Tilicho Lake Is Called 'The World's Highest Lake.' It Isn't Even Nepal's Highest Anymore

Trek the Annapurna Circuit and you'll hear it from every guide, teahouse sign and blog post: Tilicho Lake, the world's highest lake. It's one of the most repeated facts in Himalayan trekking — and it's not true. It isn't even Nepal's highest lake anymore.

What Tilicho really holds

Tilicho is real, and it is genuinely extraordinary: a glacial lake nearly 5,000m up, ringed by ice walls, with an average depth of 85m and a surface so still it mirrors the peaks around it. It even holds a real record — the site of the highest-altitude scuba dives ever attempted. What it does not hold is the title trekking marketing gives it every single day.

The lakes that sit higher

The gap matters. Ojos del Salado's summit lake sits 1,471m above Tilicho — more than the entire height of Ben Nevis stacked on top of the difference. Reaching it means climbing the world's highest active volcano, a serious high-altitude mountaineering objective on the Chile-Argentina border, not a trek. Even Lhagba Pool in Tibet, rarely visited and little photographed, sits nearly a kilometre and a half above Tilicho. And within Nepal itself, Kajin Sara — discovered by a group of mountaineers in Chame rural municipality, in the same Manang district as Tilicho — was reported at 5,020m by the team that found it and is now widely listed as the country's highest lake, more than 100m above its famous neighbour. Treat that figure with some care: published heights for Kajin Sara range from about 5,000m to 5,200m, and we have not found an official survey behind any of them.

When The Himalayan Times set out to check the Tilicho claim, it listed several more lakes that sit higher: Changtse Pool on Everest’s north side (about 6,216m), Acamarachi Pool in Chile (about 5,950m) and Ridonglabo Lake in Tibet (about 5,801m). None of them is on a trekking route, which is exactly why Tilicho gets the credit.

How the myth took hold

What this means for trekkers

What this means for you

None of this makes Tilicho less worth the walk — if anything, it's the honest version that sells it better. Ojos del Salado's lake needs technical volcano mountaineering to reach; Lhagba Pool sees almost no visitors at all. Tilicho is the rare high-altitude lake you can actually stand beside after a well-supported trek, on marked trails, without ropes or a mountaineering permit. That's the real headline: not the tallest lake on Earth, but one of the very few genuinely spectacular ones you can reach on foot. Our Tilicho Lake Trek takes you there directly over 11 days from Kathmandu; if you'd rather see it as a side trip on the full loop, the Annapurna Circuit passes within reach of it before crossing Thorong La.

Source: Wikipedia, Lhagba Pool (elevation and world-ranking data cross-checked against the Tilicho Lake and Kajin Sara Lake entries).

Cover photo: Prabeshsdev via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Section photos: Ashok J Kshetri via Pexels (Pexels licence); Kyle Roxas via Pexels (Pexels licence).