Nepal Just Found the World's Highest Lake — and Almost No One Has Seen It

At roughly 5,020 metres above sea level, in a fold of the Annapurna range that most trekkers walk straight past, sits a lake that barely existed on any map before 2019. It has no lodge, no signpost, and until recently, no name outsiders knew. Locals call it Singar. The rest of the world now calls it Kajin Sara — and it may already be the highest lake on Earth.

Kajin Sara sits above Chame, the district headquarters of Manang and a regular overnight stop on the Annapurna Circuit. It was first reported by a small group of mountaineers who wandered off-route while scouting terrain above the village and came back describing a sheet of glacial turquoise water where their maps showed nothing but contour lines. The Himalayan Times broke the story in 2019, and Nepali surveyors have quietly revisited the site since, trying to pin down its exact elevation — the kind of measurement that, at this altitude, shifts with the season, the snowmelt, and exactly where you decide the shoreline ends.

That uncertainty is the whole story. Tilicho Lake, a few valleys to the west and already one of the most-photographed stops on the Annapurna Circuit, has held the 'world's highest lake' title in guidebooks and record lists for decades, sitting at 4,919 metres with a marked trail and a high camp built for trekking traffic. If Kajin Sara's higher readings hold up, it dethrones a landmark that draws tens of thousands of visitors a year — without a single teahouse, bridge, or crowd of its own.

Why does a country the size of Nepal keep 'discovering' lakes in the 2020s? Because most glacial basins above 4,500 metres have never been formally surveyed. The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development counts more than 3,000 glacial lakes across Nepal, and new ones keep forming, shrinking, or simply getting noticed as trekking routes push further off the classic trails. Kajin Sara isn't a new lake so much as a lake nobody with a GPS unit had bothered to visit — it sat there through the entire history of Annapurna Circuit trekking, a short detour from a trail hundreds of thousands of people have walked since the 1970s.

What this means for trekkers

For most visitors, Tilicho Lake remains the realistic target — decades of trekking traffic have given it a trail, a high camp, and a support network Kajin Sara simply doesn't have yet. But it's a reminder of something Nepal's mountains keep proving, even after a century of mapmakers, mountaineers and trekking companies: the Himalaya still has blank spaces. Somewhere above 5,000 metres in Manang, one of them is a lake nobody outside Nepal had heard of until seven years ago.

Cover photo: Ashok J Kshetri via Pexels (Pexels License).