Turkey
Nemrut Crater Lakes
Two lakes inside a volcanic crater, side by side, one steaming warm, one ice-cold.
The rim of the caldera drops away and two lakes fill the bowl below, one steaming, one still. Vapour rises from the warm lake in slow columns while the cold lake beside it sits flat and blue, untouched. This is a place of geological contradictions, where you can swim in one lake and watch geothermal vents bubble along the shore of the other.
Nemrut Dağı, not to be confused with the Mount Nemrut of the stone heads further west, is a dormant volcano beside Lake Van whose 7-kilometre-wide caldera holds two lakes at radically different temperatures. Sıcak Göl, the warm lake, is fed by geothermal vents, and hot springs along its shore approach 60°C, steam drifting off the water at dawn. Soğuk Göl, the cold lake, stays cool enough for a bracing swim even in midsummer. The caldera floor spreads out at 2,250 metres, with the rim road giving views over Lake Van and the whole Eastern Anatolian plateau, and the crater sees only a small share of the traffic of its famous namesake.
Solo
The kind of off-grid destination that rewards self-sufficiency: camp on the crater rim, watch steam rise at dawn, and have the caldera almost entirely to yourself.
Friends
Crater-rim hikes and the bragging rights of swimming between a warm lake and a cold lake in a caldera most people have never heard of.
Family
Older children with hiking experience find the two-lake contrast genuinely mind-expanding: natural science in real time, no textbook required.
- The Nemrut caldera is 7 kilometres wide, a dormant volcano holding two lakes at different temperatures.
- Hot springs along the shore of Sıcak Göl approach 60°C; steam drifts off the water at dawn.
- The cold lake, Soğuk Göl, stays cool enough for swimming even in midsummer.
- The caldera floor spreads out 2,250 metres above sea level, twin lakes side by side below the rim road.
Bitlis büryan, meat hung in a sealed tandır to steam for ninety minutes, served on pide.
Avşor, whose name means salted water, thickened with büryan fat and pepper paste.
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