The 20 Most Beautiful Lakes in The World

Hidden in the Valley of the Ten Peaks in Banff National Park, Moraine Lake is fed by glacial meltwater that gives it its extraordinary turquoise colour.

The classic view from the Rockpile overlook, with the lake reflecting the surrounding peaks, appeared on the Canadian twenty-dollar bill.

Lake Louise is the Canadian Rockies at their most theatrical: a milky turquoise lake framed by pine-clad ridges, with Victoria Glacier hanging at the far end and the famous red canoes gliding out from the boathouse dock.

The colour is real, glacial rock flour in the meltwater, and it shifts with every hour of light.

Easy lakeshore paths and grand teahouse hikes ring the water.

Lake Bled is Slovenia's most famous sight — a glacial lake of impossibly vivid turquoise water, a tiny island crowned with a baroque church, and a medieval castle perched on a sheer cliff above.

The surrounding Julian Alps complete a scene that seems almost too perfect to be real.

A traditional pletna boat is the only way out to the island's 99 steps.

Lake Baikal holds a fifth of the planet's unfrozen fresh water and is both the world's deepest and oldest lake, ringed by taiga forest and mountains in Siberia.

Its clarity lets you see many metres down in summer, while in winter the surface freezes into clear blue ice sheets thick enough to drive on.

Most visitors base themselves in Listvyanka or on Olkhon Island to explore the shoreline and villages.

A single willow stands alone in the shallows of Lake Wanaka, backed by the Southern Alps - improbable, minimalist, and famous well beyond New Zealand.

The lake itself is a vast glacier-carved expanse ringed by mountains, with lakeside walks and the Roys Peak track nearby for anyone wanting more than a quick stop.

Still water at dawn doubles the tree in near-perfect reflection.

Ringed by three volcanoes and a dozen distinct Maya villages, each with its own dialect, dress and market traditions, Lake Atitlán fills a volcanic caldera with water famously described by Aldous Huxley as almost too beautiful.

Boats shuttle between lakeside towns like laid-back Panajachel, spiritual San Marcos and traditional Santiago Atitlán, each offering a genuinely different pace and character rather than interchangeable lake stops.

A vivid turquoise alpine lake at 1,578 meters, ringed by sheer limestone cliffs and wildflower meadows below the Blüemlisalp glacier.

Reached by cable car and a short walk, it's one of the Bernese Oberland's most spectacular — and comparatively uncrowded — spots.

The world's highest navigable lake stretches across the Bolivia-Peru border at 3,812m, its cobalt water dotted with the Uros people's hand-woven reed islands.

Traditional wooden boats still work the shallows beneath distant snow-capped peaks.

Copacabana's lakeside promenade and Isla del Sol's Inca ruins give it real cultural depth beyond the scenery, though the altitude takes a day or two to adjust to.

Lake Tahoe straddles the border between California and Nevada in the Sierra Nevada mountains, its remarkable clarity allowing visibility to a depth of over 20 metres.

Surrounded by ski resorts, pine forests, and granite peaks, it offers spectacular hiking and water sports in summer and world-class skiing in winter.

Switzerland's largest lake curves along the base of the Alps between Geneva and Montreux, its mild microclimate supporting palm-lined promenades, terraced vineyards, and the turreted, moated Château de Chillon rising straight out of the water.

Lakeside towns like Montreux and Vevey give it a genteel, resort-town character, and paddle-steamers still cross between them much as they did a century ago.

Kelimutu volcano holds three crater lakes side by side, each a different color from mineral and gas activity below, ranging through turquoise, teal, and near-black depending on when you visit.

The lakes have shifted hue repeatedly over recorded history, a phenomenon still not fully explained.

Most visitors arrive before dawn to catch sunrise from the rim, then walk a short paved trail between viewpoints overlooking each lake.

A narrow alpine lake in Austria's Salzkammergut lake district is ringed by forested peaks and postcard villages, the best-known of which, St.

Wolfgang, grew up around the lakeside White Horse Inn made famous by a 20th-century operetta.

Passenger ferries still cross the lake between villages, a rack railway climbs the Schafberg for panoramic views, and swimming spots line much of the shore in summer.

A collapsed volcanic caldera holds this startlingly turquoise-green crater lake, its color shifting with the light and mineral content of the water below.

A rim trail circles the crater edge with views down to the lake and out across the Andean highlands, while a steep path descends to the shoreline for those who want to kayak or simply stand at the water's edge.

A pair of small roadside lakes on the drive to Milford Sound that reflect the surrounding peaks and tussock grassland with near-perfect clarity on calm mornings.

A short boardwalk loop makes them one of the easiest stops on the whole Fiordland route.

A hypersaline lagoon in the Atacama salt flat, dense enough with dissolved minerals that swimmers float effortlessly, Dead Sea-style.

Ringed by pale salt crust and distant volcanoes, it's a strange, buoyant swim in one of the driest places on Earth, best paired with a freshwater rinse straight after.

High on the Bolivian Altiplano near the Chilean border, this shallow lake turns a vivid blood-red from algae and mineral sediment, its shores dotted with borax islands and thousands of James's flamingos feeding in the mineral-rich water.

At over 4,200 meters altitude, the surrounding landscape is a stark, otherworldly desert of volcanoes, geysers and rock formations typically visited as part of a multi-day Uyuni salt-flat circuit.

Slovenia's largest permanent lake sits deeper inside Triglav National Park than its more famous neighbor Lake Bled, ringed by steep alpine peaks and largely free of the castle-and-island crowds that draw most day-trippers to Bled instead.

A cable car climbs to the Vogel ski area for panoramic views over the lake and surrounding mountains, while the Savica Waterfall trailhead sits at the lake's western end.

A quiet alpine reservoir in Ticino reached by one of Europe's steepest funicular railways, climbing to a plateau ringed by peaks and pine forest.

Far quieter than the Bernese Oberland lakes, with hiking trails that see only a fraction of the region's tourists.

A small thermally-warmed lake in the Altai Mountains, where underground springs stir blue clay into constantly shifting turquoise swirls against a backdrop of pine forest.

Never freezes even in the Siberian winter, staying an otherworldly warm turquoise year-round.

A small, secluded tarn on the shoulder of Haystacks fell in the Lake District, where guidebook author Alfred Wainwright chose to have his ashes scattered.

Reached only on foot, it offers a quiet, mirror-still pool ringed by fells with none of the crowds of the district's bigger lakes.