Lake Batur

Lake Batur fills the southeastern floor of the Batur caldera in the Kintamani highlands of central Bali, some 30 km northeast of Ubud. At about 1,030 metres above sea level and close to 16 square kilometres in area, it is the largest lake on the island, with a deepest point of around 88 metres. The setting explains its fame: the lake lies inside a double caldera left by two enormous collapses of an old magma chamber, dated to roughly 29,000 and 20,000 years ago, and out of the inner basin rises Mount Batur, an active cone standing some 700 metres above the water. UNESCO added the Batur caldera to its Global Geoparks Network in 2012.

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.

For Balinese Hindus the lake is sacred water, the source that feeds the island's springs and rice terraces. Its goddess, Dewi Danu, is honoured at Pura Ulun Danu Batur, one of Bali's principal temples, which has a turbulent history of its own: it once stood at the foot of the volcano, where the lava of 1917 halted at its gates, but the eruption of 1926 buried the old village, and the surviving eleven-tiered shrine was carried up to the caldera rim, where the temple was rebuilt. It now forms part of the UNESCO-listed Cultural Landscape of Bali Province, inscribed in 2012 for the subak water-temple system. On the eastern shore, the Bali Aga village of Trunyan keeps customs older than mainstream Balinese Hinduism, including leaving its dead exposed under bamboo shelters instead of cremating them.

Down at the waterline the lake is a working landscape. Hot springs at Toya Bungkah, fed by the volcano, run into the lake and have been developed for visitors, farmers cultivate a wide range of crops on the caldera floor, and floating cages raise tilapia. The pressures show, too: ash sediment, farm runoff and spreading water hyacinth are recurring worries for the lake's health. The classic view is from the rim at Kintamani, looking down on the lake with the lava fields and the cone beyond; a road descends to Kedisan, Toya Bungkah and Songan on the shore.

Getting there

The lake lies in Kintamani district, Bangli Regency, about 30 km northeast of Ubud; Bedugul, in the neighbouring highlands, is about 30 km away. The nearest airport is Denpasar's I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport (DPS), about 60 km in a straight line. Visitors reach the caldera rim by road, and a road descends from there to the shore villages.