, and a flight of steps cut down into the rock. At the bottom the passage opens into a domed limestone chamber holding a round pool of clear, blue-green fresh water, roughly twenty-five metres across. The vault overhead is studded with stalactites, and the largest of them hang in a dense cluster that reaches down almost to the water, so that swimmers move between stone fingers rather than beneath a bare ceiling.
Did you know? According to Valladolid's tourism office, the cenote was discovered only around 1950, in the middle of the twentieth century.
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 is the most beautiful sinkhole in the world?
- On our list, Darvaza Gas Crater (Turkmenistan) ranks first, followed by Great Blue Hole (Belize) and Red Lake (Imotski) (Croatia).
- What makes a cenote different from a sinkhole?
- A cenote is a type of sinkhole: a collapse in limestone that exposes groundwater. The word comes from Yucatec Maya, and it is used mainly for the water-filled sinkholes of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.
- What is a blue hole?
- A blue hole is a marine sinkhole, a vertical cavity in a reef or carbonate bank that formed on land when sea levels were lower and was later flooded. Its depth makes it look dark blue against the shallow water around it.
- Which country has the most sinkholes?
- In our collection, the most come from Mexico (4), Belize (1) and Brazil (1).
- How many sinkholes are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 14 sinkholes in 11 countries. Mexico has the most, with 4.